Something has been said of Guinevere already. It is perhaps hard to look, as any English reader of our time must, backward through the coloured window of the greatest of the _Idylls of the King_ without our thoughts of the queen being somewhat affected by it. But those who knew their Malory before the _Idylls_ appeared escape that danger. Mr Morris's Guinevere in her _Defence_ is perhaps a little truer than Lord Tennyson's to the original conception--indeed, much of the delightful volume in which she first appeared is pure _Extrait Arthurien_. But the Tennysonian glosses on Guinevere's character are not ill justified: though perhaps, if less magnificent, it would have been truer, both to the story and to human nature, to attribute her fall rather to the knowledge that Arthur himself was by no means immaculate than to a despairing sense of his immaculateness. The Guinevere of the original romances is the first perfectly human woman in English literature. They have ennobled her unfaithfulness to Arthur by her constancy to Lancelot, they have saved her constancy to Lancelot from being insipid by interspersing the gusts of jealousy in the matter of the two Elaines which play so great a part in the story. And it is curious that, coarse as both the manners and the speech of the Middle Ages are supposed to have been, the majority of these romances are curiously free from coarseness. The ideas might shock Ascham's prudery, but the expression is, with the rarest exceptions, scrupulously adapted to polite society. There are one or two coarse passages in the _Merlin_ and the older _Saint Graal_, and I remember others in outside branches like the _Chevalier as Deux Espees_. But though a French critic has detected something shocking in _Le Chevalier a la Charette_, it requires curious consideration to follow him. [Sidenote: _The Graal._]