"You took my criticism on 'Maud' like an angel," he writes in 1856, "which was very good indeed of you. I wish only you could be as glad whenever I thoroughly admire your poems, as I am sorry whenever I cannot." One reference to a hint of criticism in a letter of June 1857, after the publication of the early Idylls "Enid" and "Nimue (Vivien)" is not without interest. Lushington writes to Tennyson: I am very much grieved if anything that I wrote distrest you. I said it all in love, and only my love could have prompted me to say it. My tenderness for your fame will not let me be silent when I fear anything that may cast a shade upon it, and few things can be more certain to me than that these two poems, coming out by themselves, would not receive their due of admiration. It would be quite different if they were, as I hope they will be, supported by others of varied matter and interest, giving more completeness and beauty of circular grouping and relation. Such a work I want you to produce, and believe you can, which would surpass all you have written yet. The Idylls always had a peculiar interest for Lushington, and he had long encouraged their production. "I am beyond measure delighted," he writes in 1856, "to hear of Merlin and his compeers"; and again in the same year, and in his deepest pangs of anxiety about his boy, he does not forget the wish, "All genial inspiration from home breezes come to 'Enid.'" "Is anything of the Arthurian plan getting into shape?" he writes again in 1859. He was fervent in his admiration of the Dedication to Prince Albert of the new edition of the Idylls in 1862: "Its truth and loftiness and tenderness will be felt in a hundred years as much as now." "Anything of our own Arthur?" he writes again in 1866, "That's the true subject." His letters (published and unpublished) to Tennyson convey not only the picture of a circle knit by warmest affection, but estimates of others always generous, and sometimes warm with enthusiastic admiration. Carlyle he met at Edinburgh in 1866, and was "struck with the beauty and sweetness of his face; through all its grimness ... there seems to be an infinite freshness of spirit with infinite sadness. His laugh is exactly like a boy's." In 1856 he writes: "Have you seen Browning's new volumes? I have been trying to construe them, and no gold had ever to be digged out through more stubborn rocks. But he is a poet as well as good fellow."