Excerpt from The National Portrait Gallery

The immediate rendering of the allegory is that Arthur is the higher and more spiritual part of man - that the knights of the Table Round are the faculties which yield willing subjection to a pure conscience - that the uncultivated waste ravaged by the beast and overrun with wrong is that against which it is a man's duty in this world to fight, and is partly within and partly without, as all men find it. But there are deeper meanings than this mere outer surface of allegory - folds within folds of philosophy. Wisdom has not often worn a fairer dress.

In the year 1851, four years before the publication of the first volume of the Idylls, William Wordsworth died, and Tennyson was made laureate as a thing of course, and the laurel was laid upon a head as worthy as that from which it had been taken by the hand of death. The royal approbation is believed to have been first secured by the poem entitled The Miller's Daughter. The office of poet laureate had never before been held by two men in succession who have done such honour to literature as Wordsworth and Tennyson. If we except Dryden, Wordsworth's predecessors are scarcely to be mentioned as great poets. Southey was probably the ablest of the rest, and his Thalaba and Roderick, along with other ¿uent outpourings of the kind, are fast seeking their own place. The laureateship cannot dignify such men as Wordsworth and Tennyson, but they dignify it, and do a service to literature by holding it.

In 1855 Oxford conferred upon the poet the degree of D.C.L. The sister university purchased the famous bust by Woolner, and gave it a place of honour in its library. In 1869 he was elected an honorary fellow of Cambridge.

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