"He had no great liking, he said, for arranging the poets in a hierarchy. He found so much that surpassed him in different ways in all the great ones; but he thought that Homer, Æschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakspere, and Goethe,--these seven,--were the greatest of the great, up to the year 1800. They are not all equal in rank, and even in the work of that heptarchy of genius, there were trivial things to be found.... "Just at this stage of our talk Mrs. Hallam Tennyson, Mrs. Douglas Freshfield, and her daughter came up the garden-walk to the summer-house. Miss Freshfield wore a hat on which was an artificial flower, a lilac-branch. It at once caught Tennyson's eye. There was a lilac-tree in bloom close at hand, and he said, 'What is that you are wearing? It's a flowery lie, it's a speaking mendacity.' He asked how she could wear such a thing in the month of May! We rose from the bower, and all went down the garden-walk to see the fig-tree at the foot of it, and sundry other things at the western entrance-door, where Miss Kate Greenaway was painting. We returned along a twisting alley under the rich green foliage of elms and ilexes.... "Listening to the wind in the trees and the sound of running water--although it was the very tiniest of rillets--led us away from philosophy, and he talked of Sir Walter Scott, characterizing him as the greatest novelist of all time. He said, 'What a gift it was that Scotland gave to the world in him. And your Burns! He is supreme amongst your poets.' He praised Lockhart's _Life of Scott_, as one of the finest of biographies; and my happening to mention an anecdote of Scott from that book led to our spending the greater part of the rest of our walk in the telling of stories. Tennyson was an admirable storyteller. He asked me for some good Scotch anecdotes, and I gave him some, but he was able to cap each of them with a better one of his own--all of which he told with arch humor and simplicity. "He then told some anecdotes of a visit to Scotland. After he had left an inn in the island of Skye, the landlord was asked, 'Did he know who had been staying in his house? It was the poet Tennyson.' He replied, 'Lor', to think o' that! and sure I thoucht he was a shentleman!' Near Stirling the same remark was made to the keeper of the hotel where he had stayed. 'Do you ken who you had wi' you t' other night?' 'Naa, but he was a pleesant shentleman.' 'It was Tennyson, the poet.' 'An' what may _he_ be?' 'Oh, he is the writer o' verses such as you see i' the papers.' 'Noo, to think o' that, jest a pooblic writer, an' I gied him ma best bedroom!' Of Mrs. Tennyson, however, the landlord remarked, 'Oh, but _she_ was an angel!'