Good Lord! I wouldn't ave that mann
Attack me in the _Times_!----"

while Leech took his part against Lord John Russell on the occasion of
Higgins's "Story of the Mhow Court Martial." He was shown as a tall,
self-possessed gentleman, saying to the little fellow, who is sparring
up to him--"Pooh, go and hit one of your own size." Higgins's height,
indeed, was greater than that of either Thackeray or his friend Dean
Hole--six feet eight; and when the three friends walked abroad, the
sensation among the passers-by was considerable. On Thackeray and Dean
Hole measuring heights once in the house of a common friend, it was
found that they were practically equal. "Ah, yes," exclaimed the Dean;
"the cases are about the same, but one contains a poor dancing-master's
fiddle, and the other a Stradivarius."

_Punch's_ sensation of the year was the fierce revenge taken by Tennyson
in its pages on Bulwer Lytton. Bulwer, as is explained elsewhere, had
been set up by _Punch_ as one of its pet butts from the very beginning;
and when Tennyson's sledge-hammer onslaught was brought to them, so it
is said, by a distinguished man of letters--a particular friend of both
parties--they rejoiced exceedingly. Tennyson's broadside had not been
unprovoked. Years before, in 1830, he had published, through Effingham
Wilson, "Poems, chiefly Lyrical," which contained the poem "To a Darling
Room," afterwards suppressed. Seizing on this, Lytton had re-echoed in
his "New Timon: A Romance of London," the strictures which Christopher
North has so severely, though good-naturedly, passed upon it in
"Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine" for May, 1832, and furthermore taunted
the Laureate with the pension of L200 which had just been conferred upon
him. The attack was just the sort to extort a violent reply.

"Not mine, not mine (O, muse forbid!) the boon
Of borrowed notes, the mock-bird's modish tune,
The jingling medley of purloined conceits
Out-babying Wordsworth, and out-glittering Keats,
Where all the airs of patchwork pastoral chime
To drown the ears in Tennysonian rhyme.

* * * * *

"Let school-miss Alfred vent her chaste delight
On darling rooms, so warm and bright;[43]
Chant 'I am weary' in infectious strain,
And 'catch the blue-fly singing on the pane;'
Though praised by critics and adored by Blues,
Though Peel with pudding plumb the puling muse;
Though Theban taste the Saxon purse co