end, as follows:--"Yesterday a Mr. Moreton, a
young man of rare judgment, read to me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson,
being different in style from his printed poems. The subject is the
Death of Arthur. It is more Homeric than any poem of our time, and
rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea." A still earlier
composition is assured by the correspondence of Edward Fitzgerald who
writes that, in 1835, while staying at the Speddings in the Lake Country,
he met Tennyson and heard the poet read the _Morte d'Arthur_ and other
poems of the 1842 volume. They were read out of a MS., "in a little red
book to him and Spedding of a night 'when all the house was mute.'"

In _The Epic_ we have specific reference to the Homeric influence in
these lines:

"Nay, nay," said Hall,
"Why take the style of those heroic times?
For nature brings not back the Mastodon,
Nor we those times; and why should any man
Remodel models? these twelve books of mine
Were faint Homeric echoes, nothing-worth," . . .

Critics have agreed for the most part in considering the _Morte d'Arthur_
as the most Homeric of Tennyson's poems. Bayne writes: "Not only in the
language is it Homeric, but in the design and manner of treatment. The
concentration of interest on the hero, the absence of all modernism in
the way of love, story or passion painting, the martial clearness,
terseness, brevity of the narrative, with definite specification, at the
same time, are exquisitely true to the Homeric pattern." Brimley notes,
with probably greater precision, that: "They are rather Virgilian than
Homeric echoes; elaborate and stately, not naive and eager to tell their
story; rich in pictorial detail; carefully studied; conscious of their
own art; more anxious for beauty of workmanship than interest of action."

It has frequently been pointed out in this book how prone Tennyson is to
regard all his subjects from the modern point of view:

a truth
Looks freshest in the fashion of the day.

The Epic and the epilogue strongly emphasize this modernity in the varied
modern types of character which they represent, with their diverse
opinions upon contemporary topics. "As to the epilogue," writes Mr.
Brooke (p. 130), "it illustrates all I have been saying about Tennyson's
method with subjects drawn from Greek or romantic times. He filled and
sustained those subjects with thoughts which were as modern as they were
ancient. While he placed his rea