TENNYSON AND HIS NEIGHBOURS

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1507, 17 January 1901, Page 42

TENNYSON AND HIS NEIGHBOURS

In his interesting book on the “Memories of the Tennysons,” by Canon Rawnsley, which Messrs MacLehose and Sons have just published, the author tells us that among the “folk-lore” that remains in the neighbourhood of Somersby Rectory on the subject of the late Laureate, he gathered the curious fact, that the humbler neighbours all thought him quite mad. “T them daays,” says a survivor of his early years, “we thowt he will' daft. He was' alius ramciing off quite by hissen, wi'out a coat to his back and wi’out a hat to his head, nor nowt.” The same narrator recalls a curious incident which must have annoyed the least sensitive of poets. Her husband was an itinerant fiddler, who, one would have supposed:, should have had some comprehension of the vagaries into which the artistic temperament leads its possessor. If so, lie did not show it. He was coming home early one morning after a dance at which 1 e had been engaged to pi ly to the quality, when, “be-dashed, who should lie light on but Mr Alfred, a-ravin’ and tsavin’ upon tno sandhills in liis . siurt sit eves an’ a 1 and Mr Alfred says, 'Thou poor foci, Ikon doesn’t knaw morning from night/ for you know, sir, i’ them daays we ail thowt he .was crazed. And the Queen wants to make him a Lord, poor Qiin.g! Y, ell, I mvver did hear the likes o’ that, for sarten sewerness.” A mischievous boy, the Canon also remarks, had V ribbled on the wicket-gate, marked “Private,” that led out of the garden at Faivngdon on to the downs, “Old Tennyson is a fool/’ "When the old poet caught sight of it, he said cheerily, “The boy’s about right; we arc- all of us fools, if we only knew it. Wo are but at the beginning of wisdom.”