in all the details of the simile. The faults in the construction and imagination of the Idylls are great and indefensible, and Sir Gawain and Sir Tristram have suffered heavy wrong. But the blame of this is not to be put upon the Homeric similes. It may be observed that some of the best and most elaborate come in the Idyll of Enid from which I have quoted more than once, and that the story of Enid will stand any fair test of criticism with regard to its plot, its characters, its unity of narrative. It is a poem which atones for a great neglect in English poetry. Enid, who is more like Nausicaa than any other earl's daughter of Romance, had been honoured by all Christendom, except in England, till Tennyson took up the story from Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion and made good the failure of the older English minstrelsy. The story in its older forms, Welsh or French or German or Norse, is unlike most of the romances; it is romantic, with not a little of the higher comedy; romantic without the extravagance
