T. “My tailor at Cambridge was a man of the name of Law. When he made his way into our rooms, and worried us about paying our bills, we used to say, ‘This is Law’s Serious Call.’ I capped this story with a similar Oxford tradition. The name of the Oxford tailor was Joy, and the undergraduates, soaked with port wine, used to say, ‘Heaviness may endure for a night, but Joy cometh in the morning.’”
T. “You cannot wonder at my horror of all the libels and slanders; people began to slander me in early days. For example, after my marriage we spent the honeymoon on Coniston Lake in a cottage lent to me by James Marshall. Shortly after this, a paragraph appeared in an American newspaper to the following effect: ‘We hope, now that Mr. Tennyson is married and has returned to his native lakes, that he will give up opium.’ The penny-a-liners evidently confounded your uncle, S. T. Coleridge, with myself—anyhow, if he wasn’t quite certain, he gave your relative the benefit of the doubt.”
“Again, I was once persuaded by an adventuress (who wrought upon me by her tale of hopeless poverty) to hear her read in my own drawing-room. She was in my house for exactly half an hour, and profited by her experience in telling her audiences that she had seen me thrashing my wife, and carried away drunk by two men-servants to my bedroom.”
One day we visited the grave of Lord Tennyson’s shepherd; he died at the age of ninety-one. On his death-bed Hallam asked him if he would remember in his will his two sons in Australia who had entirely ignored and neglected him. “No,” he said firmly; and he left his 17s. 6d. a year to the poorest man in the parish of Freshwater. On his tombstone are engraved the Laureate’s own words from “In Memoriam”:
God’s finger touched him and he slept.
I showed Lord Tennyson some manuscript verses by my friend Bernard Drake, who died at Madeira in 1853. He read them twice through, slowly and aloud. I had told him of Drake’s history, and then showed him the verses; their sadness impressed him greatly:
ON ILLNESS