learnt all his tennis in America. Charles Saunders beat Lambert in 1886, thereby becoming champion of England. Pettitt and Saunders met for the championship of the world at Dublin, Pettitt winning by seven sets to five. The match took place in May 1890, and during the autumn, Pettitt declining to defend the title, Saunders assumed it, but five years later he was challenged by Peter Latham and beaten, Latham thus becoming the champion of the world both at racquets and tennis. An American, George Standing, challenged him in 1897 for the racquets championship, but was beaten, and next year Pettitt challenged Latham at tennis. In 1904 C. Fairs (“Punch”) challenged Latham for the championship, but was beaten; but in 1908 Latham resigned his title, and Fairs then issued a challenge to any other player in the world to contest his right to the position of champion. The challenge was taken up in 1910 by G. F. Covey, the match for the championship, played at Brighton in the summer of 1910, being won by Fairs after a close contest, in which the younger player secured six sets to his opponent’s seven, and fifty-three games to fifty-nine won by the champion. Among amateurs a formal championship was not established till 1889, the recognized champion being the winner of the gold prize annually given by the Marylebone Cricket Club to its members, the competition not being made “open” till 1896. For fifteen years, from 1867 to 1881, J. M. Heathcote held the title, among those whom he defeated during that period being such fine tennis-players as Julian Marshall, G. B. Crawley, the Hon. C. G. Lyttelton (afterwards Lord Cobham), R. D. Walker, C. E. Boyle, and the Hon. Alfred Lyttelton. In 1882 A. Lyttelton defeated Heathcote, only to be beaten next year by him, and to beat him in turn in 1884 and 1885; but in 1886 Heathcote (then fifty-three years of age) was again champion. From 1887 to 1895 inclusive the Hon. A. Lyttelton was champion, defeating during that time (besides Heathcote) A. J. Webbe, Sir Edward Grey and H. E. Crawley. Grey’s perseverance—he won the silver prize on six occasions—was rewarded with the gold prize in 1896, but he was dispossessed in 1897 by E. H. Miles, who won for the next ten years, with the exception of 1900 when he was beaten by J. B. Gribble. On six occasions during this series Sir Edward Grey was second to the winner.
In 1889 the amateur championship, open to all amateurs, was instituted at Queen’s Club, West Kensington. The following list shows the winners:—
| 1889. Sir E. Grey. | 1900. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1890. E. B, Curtis. | 1901. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1891. Sir E. Grey. | 1902. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1892. H. E. Crawley. | 1903. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1893. H. E. Crawley. | 1904. V. Pennell. | |
| 1894. H. E. Crawley. | 1905. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1895. Sir E. Grey. | 1906. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1896. Sir E. Grey. | 1907. Jay Gould. | |
| 1897. J. B. Gribble. | 1908. Jay Gould. | |
| 1898. Sir E. Grey. | 1909. E. H. Miles. | |
| 1899. E. H. Miles. | 1910. E. H. Miles. |
It may be mentioned that Heathcote and Lyttelton, who monopolized the Marylebone Club’s gold prize for twenty-nine years, were strict adherents to the old-fashioned classical game, the winning and defending of chases and the clever placing of the ball being the leading feature of their game. A different and less attractive style of play, consisting of harder hitting, asserted itself in Miles’s first success, which was followed by many others; but Jay Gould, an American amateur, who beat Miles for the championship in 1907 and again in 1908, owed his success to the perfection of his style in the older and more scientific tennis. He did not defend his title in 1909, when Miles again became amateur champion in his absence, a title which Miles again retained in 1910.
The universities of Oxford and Cambridge have played two matches, two-handed and four-handed, ever since 1859, with the exception of 1864 when neither match was played. The games are played at the court of the Marylebone Club.
