Trouveurs (continues Turner), troubadours, and monkish versifiers combine to express the same idea. We find the same in the traditions of the old Welsh bards, "who believed that King Arthur was not dead, but conveyed away by the fairies into some pleasant place, where he should remaine for a time, and then return again, and reign in as great authority as ever."--_Holinshed_, b. 5. c. 14. "Some men yet say, in many parts of England, that King Arthur is not dead; but by the will of our Lord Jesu Christ, into another place; and men say that he will come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say that it shall be so; but rather I will say, that here, in this world, he changed his life. But many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse:-- "'Hic jacet Arthurus rex quondam, rex futuris.'" _Mort d'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Maleor_, or _Malory, Knight_. BOOK II. _Note 4._ Page 212. Cervantes makes strange blunders with these northern nations, of which he evidently knew very little. It seems singular, for one so well informed as he was on many points, to be so ignorant about their history at the same period as his own. He here talks of the King of _Danea_, having already a Danish prince in his story; but I have ventured to suppose that Cervantes considers the countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway as being all included in the word Danes, which was the general appellation given to the Scandinavian tribes in the ninth and tenth centuries. There were the Western Danes, inhabitants of what is now called Denmark. The Eastern Danes are now Sweden. The Northern Danes are Norway. These people had all one common language. Later in the book, Periander hears the language of Norway, and recognizes it as his own. I have therefore changed the word Danea, and made Leopold King of Norway. It was a curious oversight that Cervantes fell into, giving imaginary sovereigns to all the northern kingdoms, and, as Sismondi observes, in fact, knowing no more of them than his own Don Quixote did. "The Poles, the Norwegians, the Irish and the English are all introduced in their turns, and represented as possessing manners no less extraordinary, and a mode of life no less fantastic, than that of the savages with whom he peoples his unknown isles; nor is the scene laid in that remote antiquity, the obscurity of which might admit of such fables."--_Sismondi: Roscoe's Translation._