LETTERS AND OTHER PROSE WRITING.
Very few private letters of Tennyson have seen the light. A very short one to Lady Ashburton (1855), of small significance, is facsimiled in the Autographic Mirror; and a curious and discursive letter (presumably genuine) to some unknown correspondent, on an abstruse metaphysical question, crept into some of the newspapers a few years ago. There are two or three brief letters to the Times; corrections of misprints in his Exhibition Ode of 1862, a protest against a new line of railway in the Isle of Wight, etc., and a letter to Mr. Hamilton Hume, in defence of Governor Eyre, who had in his youth been an alumnus of the Louth Grammar School, shortly after Tennyson's departure for Cambridge; and a letter to a Society recommending for their choice a Welsh motto, displayed in his own hall, at Farringford or Blackdown, "The truth against the world." Two interesting and comparatively lengthy letters, of
