Page:Tennyson; the Leslie Stephen lecture.djvu/35

 simile, no doubt, may be overdone. It has often been satirised in many mock heroic works. But it survives; it is one of the great beauties of Hyperion; there is as much of it in Sohrab and Rustum as in the Idylls of the King, and in neither is it untrue to its origin:—

An answer to the critics on this point has been given by Dr Warren in his comparison of Tennyson and Dante, and I am content to follow the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford and find in the similes of Tennyson the same proportions as in Dante, the same transgression, if such it be, from the main theme to the incidental, the same exorbitant delight