Selected Idylls of the King Author:Alfred Tennyson Tennyson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: NOTES In Twelve Books. Twelve books is the number in the two great epics best known to modern readers: Virgil's Mneid and Milton's Paradise Lost. Twelve was a... more »lso the number of books planned by Spenser for his Faerie Queene, though he completed only six of them, and a little of the seventh. Flos Regum Arthurus. Arthur, the flower of kings. DEDICATION 1 His Memory. To the memory of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. He died in December, 1861. The volume of the Idylls containing The Coming of Arthur, The Holy Grail, Pelleas and Ettare, and The Passing of Arthur was published in 1869. 12 Imminent war. An allusion, probably, to the danger of war, late in 1861, between England and the United States, caused by " the Trent affair." See any history of the United States; for example, Fiske's. 35 The rich dawn of an ampler day. In reference to the many new discoveries in science, and new ideas of the nineteenth century. Compare Locksley Hall. 36-7 Summoner of War and Waste, etc. Prince Albert had arranged the great International Exposition at London in 1851, and was at work on the second, that of 1862, at the time of his death. 47 Has past. The subject of this verb is " that star," in line 45. THE COMING OF ARTHUR 1 Cameliard, an unidentified region, seemingly in southeast England. 5 Petty king. Britain was divided into many tribes or clans, the " king " of each being no more than a sort of chief. 8 Heathen host. The Angles and the Saxons, who made invasions and settlements in Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. 13 Aurelius, " a descendant of the last Roman general who claimed the purple as an emperor of Britain." — Green, The Making of England. 32 Wolf-like men. Stories of children nourished by wolves, and growing up into " wolf-like ...« less