We have only space left for a few examples of the quaint and poetical phrases that, as we have said, frequently occur in these Romances, some of which Tennyson has culled, and set like uncut mediæval gems in his circlet of "Idyls of the King." In the account of the great battle between King Arthur and his knights against the eleven kings "and their chivalry," we read "they were so courageous, that many knights shook and trembled for eagerness," and "they fought together, that the sound rang by the water and the wood," and "there was slain that morrow-tide ten thousand of good men's bodies." The second of these expressions is a favourite one; we meet with it again: "when King Ban came into the battle, he came in so fiercely, that the stroke resounded again from the water and the wood." Again we read, King Arthur "commanded his trumpets to blow the bloody sounds in such wise that the earth trembled and dindled." He was "a mighty man of men;" and "all men of worship said it was merry to be under such a chieftain, that would put his person in adventure as other poor knights did." CHAPTER V. KNIGHTS-ERRANT. In the British Museum are two volumes containing a rather large number of illuminated pictures which have been cut out of MSS., chiefly of the early fourteenth century, by some collector who did not understand how much more valuable they would have been, even as pictures, if left each by itself in the appropriate setting of its black letter page, than when pasted half-a-dozen together in a scrap-book. That they are severed from the letterpress which they were intended to illustrate is of the less importance, because they seem all to be illustrations of scenes in romances, and it is not difficult to one who is well versed in those early writings either to identify the subjects or to invent histories for them. Each isolated picture affords a subject in which an expert, turning the book over and explaining it to an amateur, would find material for a little lecture on mediæval art and architecture, costume, and manners. In presenting to the reader the subjects which illustrate this chapter, we find ourselves placed by circumstances in the position of being obliged to treat them like those scrap-book pictures of which we have spoken, viz., as isolated pictures, illustrating generally our subject of the Knights of the Middle Ages, needing each its independent explanation.