Lord Tennyson’s remarks upon the ‘Idylls of the King,’ and upon the enormous success of the book have a special interest, and serve to illustrate our opening remarks upon the popularity of his father’s works. Popular as Tennyson had become through ‘The Gardener’s Daughter,’ ‘The Miller’s Daughter,’ ‘The May Queen,’ ‘The Lord of Burleigh,’ and scores of other poems—endeared to every sorrowing heart as he had become through ‘In Memoriam’—it was the ‘Idylls of the King’ that secured for him his unique place. Many explanations of the phenomenon of a true poet securing the popular suffrages have been offered, one of them being his acceptance of the Laureateship. But Wordsworth, a great poet, also accepted it; and he never was and never will be popular. The wisdom of what Goethe says about the enormous importance of “subject” in poetic art is illustrated by the story of Tennyson and the ‘Idylls of the King.’ For what was there in the ‘Idylls of the King’ that brought all England to Tennyson’s feet—made English people re-read with a new seeing in their eyes the poems which they once thought merely beautiful, but now thought half divine? Beautiful these ‘Idylls’ are indeed, but they are not more beautiful than work of his that went before. The rich Klondyke of Malory and Geoffrey of Monmouth had not escaped the eyes of previous prospectors. All his life Milton had dreamed of the mines lying concealed in the “misty mid-region” of King Arthur and the Round Table, but, luckily for Tennyson, was led away from it into other paths. With Milton’s immense power of sensuous expression—a power that impelled him, even when dealing with the spirit world, to flash upon our senses pictures of the very limbs of angels and fiends at fight—we may imagine what an epic of King Arthur he would have produced. Dryden also contemplated working in this mine, but never did; and until Scott came with his Lyulph’s Tale in ‘The Bridal of Triermain,’ no one had taken up the subject but writers like Blackmore. Then came Bulwer’s burlesque. Now no prospector on the banks of the Yukon has a keener eye for nuggets than Tennyson had for poetic ore, and besides ‘The Lady of Shalott’ and ‘Launcelot and Guinevere,’ he had already printed the grandest of all his poems—the ‘Morte d’Arthur.’ It needed only the ‘Idylls of the King,’ where episode after episode of the Arthurian cycle was rendered in poems which could be understood by all—it needed only this for all England to be set reading and re-reading all his poems, some of them more precious than any of these ‘Idylls’—poems whose familiar beauties shone out now with a new light. Ever since then Tennyson’s hold upon the British public seemed to grow stronger and stronger up to the day of his death, when Great Britain, and, indeed, the entire English-speaking race, went into mourning for him; nor, as we have said, has any weakening of that hold been perceptible during the five years that have elapsed since.