e what they said to him in one of his early adventures, with no
great ill following, "Fair Knight, thou art unhappy," was always true in
a higher sense. He may have been Lord of Joyous Gard, in title and fact;
but his own heart was always a Garde Douloureuse--a _cor
luctificabile_--pillowed on idle triumphs and fearful hopes and
poisoned satisfactions, and bafflements where he would most fain have
succeeded. He has almost had to have the first kiss forced on him; he is
refused the last on grounds of which he himself cannot deny the
validity. Guinevere is a tragic figure in the truest and deepest sense
of the term, and, as we have tried to show, she is amply complex in
character and temperament. But it is questionable whether Lancelot is
not more tragic and more complex still.

[Sidenote: Books.]

It may perhaps without impropriety be repeated that these are not mere
fancies of the writer, but things reasonably suggested by and solidly
based upon "the French books," when these later are collated and, so to
speak, "checked" by Malory and the romances of adventure branching off
from them. But Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot by no means exhaust the
material for advanced and complicated novel-work--in character as well
as incident--provided by the older forms of the Legend. There is Gawain,
who has to be put together from the sort of first draft of Lancelot
which he shows in the earlier versions, and the light-o'-love opposite
which he becomes in the later, a contrast continued in the Amadis and
Galaor figures of the Spanish romances and their descendants. There is
the already glanced at group of Arthur's sisters or half-sisters, left
mere sketches and hints, but most interesting. Not to be tedious, we
need not dwell on Palomides, a very promising Lancelot unloved; on
Lamoracke, left provokingly obscure, but shadowing a most important
possibility in the unwritten romance of one of those very sisters; Bors,
of whom Tennyson has made something, but not enough, in the later
_Idylls_; and others. But it is probably unnecessary to carry the
discussion of this matter further. It has been discussed and illustrated
at some length, because it shows how early the elements, not merely of
romance but of the novel in the fullest sense, existed in French
literature.

[_Here follows the noble passage above referred to between
Lancelot and King Bagdemagus after the death of
Meleagraunce, whose cousin Lancelot has just sl