ABSTRACT
W l E N Tennyson as a small schoolboy at Louth climbed a wall to expound his political views, a stern usher, ordering h im down, rebuked his aping of the parish beadle.1 Yet the time came when few would so rudely question his capacity for public speech. By 1842 Tennyson had become to many the true Laureate of Victorian England, long before the Queen's minister was able to offer him that title. And for a ful l half-century he retained his place as oracle, as prophetic interpreter of the ideals, the fears, the tastes and prejudices of a troubled and tumultuous age. Then, on the poet's death, even Thomas Henry Huxley, the ablest of the prose controversialists, was moved to rhyme:
And lay him gcnuy aown among The men of state, the men of song: The men who would not suffer wrong:
The thought-worn chieftains of the mind, Head servants of the human \ind?
