Our own Geoffrey of Monmouth was the first to draw Sir Tristram into the magic circle of Arthur’s knights, in whose good company he has ever since remained. Lady Juliana Berners mentions him as the inventor of “venery” or terms of hunting; and his name occurs in “The Temple of Glass,” and in Gower, who states that he fell by King Mark’s own hand, a tradition followed only by Sir Thomas Malory and Tennyson. In the “Orlando Furioso” we hear of the “Rocca di Tristano,” and Ariosto and Boiardo drew from his legend, old even then, their fountains of love and hatred. Dante places him next to Paris among the lovers flitting by like cranes in his “Inferno.” In 1485 Sir Thomas Malory, himself a knight, published his noble “Morte D’Arthur,” in which Tristram is one of the most striking figures; and it is remarkable that although he never seems to have thought there was anything to condemn greatly in the nephew’s conduct, he palliates it by defaming the uncle as much as possible—a moral concession not to be found in either of the earlier romances, which he must have consulted for his work. But we will not multiply references, lest the reader should be fain to cry with the author of “Sir Hain and Dame Anieuse,” Or pues tu chanter de Tristan, Ou de plus longue, se tu sez. The theme was getting wearisome. Le Seigneur Luce du château de Gast had exhausted it in his prose Romance (where, for the first time, Palamides, the Paynim lover of Iseult, and Dinadan, the foolish, knight, appear); and, besides this, there was a “Romance of Meliodas,” Tristram’s father, and afterwards a “Romance of Ysaie le Triste,” his son; so that all the details of his private life were nearly as well known as those of Mr. Carlyle’s to the present generation. “Ysaie le Triste” appeared in 1522; and in 1554, when no imagination, however vivid, could possibly add a single exploit to those which had been recounted already, Jean Maugin took a new departure, and turned the whole thing into an allegory, in which Sir Tristram became the type of Christian chivalry. His queer attempt is justly ridiculed by Scott; but it is not altogether without interest, as the first indication of the symbolic spirit in which modern poets have treated the legend—with the exception of Scott himself, whose beautiful Conclusion and Ballad are pure imitations of the mediæval spirit as well as of the mediæval form, and have nothing modern about them. Towards the end of the sixteenth century the taste for chivalrous romance died out in Europe—or rather fell asleep—and the name of Tristram was no more heard for more than two hundred years, except in a glowing stanza or two of Spenser’s “Fairy Queen.” Then came the revival of Scott and Southey to prepare the way, and lastly that signal triumph of the ancient story in our own day, when four of the greatest living poets singled it out for illustration, and it became a living power again in the hands of Wagner, Tennyson, Swinburne, and Matthew Arnold.