tially allied and perhaps the differences between them may be due in greater or in less part to the fact that they come to us through different media. We of the nineteenth century read the Carlovingian romance in the pages of Ariosto and Bojardo, who gave to their materials the colour of their times, and of a civilisation rank in some respects, while still unripe in some others. The genius of poetry was not at the same period applying its transmuting force to the Romance of the Round Table. The date of Sir Thomas Mallory, who lived under Edward IV., is something earlier than that of the great Italian romances; England was younger in its poetical development; he appears, too, to have been on the whole content with the humble offices of a compiler and a chronicler, and we may conceive that his spirit and diction are still older than his date. The consequence is, that we are brought into more immediate and fresher contact with the original forms of this romance. So that, as they present themselves to us, the Carlovingian cycle is the child of the latest middle age, while the Arthurian represents the earlier.

29. Much might be said on the specific differences which have thus arisen, and on those which may be due to a more northern and a more southern extraction respectively. Suffice it to say that the Romance of the Round Table, far less vivid and brilliant, far ruder as a work of skill and art, has more of the innocence, the emotion, the transparency, the inconsistency of childhood. Its political action is less specifically Christian than that of the rival scheme, its individual portraits more so. It is more directly and seriously aimed at the perfection of man. It is more free from gloss and varnish; it tells its own tale with more entire simplicity. The ascetic element is more strongly, and at the same time more quaintly, developed.

It has a higher conception of the nature of woman; and, like the Homeric poems, it appears to eschew exhibiting her perfections in alliance with warlike force and exploits. So also love, while largely infused into the story, is more subordinate to the exhibition of other qualities. Again, the Romance of the Round Table bears witness to a more distinct and keener sense of sin and on the whole, a deeper, broader, and more manly view of human character, life, and duty. It is in effect more like what the Carlovingian cycle might have been, had Dante moulded it. It hardly needs to be added that it is more mythical; inasmuch as Arthur of the Round Table is a personage, we fear, wholly doubtful, though not impossible; while the broad back of the historic Charlemagne, like another Atlas, may well sustain a world of legendary accretions. This slight comparison, be it remarked, refers exclusively to what may be termed the latest "redactions" of the two cycles of romance. Their early forms, in the lays of troubadours, and in the pages of the oldest chroniclers, offer a subject of profound interest. It is one still unexhausted, although it has been examined by Mr. Panizzi and M. Fauriel ;* but it is also one, which is quite beyond the scope of our present subject.

30. It is to this rich repository that Mr. Tennyson has resorted for his material. He has shown, as we think, rare judgment in the choice. The Arthurian Romance has every recommendation that should win its way to the homage of a great poet. It is national: it is Christian. It is also human in the largest and deepest sense; and, therefore, though highly national, it is universal; for it

* Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians: London, 1830. Histoire de la Poésie Provençale: Paris, 1846.

rests upon those depths and breadths of our nature, to which all its truly great developments, in all nations, are alike essentially and closely related. The distance is enough for atmosphere, not too much for detail; enough for romance, not too much for sympathy. A poet of the nineteenth century, the Laureate has in the main appropriated and adapted characters, incidents, and even language, instead of attempting to project them, on a basis of his own, in the region of illimitable fancy. But he has done much more than this. Evidently by reading and by deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, he has penetrated himself, down to the very core of his being, with all that is deepest and best in the spirit of the time, or in the representation with which he deals; and as others, using old materials, have been free to alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has claimed and used the right to sever and recombine, to enlarge, retrench, and modify, for the purposes at once of a more powerful and elaborate art than his original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at least of a far more sustained, ethical and Christian strain.

31. We are a little disposed to quarrel with the title of Idylls for no diminutive (eiduλλcov) can be adequate to the breadth, vigour, and majesty which belong to the subjects, as well as to the execution, of the volume. The poet used the name once before; but he then applied it to pieces generally small in the scale of their delineations, whereas these, even if broken away one from the other, are yet like the disjoined figures from the pediment of the Parthenon in their dignity and force. One indeed among Mr. Tennyson's merits is, that he does not think it necessary to keep himself aloft by artificial effort, but undulates with his matter, and flies high or low as it requires. But

even in the humblest parts of these poems-as where the little Novice describes the miniature sorrows and discipline of childhood-the whole receives its tone from an atmosphere which is vitally heroic, and which, even in its extremest simplicity, by no means parts company with grandeur, or ceases to shine in the reflected light of the surrounding objects. Following the example which the poet has set us in a former volume, we would fain have been permitted, at least provisionally, to call these Idylls by the name of Books. Term them what we may, there are four of them; and they are. arranged, as we think, in an ascending scale.

32. The simplicity and grace of the principal character in Enid, with which the volume opens, touches, but does not too strongly agitate, the deeper springs of feeling. She is the beautiful daughter of Earl Yniol, who, by his refusal of a turbulent neighbour as a suitor, has drawn down upon himself the ruin of his fortunes, and is visited in his depressed condition by (p. 1)

"The brave Geraint, a knight of Arthur's court,

A tributary prince of Devon, one

Of that great order of the Table Round."

We cannot do better than cite the passage which describes the mother's coming, on the evening of this visit, to the chamber of the maiden (p. 28).

66 She,

With frequent smile and nod departing, found,
Half disarrayed as to her rest, the girl;
Whom first she kissed on either cheek, and then
On either shining shoulder laid a hand,
And kept her off and gazed upon her face,
And told her all their converse in the hall,

Proving her heart: but never light and shade
Coursed one another more on open ground
Beneath a troubled heaven, than red and pale
Across the face of Enid hearing her;
While slowly falling, as a scale that falls,
When weight is added only grain by grain,
Sank her sweet head upon her gentle breast;
Nor did she lift an eye, nor speak a word,
Rapt in the fear and in the wonder of it:
So, moving without answer to her rest,
She found no rest, and ever failed to draw
The quiet night into her blood, but lay
Contemplating her own unworthiness;
And when the pale and bloodless East began
To quicken to the sun, arose, and raised
Her mother too, and hand in hand they moved
Down to the meadow where the jousts were held,
And waited there for Yniol and Geraint."

Geraint wins her, against the detested cousin. They wed, and she becomes the purest gem of the court of Guinevere, her place in which is described in the beautiful exordium of the poem. An accident, slight perhaps for the weight it is made to carry, arouses his jealousy, and he tries her severely by isolation and rude offices on one of his tours; but her gentleness, purity, and patience are proof against all, and we part from the pair in a full and happy reconciliation, which is described in lines of a beauty that leaves nothing to be desired.

33. The treatment of Enid by her husband has appeared to some of Mr. Tennyson's readers to be unnatural. It is no doubt both in itself repulsive, and foreign to our age and country. But the brutal element in man, which now only invades the conjugal relation in cases where it is highly concentrated, was then far more widely diffused, and not yet dissociated from alternations, and even habits, of