THE TENNYSONS each succeeding generation moved south again. Thus, Michael, who married Elizabeth Clayton, lived at Lincoln, and was the father of George, the first Tennyson occupant of Bayons Manor. He had four children: George Clayton, the poet's father; Charles, who took the name of Tennyson d'Eyncourt; Elizabeth, the "Aunt Russell" that the poet and his brothers and sisters were so fond of; and Mary, the wife of John Bourne of Dalby, of whom, though she lived so near to them, the Somersby children were content to see very little, for she was a rigid Calvinist, and once said to her nephew, "Alfred, when I look at you I think of the words of Holy Scripture, 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire.'" At Somersby, then, the poet and all the children after Frederick were born in this order: Charles, Alfred, Mary, Emilia, Edward, Arthur, Septimus, Matilda, Cecilia, Horatio. They were a singularly fine family, tall and handsome, taking after their father in stature (he was six feet two inches) and after their mother (a small and gentle person, whose good looks had secured her no less than twenty-five offers of marriage) in their dark eyes and Spanish colouring. She was idolised by her eight tall sons and her three handsome daughters, of whom Mary, who became Mrs. Ker, was a wonderfully beautiful woman. Frederick, who outlived all his brothers, dying at the age of ninety-one after publishing a volume of poems in his ninetieth year, alone of the family had fair hair and blue eyes. Matilda is alive still at the age of ninety-eight.
The three elder sons all went to the Grammar School at Louth in 1813, when Alfred was but seven. Frederick went thence to Eton in 1817, and to St. John's, Cambridge, in 1826; Charles and Alfred stayed at Louth till 1820, and they left it with pleasure for home teaching. Few could have been better qualified to teach than the Doctor. He had a good library and he was a classical scholar; could read Hebrew and was not without a knowledge of mathematics, natural science and modern languages; also he was a rigid disciplinarian, and, like all good schoolmasters, was held in considerable awe by his pupils. I should like to have heard him had anyone in his day outlined to him as the method of the future the Montessori system. This power of terrifying a whole class and causing each one of a set of ordinarily plucky English lads to feel for the space of half an hour that his heart was either in his
