says our verse-writer: and to that the modern reader must still be referred, or to the translations of parts of it, which we hope to print or reprint, and that most pleasantly jumbled abstract of its parts by Sir Thomas Maleor, Knight, which has long been the delight of many a reader,—though despised by the stern old Ascham, whose Scholemaster was to turn it out of the land.—There the glory of the Holy Grail will be revealed to him; there the Knight of God made known; there the only true lovers in the world will tell their loves and kiss their kisses before him; and the Fates which of old enforced the penalty of sin will show that their arm is not shortened, and that though the brave and guilty king fights well and gathers all the glory of the world around him, yet still the sword is over his head, and, for the evil that he has done, his life and vain imaginings must pass away in dust and confusion.
Of the language of the Poem there is little to say: its dialect is Southern, as shown by the verbal plural th, the vyve for five, zyx for six, ych for I, har (their), ham (them), for her, hem; hulle, dude, ȝut, for hill, did, yet, the infinitive in y (rekeny), etc. Of its poetical merits, every reader will judge for himself; but that it has power in some parts I hope few will deny. Arthur's answer to Lucius, and two lines in the duel with Frollo,
"There was no word y-spoke,
But eche had other by the throte,"
are to be noted. Parts of the MS. have very much faded since it was written some ten or twenty years before 1450, so that a [pg vii] few of the words are queried in the print. The MS. contains a few metrical points and stops, which I have here printed between parentheses (). The expansions of the contractions are printed in italics, but the ordinary doubt whether the final lined n or u—for they are often undistinguishable—is to be printed ne, nne, or un, exists here too.
I am indebted to Mr. Sims, of the Manuscript Department of the British Museum, for pointing out the Poem to me, and to the Marquis of Bath for his kind permission to copy it for printing.
3, Old Square, Lincoln's Inn,
London, W.C., August 30, 1864.
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