21 JANUARY 1899, Page 15

THE "IN MEMORIAM" METRE.

[TO THY EDITOR Or THE "SPECTATOR?']

SIR,—If your correspondent will turn to the fourteenth chapter of the " Memoir of Lord Tennyson," by his son (Vol. I., p. 305), he will find that the late Poet-Laureate wrote thus :—" As for the metre of In Memoriam,' I had no notion till 1880 that Lord Herbert of Cherbury had written his occasional verses in the same metre. I believed myself the originator of the metre, until after ' In Memoriam' came out, when some one told me that Ben Jonson and Sir Philip

Sidney had used it."—I am, Sir, 8cc., E. F.