Ther walketh now the lymytour hymself.”
With the elves had gone the knights-errant, and Chaucer’s poetical genius was not of the kind to restore either to their original pride of place in imaginative literature.
It was Malory who gave new life to the Arthurian legends, and to him, more than to any other writer, is due the fascination which Arthurian story has had for so many modern English poets. Malory’s book, as we know from Ascham’s testimony, was exceedingly popular in the Elizabethan age; but there were other causes of the interest then so widely felt in ancient British legends. Throughout the sixteenth century chroniclers were busy in recording, and antiquaries in investigating, the early annals of Britain; and, in the reign of Elizabeth herself, the heightened patriotic feeling of the day was a potent stimulus to all who sought to discover material for, and to reconstruct from it, the history of their country. Hence Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin chronicle in its first printed forms comes to be one of the most eagerly studied books of the time. And it is, perhaps, not fanciful to find in the new interest aroused in the annals and legends of early Britain the influence of the reigning Tudor dynasty. On what other grounds are we to account, for example, for Spenser going out of his way to remind Elizabeth that she can boast of a genuine British ancestry, and that among her forebears is no less a person than the great King Arthur himself?
“Thy name, O soveraine Queene, thy realme and race
From this renowned Prince derived arre,
Who mightily upheld that royall mace
Which now thou bear’st, to thee descended farre
From mighty kings and conquerours in warre,
Thy fathers and great Grandfathers of old,
Whose noble deeds above the Northern starre