Mary insisted. "Now, I see," said Tennyson. "I am to wear them for that priest, eh?" "Plaze, sir!" "Will he come in his altar robes and stole?" "The saints forbid!" said she. "If they forbid him, why should they compel me?" he asked. "It 's I, yer Honour, that tell ye, for the sake of the house! And he 's a man of God." "I could n't resist that, could I?" the poet asked of Father Peter. "And so," said he, "I dressed." At the table one evening, Tennyson, being in a humorous mood, composed rhyming epitaphs upon every name that occurred to him. "What would you say of me?" asked Father Peter. Instantly this couplet rolled from the lips of the host: "Here lies P. Haythornthwaite, Human by nature, Roman by fate." A letter of Mrs. Cameron's came under my observation one day, and I was permitted to make a note from it. "Tennyson," she wrote, "was very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for {124} autographs. He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records; that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; and that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew nothing, and would know nothing, of Jane Austen; and that there were no letters preserved, either of Shakespeare's, or of Jane Austen's; and that they had not been ripped open like pigs. Then he said that the post for two days had brought him no letters, and that he thought there was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and his fame." That last touch is delicious. Tennyson did not like to be ignored. He was proud, and justly proud, of his fame. Sir Edwin Arnold said: "Tennyson had a noble vanity, a proud pleasure in the very notoriety which brought strangers peeping and stealing about his gates." Perhaps so, but it was a case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be to him through whom the offence cometh." He hated to have tributes thrust upon him; he hated intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too much from that sort of thing at Farringford when summer visitors overran Freshwater. He liked to be recognised along the country roads; he liked to have people lift their hats to him; he liked to know that his work meant something to the passer by. But he shunned the merely curious stranger. {125}