“Old Timon, who in youthly yeares had beene In warlike feates th’ expertest man alive,” and who dwelt “Under the foot of Rauran mossy hore,” --the Merionethshire mountain, Yr Aran, where the river Dee has its source. “Thither,” so Prince Arthur’s tale of his own history runs,--[126] “Thither the great magician Merlin came, As was his use, oft-times to visit me; For he had charge my discipline to frame And Tutors nouriture to oversee.” It was Merlin “which whylome did excell All living wightes in might of magick spell,” who forged for Arthur his shield and sword and armour. Spenser, however, departs from the romancers in calling Arthur’s sword “Morddure,”[127] and in stating, what is nowhere told of Excalibur, that it could not be “forst his rightful owner to offend.” Nor do we hear in the romances of such marvellous details about the prince’s shield as those which Spenser gives; it was made of “diamond perfect, pure and cleene,” and when Arthur chose to uncover it, “Men into stones therewith he could transmew, And stones to dust, and dust to nought at all; And when him list the prouder lookes subdew, He would them gazing blind, or turne to other hew.”[128] Spenser, again, finds none of the knights of the Round Table suitable for the main purposes of his allegory--the only prominent one who is brought into the poem is Tristram, and he is introduced only as quite a subordinate character. As the poet expressly tells us in his prefatory letter that his purpose is to “pourtraict” Arthur “before he was king,” _The Faerie Queene_, even had it been completed, could hardly have contained any reference to the later, and more especially the tragic, features of Arthurian story. Neither did Spenser’s general design admit of any treatment of them. There could be no Guinevere in his poem, as Arthur was destined at the end to marry Gloriana, the Fairy Queen, in whom “I mean Glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene, and her kingdom in Faery land.” There is indeed some excuse even for Blackmore’s “particular intentions” in his egregious epics when we remember that a really great poet was capable of thus imagining Arthur, even in allegory, as the husband of Queen Elizabeth. The uses to which Spenser and Blackmore, each in his own way, put the Arthurian legends are not, after all, so dissimilar to those which underlie the most popular, and on the whole the most successful, poetical treatment of them in the nineteenth century.[129] _The Idylls of the King_ have a palpably symbolical, not to say an allegorical, meaning, and “a message for the times.” It may be that in no other way could any new life be infused into stories of which Swinburne says that “their day is done,”-- “Their records written of the winds, in foam Fly down the wind, and darkness takes them home.”[130]