ABSTRACT
Charles Tennyson and Jennie Stanford started the year by visiting the Tennysons on the Isle of Wight, and it was probably here that Tennyson suggested to Charles that he set the recently completed poem Carmen saeculare. Charles Villiers Stanford's other work from 1885 is the incidental music for the Cambridge Greek Play Committee's production of Aeschylus's Eumenides, completed in May. The precise subject of his irritation was Edmund Garrett's conduct in trying to secure an invitation to a member of the Irish National Party to address the Cambridge Union, but as Garrett surmised in one of his replies, it was not so much this that annoyed Stanford, but the presence of a Nationalist speaker at all. Stanford gave his first series of lectures as Cambridge Professor in the May term 1888 and chose the string quartet from Orlando Gibbons to Haydn Wood as his subject.
