ories in rhyme, which the minstrels sang, striking their
harps at the end of each verse.

The stories were really fairy tales, dressed up and spun out, and
instead of 'a boy' or 'a king' or 'a princess' with no name, the old
fairy adventures were said to have happened to people with names: King
Arthur, or Charlemagne, or Bertha Broadfoot. A little real history came
in, but altered, and mixed up with fairy tales, and done into rhyme.

Later, more and more people learned to read, and now the long poems were
done into prose, and written in books, not printed but written books;
and these were the Romances, very long indeed, all about fighting, and
love-making, and giants, and dwarfs, and magicians, and enchanted
castles, and dragons and flying horses. These romances were the novels
of the people of the Middle Ages, about whom you can read in the History
Books of Mrs. Markham. They were not much like the novels which come
from the library for your dear mothers and aunts. There is not much
fighting in them, though there is any amount of love-making, and there
are no giants; and if there is a knight, he is usually a grocer or a
doctor, quite the wrong sort of knight.

Here is the beginning of a celebrated novel: 'Comedy is a game played to
throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in
the drawing-rooms of civilised men and women.' You do not want to read
any more of that novel. It is not at all like a good old romance of
knights and dragons and enchanted princesses and strong wars. The
knights and ladies would not have looked at such a book, all about
drawing-rooms.

Now, in this book, we have made the old romances much shorter, keeping
the liveliest parts, in which curious things happen. Some of the tales
were first told in Iceland eight hundred years ago, and are mostly true
and about real people. Some are from the ancient French romances of the
adventures of Charlemagne, and his peers and paladins. Some are from
later Italian poems of the same kind. 'Cupid and Psyche' is older, and
so is the story of the man who was changed into a donkey. These are from
an old Latin romance, written when people were still heathens, most of
them. Some are about the Danes in England (of whom you may have heard),
but there is not much history in them.

Mrs. Lang says: 'In this book you will read of men who, like Don
Quixote, were often mistaken but never mean, and of women, such as Una
and Bradamante, who kept pati