Early in the year 1827 we find Alfred Tennyson and his elder brother Charles together at the Louth grammar-school, and preparing for the press a volume of juvenile poems, written from the age of fifteen upwards. The copyright was disposed of for a small sum to Messrs. Jackson, booksellers and printers of Louth,[1] who published the volume in the spring of 1827, under the title of "Poems by Two Brothers," and with the modest motto, from Martial, on the title-page, "Hæc nos novimus esse nihil."
These poems are 102 in number, few of them extending to great length, as the volume only contains 228 pages. They are written in all kinds of metre, and on all sorts of subjects—classical and modern—strangely alternating. Nearly all of them are loaded with footnotes, and headed by quotations, chiefly from Addison, Beattie, Byron, Cicero, Claudian, Cowper,
- ↑ "From Grantham, Eyre went to the grammar-school of Louth, in Lincolnshire, which Charles and Alfred Tennyson had left a year or two before. Their fame as poets was still traditionary in the school, and Edward Eyre seemed to feel a kind of noble envy, at once proud of the fact that two of 'our boys' had actually published a volume of poems for which a bookseller gave them ten pounds, and grieved he could not emulate them."—Life of Edward John Eyre, by Hamilton Hume (London, 1867), p. 11.
