tet of Idylls, _Enid_, _Vivien_,
_Elaine_, and _Guinevere_. No such book of English blank verse, with the
doubtful exception of the _Seasons_, had been seen since Milton. Nothing
more adroitly selected than the contrast of the four special pieces--a
contrast lost to those who only read them in the completed
Arthuriad--has been often attempted or ever achieved. It is true that
the inner faithful, the sacred band of Tennysonians, old and young,
grumbled a little that polish had been almost too much attended to; that
there was a certain hardish mannerism, glittering but cold, about the
style; that there was noticeable a certain compromise in the appeal, a
certain trimming of the sail to the popular breeze. These criticisms
were not entirely without foundation, and they were more justified than
their authors could know by the later instalments of the poem, which,
the latest not published till twenty-seven years afterwards, rounded it
off to its present bulk of twelve books, fifteen separate pieces, and
over ten thousand lines. Another, more pedantic in appearance, but not
entirely destitute of weight, was that which urged that in handling the
Arthurian story the author had, so to speak, "bastardised it," and had
given neither mediaeval nor modern sentiment or colouring, but a sort of
amalgamation of both. Yet the charm of the thing was so great, and the
separate passages were so consummate, that even critics were loth to
quarrel with such a gift.

The later instalments of the poem--some of them, as has been said, very
much later, but still so closely connected as to be best noticed
here--were of somewhat less even excellence. It was an inevitable, but
certainly an unfortunate thing, that the poet republished the
magnificent early fragment above noticed in a setting which, fine as it
would have been for any one else, was inferior to this work of the very
best time. Some of the lighter passages, as in _Gareth and Lynette_,
showed less grace than their forerunners in _The Princess_; and in
_Pelleas and Ettarre_ and _Balin and Balan_ the poet sometimes seemed to
be attempting alien moods which younger poets than himself had made
their own. But the best passages of some of these later Idylls, notably
those of _The Holy Grail_ and _The Last Tournament_, were among the
finest, not merely of the book, but of the poet. Nowhere has he caught
the real, the best, spirit of the legends he followed more happily;
nowhere has he written mo