of all men and women in all times. But those who have no great skill at deciphering the Hyponoia, the underlying significance, of the "Idylls" may be pardoned for confessing to an occasional feeling of something abstract, shadowy, and spectacular in the company of these knights and dames.[96] FitzGerald, after reading the "Holy Grail," writes (1870) to Tennyson: The whole myth of Arthur's Round Table Dynasty in Britain presents itself before me with a sort of cloudy Stonehenge grandeur. I am not sure if the old knights' adventures do not tell upon me better touched in some lyrical way (like your "Lady of Shalott") than when elaborated into epic form. I never could care for Spenser, Tasso, or even Ariosto, whose epic has a ballad ring about it.... Anyhow, Alfred, while I feel how pure, noble, and holy your work is--and whole phrases, lines, and sentences of it will abide with me, and, I am sure, with men after me--I read on till the "Lincolnshire Farmer" drew tears from my eyes. I was got back to the substantial rough-spun Nature I knew; and the old brute, invested by you with the solemn humour of Humanity, like Shakespeare's Shallow, became a more pathetic phenomenon than the knights who revisit the world in your other verse. There! I cannot help it, and have made a clean breast. If the extreme realism of some modern writers has been rightly condemned as truth divorced from beauty, we may say that it has been by his skill in maintaining their indissoluble union that Tennyson's best work shows its peculiar strength and has earned its enduring vitality. He excels in the verisimilitude of his portraiture, in the authentic delineation of character, preserving the type and developing the main lines of thought and action by imaginative insight, with high artistic fidelity in details. I venture to anticipate that his short monodramatic pieces in blank verse--his studies from the antique, like "Ulysses" and "Tithonus," and his poems of English life, breathing the true idyllic spirit, like the "Gardener's Daughter" and "Aylmer's Field"--will sustain their popularity longer than the Arthurian Idylls. Nor can some of us honestly agree with the unqualified praise bestowed by high authority (as the _Memoir_ testifies) on "Guinevere," where the scene between the king and the queen at Almesbury, with all its elevation of tone and purity of sentiment, is not very far from a splendid anachronism. But the epilogue "To the Queen," which closes the Arthurian epic, brings us back to modern thought and circumstance by its ringing protest against faint-heartedness in English politics.