chiefly with enchantments and fairies and
'giaunts, hard to be beleeved.' But alas! all alike have come under the
ban of those who decry reading for recreation's sake. Good and bad have
been damn'd indifferently. One cannot help wondering however that so much
has been written against them, and that so many have been at pains to
point out their unreasonableness. One would have thought that the very
fact of them _all_ abounding with incidents that are not only impossible
but preposterous, would have given these critics pause, and have urged
them to ask themselves why and wherefore such things were repeated.

To anyone possessed of imagination the answer, of course, is obvious. The
better tales all had the exaltation of the chivalric spirit in view, and
sought to achieve this end by allegory as well as by parable. He must be
a dullard indeed who fails to understand their symbolism. Malory,
describing the entry of Tristram into the field, wishes to impress upon
us the fact that he was indeed a 'preux chevalier, sans peur et sans
reproche,' the model of a Christian knight; so he mounts him on a white
horse and arrays him in white harness, and he rides out at a postern,
'and soo he came in to the feld as it had ben a bryght angel.' Doubtless
those to whom understanding has been denied would argue hotly as to
whether there is any authority for a knight painting his armour white.
What sane man, reading 'The Faerie Queene,' could think that it purported
to depict actual scenes or incidents? Yet time and again the 'sheer
impossibility' of these stories has been urged in condemnation of them.
Truly it is not every man who should turn to these ancient books which

'In sage and solemn tunes have sung
Of Turneys and of Trophies hung,
Of Forests, and inchantments drear,
_Where more is meant than meets the ear_.'

Gavaudan, a troubadour of the twelfth century, meets the undiscerning
critic more than half-way. Let none judge, he writes, till he be capable
of separating the grain from the chaff; 'for the fool makes haste to
condemn, and the ignorant only pretends to know all things, and muses on
the wonders that are too mighty for his comprehension.'

'Romances,' says Sharon Turner, 'are so many little Utopias, in which the
writer tries to paint or to inculcate something which he considers to be
more useful, more happy or more delightful, more excellent or more
interesting, than the world he lives in, than the chara