With a cat to the cream, which was not the cheese;
And a guinea a line is about the rate
You must pay for what flows from the poet's pate
When the blue fire wakes up the whole of the town;
And I'm sure I don't know what to say about Brown.
But whatever I say and whatever I sing
Will be worth to an obolus what it will bring!
The Referee, September, 1883.
It is generally admitted that Tennyson's more recent official poetry has added little to his fame, whilst it has often been mercilessly ridiculed, and, of late, his adulatory poems, and protestations of loyalty, have frequently been ascribed to interested motives. As soon as it was definitely announced that he was to be ennobled, a genealogy was compiled tracing his descent from the kings who ruled in Britain long before the Conquest. This grand claim (which was quoted at page 28) has since been rather spoilt by the plain statement that Alfred Tennyson's grandfather was a country attorney, practising in a small, quiet way in Market Rasen, North Lincolnshire, who, having made money in his business, retired, and bought some land in the neighbourhood.
But for the title just conferred upon him, Tennyson's birth and lineage would have been matters of perfect indifference to his readers. As for raising Tennyson to the peerage, no writer seems seriously to have defended an act which most people look upon as a mistake. Not one parody in its favour has been written, but many against it.