Tennis in America.—Few tennis-courts existed in America before 1880, about which time the buildings of the Boston Athletic Association and the New York Racquet and Tennis Club were built. There are now also courts at Chicago, Tuxedo, Lakewood and several other places, but the game is naturally played by comparatively few persons. Tom Pettitt, mentioned above as for several years champion of the world, was for many years in charge of the Boston courts. Other first-class men are Alfred Tompkins of New York, Boakes of Chicago, and Forester. Richard Sears first won the American championship in 1892, and it has been won since by F. Warren, B. S. de Garmendia, L. M. Stockton (four times), Eustace Miles (champion of Great Britain), Joshua Crane, and Jay Gould (amateur champion 1907 and 1908). The older courts at Boston and New York are rather low and small, but the newer ones are perfect.
See I. M. Heathcote, Tennis, Lawn Tennis, Rackets, Fives, in “The Badminton Library,” new and revised edition (London, 1903); Racquets, Tennis and Squash, by Eustace Miles (London, 1902).
TENNYSON, ALFRED TENNYSON, 1st Baron (1809–1892), English poet, was born at Somersby, Lincolnshire, on the 6th of August 1809. He was the fourth of the twelve children of the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831) and his wife Elizabeth Fytche (1781–1865). The Tennysons were an old Lincolnshire family settled at Bayon’s Manor. The poet’s grandfather, George Tennyson, M.P., had disinherited the poet’s father, who was settled hard by in the rectory of Somersby, in favour of the younger son, Charles Tennyson D’Eyncourt. The rich pastoral scenery of this part of Lincolnshire influenced the imagination of the boy, and is plainly reflected in all his early poetry, although it has now been stated with authority that the localities of his subject-poems, which had been ingeniously identified with real brooks and granges, were wholly imaginary. At a very early age he began to write in prose and verse. At Christmas 1815 he was sent to the grammar school at Louth, his mother having kept up a connexion with this typical Lincolnshire borough, of which her father, the Rev. Stephen Fytche, had been vicar. Tennyson was at this school for five years, and then returned to Somersby to be trained by his father. In the rectory the boys had the run of an excellent library, and here the young poet based his wide knowledge of the English classics. The news of Byron’s death (19th April 1824) made a deep impression on him: it was a day, he said, “when the whole world seemed to be darkened for me”; he went out into the woods and carved “Byron is dead” upon a rock. Tennyson was already writing copiously—“an epic of 6000 lines” at twelve, a drama in blank verse at fourteen, and so on: these exercises have, very properly, not been printed, but the poet said of them at the close of his life, “It seems to me, I wrote them all in perfect metre.” The family was in the habit of spending the summer holidays at the coast of the county, commonly at Mablethorpe, and here Tennyson gained his impressions of the vastness of the sea. FitzGerald very justly attributed the landscape character of Tennyson’s genius to the impress left on his imagination by “old Lincolnshire, where there were not only such good seas, but also such fine hill and dale among the wolds.”
In 1827 Frederick Tennyson (1807–1898), the eldest surviving brother, uniting with his younger brothers Charles and Alfred, published at Louth an anonymous collection of Poems by Two Brothers. The “two” were Charles and Alfred (whose contributions predominated), and who shared the surprising profits, £20. On the 20th February 1828 Charles and Alfred matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where Frederick was already a student. The poet subsequently told Mr Edmund Gosse that his father would not let him leave Somersby till, on successive days, he had recited from memory the whole of the odes of Horace. The brothers took rooms at 12 Rose Crescent, and afterwards moved into Trumpington Street (now 157 Corpus Buildings). They were shy, and made at first few friends; but they gradually gathered selected associates around them, and Alfred grew to be looked up to in Cambridge “as to a great poet and an elder brother” by a group which included Richard Chenevix Trench, Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), James Spedding, W. H. Thompson, Edward FitzGerald, W. H. Brookfield, and, above all, A. H. Hallam (1811–1833). Charles Tennyson (1808–1879) afterwards took the additional name of Turner. He published four volumes
