here is nothing like pulling them out of it. So in the actual
pulling-out there is the idlest exaggeration and surplusage; the first
bar splits one of Lancelot's fingers to the sinews and cuts off the top
joint of the next. The actual embraces are prettily and gracefully told
(though again with otiose observations about silence), and the whole,
from the knight's coming to the window to his leaving it, takes 150
lines. Now hear the prose of the so-called "Vulgate _Lancelot_."

"And he came to the window: and the Queen, who waited for
him, slept not, but came thither. And the one threw to the
other their arms, and they felt each other as much as they
could reach. "Lady," said Lancelot, "if I could enter
yonder, would it please you?" "Enter," said she, "fair sweet
friend? How could this happen?" "Lady," said he, "if it
please you, it could happen lightly." "Certainly," said she,
"I should wish it willingly above everything." "Then, in
God's name," said he, "that shall well happen. For the iron
will never hold." "Wait, then," said she, "till I have gone
to bed." Then he drew the irons from their sockets so softly
that no noise was made and no bar broke."

In this simple prose, sensuous and passionate for all its simplicity, is
told the rest of the story. There are eighteen lines of it altogether in
Dr. Sommer's reprint, but as these are long quarto lines, let us
multiply them by some three to get the equivalent of the "skipping
octosyllables." There will remain fifty to a hundred and fifty, with, in
the prose, some extra matter not in the verse. But the acme of the
contrast is reached in these words of the prose, which answer to some
forty lines of the poet's watering-out. "Great was the joy that they
made each other that night, for long had each suffered for the other.
And when the day came, they parted." Beat that who can!

Many years ago, and not a few before M. Gaston Paris had published his
views, I read these two forms of the story in the valuable joint
edition, verse and prose, of M. Jonckbloet, which some ruffian (may
Heaven _not_ assoil him!) has since stolen or hidden from me. And I said
then to myself, "There is no doubt which of these is the original."
Thirty years later, with an unbroken critical experience of imaginative
work in prose and verse during the interval, I read them again in Dr.
Forster's edition of the verse and Dr. Sommer's of the prose