UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
not be as much greater than Tennyson as the critic shall please, but this is not a sufficient process of proof. Nor assuredly do I think it is; but the method chosen is none of mine; it is the method chosen by the critic whom for the moment I follow to examine his system of criticism. His choice of an instance is designedly injurious to the poet whom it shows at his weakest; but it seems to me, however undesignedly, not much less injurious to the poet whom it shows at his strongest. Such is frequently the effect of such tactics, the net result and upshot of such an advocate's good intentions. It will hardly be supposed that I have dwelt with any delight on the disparaging scrutiny of an otherwise admirable extract from a poet in whose praise I should have said enough elsewhere to stand clear of any possible charge of injustice or incompetence to enjoy his glorious and ardent genius; I have dwelt indeed with a genuine delight on a task far different from this—the task of praising with all my might, and if with superfluous yet certainly with sincere expression, his magnificent quality of communion with the great things of nature and translation of the joyous and terrible sense they give us of her living infinity, which has been given in like degree to no living poet but one greater far than Byron—the author of the Contemplations and the Légende des Siècles. This tribute, however inadequate and however unnecessary, was paid to the memory of Byron
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