Note 4 — Early Poems (continued 4)

All up to and including 1850 read:— Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born. Mr. Babbage, the famous mathematician, is said to have addressed the following letter to Tennyson in reference to this couplet:— “I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world’s population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that, in the next edition of your excellent poem, the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:— Every moment dies a man, And one and a sixteenth is born. I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.”