Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/29

 the Duke of Argyll, suggests some of the names, 'the thinkers of the day,' with whom Tennyson is to be ranked or not to be ranked, according to one or the other opinion. Thought is here discursive thought, philosophical or moral argument. Tennyson as a thinker is compared with thinkers who use prose. There need not be any unfairness in this. There certainly are poems, like the Essay on Man, which enter into competition with the prose thinkers, and whose arguments are fairly judged by the same standards. There is nothing unfair that I can see in Mr Gladstone's discussion of Locksley Hall. Whether his arguments are really valid is another question. Is the contention of Locksley Hall sixty years after really met by Mr Gladstone's references to the penny post, cheap newspapers, and Mr Thomas Cook's tourist agency? It may be doubted. A Canadian critic at the time (with perhaps a little too much emphasis) said it was almost as if someone had answered John the Baptist 'by pointing out that there had