The Master of Balliol, the most adviceful man, if one may use the
term, of his age, appears to have advised Tennyson to publish the
Idylls at once. There had been years of silence since Maud, and the
Master suspected that "mosquitoes" (reviewers) were the cause.
"There is a note needed to show the good side of human nature and to
condone its frailties which Thackeray will never strike." To others
it seems that Thackeray was eternally striking this note: at that
time in General Lambert, his wife, and daughters, not to speak of
other characters in The Virginians. Who does not condone the
frailties of Captain Costigan, and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong?
In any case, Tennyson took his own time, he was (1858) only beginning
Elaine. There is no doubt that Tennyson was easily pricked by
unsympathetic criticism, even from the most insignificant source,
and, as he confessed, he received little pleasure from praise. All
authors, without exception, are sensitive. A sturdier author wrote
that he would sometimes have been glad to meet his assailant "where
the muir-cock was bailie." We know how testily Wordsworth replied in
defence to the gentlest comments by Lamb.

The Master of Balliol kept insisting, "As to the critics, their power
is not really great. . . . One drop of natural feeling in poetry or
the true statement of a single new fact is already felt to be of more
value than all the critics put together." Yet even critics may be in
the right, and of all great poets, Tennyson listened most obediently
to their censures, as we have seen in the case of his early poems.
His prolonged silences after the attacks of 1833 and 1855 were
occupied in work and reflection: Achilles was not merely sulking in
his tent, as some of his friends seem to have supposed. An epic in a
series of epic idylls cannot be dashed off like a romantic novel in
rhyme; and Tennyson's method was always one of waiting for maturity