himself that he tells a true story is gone.  That this diversion into the region of didactics is accompanied, on our poet’s part, with every ingenuity of ornament, and every grace of a style which people have learned to like and which he has made his own, need not be said.  The Tennysonian beauties are all there.  The work takes its place in literature, obscuring the Arthurian work of Dryden, as Milton’s achievement of Paradise Lost obscured the Italian work on the same subject which preceded it.  The story is told, and the things of the Round Table can hardly be related again in English, any more than the tale of Troy could be sung again in Greek after the poem of Homer.  But beauties do not necessarily compose into perfect Beauty, and the achievement of a task neatly done does not prevent the eye from wandering over the work to see if the material has been used to the best advantage.  So, the reader who has allowed himself to rest long in the simple magic evoked by Malory or in the Celtic air of Villemarque’s legends, will be fain to ask whether a man of Tennyson’s force could not have given to his century a recasting which would have satisfied primitive credulity as well as modern subtility.  There is an antique bronze at Naples that has been cleaned and set up in a splendid museum, and perhaps looks more graceful than ever; but the pipe that used to lead to the lips, and the passage that used to communicate with the priest-chamber, are gone, and nothing can compensate for them:  it used to be a form and a voice, and now it is nothing but a form.

We have just observed that in our opinion the first essays made by the Laureate with his Arthurian material had the best ring, or at least had some excellences lost to the later work. Gareth and Lynette, however, by its fluency and simplicity, and by not being overcharged with meaning, seems to part company with some of this overweighted later performance, and to attempt a recovery of the directness and spring of the start.  It is, however, far behind all of them in a momentous particular; for in narrating them, the poet, while able to keep up his immediate connection with the source of tradition, and to narrate with the directness of belief, had still some undercurrent of thought which he meant to convey, and which he succeeded in keeping track of:  Arthur and Guinevere, in the little song, ride along like primeval beings of the world—­the situation seems the type of all seduction; the Lady of Shallot is not alone the recluse who sees life in a mirror, she is the cloistered Middle Age itself, and when her mirror breaks we feel that a thousand glasses are bursting, a thousand webs are parting, and that the times are coming eye to eye with the actual.  In those younger days, Tennyson, possessed with a subject, and as it were floating in it, could pour out a legend with the credulity of a child and the clear convincing insight of a teacher:  when he came in mature life to