Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/13

 use the term freely and in no restricted or scholastic sense.

For many years past the Devil's Advocate has been busy, and it is impossible to ignore him. It is not on the ground of the biography but on the poems themselves that he must be met; nevertheless I take this passage from the biography to begin with, to show what sort of a man Tennyson might be in a problem and ordeal of personal conduct. The Lives of the Poets are often useful to correct false impressions; the Lives of Wordsworth and Keats do not prove that they were good poets, but they show that their adversaries were mistaken about them. Wordsworth among the Girondists, taking a share in the French Revolution, and Keats on his long walking-tour, travelling to the Ross of Mull, are very different from the tame soft creatures which some of their reviewers imagined them to be. Tennyson's character was often misjudged in a similar way; the Life of Tennyson makes it impossible to repeat the old false opinions.