It will be noticed that some of these subjects are taken from the Round Table romances.  Tennyson was partly responsible for the newly awakened interest in the Arthurian legend, but the purely romantic manner which he had abandoned in advancing from “Sir Galahad” and “The Lady of Shalott” to the “Morte d’Arthur” of 1842 and the first “Idylls” of 1859, continued to characterise the work of the Pre-Raphaelites both in poetry and in painting.  Malory’s “Morte Darthur” was one of Rossetti’s favourite books, and he preferred it to Tennyson, as containing “the weird element in its perfection. . . .  Tennyson has it certainly here and there in imagery, but there is no great success in the part it plays through his ‘Idylls.’” [19] The five wood-engravings from designs furnished by Rossetti for the Moxon Tennyson quarto of 1857 include three Arthurian subjects:  “The Lady of Shalott,” “King Arthur Sleeping in Avalon,” and “Sir Galahad Praying in the Wood-Chapel.”  “Interwoven as were the Romantic revival and the aesthetic movement,” writes Mr. Sharp, “it could hardly have been otherwise but that the young painter-poet should be strongly attracted to that Arthurian epoch, the legendary glamour of which has since made itself so widely felt in the Arthurian idyls of the laureate. . . .  Mr. Ruskin speaks, in his lecture on ’The Relation of Art to Religion’ delivered in Oxford, of our indebtedness to Rossetti as the painter to whose genius we owe the revival of interest in the cycle of early English legend.”

It was in 1857 that Rossetti, whose acquaintance had been recently sought by three young Oxford scholars, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, volunteered to surround the gallery of the new Union Club House at Oxford with life-size frescoes from the “Morte Darthur.” [20] He was assisted in this work by a number of enthusiastic disciples.  Burne-Jones had already done some cartoons in colour for stained glass, and Morris had painted a subject from the “Morte Darthur,” to wit:  “Sir Tristram after his Illness, in the Garden of King Mark’s Palace, recognised by the Dog he had given to Iseult.”  Rossetti’s contribution to the Oxford decorations was “Sir Lancelot before the Shrine of the Sangreal.”  Morris’ was “Sir Palomides’ Jealousy of Sir Tristram and Iseult,” an incident which he also treated in his poetry.  Burne-Jones, Valentine Prinsep, J. H. Pollen, and Arthur Hughes likewise contributed.  Scott says that these paintings were interesting as designs; that they were “poems more than pictures, being large illuminations and treated in a mediaeval manner.”  But he adds that not one of the band knew anything about wall painting.  They laid their water-colours, not on a plastered surface, but on a rough brick wall, merely whitewashed.  They used no adhesive medium, and in a few months the colours peeled off and the whole series became invisible.