It is not, however, by such fragments of legend that Arthur is best known to English readers. Not Arthur the god, but Arthur the “blameless king”, who founded the Table Round, from which he sent forth his knights “to ride abroad redressing human wrongs”,[452] is the figure which the name conjures up. Nor is it even from Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur that this conception comes to most of us, but from Tennyson’s _Idylls of the King_. But Tennyson has so modernized the ancient tradition that it retains little of the old Arthur but the name. He tells us himself that his poem had but very slight relation to— ... “that gray king, whose name, a ghost, Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain-peak, And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him Of Geoffrey’s book, or him of Malleor’s ...”;[453] but that he merely used the legend to give a substantial form to his ideal figure of the perfect English gentleman—a title to which the original Arthur could scarcely have laid claim. Still less does there remain in it the least trace of anything that could suggest mythology. As much as this, however, might be said of Malory’s book. We may be fairly certain that the good Sir Thomas had no idea that the personages of whom he wrote had ever been anything different from the Christian knights which they had become in the late French romances from which he compiled his own fifteenth-century work. The old gods had been, from time to time, very completely euhemerized. The characters of the “Four Branches of the Mabinogi” are still recognizable as divine beings. In the later Welsh stories, however, their divinity merely hangs about them in shreds and tatters, and the first Norman adapters of these stories made them still more definitely human. By the time Malory came to build up his Morte Darthur from the foreign romances, they had altered so much that the shapes and deeds of gods could only be recognized under their mediæval knightly disguises by those who had known them in their ancient forms. We have chosen Malory’s Morte Darthur, as almost the sole representative of Arthurian literature later than the Welsh poems and prose stories, for three reasons. Firstly, because it is the English Arthurian romance _par excellence_ from which all later English authors, including Tennyson, have drawn their material. Secondly, because the mass of foreign literature dealing with the subject of Arthur is in itself a life-study, and could not by any possibility be compressed within the limits of a chapter. Thirdly, because Malory’s fine judgment caused him to choose the best and most typical foreign tales to weave into his own romance; and hence it is that we find most of our old British gods—both those of the earlier cycle and those of the system connected with Arthur—striding disguised through his pages.