Next day we walked up at about 12.20 to accompany him in his morning walk. Montagu and he were in front, Hallam Tennyson and I behind. Montagu tells me how he was indignant with Z. for charging him with general plagiarism, in particular about Lactantius and other classics, "of whom," he said, "I haven't read a word." Also, of taking from Sophocles, "whom I never read since I was a young man"; and of owing his "moanings of the sea" to Horace's _gementis litora Bospori_. Some one charged him with having stolen the "In Memoriam" metre from some very old poet of whom he had never heard. He said, in answer to Montagu's question, that the metres of both "Maurice" and "The Daisy" were original. He had never written in the metre of Gray's _Elegy_, except epitaphs in Westminster Abbey. He admired the metre much, and thought the poem immortal[63]. Hartley Coleridge, he said, spoke of Pindar as the "Newmarket Poet." He thought the loss of his Dithyrambs most serious, judging from the remaining fragment. He had from early boyhood been familiar with the fact that Wolsey and Cromwell in _Henry VIII._ were by Fletcher, but he felt absolutely certain that the description of the Field of the Cloth of Gold was by Shakespeare's own hand. He quoted it, as well as several lines from Wolsey. When I said how glad I was he had written about the Duke of Clarence, he said, "Yes, but I wouldn't write an Installation Ode for the Chancellor." So far Montagu reported. After this we others came up, and the old Poet and I walked home together. We spoke a little of our projected tour to Greece. He had never been there, but would have greatly liked to go--in a private yacht--"but they tell me an old man is safest at home, and I dare say it is true; and I couldn't stand the vermin!" I told him I was hoping to study classical architecture a little before going out, and he said that he thought, after all, Gothic architecture was finer than classic. "It is like blank verse," he said; "it will suit the humblest cottage and the grandest cathedral. It has more mystery than the classic." He thought many of our cathedrals spoiled by their vile glass. He had been disappointed, in his late visit to Cambridge, to notice that the windows in King's seemed to be losing their brilliancy and to look dark. After we had been walking a few minutes in silence, he said to me, "Do you see what the beauty is in the line, That all the Thrones are clouded by your loss?"--