ing, and I hope you will persuade him to work on.” He speaks of Tennyson’s “Maud” in another part of the same letter:
“I find much in ‘Maud’ to admire, both in the old and the new sense of the word, and love and cherish. But it must be owned that many of the lines are without hook or bait, and many of the ideas would pass for nonsense at every toll-gate in criticism. Still, there is so much peculiarly Tennyson’s own in it, in form and fancy, that we willingly tramp over its long beach of sand to gather his grains of gold, and shells and pebbles of beauty. For instance,
‘—the cobweb woven across the cannon’s throat,
Shall shake its threaded tears in the wind no more.’
Threaded tears! How true and Tennysonian!” Of Burns he said, “There was a speech made at the Burns festival, in which the speaker called Burns a man of the million. Now the fact is, Burns was not a man of the million, but a man of a million, and in this case the indefinite article is of greater value than the definite.”
Upon the same occasion he referred to one or two luckless orators, who, in attempting to eulogize a man whose genius they did not comprehend, fell into some ludicrous mistakes. In alluding to this he said, “Poor Burns! he belonged to the militia, and his last dying request was, ‘Don’t let the awkward squad fire over my grave.’ The other night, at that dinner, the awkward squad were firing away over his grave just as hard as ever.” In his opinion, Faulconbridge in King John was Shakespeare’s greatest creation—the most
