TENNYSON'S ANACHRONISMS.
[To THE EDITOR or THE " SPUNATOR."3 Sur,—Professor Hearnshaw, whose article on Tennyson 1 have just read, apparently considers it a weakness in the " Idylls" that rude warriors of the sixth century should wear the armour of the fourteenth and express the philanthropic sentiments of the nine- teenth. It is of course most improbable that they spoke HO or were so armed; nor (the critic might have added) did they speak hi metre, or in modern English; nor, presumably, did Hamlet the Dane, or Othello the Moor, or Julius Caesar the Roman; nor could Hector of Troy possess that acquaintance with Aristotle's Ethics with which he is credited by Slutkospeare. Really, Professor Hearnshaw does, I think, go a little beyond fair criticism in this matter. Only the most intractable archaeologist can ever have blamed poets for allowing themselves a reasonable latitude in archaeological details—always provided that these ore not paraded overmuch before the reader, but duly subordinated to the main interest. And if the legendary heroes of poetry and the drama are to be debei'ved from the expression of all moral ideas belong- ing to a later age than their own, then poets and dramatists must be lamentably curtailed of what the world has so far regarded as their proper material. Does the Professor think that Greek tragedy is the lase worthy of survival because it puts in the mouth of characters, which it borrowe from Homer, language much more appropriate to the fifth than to (somewhere about) the twelfth
century no. P Surely not—I am, Sir, 40., A. D. G.
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