arringford in the company of the venerable poet and his only
surviving son Hallam, named after the friend of his father's early
years. Although Tennyson was averse to mingling in general society,
and was difficult of access in his home, except to his intimate
friends, yet those friends were among the elect spirits of England,
and he has recorded his feeling for some of them--for Maurice,
Fitzgerald, Spedding, Lear, among others--in poems that deserve a
place among his best. His friendship for Carlyle grew out of his
admiration for the genius of the man as well as his character, and
Carlyle has left more than one sketch of his friend among his
inimitable word-portraits of notable men.

The interest of Tennyson's life really centres in his early days spent
in his father's parish of Somersby; his later life has flowed on in a
stream rarely interrupted by any events with which the public was
concerned, or that can be said to have greatly influenced his poetry.
He was no doubt the product of his time, and took a deep interest in
what was going on in the world, especially in so much of it as
affected England. But his strong conservatism made him unsympathetic
with much that is called progress, and which at any rate is change;
and change of any sort was little welcome to Tennyson. He was not born
to be a reformer, and was ill-fitted by his temper to lead public
opinion. But his lofty moral character, the noble purity and elevation
of his life, and his singleness of aim, joined with his extraordinary
powers as a poet, as a wielder of the English language--and no poet
since the great days has had such a varied power over all chords of
the lyre--these elements combined to make the name of Tennyson without
a doubt the greatest of his time among the poets of the
English-speaking race. He died at Aldworth House, in Surrey, October
6, 1892.

[Signature of the author.]

CHARLES DICKENS

By WALTER BESANT

(1812-1870)

[Illustration: Charles Dickens.]

Charles Dickens was born at Landport, now a great town, but then a
little suburb of Portsmouth, or Portsea, lying half a mile outside of
the town walls. The date of his birth was Friday, February 7, 1812.
His father was John Dickens, a clerk in the navy pay-office, and at
that time attached to the Portsmouth dockyard. The familiarity which
the novelist shows with sea-ports and sailors is not, however, due to
his birthplace, because his father, in the year 1814, was recal