And in the pathetic account of Tennyson’s last moments we find it recorded that on the Tuesday before the Wednesday on which he died, he called out, “Where is my Shakespeare? I must have my Shakespeare”; and again on the day of his death, when the breath was passing out of his body, he asked for his Shakespeare. All this, however, makes it the more remarkable that of poets Shakespeare had the least influence upon Tennyson’s art. There was a fundamental unlikeness between the genius of the two men. The only point in common between them is that each in his own way captivated the suffrages both of the many and of the fit though few, notwithstanding the fact that their methods of dramatic approach in their plays are absolutely and fundamentally different. Even their very methods of writing verse are entirely different. Tennyson’s blank verse seems at its best to combine the beauties of the Miltonic and the Wordsworthian line; while nothing is so rare in his work as a Shakespearean line. Now and then such a line as Authority forgets a dying king turns up, but very rarely. We agree with all Professor Jebb says in praise of Tennyson’s blank verse. “He has known,” says he, “how to modulate it to every theme, and to elicit a music appropriate to each; attuning it in turn to a tender and homely grace, as in ‘The Gardener’s Daughter ‘; to the severe and ideal majesty of the antique, as in ‘Tithonus’; to meditative thought, as in ‘The Ancient Sage,’ or ‘Akbar’s Dream’; to pathetic or tragic tales of contemporary life, as in ‘Aylmer’s Field,’ or ‘Enoch Arden’; or to sustained romance narrative, as in the ‘Idylls.’ No English poet has used blank verse with such flexible variety, or drawn from it so large a compass of tones; nor has any maintained it so equably on a high level of excellence.” But we fail to see where he touched Shakespeare on the dramatic side of Shakespeare’s immense genius.