though some of them may have little value for 'thinkers' in the Nineteenth Century meaning of the word. It was not as a 'thinker' of this sort that Tennyson made those early conquests, so well described by so many witnesses, best perhaps by Canon Dixon, as quoted in the Life of William Morris, or perhaps in that well-known chapter which describes the perplexities of Colonel Newcome over the taste of the younger generation:—
'He heard opinions that amazed and bewildered him: he heard that Byron was no great poet though a very clever man; he heard that there had been a wicked persecution against Mr Pope's memory and fame, and that it was time to reinstate him; that his favourite Dr Johnson talked admirably, but did not write English; that young Keats was a genius to be estimated in future days with young Raphael, and that a young gentleman of Cambridge, who had lately published two volumes of verses, might take rank with the greatest poets of all.' The friends of
