ter form. He is still rather prone to group his
rhymes instead of keeping the couplets separate: but as he is not
translating from _chanson de geste_ form, he does not, as Robert of
Brunne sometimes does, fall into complete _laisses_. I have counted as
many as twenty continuous rhymes in Manning, and there may be more:
but there is nothing of that extent in the earlier Robert.

[Sidenote: _Romances._]

Verse history, however, must always be an awkward and unnatural form
at the best. The end of the thirteenth century had something better to
show in the appearance of romance proper and of epic. When the study
of any department of old literature begins, there is a natural and
almost invariable tendency to regard it as older than it really is;
and when, at the end of the last century, the English verse romances
began to be read, this tendency prevailed at least as much as usual.
Later investigation, besides showing that, almost without exception,
they are adaptations of French originals, has, partly as a consequence
of this, shown that scarcely any that we have are earlier than the
extreme end of the thirteenth century. Among these few that are,
however, three of exceptional interest (perhaps the best three except
_Gawaine and the Green Knight_ and _Sir Launfal_) may probably be
classed--to wit, _Horn_, _Havelok_, and the famous _Sir Tristram_. As
to the last and best known of these, which from its inclusion among
Sir Walter Scott's works has received attention denied to the rest, it
may or may not be the work of Thomas the Rhymer. But whether it is or
not, it can by no possibility be later than the first quarter of the
fourteenth century, while the most cautious critics pronounce both
_Havelok the Dane_ and _King Horn_ to be older than 1300.[99]

[Footnote 99: _Tristram_, for editions _v._ p. 116: _Havelok_, edited
by Madden, 1828, and again by Prof. Skeat, E.E.T.S., 1868. _King Horn_
has been repeatedly printed--first by Ritson, _Ancient English
Metrical Romances_ (London, 1802), ii. 91, and Appendix; last by Prof.
Skeat in the _Specimens_ above mentioned.]

[Sidenote: Havelok the Dane.]

It is, moreover, not a mere accident that these three, though the
authors pretty certainly had French originals before them, seem most
likely to have had yet older English or Anglo-Saxon originals of the
French in the case of _Horn_ and _Havelok_, while the Tristram story,
as is pointed out in the chapter on the Arthurian Legend, is