dominant one among all but a few. As in the eighteenth century every poetaster aped Pope, so in the nineteenth every English minor poet has followed in the wake of Tennyson.
There can be little doubt that this loving care for form was due to his University education on the old Trinity lines. Tennyson is of the classical order of poets in a double sense. There are always poets learned in their art who love to reproduce and recall the best work of their predecessors in their own or in the classical languages: Milton and Gray are of this class. There are poets, again, who preserve in their lines the reserve, the dignity, the καιρός of the great poets of antiquity, even though they may not be intimately acquainted with them: Collins and Keats are classical in this sense. Tennyson was classical in both ways: he has antique reserve, he is full of reminiscences. It is this fact that has made the comparison to Virgil or to Theocritus so natural, yet so misleading. The reference to Theocritus might pass for one side of his work, and that the least important. But Tennyson had no such theme as the Majestas Romae of the great Mantuan before him: no national-religious sanction to his subject, no haunting sense of a world-theme in his words.
There is, indeed, in Tennyson's first period,
