Thus endeth this noble and joyous booke entitled _La Mort Darthur_, notwithstanding it treateth of the birth, life, and acts of the said King Arthur and of his noble Knights of the round table, and their mervailous enquests and adventures, the achieving of the holy sancgreall, and in the end the dolorous death and departing out of this world of them all. As literature, this work of Malory is very interesting, and has been frequently edited within the last hundred years. Beyond the powerful influences exerted by the Celtic romances, there falls to be noticed another way in which the Gaelic genius is believed to have affected and even moulded English poetry in the later Middle Ages. It is well known that down to Chaucer’s time English poetry was characterised chiefly by alliteration. Scarcely any authors attempted rhyme. And those, like Layamon, who tried to combine both, often seem to achieve neither the one nor the other. They failed to produce the real effect of metre. But after Chaucer, rhyme gradually supplanted alliteration. And it is held by various learned authorities that this is due to Celtic influence. The Celts first invented rhyme, they say, and in proof of this it is shown that they used it centuries before the English or any other western nation. “Outside of Wales and Ireland,” says Dr. Hyde, “there probably exists no example in a European vernacular language of rhymed poetry older than the ninth century.” And Matthew Arnold, in a footnote to his _Study of Celtic Literature_, asserts that “rhyme,—the most striking characteristic of our modern poetry as distinguished from that of the ancients, and a main source, to our poetry, of its magic and charm, of what we call its _romantic element_,—rhyme itself, all the weight of evidence tends to show, comes into our poetry from the Celts.” And in this opinion these litterateurs are supported by the earlier testimony of great philologists like Zeuss and Count Nigra. From the time of John Barbour, too, it is recognised that the bards of Scotland who wrote English poetry have been influenced in various ways not peculiar to their own contemporaries in England, by their connection with and descent from the Celt. Stopford Brooke mentions three elements of Scottish poetry that he regards as distinctly Celtic contributions. These are, first, the love of wild nature for its own sake—the passionate, close, and poetical observation and description of natural scenery, which is not found in the poetry of England till near the end of the eighteenth century; second, the love of colour so characteristic of Gaelic and Cymric authorship; and, third, the wittier, more rollicking humour, which contrasts with the Teutonic humour, which has its root in sadness. The humour of Dunbar is thus as widely different from that of Chaucer as the humour of Burns is from that of Cowper, or of a modern Irishman is from that of a modern Englishman.