The dates answer Mr Harrison. Jowett did not publish anything till at least fifteen years after Tennyson wrote his poems on evolution and belief. Dr Boyd Carpenter’s works previous to 1840 are unknown to bibliography. F. W. Robertson was a young parson at Cheltenham. Ruskin had not published the first volume of _Modern Painters_. His Oxford prize poem is of 1839. Mr Stopford Brooke was at school. The Duke of Argyll was being privately educated: and so with the rest, except the contemporary Maurice. How can Mr Harrison say that, in the time of _In Memoriam_, Tennyson was “in touch with the ideas of Herschel, Owen, Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall”? {65} When Tennyson wrote the parts of _In Memoriam_ which deal with science, nobody beyond their families and friends had heard of Huxley, Darwin, and Tyndall. They had not developed, much less had they published, their “general ideas.” Even in his journal of the _Cruise of the Beagle_ Darwin’s ideas were religious, and he naïvely admired the works of God. It is strange that Mr Harrison has based his criticism, and his theory of Tennyson’s want of originality, on what seems to be a historical error. He cites parts of _In Memoriam_, and remarks, “No one can deny that all this is exquisitely beautiful; that these eternal problems have never been clad in such inimitable grace . . . But the train of thought is essentially that with which ordinary English readers have been made familiar by F. D. Maurice, Professor Jowett, _Ecce Homo_, _Hypatia_, and now by Arthur Balfour, Mr Drummond, and many valiant companies of _Septem_ [why _Septem_?] _contra Diabolum_.” One must keep repeating the historical verity that the ideas of _In Memoriam_ could not have been “made familiar by” authors who had not yet published anything, or by books yet undreamed of and unborn, such as _Ecce Homo_ and Jowett’s work on some of St Paul’s Epistles. If these books contain the ideas of _In Memoriam_, it is by dint of repetition and borrowing from _In Memoriam_, or by coincidence. The originality was Tennyson’s, for we cannot dispute the evidence of dates.