There are many specialists in Tennysonian bibliography who take a pride (and a worthy pride) in their knowledge of the master’s poems. But the knowledge of all of these specialists put together is not equal to that of him who writes this book. Not only is every line at his fingers’ ends, but he knows, either from his own memory or from what his father has told him, where and when and why every line was written. He, however, shares, it is evident that dislike—rather let us say that passionate hatred—which his father, like so many other poets, had of that well-intentioned but vexing being whom Rossetti anathematized as the “literary resurrection man.” Rossetti used to say that “of all signs that a man was devoid of poetic instinct and poetic feeling the impulse of the literary resurrectionist was the surest.” Without going so far as this we may at least affirm that all poets writing in a language requiring, as English does, much manipulation before it can be moulded into perfect form must needs revise in the brain before the line is set down, or in manuscript, as Shelley did, or partly in manuscript and partly in type, as Coleridge did. But the rakers-up of the “chips of the workshop,” to use Tennyson’s own phrase, seem to have been specially irritating to him, because he belonged to those poets who cannot really revise and complete their work till they see it in type. “Poetry,” he said, “looks better, more convincing in print.” “From the volume of 1832,” says his son, “he omitted several stanzas of ‘The Palace of Art’ because he thought that the poem was too full. ‘The artist is known by his self-limitation’ was a favourite adage of his. He allowed me, however, to print some of them in my notes, otherwise I should have hesitated to quote without his leave lines that he had excised. He ‘gave the people of his best,’ and he usually wished that his best should remain without variorum readings, ‘the chips of the workshop,’ as he called them. The love of bibliomaniacs for first editions filled him with horror, for the first editions are obviously in many cases the worst editions, and once he said to me: ‘Why do they treasure the rubbish I shot from my full-finish’d cantos?’ νήπιοι ουδε ισασιν οσω πλέον ημισυ παντός.