This is Tennyson’s first study from Malory’s _Morte d’Arthur_. We learn from Fitzgerald that it was written as early as the spring of 1835, for in that year Tennyson read it to Fitzgerald and Spedding, “out of a MS. in a little red book,” and again we learn that he repeated some lines of it at the end of May, 1835, one calm day on Windermere, adding “Not bad that, Fitz., is it?” (_Life_, i., 184). It is here represented as the eleventh book of an Epic, the rest of which had been destroyed, though Tennyson afterwards incorporated it, adding introductory lines, with what was virtually to prove an Epic in twelve books, _The Idylls of the King_. The substance of the poem is drawn from the third, fourth and fifth chapters of the twenty-first book of Malory’s _Romance_, which is followed very closely. It is called “an Homeric echo,” but the diction bears a much closer resemblance to that of Virgil than to that of Homer, though the rhythm is perhaps more Homeric than Virgilian. It is Tennyson’s masterpiece in “the grand style,” and is indeed as near perfection as any work of this kind could be. In spite of its singular mixture of simplicity, purely Homeric, and artificiality, at times ultra-Virgilian, the incongruity never shocks, so noble and impressive is the general effect. The text of 1842 was never subsequently altered except in the spelling of “mere” and “though” in lines 37, 77, 147, 155, 162, 272, and in the insertion in 1853 of the line:— “Across the ridge and pac’d beside the mere.”