tle for them that they gave a handful to a
boy whom they met. "I told them," said Tennyson, "that they had been
guilty of malappropriation, and though I was not quite sure whether the
coins belonged to me or to the Crown, that they certainly had no right to
them. Whereupon their leader said that if I was not satisfied they would
not work any longer for me, and so they went away." I had on this
occasion a long and interesting discussion with Mr. Tennyson relative to
Walt Whitman, and involving the principles or nature of poetry. According
to the poet-laureate, poetry, as he understood it, consisted of elevated
or refined, or at least superior thought, expressed in melodious form,
and in this latter it seemed to him (for it was very modestly expressed)
that Whitman was wanting. Wherein he came nearer to the truth than does
Symonds, who overrates, as it seems to me, the value, as regards art and
poetry, of simply _equalising_ all human intelligences. Though I never
met Symonds, there was mutual knowledge between us, and when I published
my "Etrusco-Roman Remains in Popular Traditions," which contains the
results of six years' intimacy with witches and fortune-tellers, he wrote
a letter expressing enthusiastic admiration of it to Mr. T. Fisher Unwin.
Now all three of these great men are dead. I shall speak of Whitman
anon, for in later years for a long time I met him almost daily.

I can remember that during the conversation Tennyson expressed himself,
rather to my amazement, with some slight indignation at a paltry review
abusing his latest work; to which I replied--

"If there is anything on earth for which I have envied you, even more
than for your great renown as a poet, it has been because I supposed you
were completely above all such attacks and were utterly indifferent to
them." Which he took amiably, and proceeded to discuss ripe fruit and
wasps--or their equivalent. Yet I doubt whether I was quite in the
right, since those who live for fame honourably acquired must ever be
susceptible to stings, small or great. An editor who receives abusive
letters so frequently that he ends by pitching them without reading into
the waste-basket, and often treats ribald attacks in print in the same
manner--as I have often done--has so many other affairs on his mind that
he becomes case-hardened. But I have observed from long experience that
there is a Nemesis who watches those who arrogate the right to lay on the
rod, a