There is, however, in the entire human race, a fatal instinct for marring itself. To break down the exterior signs of this variety of individualism in the race by mutual imitation, by all sorts of affectations, is the object not only of the civilization of the Western world, but of the very negroes on the Gaboon River. No wonder, then, that whensoever we meet, as at rarest interval we do meet, an individual who is able to preserve his personality as Nature meant it to live, we feel an attraction towards him such as is irresistible. Now I would challenge those who knew him to say whether they ever knew any other man so free from this great human infirmity as Tennyson. The way in which his simplicity of nature would manifest itself was, in some instances, most remarkable. Though, of course, he had his share of that egoism of the artist without which imaginative genius may become sterile, it seemed impossible for him to realize what a transcendent position he took among contemporary writers all over the world. “Poets,” he once said to me, “have not had the advantage of being _born_ to the purple.” Up to the last he felt himself to be a poet at struggle more or less with the Wilsons and the Crokers who, in his youth, assailed him. I, and a very dear friend of his, a family connexion, tried in vain to make him see that when a poet had reached a position such as he had won, no criticism could injure him or benefit him one jot. What has been called his exclusiveness is entirely mythical. He was the most hospitable of men. It was very rare, indeed, for him to part from a friend at his hall door, or at the railway station without urging him to return as soon as possible, and generally with the words, “Come whenever you like.” The fact is, however, that for many years the strangest notions seem to have got abroad as to the claims of the public upon men of genius. There seems now to be scarcely any one who does not look upon every man who has passed into the purgatory of fame as his or her common property. The unlucky victim is to be pestered by letters upon every sort of foolish subject, and to be hunted down in his walks and insulted by senseless adulation. Tennyson resented this, and so did Rossetti, and so ought every man who has reached eminence and respects his own genius. Neither fame nor life itself is worth having on such terms as these. One day, Tennyson when walking round his garden at Farringford, saw perched up in the trees that surrounded it, two men who had been refused admittance at the gate—two men dressed like gentlemen. He very wisely gave the public to understand that his fame was not to be taken as an abrogation of his rights as a private English gentleman. For my part, whenever I hear any one railing against a man of eminence with whom he cannot possibly have been brought into contact, I know at once what it means: the railer has been writing an idle letter to the eminent one and received no reply.