her greatest work, did not appear till 1876. The composition of it caused her the same anxiety, the "fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature, and not a mere addition to the heap of books," but she was comforted on looking back to see "that I really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about Romola; and, so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of Middlemarch." Her interest in the Jews, an interest especially revealed in this book, had been growing for some time and was enough to stimulate her manner of moralizing which so many deplore. People "hardly know," she wrote to Mrs. Stowe, "that Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. . . . The best that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness - in plain English, the stupidity — which is still the -which is still the average mark of our culture." The English people were being indeed scourged at all hands; for the genial Dickens was dead, and if they turned from George Eliot, they were like to encounter Ruskin, now grown shrill, or Carlyle, violent with his anathemas.

On November 28, 1878, George Lewes died, leaving her almost inconsolable. One of the first things she did, on collecting herself, was to arrange for a Cambridge "studentship" endowed in his name. The Impressions of Theophrastus Such, her last work, was published the following year. Not long after, May 6, 1880, she married her subsequent biographer, Mr. John Cross. "No one," says Mr. Oscar Browning, "can have studied the character of George Eliot, even superficially, without being convinced how necessary it was for her to have some one to depend upon, and how much her na

ture yearned for sympathy and support." But she did not live long to enjoy the world which she now found "so intensely interesting." She died, after a short attack of throat trouble," something like croup," on December 22, 1880, and was buried beside Mr. Lewes in Highgate Cemetery.

ALFRED TENNYSON

As the nineteenth century recedes, and so comes more and more into view as a whole, so much greater seems the likelihood that Tennyson will always be regarded as its representative poet in English literature. He was born in its first decade, and died in its last. He came of age during the agitation for the great Reform Bill, echoed the hopes of ardent Liberals who were fain to press on with the good cause

"Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World;"

but lived to share a growing distrust in democracy, to sneer at “the suffrage of the plow," and to say

"Let us hush this cry of Forward!' till ten thousand years have gone."

He was precisely fifty years old when Darwin's book on the Origin of Species appeared, marking a revolution in man's thought; but he had shared the doubts and dissensions which preceded Darwin's summary, and in his In Memoriam grapples hard with the many difficulties which attended the meeting of a new science and an ancient faith. In poetry he could remember Byron as a living voice, and records the grief with which on an April day in 1824, "a day when the whole world seemed to be darkened for me," he went out and carved on a rock the words "Byron is dead." When the world recorded the poet's own death, he had outlived all but

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one of the great singers of the century, and left only Swinburne to hand down the traditions of our nobler verse. Unlike Browning, he was popular with all classes of readers, yet he kept intact the dignity and distinetion of his own personal art. Unlike Browning, too, he > shunned society; his love of nature was as genuine as it was profound; and all his portraits show the face of an artist and a dreamer. Clearly, then, he must be accepted as the representative poet of his nation and of his time.

Alfred Tennyson was born at Somersby in Lincolnshire, August 6, 1809, the fourth of twelve children. His father was rector of the parish, and belonged to a very old family of that country. The mother, born Elizabeth Fytche, was also of ancient descent. His native country is described in many poems; we are told that the stream which flowed through Somersby is addressed in that charming lyric Flow down, Cold Rivulet, to the Sea. At seven he was sent to school in Louth, and went through the common experience of that day, copious floggings from the master and still more copious cuffings from the boys. "How I did hate that school!" was his comment in later life. After four years he returned to Somersby and was taught by his father, a man of great ability and varied tastes, until he was ready for Cambridge. Juvenile poems of this period show uncommon ability compared with most effusions of the kind; and when he was but sixteen years of age he was engaged on verse which was published two years later along with that of his elder brother Charles, as Poems by Two Brothers. Some of these Juvenilia are now included in the poet's collected works.

In February, 1828, the two brothers entered Trinity

College, Cambridge, whither their older brother Frederick had preceded them. Alfred is described in these days as striking and distinguished in appearance. His son and biographer quotes the following: "Six feet high, broad-chested, strong-limbed, his face Shakespearean, with deep eyelids, his forehead ample, crowned with dark wavy hair, his head finely poised, his hand the admiration of sculptors, long fingers with square tips, soft as a child's, but of great size and strength. What struck one most about him was the union of strength with refinement." The two brothers lived in lodgings, and so missed the more intimate college life; but they made friends among the best men of the University Nearest and dearest of these to the poet was Arthur Henry Hallam, a man of great attainments and promise, whose early death called out the In Memoriam. Other friends were Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton; Trench, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin; Thompson, subsequently Master of Trinity; Maurice, celebrated as a great liberal preacher; Spedding, the editor of Bacon. In the formal debates of their society Tennyson took little part and is said never to have read a paper before them, but his conversation was brilliant enough in that

"band

Of youthful friends, on mind and art,

And labour, and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land."

This society went by the name of "The Apostles." In 1829 Tennyson won the prize medal in poetry on the subject of Timbuctoo. He was too shy to declaim the poem at Commencement, and that part of the task was performed by his friend Merivale; but in the presence