But its power is of a different kind, for a change has come over the spirit of the dream, since it was first dreamed long ago among the Welsh mountains. Accordingly Tristram, once the mere sport of existing circumstances, becomes a highly responsible person with correctly oppressive notions of duty. He has grown old along with the rest of the world; he rides no more light-hearted through the forest, sails no more gaily across the sea, forgetful of all but life and its deliciousness, woos no more whom he would. Nor, in the modern versions, does he die merrily, as he died in the “Morte D’Arthur” and in the “Book of Howth,” “harping afore his lady La Belle Isoud.”Wagner, to whom one might have fancied, _à priori_, that such an exit for his tenor would have been most welcome, sentences him to lingering death of a wound given him by the traitor Melot; Tennyson fells him with a blow of King Mark’s from behind; in Matthew Arnold he dies naturally; in Swinburne the false words of Iseult Les Blanches Mains finish the work of sickness. His love, his death, are all-important now; whereas of old the first was but an interesting episode in the life of a man who was second only to Sir Launcelot at a tourney, and the last so insignificant as to be disposed of in a single sentence. We hear nothing now of the Castle of Maidens, or of Lonazep; nothing of the wife of Sir Segwarides, or of other fair ladies; nothing at all of that great crisis in his life when he met Sir Launcelot at the peron, “and either wounded other wonderly sore, that the blood ran out upon the grass.” Of course there may be a reason for this in the fact that we look upon Tristram as a hero by himself, and therefore have no need to illustrate his inferiority to Launcelot, and to Launcelot only, in love and in war. But where are ye now, Sir Palamides, Sir Bruno, and Sir Elias? Your very names have a forgotten sound. The knights’ bones are dust, And their good swords rust, Their souls are with the saints, I trust. But he who wishes to find any record of their doings with Sir Tristram must search through the length and breadth of Malory’s twenty-one books ere he find it. Nor is there any trace in the modern poems of the sweet old story, how after that “deep draughts of death” had taken the Lady Elizabeth, Tristram’s mother, and his father, King Maliodas, had “let call him Tristram, the sorrowful-born child,” and had actually, for love of her, “endured seven years without a wife,” he married a wicked lady, who tried to poison Tristram; and how she was condemned to death for the attempt, and he rescued her from his father’s wrath, and made them accorded, and how she “loved him ever after, and gave Tristram many great gifts.”