y younger than _Havelok_ and _Horn_, is likely to have existed
earlier: indeed must have done so if Thomas of Erceldoune wrote on the
subject. Few can require to be told that beautiful and tragical history
of "inauspicious stars" which hardly any man, of the many who have
handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil. Our Middle
English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner
and in sentiment. But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic
repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather
rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be
found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is
one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his
faithless queen slumbering by her lover's side with the sun on it. "And
Mark rewed therefore." The story, especially in its completion with the
"Iseult of Brittany" part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for
every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the
most picturesque novelist of modern times. There is nothing in the least
like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do
it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of
Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all
their faults, and combine. It is not surprising that, in the very
infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English
(though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done
it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities
should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail,
so early.

Of the far greater story of which _Tristram_ is a mere episode and
hardly even that--a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great
cathedral--the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather
the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only
fragmentary but disappointing. There is nothing in the least strange in
this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent
knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its
greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English. The
original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give
themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason
for disbelieving them. But in these earlier forms--the authority of the
most learne