Tennyson’s King Arthur is certainly modern enough in sentiment and speech, but the position which he holds in the ‘Idylls’ is, in many ways, in harmony with that which he occupies in history and romantic legend. Tennyson himself warns his readers that they must not expect to find in the ‘Idylls’ “that gray king whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey’s book, or him of Malleor’s.” Rather they ought to discern in him “Ideal manhood closed in real man.” All the same, Tennyson’s pre-occupation with “ideal manhood” did not prevent him from bestowing painful labour upon knowing the “real man,” so far as the records, historical and romantic, reveal him; and one of the outstanding features of _The Idylls of the King_ is their remarkable fidelity to the details of Arthurian story as given in its time-honoured literary sources. “Geoffrey’s book,” and “Malleor’s,” had been carefully studied by the poet, and he had even been at pains to garner all he could from early Welsh poetry and from the _Mabinogion_, as presented in Lady Charlotte Guest’s charming translation. While Malory is their main source, the ‘Idylls’ contain much that shows how familiar Tennyson was with Arthurian lore generally in its most primitive forms. The story of Geraint, for example, as told by him, follows closely the Welsh version of it given by Lady Charlotte Guest.[134] Again, the description of Britain in the opening lines of _The Coming of Arthur_ as a country where each “petty king” was ever waging war upon some other, and where the children “grew up to wolf-like men, worse than the wolves,” until “King Leodogran Groan’d for the Roman legions here again,” recalls vividly the bitter lamentations of Gildas over the degeneracy of his countrymen. The account which Lancelot gives of Arthur’s wars in _Lancelot and Elaine_ is an expansion of the record in Nennius of the twelve Arthurian battles. And Tennyson’s general conception of Arthur as the flower of kings who “Drew all the petty princedoms under him,” and “made a realm” in Britain, is far more in keeping with that of the early chroniclers than with the picture given of him in the later romances.