By the eighteenth century the influence of Malory was scarcely felt at all; but his imaginativeness, as interpreted by Tennyson, in _The Idylls of the King_, and by William Morris, in his _Defence of Guinevere_, has given to the Anglo-Saxon world a new romantic background for its thoughts. _The Idylls of the King_ are not Tennyson's most successful interpretation. The finest example of his superior short-story craftsmanship is seen in the triumphant use which he makes of the theme contained in _The Book of Elaine_, in his poem of _The Lady of Shalott_. Not only has he remodelled and added fantasy to the story, but he has threaded it through with _atmosphere_--an entirely modern attribute, of which more must be said hereafter. So much for our contention that the laws and technique of the prose short-story, as formulated by Poe, were first instinctively discovered and worked out in the medium of poetry. VI "_The Golden Ass_ of Apuleius is, so to say, a beginning of modern literature. From this brilliant medley of reality and romance, of wit and pathos, of fantasy and observation, was born that new art, complex in thought, various in expression, which gives a semblance of frigidity to perfection itself. An indefatigable youthfulness is its distinction."[12] [Footnote 12: From the introduction, by Charles Whibley, to the Tudor Translations' edition by W.E. Henley, of _The Golden Ass of Apuleius_, published by David Nutt, London, 1893. All other quotations bearing upon Apuleius are taken from the same source.] _An indefatigable youthfulness_ was also the prime distinction of the Elizabethan era's writings and doings; it was fitting that such a period should have witnessed the first translation into the English language of this Benjamin of a classic literature's old age. Apuleius was an unconventional cosmopolitan in that ancient world which he so vividly portrays; he was a barbarian by birth, a Greek by education, and wrote his book in the Romans' language. In his use of luminous slang for literary purposes he was Rudyard Kipling's prototype. "He would twist the vulgar words of every-day into quaint unheard-of meanings, nor did he deny shelter to those loafers and footpads of speech which inspire the grammarian with horror. On every page you encounter a proverb, a catchword, a literary allusion, a flagrant redundancy. One quality only was distasteful to him--the commonplace." There are other respects in which we can trace Mr. Kipling's likeness: in his youthful precocity--he was twenty-five when he wrote his _Metamorphoses_; in his daring as an innovator; in his manly stalwartness in dealing with the calamities of life; in his adventurous note of world-wideness and realistic method of handling the improbable and uncanny.