men still wore armor, and so near to the actual age of chivalry as to be in full sympathy with the spirit of its fiction, and its pervading love of adventure and belief in the magical.

Malory did a work of high value in editing the confused mass of earlier fiction, lopping off its excrescences and redundancies, reducing its coarseness of speech, and producing from its many stories and episodes a coherent and continuous narrative, in which the adventures of the Round Table Knights are deftly interwoven with the record of the birth, life, and death of the king, round whom as the central figure all these knightly champions revolve. Malory seems to have used as the basis of his work perhaps one, perhaps several, old French prose romances, and possibly also material derived from Welsh and English ballads. Such material in his day was doubtless abundant. Geoffrey had drawn much of his legendary history from the ancient Welsh ballads. The mass of romantic fiction which he called history became highly popular, first in Brittany, and then in France, the Trouveres making Arthur, Lancelot, Tristram, Percival, and others of the knightly circle the heroes of involved romances, in which a multitude of new incidents were invented. The Minnesingers of Germany took up the same fruitful theme, producing a "Parzivale," a "Tristan and Isolt," and other heroic romances. From all this mass of material, Malory wrought his "Morte Darthur," as Homer wrought his "Iliad" from the preceding warlike ballads, and the unknown compiler of the "Nibelungenlied" wrought his poem from similar ancient sources.

Malory was not solely an editor. He was in a large sense a creator. It was coarse and crude material with which he had to deal, but in his hands its rude prose gained a degree of poetic fervor. The legends which he preserves he has in many cases transmuted from base into precious coin. There is repulsive matter in the old romances, which he freely cuts out. To their somewhat wooden heroes he gives life and character, so that in Lancelot, Gawaine, Dinadan, Kay, and others we have to deal with distinct personalities, not with the non-individualized hard-hitters of the romances. And to the whole story he gives an epic completeness which it lacked before. In the early days of Arthur's reign Merlin warns him that fate has already woven its net about him and that the sins of himself and his queen will in the end bring his reign to a violent termination, and break up that grand fellowship of the Round Table which has made Britain and its king illustrious. This epic character of Malory's work is pointed out in the article "Geoffrey of Monmouth" in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," whose writer says that the Arthurian legends "were converted into a magnificent prose poem by Sir Thomas Malory in 1461. Malory's Morte Darthur is as truly the epic of the English mind as the Iliad is the epic of the Greek mind."

Yet the "Morte Darthur," if epic in plan and treatment, is by no means free from the defects of primitive literature. It was written before the age of criticism, and confusion reigns supreme in many of its pages,—a confusion which a very little critical supervision might have removed. As an instance, we find that Galahad, two years after his birth, is made a knight, being then fifteen years old. In like manner the "seat perilous" at the Round Table is magically reserved for Galahad, the author evidently forgetting that he had already given it to Percivale. King Mark's murder of his brother Baldwin is revenged by Baldwin's grandson, thirty or forty years afterward, though there is nothing to show that the characters had grown a year older in the interval. Here a knight finds one antagonist quite sufficient for one man; there he does not hesitate to attack fifty at once; here a slight wound disables him; there a dozen deep wounds are fully healed by a night's rest. Many similar instances might be given, but these will suffice. The discrepancies here indicated were perhaps due to the employment of diverse legends, without care to bring them into accordance, but they lay the work open to adverse criticism.

This lack of critical accuracy may have been a necessary accompaniment of the credulous frame of mind that could render such a work possible. It needed an artlessness of mental make-up, a full capacity for acceptance of the marvellous, a simple-minded faith in chivalry and its doings, which could scarcely exist in common with the critical temperament. In truth, the flavor of an age of credulity and simplicity of thought everywhere permeates this quaint old work, than which nothing more artless, simple, and unique exists in literature, and nothing with a higher value as a presentation of the taste in fiction of our mediæval predecessors.

Yet the "Morte Darthur" is not easy or attractive reading, to other than special students of literature. Aside from its confusion of events and arrangement, it tells the story of chivalry with a monotonous lack of inflection that is apt to grow wearisome, and in a largely obsolete style and dialect with whose difficulties readers in general may not care to grapple. Its pages present an endless succession of single combats with spear and sword, whose details are repeated with wearisome iteration. Knights fight furiously for hours together, till they are carved with deep wounds, and the ground crimsoned with gore. Sometimes they are so inconsiderate as to die, sometimes so weak as to seek a leech, but as often they mount and ride away in philosophical disregard of their wounds, and come up fresh for as fierce a fight the next day.

As for a background of scenery and architecture, it scarcely exists. Deep interest in man and woman seems to have shut out all scenic accessories from the mind of the good old knight. It is always but a step from the castle to the forest, into which the knights-errant plunge, and where most of their adventures take place; and the favorite resting-and jousting-place is by the side of forest springs—or wells, as in the text. We have mention abundant of fair castles, fair valleys, fair meadows, and the like, the adjective "fair" going far to serve all needs of description. But in his human characters, with their loves and hates, jousts and battles, bewitchments and bewilderments, the author takes deep interest, and follows the episodical stories which are woven into the plot with a somewhat too satisfying fulness. In evidence of the dramatic character of many of these episodes we need but refer to the "Idyls of the King," whose various romantic and tragic narratives are all derived from this quaint "old master" of fictitious literature.

With all its faults of style and method, the "Morte Darthur" is a very live book. It never stops to moralize or philosophize, but keeps strictly to its business of tale-telling, bringing up before the reader a group of real men and women, not a series of lay-figures on a background of romance, as in his originals.

Kay with his satirical tongue, Dinadan with his love of fun, Tristram loving and noble, Lancelot bold and chivalrous, Gawaine treacherous and implacable, Arthur kingly but adventurous, Mark cowardly and base-hearted, Guenever jealous but queenly, Isolde tender and faithful, and a host of other clearly individualized knights and ladies move in rapid succession through the pages of the romance, giving it, with its manners of a remote age, a vital interest that appeals to modern tastes.

In attempting to adapt this old masterpiece to the readers of our own day, we have no purpose to seek to paraphrase or improve on Malory. To remove the antique flavor would be to destroy the spirit of the work. We shall leave it as we find it, other than to reduce its obsolete phraseology and crudities of style to