03-2-37 ym PREFACE. IN presenting to the public the second volume of Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century, the Editors beg to draw particular attention to the section entitled The Building of The Idylls. This chapter deals exhaustively with an interesting and but little known subject, namely the slow up-building and gradual development of Tennyson's Idylls of the King. The extent to which the late Laureate altered, re-wrote, revised, and re-cast the various portions of this worklatterly with the intent to weld the several separate Idylls into Epic form-has been recognised by few students of his works. All this is exhibited fully in the present Essay, in the course of which will be found full and careful descriptions of Enid and Nimuë (1857), The True and the False (1859), The Last Tournament (1871), and other Tennysonian "trial books," particulars of which have never |