It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the Round
Table romances. Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakened
interest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which he
had abandoned in advancing from "Sir Galahad" and "The Lady of Shalott"
to the "Morte d'Arthur" of 1842 and the first "Idylls" of 1859, continued
to characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in
painting. Malory's "Morte Darthur" was one of Rossetti's favourite
books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing "the _weird_
element in its perfection. . . . Tennyson _has_ it certainly here and
there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays
through his 'Idylls.'" [19] The five wood-engravings from designs
furnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include three
Arthurian subjects: "The Lady of Shalott," "King Arthur Sleeping in
Avalon," and "Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel." "Interwoven as
were the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement," writes Mr. Sharp,
"it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poet
should be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary
glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurian
idyls of the laureate. . . . Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on 'The
Relation of Art to Religion' delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to
Rossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest in
the cycle of early English legend."

It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently sought
by three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and
Algernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of the
new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the "Morte
Darthur." [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiastic
disciples. Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for
stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the "Morte Darthur,"
to wit: "Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark's
Palace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult." Rossetti's
contribution to the Oxford decorations was "Sir Lancelot before the
Shrine of the Sangreal." Morris' was "Sir Palomides' Jealousy of Sir
Tristram and Iseult," an incident which he also treated in his poetry.
Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewise
contributed.