s,
righted the wrong wherever he found it, won all the honors at the
tournaments, and ever remained faithful in his devotion to the queen,
although many fair ladies tried to make him forget her.

Some of the poems, anxious to vindicate the queen, declare that there were
two Guineveres, one pure, lovely, and worthy of all admiration, who
suffered for the sins of the other, an unprincipled woman. When Arthur
discovered his wife's intrigue with Lancelot, he sent her away, and
Guinevere took refuge with her lover in Joyeuse Garde (Berwick), a castle
he had won at the point of his lance to please her. But the king, having
ascertained some time after that the real Guinevere had been wrongfully
accused, reinstated her in his favor, and Lancelot again returned to court,
where he continued to love and serve the queen.

[Illustration: SIR LANCELOT DU LAC.--Sir John Gilbert.]

On one occasion, hearing that she had been made captive by Meleagans,
Lancelot rushed after Guinevere to rescue her, tracing her by a comb and
ringlet she had dropped on the way. His horse was taken from him by
enchantment, so Lancelot, in order sooner to overtake the queen, rode on in
a cart. This was considered a disgraceful mode of progress for a knight, as
a nobleman in those days was condemned to ride in a cart in punishment for
crimes for which common people were sentenced to the pillory.

Lancelot succeeded in reaching the castle of Guinevere's kidnaper, whom he
challenged and defeated. The queen, instead of showing herself grateful for
this devotion, soon became needlessly jealous, and in a fit of anger
taunted her lover about his journey in the cart. This remark sufficed to
unsettle the hero's evidently very tottering reason, and he roamed wildly
about until the queen recognized her error, and sent twenty-three knights
in search of him. They journeyed far and wide for two whole years without
finding him.

"'Then Sir Bors had ridden on
Softly, and sorrowing for our Lancelot,
Because his former madness, once the talk
And scandal of our table, had return'd;
For Lancelot's kith and kin so worship him
That ill to him is ill to them.'"
TENNYSON, _The Holy Grail_.

Finally a fair and pious damsel took pity upon the frenzied knight, and
seeing that he had atoned by suffering for all his sins, she had him borne
into the chamber where the Holy Grail was kept; "and then there came a holy
man, wh