Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 56.djvu/72

Tennyson on 16 Nov. 1876, the baronetcy became extinct (Times, 17 Nov. 1876).

Besides the works mentioned, Sir James Tennent wrote:
 * 1) 'Letters from the Ægean,' 1829, 2 vols., originally printed in the 'New Monthly Magazine.'
 * 2) 'The History of Modern Greece,' 1830, 2 vols.
 * 3) 'A Treatise on the Copyright of Designs for Printed Fabrics and Notices of the state of Calico Printing in Belgium, Germany, and the States of the Prussian Commercial  League,' 1841, 2 vols.
 * 4) 'Christianity in Ceylon, with Sketch of the Brahmanical and Buddhist Superstition,' 1850.
 * 5) 'Wine, its Use and Taxation: an Inquiry into the Wine Duties,' 1855.
 * 6) 'The Story of Guns,' 1865.
 * 7) 'The Wild Elephant and the Method of Capturing and Taming it in Ceylon,' 1867. He was author of the articles Tarshish, Trincomalie, and Wine and Wine-making in the eighth edition of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica.'

 TENNYSON, ALFRED, first (1809–1892), poet, the fourth of twelve children of the Rev. Dr. George Clayton Tennyson, rector of Somersby, a village in North Lincolnshire, between Horncastle and Spilsby, was born at Somersby on 6 Aug. 1809. His mother was Elizabeth, daughter of the Rev. Stephen Fytche, vicar of Louth in the same county. Of the twelve children of this marriage, eight were sons, and of these, two besides Alfred became poets of distinction, [q. v.] and Charles, who in later life adopted the name of an uncle, and became [q. v.] All of the children seem to have shared the poetic faculty in greater or less degree. The rector of Somersby, owing to 'a caprice' of his father, George Tennyson (1750-1835) of Bayons Manor, had been disinherited in favour of his younger brother Charles (Tennyson D'Eyncourt), and the disappointment seems to have embittered the elder son to a degree that affected his whole subsequent life.

Alfred was brought up at home until he was seven years old, when he was sent to live with his grandmother at Louth and attend the grammar school in that town. The master was one of the strict and passionate type, and the poet preserved no happy memories of the four years passed there. At the end of that time, in 1820, the boy returned to Somersby to remain under his father's tuition until he went to college. The rector was an adequate scholar and a man of some poetic taste and faculty, and the boy had the run of a library more various and stimulating than the average of country rectories could boast. He became early an omnivorous reader, especially in the department of poetry, to which he was further drawn by the rural charm of Somersby and its surroundings, which he was to celebrate in one of his earliest descriptive poems, the 'Ode to Memory.' A letter from Alfred to his mother's sister when in his thirteenth year, containing a criticism of 'Samson Agonistes,' illustrated by references to Horace, Dante, and other poets, exhibits a quite remarkable width of reading for so young a boy. Even before this date the child had begun to write verse. When only eight (so he told his son in later life) he had written 'Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers;' at the age of ten and eleven he had fallen under the spell of Pope's 'Homer' and had written 'hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre.' Somewhat later he had composed an epic of six thousand lines after the pattern of Scott, and the boy's father hazarded the prediction that 'if Alfred die, one of our greatest poets will have gone.'

In 1827 Tennyson's elder brother Frederick went up from Eton to Trinity, Cambridge; and in March of the same year Charles Tennyson and his brother Alfred published with J. & J. Jackson, booksellers of Louth, the 'Poems by two Brothers,' Charles's share of the volume having been written between the ages of sixteen and seventeen, Alfred's between those of fifteen and seventeen. For this little volume the bookseller offered 20l., of which sum, however, half was to betaken out in books. The two young authors spent a portion of their profits in hiring a carriage and driving away fourteen miles to a favourite bit of sea-coast at Mablethorpe. The little volume is strangely disappointing, in the main because Alfred was afraid to include in it those boyish efforts in which real promise of poetic originality might have been discerned. The memoir by his son supplies specimens of such, which were apparently rejected as being 'too much out of the common for the public taste.' These include a quite remarkable dramatic fragment, the scene of which is laid in Spain, and display an equally astonishing command of metre and of music in the lines written 'after reading the "Bride of Lammermoor."' The little volume printed contains chiefly imitative verses, in which the key and the