After this first visit I had the pleasure of meeting Lord Tennyson several times and of making Lady Tennyson’s charming acquaintance; the present Lord Tennyson being exceedingly kind and friendly to me in welcoming me to their house. On one occasion when I met Lord Tennyson at the house of a mutual friend, he told me, (with an innocent surprise which I could not but find diverting,) that a certain great Professor had been positively angry and rude to him about his lines in the Children’s Hospital concerning those who “carve the living hound”! I tried to explain to him the fury of the whole clique at the discovery that the consciences of the rest of mankind has considerably outstepped theirs in the matter of humanity and that while they fancied themselves, (in his words,) “the heirs of all the ages, in the foremost files of Time,” it was really in the Dark Ages, as regarded humane sentiment,—or at least one or two centuries past,—in which they lingered; practising the Art of Torture on beasts, as men did on men in the sixteenth century. I also tried to explain to him that his ideal of a Vivisector with red face and coarse hands was quite wrong, and as false as the representation of Lady Macbeth as a tall and masculine woman. Lady Macbeth must have been small, thin and concentrated, not a big, bony, conscientious Scotch woman; and Vivisectors (some of them at all events) are polished and handsome gentlemen, with peculiarly delicate fingers (for drawing out nerves, &c., as Cyon describes).
Lord Tennyson from the very first beginning of our Anti-vivisection movement, in 1874, to the hour of his death, never once failed to append his name to every successive Memorial and Petition,—and they were many,—which I, and my successors, sent to him; and he accepted and held our Hon. Membership and afterwards the Vice-Presidency of our Society from first to last.
The last time I saw Lord Tennyson was one day in London after I had taken luncheon at his house. When I rose to leave the table, and he shook hands with me at the door as we were parting, as we supposed, for that season; he said to me: “Good-Bye, Miss Cobbe—Fight the good Fight. Go on! Fight the good Fight.” I saw him no more; but I shall do his bidding, please God, to the end.
I shall insert here two letters which I received from Lord Tennyson which, though trifling in themselves, I prize as testimonies of his sympathy and goodwill. I am fortunately able to add to them two papers of some real interest,—the contemporary estimate of Tennyson’s first poems by his friends, the Kembles; and the announcement of the death of Arthur Hallam by his friend John Mitchell Kemble to Fanny Kemble. They have come into my possession with a vast mass of family and other papers given me by Mrs. Kemble several years ago, and belong to a series of letters, marvellously long and closely written, by John Kemble, during and after his romantic expedition to Spain along with the future Archbishop Trench and the other young enthusiasts of 1830. The way in which John Mitchell Kemble speaks of his friend Alfred Tennyson’s Poems is satisfactory, but much more so is the beautiful testimony he renders to the character of Hallam. It is touching, and uplifting too, to read the rather singular words “of a holier heart,” applied to the subject of “In Memoriam,” by his young companion.
“Farringford, Freshwater,
“Isle of Wight,
“June 4th, 1880.
“Dear Miss Cobbe,
“I have subscribed my name, and I hope that it may be of some use to your cause.
“My wife is grateful to you for remembrance of her, and