The latest of Tennyson's poems, of course, he did not live to see. He did not see, for instance, "Crossing the Bar." What would he have thought of it? Another old friend of Tennyson, also a fastidious critic, the Duke of Argyll, in an unpublished letter of February 1, 1892, writing of this and of the lines on the "Death of the Duke of Clarence," says: "Magnificent, is all I can say of your lines in the _Nineteenth_. The two last things of yours that I have seen, this and the 'Bar,' are both perfect in their several ways, and such as no other man could have written. The 'Bar' is the type of what I define Poetry to be, great thought in true imagery and unusual expression. All the three are needed for the type thing. Much fine poetry is to me only eloquence, which is quite another thing." With the last sentence FitzGerald would certainly have agreed, for it is what in other words he was himself constantly saying. But he seemed to require something more than great thoughts and true images and choice diction. Poignant and revealing touches, what he called in Crabbe "shrewd hits"; feeling, as well as, if not more than, thought--this was what he asked for. All Browning's genius seemed to him _emphase_, cleverness, curiosity, "cockneyism." "The Dramatic Idylls," he writes to Frederick Tennyson, "seemed to me 'Ingoldsby.' It seems to me as if the Beautiful being already appropriated by former men of genius, those who are not inspired, can only try for a Place among them by recourse to the Quaint, Grotesque, and Ugly in all the Arts,--what I call the Gargoyle style." And again: "I always said he must be a cockney, and now I find he is Camberwell-born-- It once was the Pastoral cockney, It now is the cockney Profound." The establishment of the Browning Society tried him specially. "Imagine a man abetting all this," he writes. Tennyson had, through life, a high opinion of FitzGerald's powers of criticism. They had often in their youth discussed the classics of all time and all times together, and also, with the poetic freedom of young men, their seniors, Shelley, and Byron, and Wordsworth. It was FitzGerald who invented for the last the name by which he went in their circle, of the "Daddy." They had fought for the ownership of the Wordsworthian line, the "weakest blank verse in the language": A Mr. Wilkinson, a clergyman. It really was FitzGerald's description, given in conversation, of the gentleman who was going to marry his sister. When he died in 1862 FitzGerald, writing to Tennyson, reminded him of the line. "This letter," he writes, "ought to be on a black-edged paper in a black-edged cover: for I have just lost a brother-in-law--one of the best of Men. If you ask, 'Who?' I reply, in what you once called the weakest line ever enunciated: A Mister Wilkinson, a Clergyman. You can't remember this: in Old Charlotte Street, ages ago!" In the valedictory verses Tennyson makes allusion to this critical habit: