680-683:

'I love that beauty should go beautifully:
For see ye not my gentlewomen here,

How gay, how suited to the house of one
Who loves that beauty should go beautifully?'

697-706 :

'In this poor gown my dear lord found me first,
And loved me serving in my father's hall:
In this poor gown I rode with him to court,
And there the Queen array'd me like the sun :
In this poor gown he bad me clothe myself,
When now we rode upon this fatal quest
Of honour, where no honour can be gain'd:
And this poor gown I will not cast aside
Until himself arise a living man,

And bid me cast it.'

Other instances will be found in Marriage of Geraint, 234, 239, 289, 483, 549, 647 ff.; Geraint and Enid, 135, 420, 430 (compared with Marriage of Geraint, 773), 952 (compared with Marriage of Geraint, 42).

With regard to the use of blank verse, the practice of Tennyson is in agreement with that of Milton. No one has used rhyme with more skill and effect than Tennyson in his lyrical and ballad poetry, but as Milton discarded in Paradise Lost 'the troublesome and modern bondage of riming,' and chose blank verse as more suitable for a long epic or narrative poem, so Tennyson, in all his longer poems of a narrative kind, as Enoch Arden, The Princess, and The Idylls of the King, has adopted blank verse; and he has fairly proved himself to be the greatest master of English blank verse since Milton. Tennyson's blank verse is almost always

dignified, never slovenly, and endlessly various in its rhythmical modulation, and in its adaptability to the subjects upon which it is employed. His alliteration. is most skilful and delicate, so that often we only feel its presence without perceiving where it is, or are conscious of a certain subtle harmony without realizing to what particular source it is due. That this is no mean merit we shall easily admit, if we bear in mind how dangerous a weapon alliteration is apt to be in any but a master hand, and how frequent has been the abuse of it, even by such a poet as Spenser, and much more by those of our own time. In these idylls alliteration is more sparingly employed than in others which have been published since, but as examples of the effect of it we may quote Marriage of Geraint, 326 ff.:

'And while he waited in the castle court,
The voice of Enid, Yniol's daughter, rang
Clear thro' the open casement of the hall,
Singing; and as the sweet voice of a bird,
Heard by the lander in a lonely isle,
Moves him to think,' etc.

Geraint and Enid, 274 ff. :—

'And midmost of a rout of roisterers,
Femininely fair and dissolutely pale,
Her suitor in old years before Geraint,
Enter'd, the wild lord of the place, Limours.
He moving up with pliant courtliness,
Greeted Geraint full face, but stealthily,

In the mid-warmth of welcome and graspt hand,
Found Enid with the corner of his eye,
And knew her sitting sad and solitary.'

762 ff.:

'And never yet, since high in Paradise
O'er the four rivers the first roses blew,
Came purer pleasure unto mortal kind

Than lived thro' her, who in that perilous hour
Put hand to hand beneath her husband's heart,
And felt him hers again.'

Of imitative rhythm the most marked examples are pointed out in the notes to Marriage of Geraint, 208, 282; Geraint and Enid, 90, 160-164, 379, 529 ff., 726.

With regard to the diction of these poems, it is characterized, as is usual with Tennyson, by the not unfrequent use of words which belong rather to the older English than to that of the present day, and, in general, by avoidance of the commonplace in expression. But the most remarkable feature about the diction of the Idylls, a feature which they share with most of Tennyson's other poetry, is its extreme simplicity; a result which has been attained partly by careful selection of native English words in preference to those of French or Latin origin, wherever the former can be used without obscurity or the appearance of affectation, and partly by the choice of the simplest and most popular among the words of foreign origin, wherever these are employed. It would be absurd to pretend that there are not hundreds of words derived through French from Latin which are as simple and popular as those of native origin: 'clear' is as popular as 'bright,' 'river' as 'stream,' 'cry' as 'weep,' 'flower' as 'bloom,' and so forth; yet at the same time, since the less popular element in the language is mostly of foreign origin, it will generally happen that greater simplicity of diction

is marked by a larger number of native English words, and from this point of view it is interesting to compare the proportion in which these two classes of words are used by different writers. It was said by a critic on the publication of the first four Idylls of the King, that 'since the definitive formation of the English language no poetry has been written with so small an admixture of Latin as the Idylls of the King, and what will sound still stranger in the ears of those who have been in the habit of regarding the Latin element as essential to the dignity of poetry, no language has surpassed in epic dignity the English of these poems.' If we test this assertion, we shall find that it is not far from the truth; and the idylls since published have the same characteristic. Taking passages of a hundred lines each at random from the poems before us, we find in the Marriage of Geraint, 477576, about 80 words of French or Latin origin, and in Geraint and Enid, 195-294, about 96: examining passages of similar length in Gareth and Lynette, published almost last of the idylls, we find in 11. 641-740 about 90, and in 11. 1082-1181 about 85 such words. If we compare this result with that which is given by the works of other English poets, we find that Chaucer in the first hundred lines of the Knightes Tale has about 80 words of French origin; Shakspeare in Midsummer Night's Dream 2, 1, 148-247, has 90, and in King Lear, 2, 4, 139-238, about 110; Milton in Paradise Lost, 4, 598-697 (a passage in which his diction is simpler than usual), has about 145, while in Paradise Lost, 8, 1-100, he has at least 1751;

1 These passages and the rest are not selected as extreme cases, but as fair samples of the several varieties of style in the authors referred to.

Byron in the first hundred lines of the Corsair has nearly 150; Wordsworth in the lines on Tintern Abbey has an average of about 125 for each hundred lines, but in the Excursion considerably more. It will be seen that of the

poets who have been mentioned after Chaucer, none but Shakspeare has nearly so small a proportion of imported words as we find in the Idylls of the King: a result which must certainly have been attained by a conscious endeavour on the part of Tennyson to write as far as possible in native English. Even this, however, does not give the measure of his severe simplicity of diction; for, as has been said, many of the words which are not of native origin are quite as simple and popular as those which are originally English; and the simplicity of Tennyson's diction is perhaps most plainly marked by the very great number of monosyllables in his verse: there are indeed so many as sometimes to endanger the smoothness of its flow, while often adding in an extraordinary degree to its force. Often in the more impassioned utterances we find an average of not more than one word in a line of more than one syllable, and sometimes a series of lines or a song is almost entirely monosyllabic. On the whole we may perhaps say that the chief distinguishing mark of Tennyson's style, the feature to which it owes its individuality more than to any other, is the combination of extreme simplicity of diction with extraordinary richness of imagery and subtlety of thought, the building up of the plainest materials into the most splendid edifices. It may well be supposed that this characteristic has largely contributed to his great popularity, notwithstanding that in many respects he has the stamp of the cultured rather than of the popular poet.