ornament, and every grace of a style which people have
learned to like and which he has made his own, need not be said.
The Tennysonian beauties are all there. The work takes its place
in literature, obscuring the Arthurian work of Dryden, as Milton's
achievement of _Paradise Lost_ obscured the Italian work on the same
subject which preceded it. The story is told, and the things of the
Round Table can hardly be related again in English, any more than the
tale of Troy could be sung again in Greek after the poem of Homer.
But beauties do not necessarily compose into perfect Beauty, and
the achievement of a task neatly done does not prevent the eye from
wandering over the work to see if the material has been used to the
best advantage. So, the reader who has allowed himself to rest long
in the simple magic evoked by Malory or in the Celtic air of
Villemarque's legends, will be fain to ask whether a man of Tennyson's
force could not have given to his century a recasting which would have
satisfied primitive credulity as well as modern subtility. There is
an antique bronze at Naples that has been cleaned and set up in a
splendid museum, and perhaps looks more graceful than ever; but the
pipe that used to lead to the lips, and the passage that used to
communicate with the priest-chamber, are gone, and nothing can
compensate for them: it used to be a form and a voice, and now it is
nothing but a form.

We have just observed that in our opinion the first essays made by the
Laureate with his Arthurian material had the best ring, or at least
had some excellences lost to the later work. _Gareth and Lynette_,
however, by its fluency and simplicity, and by not being overcharged
with meaning, seems to part company with some of this overweighted
later performance, and to attempt a recovery of the directness and
spring of the start. It is, however, far behind all of them in a
momentous particular; for in narrating _them_, the poet, while able to
keep up his immediate connection with the source of tradition, and to
narrate with the directness of belief, had still some undercurrent of
thought which he meant to convey, and which he succeeded in keeping
track of: Arthur and Guinevere, in the little song, ride along like
primeval beings of the world--the situation seems the type of all
seduction; the Lady of Shallot is not alone the recluse who sees life
in a mirror, she is the cloistered Middle Age itself, and when her
mirror breaks we fee