Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously
disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the
mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an adventure only to
be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of the great
Launcelot, who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in
Geoffrey's history, as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner
the love-story of Tristan and Isolde was joined by other romancers to
the Arthur-Saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus
there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed
shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day
and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a
more artistic {24} handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in
his _Idyls of the King_, by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others.
There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in
Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German,
and in other tongues. But the final form which the Saga took in
mediaeval England was the prose _Morte Dartur_ of Sir Thomas Malory,
composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the
earlier romances and is Tennyson's main authority.

Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister.
There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English,
consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion, like the
_Ancren Riwle_ (Rule of Anchoresses), 1225; the _Ayenbite of Inwyt_
(Remorse of Conscience), 1340, both in prose; the _Handlyng Sinne_,
1303; the _Cursor Mundi_, 1320; and the _Pricke of Conscience_, 1340,
in verse; metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Pater Noster, the
Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the Day, such as the
_Ormulum_, or Book of Orm, 1205; legends and miracles of saints; poems
in praise of virginity, on the contempt of the world, on the five joys
of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of hell, the
seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment, and
dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only
of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in {25} smaller part
of the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety
and superstition of the Middle Age, the childish belief in the
marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of Scripture texts, the
g