most
complicated of the kind in English literature. So did he also with
another which appeared two years (or a little more) later. It is not
therefore quite just to judge the criticism which these books received,
by the present condition of the poems which figured in them; for though
most of the beauties were there then, they were accompanied by many
defects which are not there now. Criticism, however, was undoubtedly
unfavourable, and even unfair. Although Tennyson was not, either at this
time or at any other, a party politician, the two great Tory
periodicals, the _Quarterly Review_ and _Blackwood's Magazine_, were
still animated, the former by a dislike to the Romantic school in
poetry, the latter by a dislike to "Cockneys"--though how anybody could
have discovered a Cockney in Tennyson may seem marvellous enough.
Accordingly Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other fell foul
(though in Wilson's case, at least, not indiscriminately) of work which
beyond all question offered very numerous and very convenient handles,
in ways which will be mentioned presently, to merely carping criticism.
Some attempts at reply were made by the poet's friends, notably A. H.
Hallam, but the public did not take to him, and even well-affected and
competent older judges, such as Coleridge, expressed very qualified
admiration.

But during the next decade, in which he gave himself up silently to the
task of perfecting his art, attempting no profession or literary
occupation of profit, and living (partly in London, partly in the
country at High Beach and elsewhere) with extreme simplicity and economy
on his own small means and a pension which was provided for him, the
leaven of an almost fanatical admiration was spreading among readers of
his own age or a little younger. And his next publication, a new issue
of _Poems_ in 1842--containing the final selection and revision of the
others already mentioned, and a large reinforcement of admirable
work--was received, not indeed with the popular avidity which had been
displayed towards Scott and Byron in the generation before, and which
revived in the case of his own later work, but with an immense enjoyment
by almost all true lovers of poetry. Even Wordsworth, the most
ungracious critic of other men's work in his own art of whom the history
of literature gives record, acknowledged Tennyson in the amplest terms.

This was, as has been hinted above, exactly fifty years before his
death, and tho