A very good account, by the late Mr. Locker-Lampson, of his tour through France and Switzerland with Tennyson in 1869, has preserved for us the flavour of his table and travelling talk upon literature, and occasionally upon religious problems. Into the philosophical or metaphysical abyss he did not let down his plummet very far; he recognized the limits of human knowledge, and for the dim regions beyond he accepted Faith as his guide and comforter. In regard to the poets--"As a boy," he said, "I was a great admirer of Byron, so much so that I got a surfeit of him, and now I cannot read him as I should like to do." Probably this habit of premature and excessive indulgence in Byron has blunted many an eager admirer's appetite, and has had something to do with the prevailing distaste for him, wherein we think that he has fallen into unmerited neglect. Of Shelley Tennyson said that there was "a great wind of words in a good deal of him, but that as a writer of blank verse he was perhaps the most skilful of the moderns. Nobody admires Shelley more than I once did, and I still admire him." For Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" he had a profound admiration; yet even in that poem he thought "the old poet had shown a want of literary instinct," and he touched upon some defects of composition; but he ended by saying emphatically that Wordsworth's very best is the best in its way that has been sent out by moderns. He told an anecdote of Samuel Rogers. "One day we were walking arm and arm, and I spoke of what is called Immortality, and remarked how few writers could be sure of it. Upon this Rogers squeezed my arm and said, 'I am sure of it.'" His wife's journal of this time is full of interest, recording various sayings and doings, conversations, correspondence, anecdotes, and glimpses of notable visits and visitors, Tourguéneff, Longfellow, Jenny Lind, Huxley, and Gladstone, to the last of whom Tennyson read aloud his "Holy Grail." At the house of G. H. Lewes he read "Guinevere," "which made George Eliot weep." The diary is a faithful and valuable memorial of English country life at its best in the middle of the last century. Living quietly with his family, he was in constant intercourse with the most distinguished men of his day, and was himself honoured of them all. In 1873 Tennyson had declined, for himself, Mr. Gladstone's offer of a baronetcy. In 1874 this offer was repeated by Mr. Disraeli, who does not seem to have known that it had been once before made, in a high-flying sententious letter, evidently attuned to the deeper harmonies of the mysterious relation between genius and government.