in the shaping power with which his art embodied his experience, there was a far-reaching concern with the actual nature of his conclusions. The poet was a prophet in the land, with an authority that he had not known since the old bardic days. Queues would form at the bookshops at the early hours of the morning on days when a new volume by him was to be published. And this touching faith in a poet’s word was not held only by the simple-minded and bewildered generality who wanted readymade solutions for their problems. It was shared by working men and the great leaders of science, by shrewd and liberal scholars and by unlettered adolescents, by the country squire and the stump orator, by Calvinistic churchmen and free-thinkers, by poets and the new Utilitarians, by the Queen and the village pump, in short by all sorts and conditions of men. When we remember how representative an audience it was to which Tennyson spoke we need hardly do more than this to realise that the charge that has sometimes been made against him of intellectual shallowness or charlatanry is a very ill-considered one. A religious or intellectual impostor may catch the easy ear of a credulous public for a moment, pack revival halls, or become a best seller, but a following that included Jowett and Huxley and Rossetti and FitzGerald and Francis Palgrave and Butler of Trinity, Gladstone and Disraeli, General Gordon and J. R. Green, George Eliot and Stopford Brooke and Thackeray and Tindall, not only as exceptional but as representative figures, was neither easy nor credulous, and when the last word of caricature about Tennyson and his mantle has been said the fact remains that in direct doctrine, as apart from the subtler processes of poetry, he had an influence upon the finest minds of his age which can hardly be exaggerated. He was an acknowledged as well as an unacknowledged legislator.