But now to come to Sir Thomas Malory. These stories of King Arthur, and Sir Lancelot, and Sir Tristram, and Merlin, written by Wace, and Layamon, and Map, and others, were, as I said, carried about and read with great delight through England and France during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; and the important point to remember here is that the writers who developed them from the original stock furnished by Geoffrey of Monmouth, although professing to tell of things which happened in the early centuries of our era, really did nothing more than present a picture of their own times--that is, of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--in which nothing was ancient but the names of the figures. This was a notable custom of all the middle-age artists, not only of the artists in words--the poets and prose tale-tellers--but even of the later artists who drew and painted actual pictures. Just as an old picture-maker would represent King Solomon in a costume of the ninth century; or as the old writer of Arthurian romances speaks of the Biblical Joshua as _Duke_ Joshua, thus bringing the old Jew before us with a title some thousands of years younger than his name: so these twelfth and thirteenth century writers merely took the characters of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story and clothed them as mediæval knights and ladies, while they re-arranged the events similarly into such relations as accorded with their own times. Now, in the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas Malory re-arranged this series of stories about King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, Sir Tristram, the Round Table, and the Holy Cup, which had been written in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and which were really pictures of life in those centuries, though grouped about legendary figures; while Sir John Froissart wrote chronicles which present us pictures of life grouped about the historic characters of his own fourteenth century.