exceptional mind might find room for both. Nothing was more characteristic of the age than the reaction towards medieval ideas, headed by Newman, except the rival and seemingly incompatible gospel of “the railway and the steamship” and all their corollaries. It cannot be said that Tennyson, like Gladstone, found equal room for both ideals in his mind, for until old age had made him mistrustful and querulous he was essentially a man of progress. But his choice of the Arthurian legend for what he intended to be his chief work, and the sentiment of many of his most beautiful minor poems, show what attraction the mediæval spirit also possessed for him; nor, if he was to be in truth the poetical representative of his period, could it have been otherwise. He is not, however, like Gladstone, alternately a mediæval and a modern man; but he uses mediæval sentiment with exquisite judgment to mellow what may appear harsh or crude in the new ideas of political reform, diffusion of education, mechanical invention, free trade, and colonial expansion. The Victorian, in fact, [Illustration: _From the chalk drawing by M. Arnault in the National Portrait Gallery_ ALFRED TENNYSON Rischgitz Collection] [Illustration: _From a photo by Messrs. F. Frith & Co., Reigate_ FARRINGFORD Tennyson’s residence at Freshwater] finds himself nearly in the position of the Elizabethan, who also had a future and a past; and, except in his own, there is no age in which Tennyson would have felt himself more at home than in the age of Elizabeth. He does, indeed, in “Maud” react very vigorously against certain tendencies of the age which he disliked; but this is not in the interest of the mediæval or any other order of ideas incompatible with the fullest development of the nineteenth century. If the utterance here appears passionate, it must be remembered that the poet writes as a combatant. When he constructs, there is nothing more characteristic of him than his sanity. The views on female education propounded in “The Princess” are so sound that good sense has supplied the place of the spirit of prophecy, which did not tabernacle with Tennyson. “In Memoriam” is a most perfect expression of the average theological temper of England in the nineteenth century. As in composition, so in spirit, Tennyson’s writings have all the advantages and all the disadvantages of the golden mean. [Illustration: _From a photo by Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron_ TENNYSON (ABOUT 1871) (Reproduced by permission of Mr. J. Caswall Smith)]