READING FOR EVERYBODY.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 5861, 1 May 1897, Page 7

READING FOR EVERYBODY.

A TENNYSON ANECDOTE.

The more we learn about the late Lord Tennyson the more certain we become that the best of him went into his books, and that in private life he was distinctly common clay. Professor Max Muller, writing in the March Cosmopolis, gives an amusing account of his first meeting with the Laureate at Oxford. This was, he says, rather alarming. " "We lived then in a small house in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen College, and our establishment was not calculated to receive sudden guests, particularly a Poet Laureate. He stepped in one day during the long vacation, when Oxford was almost empty. Wishing to show the great man all civility, we asked him to dinner that night and breakfast the next morning. At that time almost all the " shops were in the market, which closed at one o'clock. My wife, a young housekeeper, did her best for our unexpected guest. He was known to be a gourmand, and at dinner he was evidently put out by finding the sauce with the salmon was not the one he preferred. He was -pleased, however, with the wing of a chicken, and said it was the only advantage he got from being Poet Laureate, that he generally received the liver-wing of a chicken. The next morning at breakfast wo had rather plumed ourselves on having been able to get a dish of cutlets, and were not a little surprised when our guest arrived to see him whip off the cover of the hot dish, and to hear the exclamation Mutton chops ! the staple of every bad inn, in England. However, these were but minor matters, though not without importance in the eyes of a young wife to whom Tennyson had been like one of the Immortals."