Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE PRINCBSS AND IN MEMORIAM From 1842 to 1845 the sojourning of Tennyson in various parts of England and Ireland can be traced from his letters, which mention, however, few personal incidents, and allude rarely to public affairs. One of these refers to a trial of the water cure at Cheltenham; and in a letter of October 1844 to F. Tennyson, FitzGerald reports Alfred to be still there, "where he has been sojourning for two months, but he never writes me a word. Hydropathy has done its worst: he writes the names of his friends in water." At this time he had been persuaded by one Dr. Allen to put all his capital into a project of turning out wood-carving by machinery. By this whimsically rash investment he lost his money, a very serious blow to his prospects of marriage; and he fell ill with anxiety and vexation.1 In 1845 Mr. Hallam. had drawn Sir Robert Peel's attention to Tennyson's merits and slender means, when Peel offered a small grant of one sum, excusing his inability to provide more at that time; but Hallam treated this as inadequate. Soon after- i FitzGerald writes (1845) — " Dr. Allen is dead ; and A.T., having a life insurance and policy on him, will now, I hope, retrieve the greater part of his fortune again. Apollo certainly did this ; shooting one of his swift arrows straight at the heart of the doctor, whose perfectly heartless conduct certainly upset A. T.'s nerves." 52 wards Carlyle's solemn warning to Monckton Milnes, who had already been moving in the matter, that his eternal salvation would depend at the Day of Judgment on his ability to answer the question why he did not get a pension for Alfred Tennyson, appears to have been effective, for in 1845 the annual grant of £200 was communicated to him by Sir Robert Peel as " a mark of roy...