Merlin Emrys, the Enchanter. Science. Marries his daughter to Modred. Excalibur, War. The Sea, the people / The Saxons, the people } the S. are a sea-people and it is theirs and a type of them. The Round Table: liberal institutions. Battle of Camlan. 2d Guinevere with the enchanted book and cup. And Mr. Knowles in a letter to the biographer says:— “He encouraged me to write a short paper, in the form of a letter to _The Spectator_, on the inner meaning of the whole poem, which I did, simply upon the lines he himself indicated. He often said, however, that an allegory should never be pressed too far.” Are all the lovely passages of human passion and human pathos in these ‘Idylls’ allegorical—that is to say—make-believe? The reason why allegorical poetry is always second-rate, even at its best, is that it flatters the reader’s intellect at the expense of his heart. Fancy “the allegorical intent” behind the parting of Hector and Andromache, and behind the death of Desdemona! Thank Heaven, however, Tennyson’s allegorical intent was a destructive afterthought. For, says the biographer, “the allegorical drift here marked out was fundamentally changed in the later schemes in the ‘Idylls.’” According to that delicate critic, Canon Ainger, there is a symbolical intent underlying ‘The Lady of Shalott’:— “The new-born love for something, for some one in the wide world from whom she has been so long secluded, takes her out of the region of shadows into that of realities.” But what concerns us here is the fact that when Shakespeare wrote, although he yielded too much now and then to the passion for gongorism and euphuism which had spread all over Europe, it was against the nature of his genius to be influenced by the contemporary passion for allegory. That he had a natural dislike of allegorical treatment of a subject is evident, not only in his plays, but in his sonnets. At a time when the sonnet was treated as the special vehicle for allegory, Shakespeare’s sonnets were the direct outcome of emotion of the most intimate and personal kind—a fact which at once destroys the ignorant drivel about the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, for what Bacon had was fancy, not imagination, and Fancy is the mother of Allegory, Imagination is the mother of Drama. The moment that Bacon essayed imaginative work, he passed into allegory, as we see in the ‘New Atlantis.’