his edition the last day of July 1485, some fifteen
or sixteen years after Malory wrote his epilogue. It is clear that the
author was then dead, or the printer would not have acted as a clumsy
editor to the book, and recent discoveries (if bibliography may, for the
moment, enlarge its bounds to mention such matters) have revealed with
tolerable certainty when Malory died and who he was. In letters to The
Athenaeum in July 1896 Mr. T. Williams pointed out that the name of
a Sir Thomas Malorie occurred among those of a number of other
Lancastrians excluded from a general pardon granted by Edward IV.
in 1468, and that a William Mallerye was mentioned in the same year
as taking part in a Lancastrian rising. In September 1897, again, in
another letter to the same paper, Mr. A. T. Martin reported the
finding of the will of a Thomas Malory of Papworth, a hundred partly
in Cambridgeshire, partly in Hunts. This will was made on September 16,
1469, and as it was proved the 27th of the next month the testator
must have been in immediate expectation of death. It contains the most
careful provision for the education and starting in life of a family of
three daughters and seven sons, of whom the youngest seems to have been
still an infant. We cannot say with certainty that this Thomas Malory,
whose last thoughts were so busy for his children, was our author, or
that the Lancastrian knight discovered by Mr. Williams was identical
with either or both, but such evidence as the Morte D'Arthur offers
favours such a belief. There is not only the epilogue with its petition,
"pray for me while I am alive that God send me good deliverance and
when I am dead pray you all for my soul," but this very request is
foreshadowed at the end of chap. 37 of Book ix. in the touching passage,
surely inspired by personal experience, as to the sickness "that is
the greatest pain a prisoner may have"; and the reflections on English
fickleness in the first chapter of Book xxi., though the Wars of the
Roses might have inspired them in any one, come most naturally from an
author who was a Lancastrian knight.

If the Morte D'Arthur was really written in prison and by a prisoner
distressed by ill-health as well as by lack of liberty, surely no task
was ever better devised to while away weary hours. Leaving abundant
scope for originality in selection, modification, and arrangement, as a
compilation and translation it had in it that mechanical element which
adds t