But for the suggestion of the present Lord Tennyson, I should shrink from the presumption of posing as a friend of his illustrious father, who for three Easters made of me a companion, sometimes for two, more often three hours daily, for three weeks at a time together. I should be safe in saying that the most gifted men I have ever known, Tennyson, Browning, and Cory, were in the realms of thought, philosophy, and imagination foremost in an age which in two instances acknowledged their supremacy whilst they lived, and in the third has ungrudgingly admitted him as one taking high rank amongst the English poets of the second order. I link his name with that of the two great men, for I have abundant materials for forming my opinion of him in the shape of three volumes of correspondence, begun in my boyhood and continued for years during my friend's lifetime. Mr. Fitzherbert was a welcome friend of Dr. Johnson's. "Ursa Major" warmed to him, though perfectly conscious that Fitz was anything but a star of the first magnitude. He says: "There was no sparkle, no brilliancy in Fitzherbert, but I never knew a man who was so generally acceptable. He made everybody quite easy, overpowered nobody by the superiority of his talents, made no man think worse of himself by being his rival, seemed always to listen, did not oblige you to hear much from him, and did not oppose what you said." "Such characters," says Mr. Raleigh, "are the oil of society, yet a society made wholly of such characters would have no taste." Tennyson's fidelity and patience with me were very much of a mystery; possibly I may have fitted his hand as a pet walking-stick; anyhow, I was "Man Friday to his Crusoe" as the play-actors say, and "constitutionals" with the Poet Laureate and his dogs, a wolf-hound or a deer-hound, Karénina or Lufra, were matters of daily occurrence in my Freshwater days. After 5 o'clock tea I left the Poet to "his sacred half-hour," and his pipe of tobacco. By the way, he smoked straight-stemmed Dublin clay-pipes, and hated new pipes, which he would soak in coffee.