like belief; and _now_ he is telling a story again for the sake of the story, but without the deeper meaning. Lynette is a supercilious damsel who asks redress of the knights of the Round Table: Gareth, a male Cinderella, starts from the kitchen to defend her, and after conquering her prejudices by his bravery, assumes his place as a disguised prince. It is a plain little comedy, not much in Tennyson's line: there are places where he tries to imitate the artless disconnected speech of youth; and here, as with the little nun's babble in _Guinevere_, and with some other passages of factitious simplicity, the poet makes rather queer work: Gold? said I gold?--ay then, why he, or she, Or whosoe'er it was, or half the world, Had ventured--_had_ the thing I spake of been Mere gold--but this was all of that true steel Whereof they forged the brand Excalibur, And lightnings played about it in the storm, etc. It may be questioned whether hap-hazard talk ever, in any age of human speech, took a form like that, though it is just like Tennyson in many a weary part of his poetry. The blank verse, for its part, is broken with all the old skill, and there are lines of beautiful license, like this: Camelot, a city of shadowy palaces, or strengthened with the extra quantity, like this: Stay, felon knight, I avenge me for my friend! or imitating the motion described, as these: The hoof of his horse slept in the stream, the stream Descended, and the Sun was washed away; but occasionally the effort to give variety leads into mere puzzles and disagreeable fractures of metre, such as the following quatrain: Courteous or bestial from the moment, Such as have nor law nor king; and three of these Proud in their fantasy, call themselves the Day, Morning-Star, and Noon-Sun, and Evening-Star. The first line in this quotation, if it be not a misprint of the American edition, can only be brought to any kind of rule by accenting each polysyllable on the last, and is not, when even that is done, a pleasant piece of caprice. There are plenty of phrases that shock the attention sufficiently to keep it from stagnating on the smooth surface of the verse; such are--"ever-highering eagle-circles," "there were none but few goodlier than he," "tipt with trenchant steel," and the expression, already famous, of "tip-tilted" for Lynette's nose; to which may be added the object of Gareth's attention, mentioned in the third line of the poem, when he "stared at the _spate_." But in the matter of descriptive power we do not know that the Laureate has succeeded better for a long time past in his touches of landscape-painting: the pictures of halls, castles, rivers and woods are all felicitous. For example, this in five lines, where the travelers saw