who had the privilege of meeting the poet at the chambers of his friend, John Forster:
"Mr. Forster and I," he says, "became more intimately associated about the middle of the century. In his chambers in Lincoln's Inn he frequently gathered around him a small circle of men of letters. Those who sat at his hospitable board were seldom too few or too many for general conversation. There I first met Tennyson, and there Carlyle. In familiar intercourse, such as that of Mr. Forster's table, Mr. Tennyson was cordial and unaffected, exhibiting, as in his writings, the simplicity of a manly character, and, feeling safe from his chief aversion, the digito monstrari, was quite at his ease."[1]
Tennyson is thus described by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Manchester Exhibition, July 30, 1857):
"While I was among the Dutch painters, ——— accosted me. He told me that the 'Poet Laureate' (as he called him) was in the Exhibition rooms, and, as I expressed great interest, was kind enough to go in quest of him. Not for the purpose of introduction, however, for he was not acquainted with Tenny-
- ↑ "Charles Knight: Passages of a Working Life" (London, 1865), iii. 39-40.
