two grails as one, and identified the Celtic talisman with the Christian relic of the Cross. Thus, the Quest of the Grail was raised out of the region of Pagan magic into an emblem of Christian faith and a symbol of knightly valour. Lancelot and Galahad in turn took Perceval's place as Grail-hero. Tristan, lover of Isolt, and Lohengrin, Knight of the Swan, were assimilated to the main stock; and an immense mass of romans Bretons avenged the disappearance of the Celtic kingdom by conquering the imagination of all Europe. We need not follow any further the French books' read by Malory for the copy which Caxton imprinted, and in which, as he said, 'may be seen noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship, cowardice, hate, virtue, and sin. Do after the good', he added, and leave the evil, and it shall bring you to good fame and renommee'. There were those in after times (Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth's tutor, was among them), for whose taste these tales of the Arthuriad were too full of war and wantonness', in the epithets used by Tennyson, to be admitted as moral reading. The reproach would not be unjust, if the king and his knights could be divested of all the magic and the virtue which poets and romancers have bestowed on them during more than fourteen hundred years. But the poetry cannot be unsung, the romances cannot be untold. Amongst us Englishmen ', as Caxton wrote, Arthur is most to be remembered before all other Christian kings'; and to us, as to Spenser, he still presents the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve moral virtues'. He is still the warriorprince, whose epic Milton meditated before he wrote Paradise Lost; and still, his name, 6 6 'A ghost Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak, as in the last lines of the Idylls of the King. There is nothing to add to these praises of the old tales, preserved in early centuries by Anglo-French chroniclers and poets. But if any question their high judgments, or share the schoolmaster's doubt, let him open Malory's Morte Darthur, and turn first to book xviii, chapter 25, which tells us of young love in May 'And thus it passed on from Candlemas till after Easter, and the month of May was come, when every lusty heart beginneth to blossom and to bring forth fruit; for like as herbs and trees bring forth fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every lusty heart, that is in any manner a lover, springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For it giveth unto all lovers courage, that lusty month of May, in some thing to constrain him to some manner of thing, more in that month than in any other month, for divers causes. For then all herbs and trees renew a man and woman, and in like wise lovers call again to their mind old gentleness and old service. Therefore, like as May month flowereth and flourisheth in many gardens, so in like wise let every man of worship flourish his heart in this world, first unto God, and next unto the joy of them that he promised his faith unto. For there was never worshipful man nor worshipful woman, but they loved one better than another and worship in arms may never be foiled; but first reserve the honour to God, and secondly the quarrel must come of thy lady and such love I call virtuous love'. And the burden of proof is upon him who says otherwise. Before leaving Arthur and the Arthuriad, mention is due to a branch of his many-branching story known as Amadis of Gaul (Gaula, Wales). Its hero came from the same hills whence the romans Bretons descended, and passed through the same romantic treatment. But at an early date he was adopted in Spain and Portugal, and there his adventures entertained King Francis I of France during the campaigns of the sixteenth century. By royal command they were rendered into French, thus returning after many years to the country of their first adoption. The success of Amadis at his second coming belongs to a later chapter of French literature, and we shall reach it in due course. Here we have only to remark the derivation of the tale from the Arthur-cycle. Caxton's fine preface to Malory names nine preeminent heroes: three Christians, three Jews, and three Pagans; and he joined to Charlemagne and Arthur the name of Godfrey of Boulogne (Bouillon) as the third in the first class. To Godfrey, too, we return in a later chapter, for Tasso, the great Italian poet, retold his romantic story in Jerusalem Delivered, and drew material for this epic-romance from many an older tale, right away back to the twelfth century. Antioch, again, like Jerusalem, was a Holy City of romance for valiant knights of chivalry who set sail from Brindisi for the East 1. It would be an endless task, however, to enumerate severally by name the romantic sites and heroes of old-time story and song. We may quote a memorable couplet by Jean Bodel, a French trouvère, who admirably classified the common repertory in three groups— 'Ne sont que trois matières a nul homme entendant,— The matter of France was Charlemagne, the matter of 1 The epithet Flos regum Arthurus, which Tennyson prefixed to his Idylls of the King, first occurs in an epic romance on the Siege of Antioch, by Joseph of Exeter (twelfth century). с Jean Bodel called it 'Rome', because the thirteenth century, in which he wrote, lived under the sign of the Roman Church; and the name of Rome is preserved in the romans which it inspired. But the chief hero of the matière de Rome, its Charlemagne or Arthur, so to say, was not a Roman, but a Greek : . Alexander the Great of Macedon. Not the Alexander known in Greek history, diligently proved and documented, but a marvellous, magical Alexander, a hero of glamorous adventures in the land of the rising sun. The conqueror of all the known world who still sought new worlds to conquer, and died, unglutted of conquest, at an age when most men start their career, appealed irresistibly to the imagination of the chivalrous knights of the Middle Ages, who were always seeking a new grail, unaware of the secret of modern faith, that the Quest and the Grail are one. And this wonder-king of French chansons was not derived from sober Greek historians. The main source of the story-tellers was a Greek book composed at Alexandria in the second century, A.D., by a writer unkindly known as pseudo-Kallisthenes, and his narrative, we must admit, was as unveracious as his name. A Latin version was compiled from it in the fourth century, epitomized again in the ninth, and it was this epitome which inspired the first chanson de geste of Alexander, written by Alberic de Besançon. So far removed from reality was Besançon's picture of the Macedonian, that he was represented as a feudal monarch, surrounded by barons and knights. Next came the roman d'Alixaundre, some time towards the close of the twelfth century, and its authors used as metre an elongated verse of twelve syllables, famous ever after as the Alexandrine. Thus, the last of Alexander's conquests was the national measure of French verse. Among these poets of the Alexandriad, three are mentioned by name: Lambert le Tort de Châteaudun, Alexandre de Bernay de Paris, and Pierre de St. Cloud. They used as additional source-books Alexander's reputed correspondence with Aristotle, the philosopher, and Dindimus, King of the Brahmins, and likewise an Iter Paradise of Alexander's sojourn in Paradise. The conqueror's Indian campaign was the topic of a further romance by Jacques de Longuyon (c. 1312), and there we first meet the nine notables, three Christians, three Jews, and three Pagans, so popular in after-literature. Alexander did not exhaust Antiquity. The siege of Troy and its episodes were too close to the sympathy of besiegers of Antioch and Jerusalem to fail to find modern romancers; and there was further the foible of Western monarchs to trace their descent from Trojan chieftains. The descendants' of Brutus and Aeneas were concerned for their ancestors' renown. But here, too, true authorities were missing. Homer, as we saw, was unavailable, and these fervid national story-tellers had to retrieve their history of Troy from two source-books of the sixth century, ascribed to 'Dictys' and 'Dares', who, with admirable impartiality, had espoused respectively the Greek and the Trojan sides. We may skip the development of these chronicles. The Trojan tale acquired European interest when a French clerk, Bénoît de Ste. More (Ste. More was not far from Tours) wrote a roman de Troie in more than thirty thousand verses. Its date was c. 1160, and it was dedicated to Queen Eleanor, consort to Louis VII. Bénoît's tale was characteristic of its kind. He conformed the Greek setting to modern manners. Calchas appeared as a Christian bishop, and Hector was beloved by a fay. Next came a Sicilian redaction by Guido delle Colonne, and Gower, Boccaccio, |