provided he did not positively turn the accepted tradition inside out he was not only allowed to make what new reading of it he liked, but he was actually expected by his audience to do this. And so it was with Tennyson in his _Idylls_. Had he made Arthur a lecherous bandit, or Enid a nagging vixen, or Lancelot a saintly anchorite, or Guinevere an evil light-of-love, then we could have complained with justice that he should have found other names for his creations. But he did none of these things. In their central nature the figures of his _Idylls_ retain the essential characteristics that had belonged to them from the legends of the old days, and it is only in his modifications of these, often, it may be readily admitted, emphatic in character, that Tennyson reflected his own instincts and the spirit of his age. To acknowledge the fitness of those modifications is as much the obligation of fair criticism as it is not to overstate them. It is true that every now and again we get a line or a phrase touched by the fashion of the moment that now seems a little grotesque to us, in the same way that at our particular range of time the bonnets and antimacassars of our grandmothers seem a little grotesque.[18] But in themselves these touches are not really odd, but only twigs, as it were, that have lost their sap in the larger spread of timber, as will happen in every permanent body of poetry. When we read that Geraint withheld punishment from the dwarf through “pure nobility of temperament,” that he was “a little vext at losing at the hunt,” when we hear that Vivien in her dissembling put on the appearance of “a virtuous gentlewoman deeply wrong’d” we may be amused for a moment. But the then current idiom of chivalry was not really any more absurd than the more ancient one of false traitors and perfect knights and fair damsels, and, in any case, we lose our sense of proportion if on the strength of it we make a commotion about Tennyson’s intellectual provincialism. These things, when they are all of them accounted for in his work, amount to the merest accident of an occasional gesture in the whole general bearing of the man, and in some kind, if not precisely in that kind, they can be matched in every poet. With more claim to attention than these trivialities are lines something of the same kind but of a deeper purport, such as those when Merlin speaks of the king as O true and tender! O my liege and king! O selfless man and stainless gentleman....