"What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt—
A dapper boot—a little hand—
If half the little soul is dirt?
"A Timon, you! Nay, nay, for shame:
It looks too arrogant a jest—
The fierce old man—to take his name,
You bandbox. Off, and let him rest."
This crushing rejoinder was cordially welcomed by Thackeray and the rest of the Staff, who loved to castigate the fopperies of the conceited poetaster, and Lytton, it is said, was not a little astonished at the virility of "school-miss Alfred." But Tennyson's anger soon cooled; perhaps his conscience smote him; for the very next week he toned down the savagery of his first verses in an "Afterthought," in which he said:
"And I too talk, and lose the touch
I talk of. Surely, after all,
The noblest answer unto such
Is kindly silence when they brawl."
The first set of verses are not to be found in the poet's collected poems; but the second are included, only "kindly silence" is replaced by "perfect stillness." After that Tennyson broke silence no more; and Lytton subsequently made what was put forward as an amende honorable, in a speech at Hertford (October, 1862), when he said that "we must comfort ourselves with the thought so exquisitely expressed by our Poet Laureate," and so forth. The quarrel between Punch and Lytton faded, first into a truce, and then into friendship; and in 1851 we find several of the Staff playing "Not so Bad as we Seem"—written specially for them—at Devonshire House, before the Queen and the Prince Consort. It may not inappropriately be mentioned that when Woolner's bust of Tennyson was presented to Trinity College and the authorities excluded it from the chapel and library on the ground that there was no precedent for paying so much honour to a living person, Punch, by the hand of Shirley Brooks, published one of the finest parodies extant of the Laureate's style, beginning with the line—
"I am not dead; of that I do repent."
In January, 1847, Horace Smith, the brother of James —— they of the "Rejected Addresses"—contributed a column "Christmas Commercial Report;" and John Macgregor—"Rob Roy"—began his acknowledged series of papers and sketches with "Costumes for the Commons" and "Meeting of the Streets," the pecuniary results of which he devoted to police-court poor-boxes. He was hardly more than a lad at the time; but he was already a strong writer, and his references to the French Revolution have the intrinsic merit that they were written by one who was in Paris at the time when the "Citizen King" took flight to England.
HENRY SILVER.
(From a Photograph by Elliott and Fry.)