The knight-errant was usually some young knight who had been lately dubbed, and who, full of courage and tired of the monotony of his father's manor-house, set out in search of adventures. We could envy him as, on some bright spring morning, he rode across the sounding drawbridge, followed by a squire in the person of some young forester as full of animal spirits and reckless courage as himself; or, perhaps, by some steady old warrior practised in the last French war, whom his father had chosen to take care of him. We sigh for our own lost youth as we think of him, with all the world before him--the mediæval world, with all its possibilities of wild adventure and romantic fortune; with caitiff knights to overthrow at spear-point, and distressed damsels to succour; and princesses to win as the prize of some great tournament; and rank and fame to gain by prowess and daring, under the eye of kings, in some great stricken field. The old romances enable us to follow such an errant knight through all his travels and adventures; and the illuminations leave hardly a point in the history unillustrated by their quaint but naïve and charming pictures. Tennyson has taken some of the episodes out of these old romances, and filled up the artless but suggestive stories with the rich detail and artistic finish which adapt them to our modern taste, and has made them the favourite subjects of modern poetry. But he has left a hundred others behind; stories as beautiful, with words and sentences here and there full of poetry, destined to supply material for future poems and new subjects for our painters. It is our business to quote from these romances some of the scenes which will illustrate our subject, and to introduce some of the illuminations that will present them to the eye. In selecting the literary sketches, we shall use almost exclusively the translation which Sir Thomas Mallory made, and Caxton printed, of the cycle of Prince Arthur romances, because it comprises a sufficient number for our purpose, and because the language, while perfectly intelligible and in the best and most vigorous English, has enough of antique style to give the charm which would be wanting if we were to translate the older romances into modern phraseology. In the same way we shall content ourselves with selecting pictorial illustrations chiefly from MSS. of the fourteenth century, the date at which many of these romances were brought into the form in which they have descended to us. [Illustration: _A Squire._]