It is impossible not to agree with this pungent criticism. Every candid reader could point to a dozen Victorian biographies which deserve Mr. Strachey's condemnation. For instance, instead of taking up any of the specimens which he has chosen for illustration, we need only refer the reader's memory to the appendix of "Impressions," by a series of elderly friends, which closes the official _Life of Tennyson_, published in 1897. He will find there an expression of the purest Victorian optimism. The great object being to foist on the public a false and superhuman picture of the deceased, a set of illustrious contemporaries--who themselves expected to be, when they died, transfigured in like manner--form a bodyguard around the corpse of the poet and emit their "tedious panegyric." In this case, more even than in any of the instances which Mr. Strachey has taken, the contrast between the real man and the funereal image is positively grotesque. Without question this contrast is not a little responsible for the discredit into which the name of Tennyson has fallen. Lord Selborne found nothing in Tennyson "inconsistent with the finest courtesy and the gentlest heart." Dr. Jowett had preserved through forty years "an ever-increasing wonder at the depth of his thought," and emphatically stated that he "was above such feelings as a desire of praise, or fear of blame." (Tennyson, who was thirsty for ceaseless laudation, and to whom a hint of censure was like the bite of a mosquito!) Frederick Myers ejaculated, "How august, how limitless a thing was Tennyson's own spirit's upward flight!" The Duke of Argyll, again, during the space of forty years, had found him "always reverent, hating all levity or flippancy," and was struck by his possessing "the noblest humility I have ever known." Lord Macaulay, who "had stood absolutely aloof," once having been permitted to glance at the proof-sheets of _Guenevere_, was "absolutely subdued" to "unfeigned and reverent admiration." The duke was the glad emissary who was "the medium of introduction," and he recognised in Macaulay's subjugation "a premonition" of Tennyson's complete "conquest over the living world and over the generations that are to come."