powerful poems the Middle Ages have bequeathed to us is devoted to his celebration. His name was well known amongst the leaders of the great popular movement which broke out in the reign of Richard the Second. When the lower classes of this country were learning to work out for themselves their political salvation, when they were awaking to the necessity of self-reliance, and daring to make conditions with their masters, the picture of Piers the Ploughman presented to them in Langland's poem of the Ploughman able to guide into the way of truth, when all the professional guides proved miserably at fault, must have been eminently suggestive. The number of early MS. copies of that poem. is very great; and it is noticed of them for the most part that they are executed on inferior material, as if for the use of no wealthy readers. Other poems appeared subsequently, with this same Ploughman as their centre and hero.

And now we come to that century in whose process the Middle Ages ended and modern times began. It was a century, not of great literary production, but rather of preparation, both here and in the kingdoms of the Continent. For the Chivalrous Romances, they were still generally popular throughout it, though less so at the end than at the beginning. The popular rival of the Romance—the ballad -was gradually encroaching on their monopoly. However, Romances were still written, still adapted from the French. But the times were rapidly changing; earthquake was following earthquake; pictures of life which had once some truth in them were now becoming false false in fact, false in sentiment. The society of which the romances of chivalry were once to some extent the reflections, was breaking up. The old order was giving place to a new; the literature peculiar to it was losing all its force and meaning. Chivalry

B

was decaying, with all its glories, with all its vanities, with all its fantasies.

Ah! my Lord Arthur, whither shall I go?
Where shall I hide my forehead and my eyes?
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight.
Such times have been not since the light that led
The holy elders with the gift of myrrh.
But now the whole Round Table is dissolved,
Which was an image of the mighty world;
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.

Caxton exclaimed, when he saw the customs of chivalry falling into desuetude and oblivion :

Oh, ye knights of England, where is the custom and usage of noble chivalry that was used in those days? What do ye now but go to the baynes and play at dice? And some, not well advised, use not honest and good rule, against all order of knighthood. Leave this, leave it! and read the noble volumes of St Graal, of Lancelot, of Galaad, of Trystram, of Perse Forest, of Percyval, of Gawayn, and many more ; there shall ye see manhood, courtesy and gentleness. And look in latter days of the noble acts sith the Conquest, as in King Richard days Cœur de Lion, Edward I. and III., and his noble sons, Sir Robert Knolles, Sir John Hawkwode, Sir John Chandos, and Sir Gueltiare Marny. Read Froissart; and also behold that victorious and noble King Harry V. and the captains under him, his noble brethren the Earls of Salisbury, Montagu, and many other whose names shine gloriously by their virtuous noblesse and acts that they did in the order of chivalry. Alas, what do ye but sleep and take ease, and are all disordered from chivalry?

But these, and such clamours to recall a departing era, profited nothing. There is no staying the wheels of time. And he who uttered these laments and adjurations was himself, however unconsciously, more than any other

Englishman of his time, expediting the change he so zealously deplored. The old Romances of Chivalry received a fatal blow from the printing-press-a blow which could not be healed by any appeals to men's better feelings, or any printed editions of the old works. Then that revival of learning, whose early prognostics we observed in Italy in Petrarch's time, which duly reached its full development in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was by no means favourable to this artless literature. There were other events equally hostile to it. Probably no fresh Romances were written after the reign of Henry VI.

No other general

The day, whose

But the old Romances were re-written. literature had yet arisen to take their place. breaking Chaucer had seemed to herald, had not yet fully dawned. Towards the close of the fifteenth century, and in the earlier course of the sixteenth, the Romances of Chivalry were reproduced in prose. Numerous prose versions issued from the printing-presses of France in the reign of Charles VIII. and his immediate successors. In England, in the year 1485, there came from Caxton's press that most memorable work, the Histories of King Arthur, commonly known as the Morte d'Arthur-a comprehensive digest of the Arthurian Cycle-a work which, from the year of its appearance, has never, except, perhaps, for some years of the last century, wholly lost its popularity: a work most familiar to Spenser, to Milton, and to certain great poetical spirits of our fathers' and our own times. Caxton's successor, Wynkyn de Worde, twice reprinted this famous compilation, in 1498 and in 1529. Three other editions appeared from the press of Copeland in

in the sixteenth century, one

1557, two from that of East. A seventh edition appeared Some six or seven editions have come out in this

in 1634.

century.

'After that I had accomplished and finished

divers histories,' says Caxton in his Prologue to his edition, which, as we have said, was published in 1485, the year of the Battle of Bosworth,

as well of contemplation as of other historical and worldly acts of great conquerors and princes, and also certain books of ensamples and doctrine, many noble and divers gentlemen of this realm of England came and demanded me many and ofttimes, wherefore that I have not had made and emprinted the noble history of the Saint Graal, and of the most renowned Christian King, first and chief of the three best Christian and worthy, King Arthur, which ought most to be remembered among us Englishmen before all other Christian kings.

(The other two chief and worthy kings are Charlemagne and Godfrey of Boulogne.) The printer did not consent to the urging of these divers and noble gentlemen, till they had given him what he thought convincing proofs that Arthur was no fable, but a real, historical personage. Then 'after the simple cunning that God had sent to him, under the favour of all noble lords and gentlemen,' he 'emprised to imprint a book of the noble histories of the said King Arthur and of certain of his knights, after a copy unto me delivered, which copy Sir Thomas Malory did take out of certain books of French and reduced it into English.' Malory's version, as we learn from the conclusion of it, was finished in 1469 or early in the following year. But the French works which mainly formed its basis were composed in the reigns of Henry the Second and Henry the Third; so that in fact it carries us back in some sense to the twelfth century, and as the French works were themselves but the transcripts of yet older legends, to yet earlier centuries. We say in 'some sense,' because much of the spirit which actuates Malory's work certainly belongs to the close and not to the opening years of the Middle Ages. The spirit is of the sunset, not of the sunrise: it is that of a requiem,

not of a nativity hymn. It looks back with tender, wistful, regretting eyes on days bygone for ever-not forward with any gaiety of hope to what may be coming, or around it with any exultant pride at what is present. The times portrayed in this work were dead, the picture given of them is, as might be expected, softened and idealised. Those times were now to be used to point a moral. Caxton, in another passage of that Prologue from which we have given an extract above, speaks of Malory's account of them in very much the same tone as that in which Spenser thought of it, and reproduced it. Roger Ascham, who died some fifteen years after Spenser was born, perused the work with cold, unfascinated eyes, in a very different fashion from Spenser. Being a man deeply versed in the new learning, he had but little sympathy with such unlettered productions,-' which, as some say,' to quote his own words, 'were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton Chanons; he recognised nothing in the Morte d'Arthur but licentiousness and slaughter.

This is good stuff (he exclaims with bitter irony) for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at. Yet I know when God's Bible was banished the Court, and Morte Arthure received into the Prince's chamber. What toys the daily reading of such a book may work in the will of a young gentleman or a young maid that liveth wealthily and idly, wise men can judge, and honest men do pity.

Not less bitterly does he inveigh against them in the preface of his Toxophilus, addressed to all the gentlemen and yeomen of England. But it may be Ascham is blinded by his own conceit, when he talks after this manner. No pure soul was ever tainted by the reading of the Morte d'Arthur. Whatever the incidents of the book, the moral tone is high and reproachless; in this respect the unreality of the book gives security. But it is saying enough, and infinitely