illustration] Beard used Alfred Lord Tennyson’s likeness for his drawings of Merlin, thus underscoring the book’s satirical stance toward literature that idealized feudal values. Tennyson himself had posed as Merlin for a series of photographs taken by Julia Margaret Cameron to illustrate his Idylls of the King. The photographs were published in 1875, and Gneiting believes that they, or woodcuts made from them to illustrate the 1874–1875 edition of Tennyson’s works, served as Beard’s models (“Picture and Text,” pp. 238–239).

The figures on Merlin’s robe were probably copied from Francis Barrett’s Magus, a book about occult philosophy which Beard mentioned as his source for another illustration in A Connecticut Yankee (see the explanatory note at 250 illustration ). According to Barrett, the figures are numerical characters from an ancient book on magic.