have been founded on fact.
But, like the stones of a prehistoric wall, their facts are so densely
enveloped by the ivy of fiction that it is impossible to delve them out.

The ballads and romances in which the King Arthur of mediaeval story
figures as the hero, would scarcely prove pleasant and profitable
reading to us now, however greatly they delighted our ancestors. They
are marked by a coarseness and crudity which would be but little to our
taste. Nor have we anything of modern growth to replace them. Milton
entertained a purpose of making King Arthur the hero of an epic poem,
but fortunately yielded it for the nobler task of "Paradise Lost."
Spenser gives this hero a minor place in his "Fairie Queen." Dryden
projected a King Arthur epic, but failed to write it. Recently Bulwer
has given us a cumbersome "King Arthur," which nobody reads; and
Tennyson has handled the subject brilliantly in his "Idyls of the King,"
splendid successes as poems, yet too infiltrated with the spirit of
modernism to be acceptable as a reproduction of the Arthur of romance.
For a true rehabilitation of this hero of the age of chivalry we must go
to the "Morte Darthur" of Sir Thomas Malory, a writer of the fifteenth
century, who lived when men still wore armor, and so near to the actual
age of chivalry as to be in full sympathy with the spirit of its
fiction, and its pervading love of adventure and belief in the magical.

Malory did a work of high value in editing the confused mass of earlier
fiction, lopping off its excrescences and redundancies, reducing its
coarseness of speech, and producing from its many stories and episodes
a coherent and continuous narrative, in which the adventures of the
Round Table Knights are deftly interwoven with the record of the birth,
life, and death of the king, round whom as the central figure all these
knightly champions revolve. Malory seems to have used as the basis of
his work perhaps one, perhaps several, old French prose romances, and
possibly also material derived from Welsh and English ballads. Such
material in his day was doubtless abundant. Geoffrey had drawn much of
his legendary history from the ancient Welsh ballads. The mass of
romantic fiction which he called history became highly popular, first in
Brittany, and then in France, the Trouveres making Arthur, Lancelot,
Tristram, Percival, and others of the knightly circle the heroes of
involved romances, in which a multitude of new incidents we