Another though less frequent visitor to Oxford was Tennyson. His first visit to our house was rather alarming. We lived in a small house in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the shops were in the market, which closed at one o’clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our honoured guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out when he found the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast we had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation: “Mutton chops! the staple of every bad inn in England.” However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance at the time in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Immortals. He was simply delightful and full of inquiries about the East, more particularly about Indian poetry, and I believe that it was then that I told him that there was no rhyme in Sanskrit poetry, and ventured to ask him why there should be in English. He was not so offended as Samuel Johnson seems to have been when asked the same question. The old bear would probably have answered my question by, “You are a great fool, sir; use your own judgment,” while Tennyson gave the very sensible answer that rhyme assisted the memory. It is difficult to define the difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge man; but if Ruskin was decidedly a representative of Oxford, Tennyson was a true son of the sister University. I had been taught to admire Tennyson by my young friends at Oxford, many of whom were enthusiastic worshippers of the poet. My friends often forgot that I had been brought up on German poetry, and that though I knew Heine, Rückert, Eichendorff, Chamisso, and Geibel, to say nothing of Goethe, Schiller, Bürger, and even Klopstock, their allusions to Tennyson, Browning, nay, to Shelley and Keats, often fell by the wayside and were entirely lost on me.