We are glad to see Lord Tennyson's "indignant protest" against
the publication of his early verses, and the sale of the manuscripts containing them, without his permission. In our opinion, no greater mischief can be done to a poet than the hunting up and publication of immature work of his without his authority. And that this should be done in the lifetime of the poet, when he is still here to form his own judgment on the expediency or inexpediency of the course pursued, is a positive outrage. If poets were wise, they would carefully destroy all trace of the immature poems they had written. You might as well publish fac-similes of Shakespeare's childish copy-books, if they existed, as publish the first crude efforts of a boy to write poetry, like some of the wretched stuff which Shelley, for instance, wrote before he was expelled from Oxford.
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