character of this fierce knight is that of the Saracen Palamides, whose unquestionable courage and skill in deeds of chivalry also want—though in another way than Gawaine’s—the gentleness, the meekness, and the delicate sense of honour of the Christian knight. Sir Dinadan again, who can give and take hard knocks if need be, though he has no great bodily strength, and who is always bantering the good knights who know and esteem him with his humorous protests against love and arms, is a distinctly drawn character. So is Merlin, half Christian, half magician, but always with dog-like loyalty to the house of Uther Pendragon. So is the Bishop of Canterbury, who appears at intervals in the story. So are many others whose names I might recite. The dignity of queen Guenever towards her husband and her court is not less marked than her guilty passion for Launcelot, and the unreasoning jealousy it excites in her. The wife-like simplicity of Igraine, the self-surrender beyond all limit, though from different impulses, of the two Elaines, the pertness of the damsel Linet, and the piety and self-sacrifice of Sir Percivale’s sister, will occur to the reader among the distinctive characteristics of the different ladies and damsels who live and move, each in her own proper form, in the story. Sir Thomas Malory, as we know, found many of these men and women already existing in the old romances as he represents them to us; but we may believe that those earlier books were to him something of what the pages of Plutarch and Holinshed were to Shakespeare. MALORY’S USE OF THE OLD ROMANCES. It has been too commonly assumed that, because Caxton says that Sir Thomas Malory took his work ‘out of certain books of French and reduced it into English,’ he was a mere compiler and translator. But the book itself shows that he was its author—its ‘maker,’ as he would have called it. Notwithstanding his occasionally inartificial manner of connecting the materials drawn from the old romances, there is an epic unity and harmony, ‘a beginning, a middle, and an end,’ which, if they have come by chance and not of design, have come by that chance which only befalls an Homeric or a Shakespeare-like man. If more instances and proofs are needed than have been already given, let us turn to the opening chapters of the book. If we compare these with the old romances which supplied the materials for them, we see at once how Malory has converted prose into poetry, giving life and beauty to the clods of earth, and transmuting by his art the legends which he yet faithfully preserves. For the long and repulsive narrative of Merlin’s origin[3] he substitutes a slight allusion to it: without disguising what he probably believed to be at least an half historical record of Arthur’s birth, he gives a grace and dignity to the story by the charms of the mother’s character, the finer touches of which are wanting in the original: and so through the whole of this part of the story.