wealth and luxury had been introduced by the two victorious reigns of Edward III. and Henry V.; and the country had not yet suffered any distress either from internal revolution, or from the length and disastrous termination of the war with France. The general poverty and discontent that prevailed during the subsequent period, the declension of chivalry, and the almost utter extirpation of our principal nobles, during the contest between the houses of York and Lancaster, must have been fatal to the prosperity of the minstrels; and two causes of a different nature, viz. the invention of printing in A. D. 1474, and the taste for religious disputation introduced by Henry VIII. may have tended to complete their ruin.

Though the minstrel character be now lost both in England and France, the traces of it are not universally effaced. In Wales, the modern harper is occasionally found to possess the accomplishments of the ancient bard: and among the Italians, the improvisatori of Rome and Florence, who are usually ready to attend the table of a traveller, and greet him with an extemporary poem on any subject which he shall prescribe, and protracted to a length which is only measured by his patience, are no bad representations of the antique minstrels; particularly when they are accompanied

(as frequently happens) by an attendant musician, who gives the tone to their recitative, and fills up the pauses between the stanzas by a few notes on his instrument. The third character, or disour, is also to be found in many parts of Italy, but particularly at Venice; where, mounted on a temporary scaffolding, or sometimes on a stool or barrel, he recites, from memory, whole cantos of Ariosto.

The situation of a minstrel prescribed to him the choice of his subject. Addressing himself to an audience who lived only for the purpose of fighting, and who considered their time as of little value when otherwise employed, he was sure of being listened to with patience and credulity, so long as he could tell of heroes and enchanters: and he could be at no loss for either, because the histories of all the heroes and enchanters that the world had produced, were to be found in a few volumes of easy access.

As vanity is not easily subdued, a people who are not quite satisfied with their present insignificance, will often be tempted to indemnify themselves by a retrospective warfare on their enemies; and will be the more prodigal in assigning triumphs to their heroic ancestors, because those who in former ages contested the battle, can no longer be

brought forward to dispute the claim of victory. This will explain the numerous triumphs of King Arthur: we have already seen, that a book containing the relation of his exploits, and of those of his knights of the round table, and of his faithful enchanter, Merlin, together with the antecedent history of the British kings, from the destruction of Troy, was purchased in Brittany, about the year 1100, by Walter, arch-deacon of Oxford, a learned antiquary of those days, and confided to Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welch Benedictine monk, who translated it into Latin, with some additions and interpolations. The French translations of Wace and Rusticien de Pise, and the Saxon and English versions of Layamon and Robert de Brunne, laid open this mass of history, to readers of every description.

A second work, equally abounding in marvellous adventures, and apparently written about the same time with Geoffrey of Monmouth's chronicle, is the history of Charlemagne and the twelve peers of France, forged under the name of Turpin, a monk of the eighth century, who, for his services against the Saracens, was raised to the archbishoprick of Rheims. The real author was perhaps a Spaniard. This work was translated from Latin into French, by MICHAEL DE HAINES, in 1207.

The third source of romantic fiction, was the history of Troy. Homer's works were unknown at the period of which we are speaking, but the story was kept alive in two Latin pieces, whici passed under the names of Dares Phrygius, and Dictys Cretensis; and from these, as we have already seen, a French poem on the Tojan war, had been compiled by Benoit de St. More, the contemporary and rival of Wace. A more improved compilation from the same sources, under the title of Historia de Bello Trojano, comprehending the Theban and Argonautic stories, from Ovid, Statius, and Valerius Flaccus, was written by Guido de Colonna, a native of Messina, about the year 1260.

Alexander the Great was known to the writers of romance, not only by translations from Quintus Curtius, a writer much admired in the middle ages, but also by a history much better suited to the purposes of the historians of chivalry, originally written in Persic, and translated into Greek, under the assumed name of Callisthenes, by Simeon Seth, keeper of the wardrobe at Constantinople, under the emperor Michael Ducas, about the year 1070. Such a narrative could not fail of obtaining a very general circulation. A Latin translation of it is quoted by Giraldus Cambrensis; and the famous Roman d'Alexandre, written (as Fauchet tells us)

about the year 1200, by four confederates " en "jonglerie," appears to be partly a paraphrase of that translation.

These four works may be considered as the foundation on which was erected the vast Gothic fabric of romance; and materials for the superstructure were readily found, in an age when anecdotes and apologues were thought very necessary even to discourses delivered from the pulpit, and when all the fables that could be gleaned from ancient writings, or from the relations of travellers, were collected into story-books, and preserved by the learned for that purpose.

The Gesta Romanorum, a work of this description, which is still very common, appears to have had so great an influence on the literature of Europe, during the romantic ages, that Mr. Warton has thought it deserving of a dissertation of ninety-seven pages. He also mentions a manuscript collection of 215 stories, preserved in the Museum, which was evidently compiled by a professed preacher, for the use of the monastic societies. The legendary lives of the saints, were no bad repositories of anecdote and the bards of Armorica, who had supplied Geoffrey of Monmouth's regular history, continued to contribute detached fragments, or what we might now call memoirs, of the court of King Arthur,

: