ar salvation, without the fear and trembling of a foolish
faith.

CLOTTED BOSH.

"A heterogeneous mass of clotted bosh."
--Thomas Carlyle.

The death of Tennyson has called forth a vast deal of nonsense. Much
of it is even insincere. The pulpits have spouted cataracts of
sentimentality. Some of them have emitted quantities of sheer drivel. A
stranger would think we had lost our only poet, and well-nigh our only
teacher; whereas, if the truth must be told, we have lost one who was
occasionally a great poet, but for the most part a miraculous artist
in words. No man in his senses--certainly no man with a spark of
judgment--could call Tennyson a profound thinker. Mainly he gave
exquisite expression to ideas that floated around him. Nor did he
possess a high degree of the creative faculty, such as Shakespeare
possessed in inexhaustible abundance. Surely it is possible to admire
our dead poet's genius without telling lies over his grave.

Among the pulpit utterances on Tennyson we note the Rev. Hugh Price
Hughes's as perhaps the very perfection of slobbery incapacity. He
appears to be delivering a course of addresses on the poet. The first of
these escaped our attention; the second is before us in the supplement
to last week's _Methodist Times_. We have read it with great attention
and without the slightest profit. Not a sentence or a phrase in it rises
above commonplace. That a crowd of people should listen to such stuff
on a Sunday afternoon, when they might be taking a walk or enjoying a
snooze, is a striking evidence of the degeneration of the human mind, at
least in the circles of Methodism.

Mr. Hughes praises Tennyson for "conscientiousness in the use and
choice of words." He should have said "the choice and use of words," for
_choice_ must precede _use_ to be of any service. Mr. Hughes says it is
of great importance that we should all be as conscientious as Tennyson.
He might as well say it is of great importance that we should all be as
strong as Sandow.

Let us take a few examples of _Mr. Hughes's_ "conscientiousness."
He talks of "shining features" which "lie upon the very surface" of
Tennyson's poems. Now features seldom shine, they do not lie, and
they must be (not _upon_, but) _at_ the surface. Six lines further the
shining features change into "shining qualities," as though _features_
and _qualities_ were synonyms. Mr. Hughes speaks, in the style of
a penny-a-liner, of Tennyson's "amazi