This letter is striking evidence of the influence Tennyson had upon his contemporaries. Comparisons, however, between Shakespeare and other poets can hardly be satisfactory. A kinship between him and any other poet can only be discovered in relation to one of the many sides of the “myriad-minded” man. Where lies Tennyson’s kinship? Is it on the dramatic side? In a certain sense Tennyson possessed dramatic power undoubtedly; for he had a fine imagination of extraordinary vividness, and could, as in ‘Rizpah,’ make a character live in an imagined situation. But to write a vital play requires more than this: it requires a knowledge—partly instinctive and partly acquired—of men as well as of man, and especially of the way in which one individual acts and reacts upon another in the complex web of human life. To depict the workings of the soul of man in a given situation is one thing—to depict the impact of ego upon ego is another. When we consider that the more poetical a poet is the more oblivious we expect him to be of the machinery of social life, it is no wonder that poetical dramatists are so rare. In drama, even poetic drama, the poet must leave the “golden clime” in which he was born, must leave those “golden stars above” in order to learn this machinery, and not only learn it, but take a pleasure in learning it. In honest admiration of Tennyson’s dramatic work, where it is admirable, we yield to none, at the time when ‘The Foresters’ was somewhat coldly accepted by the press on account of its “lack of virility,” we considered that in the class to which it belonged, the scenic pastoral plays, it held a very worthy place. That Tennyson’s admiration for Shakespeare was unbounded is evident enough. “There was no one,” says Jowett in his recollections of Tennyson, “to whom he was so absolutely devoted, no poet of whom he had a more intimate knowledge than Shakespeare. He said to me, and probably to many others, that there was one intellectual process in the world of which he could not even entertain an apprehension—that was the plays of Shakespeare. He thought that he could instinctively distinguish between the genuine and the spurious in them, _e.g._, between those parts of ‘King Henry VIII.,’ which are generally admitted to be spurious, and those that are genuine. The same thought was partly working in his mind on another occasion, when he spoke of two things, which he conceived to be beyond the intelligence of man, and it was certainly not repeated by him from any irreverence; the one, the intellectual genius of Shakespeare—the other, the religious genius of Jesus Christ.”