'Hallam's style does not appear to me so bad as it has been represented; indeed I am ashamed to say I rather think it a good style. He is a bold man and great names do not deter him from finding fault; he began with Pindar, and who has any right to complain after that? The characteristic excellencies of the work seem to be fidelity, accuracy, good sense, a love of Virtue and a zeal for Liberty'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Sydney Smith Print: Book
Aubrey De Vere, on how he 'first made acquaintance with Alfred Tennyson's poetry':
'Lord Houghton, then Richard Monckton Milnes, a Cambridge friend of my eldest brother's, drove up to the door of our house at Curragh Chase one night in 1832 [...] He had brought with him the first number of a new magazine entitled The Englishman containing Arthur Hallam's essay on Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The day on which I first took the slender volume into my hands was with me a memorable one. Arthur Hallam's essay had contrasted two different schools of modern poetry, calling one of these classes Poets of Reflection, and the other class Poets of Sensation, the latter represented by Shelley and Keats. Of Keats I knew nothing, and of Shelley very little; but the new poet seemed to me, while he had a touch of both the classes thus characterized, to have little in common with either. He was eminently original, and about that originality there was for me a wild, inexplicable magic and a deep pathos [goes on to discuss further]'.
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Aubrey De Vere Print: Serial / periodical
