DEAR MRS. TENNYSON--Talking of ships again, I liked much _The Captain_ in the People's Alfred. Was the last stanza (which I like also) an afterthought?--I think a really _sublime_ thing is the end of Kingsley's "Westward Ho!"--(which I never could read through)--The Chase of the Ships: the Hero's being struck blind at the moment of revenge: then his being taken to _see_ his rival and crew at the bottom of the sea. Kingsley is a distressing writer to me: but I must think this (the inspiration of it) of a piece with Homer and the Gods--which you won't at all. He liked, too, "Gareth and Lynette," which again he thought more natural and direct than some of the earlier Idylls. He liked, as might have been expected, the "Ballads and other Poems." But what is most significant, perhaps, among his likes and dislikes, is his love for "Audley Court," "one of my old favourites," he calls it. Why did FitzGerald like "Audley Court"? It is not one of the poems which are generally best known and most admired. Indeed, while it is in many ways beautiful and contains some splendid things, such as the sonorous line The pillar'd dusk of sounding sycamores, it is just one of those poems which the severe critic of Tennyson picks out for fault-finding and even for ridicule. It has what such critics call the over-elaborate, the "drawing-room" manner. Like Milton's picture of Eve's _déjeuner_, though with more humour and appropriateness, it employs the grand and sumptuous style to describe trifles, such as the venison pasty: Where quail and pigeon, lark and leveret lay, Like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks Imbedded and injellied. But on a closer consideration it will be seen that it has just what "Old Fitz" himself loved--the easy realism, the contentment with the things of this world; above all, that flavour of After-dinner talk Across the walnuts and the wine which he also found and loved in that other favourite, "The Miller's Daughter," the harmless gossip about old friends who was dead, Who married, who was like to be, and how The races went, and who would rent the hall. This suited "Old Fitz's" temper absolutely. The humorous _pococurantism_, for cynicism it hardly is, of the quatrains put into the mouth of the Poet's friend, each ending "but let me live my life," breathes the very spirit of his own indolent, kindly Epicureanism, and indeed the poem might almost be taken as a record of a dialogue between the two friends in their early days. He loved, too, the "Lord of Burleigh," "The Vision of Sin," and "The Lady of Shalott." The delicious idealism of these youthful pieces did not displease him. They had for him a "champagne flavour." They were part of his own youth. For a brief hour of that fast-fleeting day, the wine of life had sparkled in his own glass, but then too soon turned flat and flavourless.