Tennysonian manuscripts, as might be expected, have fetched very high prices. His autograph alone has been valued at £2, though Sir Henry Taylor records1 in his autobiography that the Laureate was "very violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for autographs. He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world were connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records." Late in his life, to his intense disgust, the manuscript of a number of his poems was thrown upon the market, and there was very keen competition to obtain possession of it. In June 1889 half-a-dozen of these manuscripts were offered for sale. The first was that of the Dedication to the Queen, and it was found that the MS. varied in many lines and words from the published version. One entire verse had not been printed, and a second had ceased to appear in later editions. To add to the interest of the MS. there was a footnote at the end of the page addressed to Mr Moxon the publisher-“I send you the three last stanzas of the Dedication. Ought not all the yous and the yours and the hers to be in capitals?-A. TENNYSON. Send the revises." This MS. was purchased for £30. The MS. of that favourite poem, The Daisy, occupying four and a half pages octavo, and containing several lines which were omitted in the published version, fetched £24, 10s.; while the copy of The Letters was valued at £18, 10s. The Lines to the Rev. F. D. Maurice, covering two pages, and differing from the published poem in several small details, went for £23. The MS. of The Brook, as might be expected, was deemed worthy of a higher price, and it was eventually secured for £51. Lastly came Maud. The MS. was incomplete, but by way of some compensation it contained a few unpublished verses. The price paid for this literary treasure was no less than £111. The autograph MSS. had previously been valued at £200; they actually realised £248. If these veritable scraps are so precious, what would be the value of the autograph copy,

1 See page 4.

say, of In Memoriam or The Idylls of the King? In regard to the sale just mentioned, it is worthy of note that the Hon. Hallam Tennyson wrote to the Times as follows:"Sir,-With reference to the recent sale of my father's manuscripts, he desires me to express his surprise and indignation that unpublished verses of his have been made public, and the manuscripts sold without his leave. Some of the corrections, moreover, appear not to be his." This protest did not, however, prevent a further sale taking place in the following year, when most of the songs of The Princess were purchased for 20 guineas. Soon afterwards a brief letter written by Tennyson was sold for £7, 7s. Tennyson wrote very little prose which has been made public, and his communications on plagiarism and suggestion alone can be deemed important. In regard to his poems, however, there seems no likelihood at present of his fears being realised that the printed leaves

May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden's locks.

APPENDIX A.

LOCALISING THE LAUREATE'S POEMS.

IT is far from my wish to raise controversy in this volume, but inasmuch as the Laureate's letter, as well as my own motives, have been greatly misunderstood, and as whatever Tennyson wrote must be regarded as having some historical value, I venture to reproduce his communication to me on the question of "localising." Lord Tennyson (through the medium of his son) informed me that "however pleasant my volume [" In Tennyson Land"] might be, he thought I had ridden my hobby to death. The Ode to Memory and In Memoriam alone of his poems contain any reference to Somersby. All the poems quoted . . . have nothing of Lincolnshire about them and are purely imaginative inventions." To which I venture to reply: No poet can be accepted as a judge of his own characteristics. The cumulative evidence against the Laureate's assertion is convincing, and it is remarkable that if the Lincolnshire element in the poems is an "imaginative invention," the poet waited until he was eighty years old before declaring it. Forty years previously Charles Kingsley had stated that the poems showed the colour and tone of Lincolnshire, and Tennyson did not correct him. The Rev. Drummond Rawnsley, Tennyson's particular friend, and himself a native of the same county, wrote seventeen years before-"As a Lincolnshire man, and long familiar with the district in which Mr Tennyson was born, I have often been struck with the many illustrations of our county's scenery and character to be found in his poems. What Wordsworth has done for the English Lakes and Scott for the Highlands, our poet has done for the homelier scenes of his boyhood and early manhood in Mid-Lincolnshire. They live for us in his pages, depicted with all the truth and accuracy of a photograph." Dr Peter Bayne, in Lessons from the Masters says "The poems of the first volume bear curiously vivid marks of the Lincolnshire birth-land of the poet. . . . We seem as we read these early verses of Tennyson's to be actually transported to the scenes. . . . He trusts nothing to random strokes. . . . He sees the landscape, and details its features. He localises the moated grange for us by minute specific touches." The Rev. J. W. Dawson asserts that "Wordsworth neve

picture of mountain solitude or lake scenery more simply true than the Lincolnshire poet gives of the great open spaces of the Fen country. His scenery is specially characteristic of Lincolnshire.” So said Edmund Clarence Stedman, and many others: in short, there seems to have been a conspiracy upon the part of those who knew Lincolnshire to "localise" the Laureate's poems. I fail to see that the practice is pernicious. Tennyson's letter was honest: he was unconscious to what a great extent Lincolnshire entered into his poetry. But what can be said of the few so-called students of his works who accepted his denial and also declared that they could find no such evidence in support of my contention? Happily their number was extremely small; and I have to thank the many who readily and spontaneously came to my aid and justified me in my work. We must have heroes and be allowed to worship them, and there are few modes more disinterested and less obnoxious than that of making their homes classic shrines. If authors and poets consciously or unconsciously describe the scenery of a locality, or if the spirit of a place is infused into their work and recognisable, what harm can come of identification? Scenes are the more inspiring for their associations, and there can be no more elevating pursuit than tracing their influence upon gifted minds. Nor can it be urged that we detract from a poet's merits by believing in his fidelity to nature and his ability to pourtray its beauty. We do not ask or expect the poet to be hard and restrained, and we do not deny him imagination; we only search for truth in fairest and purest guise, and discovery wrongs no one. Great artists in words and colours have bequeathed to us real pictures of visible things-Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Thomson, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, and the legacy to be treasured must be fully understood.

APPENDIX B.

TENNYSON'S LETTER ON PLAGIARISM AND SUGGESTION.

THE following important letter on Plagiarism is referred to in the chapter on Tennyson's originality. It was addressed to Mr S. E. Dawson, author of A Study of" The Princess," published at Montreal. ALDWORTH, HASLEMERE, SURREY, Nov. 21, 1882.

DEAR SIR,-I thank you for your able and thoughtful essay on The Princess. You have seen, among other things, that if women ever were to play such freaks the tragic and the burlesque might go hand in hand. I may tell you that the songs were not an afterthought.

Before the first edition came out, I deliberated with myself whether I should put songs in between the separate divisions of the poem ; again, I thought, the poem will explain itself; but the public did not see that the child, as you say, was the heroine of the piece, and at last I conquered my laziness and inserted them. You would be still more certain that the child was the true heroine, if, instead of the first song as it now stands,

As thro' the land at eve we went,

I had printed the first song which I wrote, The Losing of the Child. The child is sitting on the bank of the river and playing with flowers -a flood comes down-a dam has been broken through-the child is borne down by the flood-the whole village distracted-after a time the flood has subsided-the child is thrown safe and sound again upon the bank, and all the women are in raptures. I quite forget the words of the ballad, but I think I may have it somewhere.

Your explanatory notes are very much to the purpose, and I do not object to your finding parallelisms. They must always recur. A man a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me saying that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem there were two whole lines of mine almost word for word. Why not? Are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions? It is scarcely possible for anyone to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which in the rest of the literature of the world a parallel could not somewhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur, and, more, I wholly disagree. There was a period in my life when, as an artist-Turner, for instance—takes rough sketches of language, &c., in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain, e.g.:

A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight.

Suggestion: The sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay was the most lovely sea village in England, though now a smoky town; the sky was covered with thin vapour, and the moon was behind it.

A great black cloud

Drags inward from the deep.

Suggestion: A coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon.