monkey, and if a monkey has no soul, or future life (which is taken for granted), where are man’s title-deeds to these possessions? With other difficulties of an obvious kind, these presented themselves to the poet with renewed force when his only chance of happiness depended on being able to believe in a future life, and reunion with the beloved dead. Unbelief had always existed. We hear of atheists in the _Rig Veda_. In the early eighteenth century, in the age of Swift— “Men proved, as sure as God’s in Gloucester, That Moses was a great impostor.” distrust of Moses increased with the increase of hypotheses of evolution. But what English poet, before Tennyson, ever attempted “to lay the spectres of the mind”; ever faced world-old problems in their most recent aspects? I am not acquainted with any poet who attempted this task, and, whatever we may think of Tennyson’s success, I do not see how we can deny his originality. Mr Frederic Harrison, however, thinks that neither “the theology nor the philosophy of _In Memoriam_ are new, original, with an independent force and depth of their own.” “They are exquisitely graceful re-statements of the theology of the Broad Churchman of the school of F. D. Maurice and Jowett—a combination of Maurice’s somewhat illogical piety with Jowett’s philosophy of mystification.” The piety of Maurice may be as illogical as that of Positivism is logical, and the philosophy of the Master of Balliol may be whatever Mr Harrison pleases to call it. But as Jowett’s earliest work (except an essay on Etruscan religion) is of 1855, one does not see how it could influence Tennyson before 1844. And what had the Duke of Argyll written on these themes some years before 1844? The late Duke, to whom Mr Harrison refers in this connection, was born in 1823. His philosophic ideas, if they were to influence Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_, must have been set forth by him at the tender age of seventeen, or thereabouts. Mr Harrison’s sentence is, “But does _In Memoriam_ teach anything, or transfigure any idea which was not about that time” (the time of writing was mainly 1833–1840) “common form with F. D. Maurice, with Jowett, C. Kingsley, F. Robertson, Stopford Brooke, Mr Ruskin, and the Duke of Argyll, Bishops Westcott and Boyd Carpenter?”