writes somewhere, “as well as the bestial Gentile.”  When I first saw Henry Irving made up as Shylock, my thoughts flew back to the garden-party at Little Holland House, and Disraeli.  I know I must have admired him greatly, for the only other time I ever saw him he was walking in Piccadilly, and I crossed the road, just to get a good look at him.  I even went the length of bumping into him on purpose.  It was a very little bump!  My elbow just touched his, and I trembled.  He took off his hat, muttered, “I beg your pardon,” and passed on, not recognizing me, of course; but I had had my look into his eyes.  They were very quiet eyes, and didn’t open wide.

I love Disraeli’s novels—­like his tie, brighter in color than any one else’s.  It was “Venetia” which first made me see the real Lord Byron, the real Lady Byron, too.  In “Tancred” I recall a description of a family of strolling players which seems to me more like the real thing than anything else of the kind in fiction.  It is strange that Dizzy’s novels should be neglected.  Can any one with a pictorial sense fail to be delighted by their pageantry?  Disraeli was a heaven-born artist, who, like so many of his race, on the stage, in music, and elsewhere, seems to have had an unerring instinct for the things which the Gentile only acquires by labor and training.  The world he shows us in his novels is big and swelling, but only to a hasty judgment is it hollow.

Tennyson was more to me than a magic-lantern shape, flitting across the blank of my young experience, never to return.  The first time I saw him he was sitting at the table in his library, and Mrs. Tennyson, her very slender hands hidden by thick gloves, was standing on a step-ladder handing him down some heavy books.  She was very frail, and looked like a faint tea-rose.  After that one time I only remember her lying on a sofa.

In the evenings I went walking with Tennyson over the fields, and he would point out to me the differences in the flight of different birds, and tell me to watch their solid phalanxes turning against the sunset, the compact wedge suddenly narrowing sharply into a thin line.  He taught me to recognize the barks of trees and to call wild flowers by their names.  He picked me the first bit of pimpernel I ever noticed.  Always I was quite at ease with him.  He was so wonderfully simple.

A hat that I wore at Freshwater suddenly comes to my remembrance.  It was a brown straw mushroom with a dull red feather round it.  It was tied under my chin, and I still had my hair down.

It was easy enough to me to believe that Tennyson was a poet.  He showed it in everything, although he was entirely free from any assumption of the poetical role.  That Browning, with his carefully brushed hat, smart coat, and fine society manners was a poet, always seemed to me far more incomprehensible than his poetry, which I think most people would have taken straightforwardly and read with a fair amount of ease, if certain enthusiasts had not founded societies for making his crooked places plain, and (to me) his plain places very crooked.  These societies have terrorized the ordinary reader into leaving Browning alone.  The same thing has been tried with Shakespeare, but fortunately the experiment in this case has proved less successful.  Coroners’ inquests by learned societies can’t make Shakespeare a dead man.