When Caxton replied to the ‘noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of England’ who urged him to print the history of Arthur, that many persons held the opinion that there was no such Arthur, ‘one in special’ insisted that this was mere blindness, since Arthur’s sepulchre was to be seen at Glastonbury, Gawaine’s skull at Dover, the Round Table at Winchester, as well as many other relics. And if this noble gentleman had only known it, he might have added that the Holy Grail itself was to be seen in the Cathedral Church of Genoa. There it is still shewn. It is an hexagonal dish, about seventeen inches across, and was long supposed to be a single emerald, which stone it resembles in colour and brilliancy. It is called ‘Sagro Catino,’ with a tradition which makes it to be the Holy Grail we have just described, and with the addition that it was brought to Solomon by the Queen of Sheba. It was taken, on the capture of Caesarea, by the Genoese under Guglielmo Embriaco in 1101 A. D. Like the other plunder of Italian cities it was taken to Paris by Napoleon I, and restored after the peace of 1815, but was broken in pieces on the road from careless packing. It is now kept together by a wire frame: and when I saw it in the Cathedral treasury a few years since I was gravely told that it was broken in its return from the Paris ‘Exposition’ of Napoleon III[13]. INFLUENCE OF THE BOOK ON ENGLISH LETTERS AND LIFE. The influence of Sir Thomas Malory’s book upon English literature, and so upon English life, upon our thoughts, morals, and manners, has been great and important. I have spoken of its claims to be considered an Epic poem; but it is not the less true, that it is our first great work of English prose, the first in which the writing of prose was shown to be one of the fine arts for England. Malory’s style is often inartificial: he is not always able to master the huge masses of his materials, and fails to fuse and mould them into a perfect whole. But we must confess the like of Milton, whose grand periods of magnificent English are often followed by others which are confused and cumbrous in form, if not in thought. It has taken many workmen, through many generations, to make our prose writing what it is: but there is an infant beauty in Malory’s style which is full of promise of the perfect manly form that is to be. The passages which I have already quoted are instances of this inartificial beauty of style. The thoughts and images spontaneously utter themselves in words without any attempt at rhetorical balance and arrangement. Thus in the lament of Sir Ector over Sir Launcelot, Malory does not ask himself whether there is a logical connection between courtesy and bearing a shield, or between true friendship and bestriding a horse, as a modern writer would have done, and so brought those sentences into a more finished though more monotonous correspondence with the rest. The flow of feeling is true, direct, and simple, and that is enough.