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 the harmonious expression of his grandest thoughts metamorphosed into clownish barbarism."

The occasion of the unprovoked attack upon Tennyson by the author of "Pelham," was the announcement in the newspapers, in the autumn of 1845, that the Government had conferred a pension on our poet, which we have heard was granted, not as a reward for literary merit, but as compensation for some claim his family had on the Crown. Be this as it may, however, there appeared anonymously in the winter of that year a satire, entitled "The New Timon: a Romance of London," well-known to be the production of the eminent novelist alluded to, in which not only was Tennyson's poetry spoken of as "'a jingling medley of purloin'd conceits," "patchwork-pastoral," "tinsel," and the like—but he himself was stated in a footnote to be "quartered on the public purse in the prime of life, without either wife or family."