The lays have some striking moments, but also some bits where the sense is clearly playing second fiddle to the meter, and they probably play better to an audience that already knows the stories they're retelling. I didn't care for them on the whole, and was more consistently interested by the author's forewords about the background of the lays than by the lays themselves. I got on better with some of the other poems in the collection that commemorate events from more recent history, possibly because the subject matter is more familiar (and not just, I'm fairly sure, because they're much shorter). "Sermon in a Churchyard" was my favourite, and the one I'm most likely to re-read at some point.