But the special service of Tennyson to romantic poetry lay in his being the first to give a worthy form to the great Arthurian saga; and the modern masterpiece of that poetry, all things considered, is his “Idylls of the King.”  Not so perfect and unique a thing as “The Ancient Mariner”; less freshly spontaneous, less stirringly alive than “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Tennyson’s Arthuriad has so much wider a range than Coleridge’s ballad, and is sustained at so much higher a level than Scott’s romance, that it outweighs them both in importance.  The Arthurian cycle of legends, emerging from Welsh and Breton mythology; seized upon by French romancers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, who made of Arthur the pattern king, of Lancelot the pattern knight, and of the Table Round the ideal institute of chivalry; gathering about itself accretions like the Grail Quest and the Tristram story; passing by translation into many tongues, but retaining always its scene in Great or Lesser Britain, the lands of its origin, furnished the modern English romancer with a groundwork of national, though not Anglo-Saxon epic stuff, which corresponds more nearly with the Charlemagne epos in France, and the Nibelung hero Saga in Germany, than anything else which our literature possesses.  And a national possession, in a sense, it had always remained.  The story in outline and in some of its main episodes was familiar.  Arthur, Lancelot, Guinivere, Merlin, Modred, Iseult, Gawaine, were well-known figures, like Robin Hood or Guy of Warwick, in Shakspere’s time as in Chaucer’s.  But the epos, as a whole, had never found its poet.  Spenser had evaporated Arthur into allegory.  Milton had dallied with the theme and put it by.[27] The Elizabethan drama, which went so far afield in search of the moving accident, had strangely missed its chance here, bringing the Round Table heroes upon its stage only in masque and pageant (Justice Shallow “was Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show"), or in some such performance as the rude old Seneca tragedy of “The Misfortunes of Arthur.”  In 1695 Sir Richard Blackmore published his “Prince Arthur,” an epic in ten books and in rimed couplets, enlarged in 1697 into “King Arthur” in twelve books.  Blackmore professed to take Vergil as his model.  A single passage from his poem will show how much chance the old chivalry tale had in the hands of a minor poet of King William’s reign.  Arthur and his company have landed on the shores of Albion, where

  “Rich wine of Burgundy and choice champagne
  Relieve the toil they suffered on the main;
  But what more cheered them than their meats and wine,
  Was wise instruction and discourse divine
  From Godlike Arthur’s mouth.”