Lord Tennyson's obiter dicta on all sorts of subjects are
now being recorded, and amongst them there is an opinion of the mischief which would be caused by the Disestablishment of the Church, which was addressed to Mr. Bosworth Smith in 1885. If there had been no record of any such expression of opinion, we might have been quite sure that Tennyson entertained it. The whole bias of his political mind was against throwing away any great historical influence which might be shown to have worked great results in the past, and to be working great results in the present, on the strength of any merely abstract principle, such as that of so-called " religious equality." " Nor deal in watchwords overmuch," he advises, in one of his gravest and most pregnant political poems, and then goes on,— " Not clinging to some ancient saw ;
Not mastered by some modern term ; Not swift, nor slow to change, but firm And in its season bring the law."
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