Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/399

EDWARD MOXO.V. 359 Mr. Tennyson had been silent for ten years, had been maturing his talents, been mourning for the death of his friend Hallam, and probably during the whole of this time not a thousand copies of his poems had been sold. But he was already acknowledged as one of our greatest living poets by a small and ardent band of admirers, and in 1 842 he was induced to break his long silence and publish an edition of his poems in two volumes, of which the second was composed en- tirely of new pieces, and in the first some were new, and many had been re-written. By this time his success was publicly and generally acknowledged, and fresh editions were called for in 1843, 1845, l %47> an d from that date in still more rapid succession. The beauty and purity of his poems attracted royal favour, and in 1846 he received a pension from the crown, and this unfortunately gave offence to some rivals in the divine art, and Lord Lytton in the " New Timon " attacked " Schoolmiss Alfred." To this Mr. Tennyson re- plied by a poem published in Punch (February, 1846), which may be summed up in the two words, " Thou bandbox." In 1843, Wordsworth, in a letter to Reed, says, " I saw Tennyson when I was in London several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets (sic), and I hope will live to give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed, in the strongest terms, his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz., the spirituality with which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral rela- tions under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances." Again, in 1848, Mr. Emer-