Or, what more pathetic than Guinevere’s words when Lancelot found her in the nunnery at Almesbury--“Sir Launcelot, wit thou well I am set in such a plight to get my soul’s health; and yet I trust, through God’s grace, that after my death to have a sight of the blessed face of Christ, and at doomsday to sit on his right side, for as sinful as ever I was are saints in heaven”? But the entire work is studded with such gems, and he who would know and revel in the richest treasures of Arthurian romance should devote his days and his nights to the reading of what is ingenuously, and truly, styled in its epilogue, “this noble and joyous book.”[114] CHAPTER V ARTHUR IN ENGLISH LITERATURE English Arthurian romance before Malory, with the conspicuous exception of _Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight_--an alliterative poem composed in the fourteenth century by an unknown author to whom three other poems, _The Pearl_, _Cleanness_, and _Patience_, are ascribed,--possesses little literary charm or distinction. The wearisome monotony and the generally jejune character of the common metrical romances of his day, with their stereotyped phraseology and futile rhymes, had probably as much to do as anything with Chaucer’s attitude towards the newer romantic matters. His _Tale of Sir Thopas_ is so openly contemptuous a burlesque of the methods of the romantic rhymers of the time that we may safely assume that the poet had little more respect for their themes. “Into his sadel he clamb anon, And priketh over stile and stoon An Elf-queene for tespye; Til he so longe hadde riden and goon That he foond in a pryvë woon The contree of Fairye,” etc. It was scarcely possible for one who could write so irreverently as this of Elfland and its denizens to attune himself to the mood required for grave poetical treatment of Arthurian story. An Arthurian setting of a sort is indeed given to _The Wife of Bath’s Tale_; but the facetious tone of the opening lines only too plainly reveals Chaucer’s sense of the unreality of it all. “In tholdë dayes of the Kyng Arthour,” he writes, “Al was this land fulfild of faërie. The elf-queene with hir joly compaignye Danced ful ofte in many a grenë mede.” But, he adds, there are no fairies now; “lymytours and other holy freres” have effectually driven them away. “For ther as wont to walken was an elf, 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.