forms, though in mortal ways the good knights, and especially Arthur, shadow it forth.  The celestial plot is humanized, and the poem becomes a hero-epic in almost an exclusive way; though the knight’s achievement is also an achievement of God’s will, the interest lies in the Divine power conceived as man’s moral victory.  In the Idyls of the King there are several traits of the epic.  There is the central idea of the conflict between the higher and lower, both on the social and the individual side; the victory of the Round Table would have meant not only pure knights but a regenerate state.  Here, however, the externalization of the Divine will in the Holy Grail, and, as in the Christian epic generally, its confusion on the marvellous side with a world of enchantment passing here into the sensuous sphere of Merlin, are felt to be inadequate.  The war of “soul with sense” was the subject-matter, as was Spenser’s; the method of revolution of its phases was also Spenser’s; but the two poems differ in the point that Spenser’s knight wins, but Tennyson’s king loses, so far as earth is concerned; nor can it be fairly pleaded that as in Milton Adam loses, yet the final triumph of the cause is known and felt as a divine issue of the action though outside the poem, so Arthur is saved to the ideal by virtue of the faith he announces in the New Order coming on, for it is not so felt.  The touch of pessimism invades the poem in many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause.  He is the hero of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval from beyond the barriers of the world to come.  But in showing the different conditions of the modern epic, its spirituality, its difficulties of interpreting in sensuous imagery the working of the Divine will, its relaxed hold on the social movement for which it substitutes man’s universal nature, and the mist that settles round it in its latest example, sufficient illustration has been given of the changes of time to which idealism is subject, and also of the essential truth surviving in the works of the past, which in the epics is the vision of how the ends of God have been accomplished in the world and in the soul by the union of divine grace with heroic will,—­the interpretation and glorification, of history and of man’s single conflict in himself ago after age, asserting through all their range the supremacy of the ideal order over its foes in the entire race-life of man.