and recognise a real though only half truth in Ascham’s strictures. But he greatly over-states the evil, while he altogether omits to recognise the good in the book. Caxton’s estimate of the moral purport of the whole book, gives not merely the other side, but both sides of the case. Much more than half the ‘open manslaughter’ is done in putting down cruel oppressors and bringing back kingdoms from anarchy to law and good government; and the occasions call forth all the knightly virtues of gentleness, forbearance, and self-sacrifice, as well as those of courage and hardihood. And though it is far from possible to deny the weight of Ascham’s other charge, yet we must not, in forming our estimate of the book, forget the silent yet implied judgment which is passed upon lawless love by its tragic end, nor the ideal presented in the lives of the maiden knights, Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale. For the purpose of a due estimate of Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur,’ we may fairly take Caxton’s Preface as an integral part of the book. The Preface gives the tone, the motive, to the whole book. The morality of ‘Morte Darthur’ is low in one essential thing, and this alike in what it says and in what it omits: and Lord Tennyson shows us how it should be raised. The ideal of marriage, in its relation and its contrast with all other forms of love and chastity, is brought out in every form, rising at last to tragic grandeur, in the _Idylls of the King_. It is not in celibacy, though spiritual and holy as that of Galahad or Percivale, but in marriage, as the highest and purest realisation of the ideal of human conditions and relations, that we are to rise above the temptations of a love like that of Launcelot or even of Elaine; and Malory’s book does not set this ideal of life before us with any power or clearness. In no age or country has the excellence of marriage, as the highest condition of man’s life, been wholly unknown: but Luther and the Reformation brought it first into the full light of day, when he, a monk, married a nun, and thus in the name of God, declared that the vows of marriage were more sacred and more binding than those of the convent, and that the one might be lawfully set aside by the other. And we know how this ideal of love in marriage is worked out by Shakespeare. With Shakespeare it is marriage which explains, justifies, forgives, glorifies, and blesses every prosperous and happy condition of life, and gives an abiding peace as well as dignity to the closing scenes of his deepest tragedies. Marriage not only sheds its radiance upon the loves of Ferdinand and Miranda, and of Rosalind and Orlando, but on all around them: marriage justifies the boldness of Helena as the love of Elaine, touching as its self-surrender is, cannot do: it secures forgiveness to the weak and foolish Leontes, and even to the worthless Angelo; it is to the husband of Desdemona that we find ourselves constrained to accord the pardon and the sympathy which she