[9] There is a curious illustration of this in an anecdote told of Queen Elizabeth. “Cecil intimated that she must go to bed, if it were only to satisfy her people.
‘Must!’ she exclaimed; ‘is must a word to be addressed to princes? Little man, little man, thy father if he had been alive durst not have used that word, but thou hast grown presumptuous because thou knowest that I shall die.’”
Lingard, Hist., vol. vi., p. 316.
[10] Romance, Id., v.:
“Then Sir Bedivere departed and went to the sword and lightly took it up and went to the waterside, and then he bound the girdle about the hilt and then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, and then came an arm and a hand above the water, and met it and caught it and so shook it thrice and brandished it, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water.”
[11] Romance, Id., v.:
“‘Alas,’ said the king, ‘help me hence for I dread me I have tarried over long’.
Then Sir Bedivere took the king upon his back and so went with him to that water.”
[12] Romance, Id., v.:
“And when they were at the waterside even fast by the bank hoved a little barge and many fair ladies in it, and among them all was a queen and all they had black hoods and all they wept and shrieked when they saw King Arthur. ‘Now put me into the barge,’ said the king, and so they did softly. And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head; and then that queen said: ‘Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?’”
[13] Romance, Id., v.:
“Then Sir Bedivere cried: ‘Ah, my Lord Arthur, what shall become of me now ye go from me and leave me here alone among mine enemies?’
‘Comfort thyself,’ said the king, ‘and do as well as thou mayest, for in me is no trust to trust in. For I will unto the vale of Avilion to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou never hear more of me, pray for my soul.’”
[14] With this cf. Greene, James IV., v., 4:—
“Should all things still remain in one estate
Should not in greatest arts some scars be found
Were all upright nor chang’d what world were this?
A chaos made of quiet, yet no world.”
And cf. Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ii., iii.:—
What custom wills in all things should we do it,
The dust on antique Time would be unswept,
And mountainous error too highly heaped
For Truth to overpeer.
[15] Cf. Archdeacon Hare’s “Sermon on the Law of Self-Sacrifice”.
“This is the golden chain of love whereby the whole creation is bound to the throne of the Creator.”
For further illustrations see Illust. of Tennyson, p. 158.
[16] Paraphrased from Odyssey, vi., 42-5, or Lucretius, iii., 18-22.
[17] The expression “crowned with summer sea” from Odyssey, x., 195: νῆσον τὴν πέρι πόντος απείριτος ἐσταφάνωται.