Tennyson. From an unpublished photograph in the possession of Charles Bruce Locker Tennyson, C. M. G.

Tennyson, as was inevitable with a man of such nobility of mind and life, regarded the torture of animals for the sake of knowledge with “the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn.”

If authority be cited in great moral questions here is one that must compel reverence from all but the poor trifler with his “hollow smile and frozen sneer.”

He looked modern Science in the eye, perceived whither its aggrandisement of knowledge to a place supreme in human estimate, above conduct, must inevitably lead mankind, and proclaimed, in accents which can never die, that it is impossible for man to acquiesce in a godless world.

He taught us that men’s hearts can never be satisfied with a world explained and comprised by the cold “changeless law” of foreordained evolution and inevitable destiny. “Knowledge comes,” said he, “but wisdom lingers.”

From the first, then, Tennyson lent the weight of his splendid name to the cause of mercy, and I find his signature to the original great petition for the restriction of vivisection between those of Leslie Stephen and Robert Browning on the same sheet of paper—a sheet of paper now one of the treasured possessions of the National Anti-Vivisection Society.

All the world knows the allusions in his works to those who “carve the living hound,” and to curare, which he called “the hellish oorali.” And thus this greatest poet of the Victorian age gave the weight of his commanding authority for all time to a fierce condemnation of vivisection as the most awful and monstrous of the offsprings of modern Science.

Tennyson was religious in the widest and most inspiring sense.

“Almost the finest summing up of religion,” he wrote, “is ‘to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.’”

“To love mercy!” That is the true sign of magnanimity in man. All holy men, all brave men, all great and knightly men have loved mercy. “It is an attribute to God Himself.”

Time passes, and succeeding races of mankind, like the leaves of autumn, are blown away and perish, but countless men of heroic mould, reaching back into the dim mists of legend and down through innumerable years while the great world spins “for ever down the ringing grooves of change,” have one and all been gloriously crowned with the same shining diadem of mercy.