With long and tedious havoc fabl’d knights
In battles feign’d.”[119]
Arthurian memories, however, lingered with him to the last, for even in Paradise Regained he cannot help referring to what once charmed him in stories
“Of fairy damsels met in forest wide
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore.”
Dryden, again, who had aspired to write an Arthuriad, as he tells us, “for the honour of his native country,” found himself obliged to turn to more immediately profitable forms of literature,—“being encouraged only with fair words by Charles II., my little salary ill-paid, and no prospect of a future subsistence.”[120] But it is doubtful whether he was quite the kind of poet who, in Scott’s words, could
“in immortal strain
Have raised the Table Round again,
But that a ribald King and Court