herself had given him. And no one will know Hamlet as he is, nor fully understand his tragic destiny, unless he sees what it might have been, as his mother saw it, when she exclaims:— ‘Sweets to the sweet, farewell! I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bridal bed to have deck’d, sweet maid, And not have strew’d thy grave.’ But this is Shakespeare’s Ophelia, not the preposterous misconception of Tieck and Goethe, who should have been warned by Polonius not ‘to cast beyond themselves in their opinions.’ If Morte Arthur does not deserve the unqualified denunciation of the learned Ascham, it cannot be denied that it exhibits a picture of a society far lower than our own in morals, and depicts it with far less repugnance to its evil elements, on the part either of the author or his personages, than any good man would now feel. Still—with the exception of stories like those of the birth of Arthur and Galahad, which show not only another state of manners from our own, but also a really different standard of morals from any which we should now hold up—the writer does for the most part endeavour, though often in but an imperfect and confused manner, to distinguish between vice and virtue, and honestly to reprobate the former; and thus shows that his object is to recognize and support the nobler elements of the social state in which he lived, and to carry them towards new triumphs over the evil. And even where, as in the story of Tristram, there is palliation rather than reprobation of what Sir Walter Scott justly calls ‘the extreme ingratitude and profligacy of the hero,’ still the fact that such palliation, by representing King Mark as the most worthless of men, was thought necessary in the later, though not in the earlier, romance on the same subject, shows an upward progress in morals; while a real effort to distinguish virtue from vice is to be seen in the story of Launcelot, with his sincere though weak struggles against temptation, and his final penitence under the punishment of the woes which his guilt has brought on all dear to him as well as to himself. Or if we look at the picture which Chaucer’s works give us of the co-existence in one mind—and that one of the noblest of its age—of the most virtuous Christian refinement and the most brutish animal coarseness, and then see how in the pages of Malory, inferior as we must hold him to be to Chaucer, the brutish vice has dwindled to half its former size, and is far more clearly seen to be vice, while the virtue, if not more elevated in itself, is more avowedly triumphant over the evil, we find the same upward progress. And I cannot doubt that it was helped on by this book, and that notwithstanding Ascham’s condemnation of Morte Arthur, Caxton was right in believing that he was serving God and his countrymen by printing it; and that he justly estimated its probable