amplifications made under the influence of mediaeval French romance.
Enid was finished in Wales in August, and Tennyson learned Welsh
enough to be able to read the Mabinogion, which is much more of Welsh
than many Arthurian critics possess. The two first Idylls were
privately printed in the summer of 1857, being very rare and much
desired of collectors in this embryonic shape. In July Guinevere was
begun, in the middle, with Arthur's valedictory address to his erring
consort. In autumn Tennyson visited the late Duke of Argyll at
Inveraray: he was much attached to the Duke--unlike Professor
Huxley. Their love of nature, the Duke being as keen-eyed as the
poet was short-sighted, was one tie of union. The Indian Mutiny, or
at least the death of Havelock, was the occasion of lines which the
author was too wise to include in any of his volumes: the poem on
Lucknow was of later composition.

Guinevere was completed in March 1858; and Tennyson met Mr Swinburne,
then very young. "What I particularly admired in him was that he did
not press upon me any verses of his own." Tennyson would have found
more to admire if he had pressed for a sight of the verses. Neither
he nor Mr Matthew Arnold was very encouraging to young poets: they
had no sons in Apollo, like Ben Jonson. But both were kept in a
perpetual state of apprehension by the army of versifiers who send
volumes by post, to whom that can only be said what Tennyson did say
to one of them, "As an amusement to yourself and your friends, the
writing it" (verse) "is all very well." It is the friends who do not
find it amusing, while the stranger becomes the foe. The psychology
of these pests of the Muses is bewildering. They do not seem to read
poetry, only to write it and launch it at unoffending strangers. If
they bought each other's books, all of them could afford to publish.