The very titles of the chapters call us into the realm of romance, like a blast blown on Arthur's horn. "How Sir Lancelot came into the Chapel Perilous, and gat there of a dead corpse a piece of cloth and a sword." "How the damsel and Beaumains came to the siege, and came to a sycamore tree, and there Beaumains blew an horn, and then the Knight of the Red Lands came to fight him." "How Sir Lancelot, half-sleeping and half-waking, saw a sick man borne in a litter, and how he was healed with the Sangreal." Who can read the titles, and not make haste to read the chapters? The beautiful close of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur" is merely done into verse from the fifth chapter of Malory's twenty-first book,—the casting of Excalibur into the mere, and the coming of the barge with the elfin ladies, "many fair ladies, and among them all was a Queen, and all they had black hoods, and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur".
But for Malory, the old Arthurian romances would be known only to a few of the learned. Malory "made them common coin," his romance was neglected only in the eighteenth century. It has been the inspiration of many poets, but none can "recapture the first fine careless rapture," to which Tennyson comes nearest in the best of his "Idylls of the King," and in "Sir Galahad," and "The Lady of Shalott".
Next to Chaucer's poems, Malory's romance is the greatest thing in English literature from "Beowulf" to Spenser. To boys, and to men who retain the boy, the "Morte" is an inestimable treasure, which has not to be sought for in the seldom-visited shelves that hold the publications of learned Societies, but is within the reach of all.[1]
[1] In the Globe edition, edited by Sir Edward Strachey. Macmillan & Co.
[CHAPTER XIV.]
EARLY SCOTTISH LITERATURE.
For purposes of convenience the development of "Ynglis" literature north of the Tweed and Esk, may be treated in this place.