and the
modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his "Idylls
of the King." Not so perfect and unique a thing as "The Ancient
Mariner"; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than "The Lay
of the Last Minstrel," Tennyson's Arthuriad has so much wider a range
than Coleridge's ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than
Scott's romance, that it outweighs them both in importance. The
Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology;
seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and
of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about
itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by
translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or
Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English
romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic
stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France,
and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our
literature possesses. And a national possession, in a sense, it had
always remained. The story in outline and in some of its main episodes
was familiar. Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult,
Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in
Shakspere's time as in Chaucer's. But the epos, as a whole, had never
found its poet. Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory. Milton had
dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which
went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed
its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in
masque and pageant (Justice Shallow "was Sir Dagonet in Arthur's show"),
or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of "The
Misfortunes of Arthur." In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his
"Prince Arthur," an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in
1697 into "King Arthur" in twelve books. Blackmore professed to take
Vergil as his model. A single passage from his poem will show how much
chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King
William's reign. Arthur and his company have landed on the shores of
Albion, where

"Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne
Relieve the toil they suffered on the main;
But wha