[Illustration: CLEVEDON CHURCH Where the remains of Arthur Hallam were finally laid to rest on January 3rd, 1834. (Reproduced from “The Homes and Haunts of Alfred, Lord Tennyson,” by kind permission of Mr. George G. Napier and Messrs. James Maclehose & Sons)] miniature of its own highest, and frequently unconscious, tendencies and aspirations. Not Dryden or Pope were more intimately associated with their respective ages than Tennyson with that brilliant period to which we now look back as the age of Victoria. His figure cannot, indeed, be so dominant as theirs. The Victorian era was far more affluent in literary genius than the periods of Dryden and Pope; and Tennyson appears as but one of a splendid group, some of whom surpass him in native force of mind and intellectual endowment. But when we measure these illustrious men with the spirit of their age, we perceive that--with the exception of Dickens, who paints the manners rather than the mind of the time, and Macaulay, who reproduces its average but not its higher mood--there is something as it were sectarian in them which prevents their being accepted [Illustration: _From a drawing by Louis Rhead_ GERAINT AND EDYRN (Reproduced from the Illustrated Edition of “Idylls of the King,” by kind permission of Messrs. Macmillan & Co., Ltd.)] [Illustration: _From a drawing by A. Garth Jones_ IN MEMORIAM “Man dies: nor is there hope in dust” (Reproduced from the Caxton Series Edition of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” by kind permission of Messrs. George Newnes, Ltd.)] as representatives of their epoch in the tidiest sense. In some instances, such as Carlyle and Browning and Thackeray, the cause may be an exceptional originality verging upon eccentricity; in others, like George Eliot, it may be allegiance to some particular scheme of thought; in others, like Ruskin and Matthew Arnold, exclusive devotion to some particular mission. In Tennyson, and in him alone, we find the man who cannot be identified with any one of the many tendencies of the age, but has affinities with all. Ask for the composition which of all contemporary compositions bears the Victorian stamp most unmistakably, which tells us most respecting the age’s thoughts respecting itself, and there will be little hesitation in naming “Locksley Hall.” [Illustration: _From a drawing by A. Garth Jones_ IN MEMORIAM “Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky” (Reproduced from the Caxton Series Edition of Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” by kind permission of Messrs. George Newnes, Ltd.)]