"Let school-miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
On darling rooms, so warm and bright;[43]
Chant 'I am weary' in infectious strain,
And 'catch the blue-fly singing on the pane;'
Though praised by critics and adored by Blues,
Though Peel with pudding plumb the puling muse;
Though Theban taste the Saxon purse controls,
And pensions Tennyson while starves a Knowles."
Punch (p. 64, Vol. X.) had rushed in to the rescue with the clever retort:—
"The New Timon" and Alfred Tennyson's Pension.
"You've seen a lordly mastiff's port,
Bearing in calm, contemptuous sort
The snarls of some o'erpetted pup
Who grudges him his 'bit and sup:'
So stands the bard of Locksley Hall,
While puny darts around him fall,
Tipp'd with what Timon takes for venom;
He is the mastiff, Tim the Blenheim."
But Tennyson's was not by any means "the lordly mastiff's port." He was stung by the contemptuous reference to the pension, and proved the truth of Johnson's aphorism—
"Of all the griefs that harass the distrest,
Sure the most bitter is the scornful jest"—
and he straightway wrote the ten verses that appeared under the title of "The New Timon, and the Poets" (p. 103, Vol. X.), signing them "Alcibiades":—
"We know him, out of Shakespeare's art,
And those fine curses which he spoke;
The old Timon, with his noble heart,
That, strongly loathing, greatly broke.
So died the Old: here comes the New.
Regard him: a familiar face:
I thought we knew him: What, it's you,
The padded man that wears the stays—