sympathise with the humours and enjoy the rude songs of the Lincolnshire peasantry.

It is very amusing to the natives of the county to read the ridiculous guesses as to who were intended by various characters, and which are the places described in the Laureate's writings. Two only need be mentioned: The Northern Farmer and the Moated Grange. Old John Baumber, who has been pointed out as the original, had none of the characteristics of the Northern Farmer. He was a respectable man, quite equal to the average “Wold farmers," who are the cream of farmers. I recollect him distinctly, and can, in imagination, see him now, with his ruddy face, his brown cloth coat, red waistcoat, drab kerseymere breeches and gaiters, and rather broad-brimmed hat. I never heard any of the "strange tales" which one writer says are told of him. And, unfortunately, he did not get rich. As for his house being the "Moated Grange," it reminds one of the French Academician's definition of a crab, as "a red fish, which walks backward," when another Academician remarked, " An excellent definition, but, unfortunately, a live crab is not red, it is not a fish, and it does not walk backwards." So John Baumber's house is not lonely, but close to the church, the rectory, and the high road. It never had a moat, and as for the "level waste" and "rounding grey" the country is woody and undulating. The much talked of "glen" also is just by, and it is but a very ordinary small affair. When I was a boy some huge holly trees growing in the hedge of John Baumber's farm, next the road, attracted my notice much, because a large quantity of his poultry were accustomed to roost in them

for the night, which I considered a very extraordinary thing; and whenever my father drove past with me towards the end of the day, long before we got to the spot, I began to wonder if the chickens would be there. But several "moated granges" still exist in the county. On a visit to my brother not long since, we passed three in one afternoon's drive, though not looking for them.

II. THE TENNYSONS.

THE Tennysons have been settled in Holderness from a very early period. I [Florence Peacock] am not aware whether the parish registers of the district have been searched with the view of tracing their genealogy, but until this has been done it will be impossible to say how far back legal evidence of their presence in Yorkshire may be procured.

Thomas Tenison, D.D., who was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1695 to 1716, is believed to have been a member of the Tennyson family, but there is no direct proof of the fact. It may, however, be said that the unusual manner in which he spelt his name is no indication that the tie of blood was distant, for long after the time at which he flourished, nay, till within living memory, it was no uncommon thing for brothers to vary the orthography of their surname. There can be but little doubt that both Tennyson and Tenison are merely altered forms of Dennisson-that is, the son of Dennis.

The grandfather of the late Poet Laureate was George

Tennyson, of Bayons Manor, near Market Rasen, in Lincolnshire, whose mother, Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of George Clayton, was, through her mother, Dorothy Hildeyard, of Kelstern, a descendant of an illustrious race, since the Hildeyards inherited the blood of the Earls of Scarsdale, who were also Barons d'Eyncourt, a member of their house having wedded an heiress of the blood of that noble family.

The late poet was also descended in another line from the d'Eyncourts, who sprang from Walter d'Eyncourt, one of the mighty men of war serving under the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings. Walter d'Eyncourt is said to have been a near relation of Remigius, the great Norman ecclesiastic, who removed the episcopal see from Dorchester to Lincoln, and thus became the first of that long line of prelates who have ever since ruled the diocese. The d'Eyncourt pedigree can be traced directly down from this Walter into the fifteenth century, when it became extinct in the male line.

There has always been a tradition in Lincolnshire to the effect that the reason Bayons Manor passed to a younger child and not to the heirs of the elder son was attributable to the extreme anxiety of George Tennyson to “found a family," which led him to make Charles, a man much given to politics-he represented Lambeth in Parliament for many years, and was a member of the Privy Council-the successor to his estates. The Laureate's grandfather himself possessed intellectual gifts of no despicable order. In early life he was a solicitor at Market Rasen, head of the firm of Tennyson, Mayne, and Vane; but as he lived

during the extreme agricultural depression, consequent on the war with our American colonies, which threw many estates into the market, he was enabled to add much to his possessions by judicious investments in farms and small holdings; he also took an active part in the great enclosures of uncultivated waste, at the end of the last century, for he was almost the only local lawyer who had a competent knowledge of manorial rights and customs, for which reason he was frequently employed, not only in Lincolnshire, but in the neighbouring counties, to make the needful arrangements for enclosure Acts, and to get them passed through Parliament. In his latter years Mr. Tennyson sat more than once in Parliament, representing Bletchingley. He died on the 4th of July, 1835, and a story told in the neighbourhood of Bayons Manor more than fifty years ago, related that the first time the nightingale was heard to sing in that part of Lincolnshire was on the evening of the day of his burial. There can be but few persons now alive who remember the great Lincolnshire lawyer; he was godfather to the present writer's grandfather, and his godson, who knew him well, had a high opinion of his legal abilities, and indeed of his capacity for business in the widest sense of that rather vague term. Probably the only serious mistake he ever made, if mistake it 'really were, as tradition represents, was when he left Bayons Manor to his younger son under the belief that the descendants of the elder one were not so likely to become prominent in the eyes of the world.

He possessed an amount of culture somewhat rare among the "practical" men of that age; in 1807 a ploughman on his estate unearthed the extraordinary number of 5,700

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F F

silver coins of Henry II., as fresh as though they had just come from the mint, and Mr. Tennyson presented a specimen of each separate type to the national collection in the British Museum, recognising, as few landowners even yet do, the duty of preserving the antiquities of the country for the benefit of future ages.

So much for the Laureate ancestry. Occasionally an amusing reminiscence of the poet himself is to be met with in the native county which he quitted so many years ago. For instance, an old woman who was once a servant in the house of one of his relations, observed in speaking of him to a friend of the writer, "that Mr. Alfred was very quiet, but he often said 'thank you"" for any service she had to do for him, such as "taking a candle into another room when he was going to study." She also remarked, "He be used for to screw a little glass into his eye when he had his dinner, a sort of thing I never see now-a-days, but they say as some folks wears them in some places. You see, Miss F——, I remember all this very well; but then, when I was there, I didn't know at all 'at he was tryin' for to be a poet."

III. EARLY RECOLLECTIONS.

IN Tennyson's Poems, published by Effingham Wilson in 1830, there are some very fine verses under the heading Isabel. These were written to his mother, and not a word was over-praise to those who knew her personally.

"Sweet lips whereon perpetually did reign

The summer calm of golden charity."