With some after-dinner speakers their task sits heavily upon them, and sets them in a state of trepidation from the commencement of the feast. I was sitting at a dinner, given to Edmund Yates after his liberation from prison on a charge of libel, by the side of a worthy alderman of the City of London who was also a member of Parliament. His name was entered upon the card in connection with the usual military toast, and before we were half way through the dinner he begged to be excused from further conversation in order that he might concentrate his thoughts upon the duty he had to discharge. It was only while he was covering the menu card with liberal pencil-notes that he realised the fact that I also was among the speakers of the evening. He turned to me suddenly with an expression of blank amazement on his face, and pointing to my name inquired with an air of incredulity if it was true I was going to speak, and when I answered in the affirmative he said, “Well, you surprise me. I notice that you have been drinking champagne. Now,” he said, “when I want to sway an audience I sway them on water.” And as he drank nothing but water that evening I was prepared to be swayed. But something must have gone wrong with the water on that occasion, and I tremble to think to what further depths of ineptitude he might have fallen if he had followed my pernicious habit of drinking champagne, for after a few halting sentences, fashioned in the usual mould, he sat down, evidently quite unconscious that he had delivered one of the feeblest addresses ever uttered by the lips of man. [Illustration: _Hollyer_ LORD TENNYSON From the painting by G. F. WATTS, R.A., in the National Portrait Gallery. _To face page 193._ ] CHAPTER XIV SOME VICTORIAN POETS Among the great literary men of the time, Lord Tennyson was the first with whom I came into personal contact. When I was about seventeen I used to stay sometimes with Mrs. Cameron in her house at Freshwater, in the Isle of Wight, where her son Henry and I occupied ourselves very earnestly in private theatricals. Farringford, where Lord Tennyson dwelt, was near by, and the first time that I saw the poet was on the occasion of our performance of Tom Taylor’s play, _Helping Hands_, in which I enacted the part of a Jew dealer in musical instruments. As I came upon the little stage I felt almost startled by the great white dome of Tennyson’s head as he sat in the front row of the stalls. I suppose there was no man of his time in any walk of life whose personal appearance was so striking and impressive. Watts has imaged him well, and Millais too. But there was something in the presence of the man himself that Art could not render, a mingled impression of beauty and dignity, of simplicity and power, which I cannot recall as being combined in equal measure in any other face I have known.