For English readers Malory’s _Morte Darthur_ is the book in which the various strands of romantic matter reviewed in this chapter are woven into a connected, though not always a coherently artistic, texture. From a literary point of view, the relative values of the various constituents of ‘The French book’ whence Malory derived most of his material are of little consequence. What really matter are the style, the tone, the atmosphere of his own book; and these are charged to the full with the subtle magic of the enchanted land in which his borrowed characters live and move. It is here that we reap the harvest of mediæval romance, and catch, in the beautifully quaint style of the narrative, something of the fresh odour and mellow colouring of the ripened corn. Of equally small importance with the question of the precise identification and the value of his sources is that of Malory’s general motive, or plan. It may, indeed, be possible to find in the book an epic in which “may be traced a thread of destiny and providence, leading either to a happy triumph over circumstance, or to a tragic doom.”[111] But it is for no such reason that the _Morte Darthur_ is valued by the modern reader. We read Malory now both for “his style and his love,”--his love of “King Arthur and his noble knights of the Round Table,” attested so signally by his painful zeal in garnering, and sifting, such a bewildering crop, both rich and rank, of manuscript material. His “style” is sufficiently near to the English of to-day, but at the same time retains so much in both vocabulary and grammar which the invention of printing forced the language to reject, as to be an almost ideal medium for the presentment to modern English readers of what was storied in the verse and prose of the age of high romance. Space does not allow of our giving any extended specimens of it here; but the reader may be referred, first, to a passage where Malory appropriately embroiders his narrative by expatiating upon “How true love is likened to summer,”[112] and, secondly, to the noble and pathetic chapter which tells of the passing of Arthur.[113] Incidental felicities of style could be quoted from almost every page of his book. Bedivere, when returning from his pretended attempt to “fling Excalibur,” tells Arthur that he saw “nothing but the waters wap and the waves wan.” Tristan, in a general fight, “fared among those knights like a greyhound among the conies”; while, of another fight we read that “the best of us all had been full cold at the heart-root had not Sir Launcelot been better than we.” What, again, could be in better chime with its theme than this sentence from the account of Gawain’s fight with Launcelot--“then Sir Gawaine deliberately avoided his horse, and put his shield afore him, and eagerly drew his sword, and bad Sir Launcelot, Alight, traitor knight, for if this mare’s son hath failed me, wit thou well a king’s son and a queen’s son shall not fail thee”?