Page:A Commentary on Tennyson's In Memoriam (1907).djvu/17

Rh Memoriam, in which a very large number of interesting parallels are noted. Those which I have used are marked with his initials (G.A.C.), and I should have liked to quote a great many more, but I have thought it best to abide by the rule of giving only such passages as I thought might not improbably have influenced Tennyson. I must add that my insertion of a parallel does not necessarily mean that I think there was such influence; and the question whether there was or not has, for me, merely a biographical or psychological interest. It appears to me as absurd to fancy that Tennyson’s mastery of phrase is called in question by his reminiscences of other men’s phrases as to suppose that Milton’s mastery is impugned by the delightful collection of parallels in Warton’s edition of the Minor Poems.

In the Preface to the first edition I mentioned, out of a regard for University College, Liverpool, that this book had its origin in lectures given there in 1884. I am anxious to guard against a misapprehension to which this statement has given rise. My book, in much that it contains and much that it omits, is very different from those lectures, and it is far from representing the kind of matter which, in my judgment, a teacher of English