The Restoration age, despite its literary pre-occupation with ‘heroic’ plays and ‘heroic’ poetry, was unpropitious for the production of a romantic epic worthy of the Arthurian, or any other similar theme. A brave attempt, however, to achieve the impossible was made by “the City Bard or Knight Physician,”[122] Sir Richard Blackmore, who in 1695 published _Prince Arthur, an Heroick Poem in Ten Books_, and followed it up in 1697 with another ‘epic,’ in twelve books, called _King Arthur_. These ponderous poems, written in heroic couplets, are really political allegories, in which Arthur stands for the Prince of Orange, and his Saxon enemy, Octa, for James the Second. But they aim at being ‘epics’ as well. Supernatural ‘machinery,’ evidently suggested in many of its details by _Paradise Lost_, is introduced, and just as the gods used to intervene in the struggles of the epic heroes of antiquity, so angels like Uriel and Raphael watch over the fortunes of Arthur. Indeed, the whole heavenly host befriends him, while Lucifer and the rebel angels are the patrons of his foes. Blackmore, whatever else may be said on his behalf, can claim to be at least faithful to the tradition which represents Arthur as “the chief and best of the three Christian kings,” for he makes him the supreme champion of Christendom in his day:-- “This great deliverer shall Europa save, Which haughty monarchs labour to enslave; Then shall Religion rear her starry head, And light divine through all the nations spread.”[123] But, alas, who now reads Blackmore? The world generally is quite content not to know him, and ready to echo Dryden’s pious wish--“peace be to the _Manes_ of his Arthurs.” Blackmore, grotesque and even ludicrous though his methods are of allegorising the Arthurian stories, could, of course, claim high poetical sanction for this particular use of them. Spenser had, long before, “laboured to pourtraict in Arthure, before he was king, the image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private morall virtues, as Aristotle hath devised,”[124] and had also, though somewhat obscurely, sought to “shadow forth” in him “a modern gentleman” of the Elizabethan court,--the Earl of Leicester. There is not much to choose between Leicester and William of Orange as “modern” types of Arthur, but Spenser has, at least, succeeded in giving a romantic glamour to his poem which helps us to forget its allegorical intent and takes us back to the legendary Arthur’s native “land of faerie.” So, in _The Faerie Queene_, Arthur appears in a rôle somewhat similar to that which he plays in the romances as the helper and deliverer of sorely-beset knights; and what the poet tells us about his person, his prowess, and his accoutrements is, in spirit though not always in the letter, quite in accord with romantic tradition. Delivered at birth to a faery knight, “to be upbrought in gentle thewes and martiall might,” he was put under the tutelage of Timon,[125]