more or less historical character, as a leader in the historical conflict between the Britons and their enemies. But in the tract on the Marvels of Britain, early joined to the history of Nennius, there are vestiges of the mythical Arthur who comes into the story of Kulhwch and Olwen, and of the hunting of the mighty boar whose name is Troit: the footprint of Arthur's dog Cabal is found on a stone in a cairn near Builth. In Geoffrey of Monmouth Arthur is a British Charlemagne or Alexander, antagonist of Rome, conqueror of many kingdoms, finding a tragic death through the perfidy of his wife and his nephew. In "the French Book" followed by Sir Thomas Malory, the French Mort Artus, the tragedy is deepened, the Nemesis more dreadful. But in many parts of the prose romance, Arthur is as little interesting as Charlemagne in many of the French epics: Arthur and Charlemagne both became, for many story-tellers, mere honourable names to give a centre for the incidents, to preside in hall. Yet for all this degradation neither lost the power derived from their historical and mythical glory; they remained great, for any poet who chose to take them so; Arthur kept his place among the Worthies, in spite of the many feeble things heaped upon him by romancers. He never had, unfortunately, for the English or French the glory that even his own people of Wales too soon forgot, though it is recorded in an old poem which evidently deals with expeditions conducted by Arthur by sea to the realms of twilight and darkness." His name "gathers round it the legends of heroes and

divinities of a past of indefinite extent. In other words, he and his men, especially Kei and Bedwyr, are represented undertaking perilous expeditions to realms of mythic obscurity, bringing home treasures, fighting with hags and witches, despatching giants, and destroying monsters." 1

This is not his proper work in the French book, though Arthur keeps a little of the dragon-slayer even there. "The horror and the hell" invaded by Arthur in his ship Prydwen did not remain in the imagination of the Arthurian poets: only through antiquarian research is one enabled to look into that strange region. It is a loss for poetry: there might have been yet another mediæval counterpart to the voyage of Ulysses if the ship Prydwen and her fortunes had been better remembered by the Welsh and interpreted to their French or English neighbours.

There were other sources of Romance in the Middle Ages which it is not irrelevant to mention here; the Bible being one of them. The Bible, which The Bible. was still printed in the shape of a noble and joyous book by Coverdale and Cranmer, a book to be read, not broken yet into verses for the convenience of Geneva, was the source of some of the bestloved stories. Samson and David took their place freely along with Jason and Lancelot in popular favour, long before the roll of the Nine Worthies was made. definite, with its equal allowance of honour to Jews,

1 See Rhŷs, Introduction to Malory (1893), pp. xxxv, xxxvi. The adventures of Arthur belong properly to the second volume of this series; cf. The Flourishing of Romance, c. iii.

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Paynim, and Christians. Nor was it only Joshua and Gideon and David's captains that came to reinforce the stories of Ogier or Charlemagne ; besides the addition of new histories and adventures to the common stock, the Bible gave to the new languages more than can be estimated of new rhetoric. The diction of the Bible has frequently caused trouble among the classically educated, who have found it sometimes necessary to apologise for the vehement and daring metaphors of the Old Testament. Its influence on styles of composition is a subject which would lead far; but one thing may be said with confidence about its part in the Middle Ages: that it could not fail to attract the vernacular and popular languages to imitate and repeat its sublimities as well as they could. So one finds the mystery of Celtic stories illustrated with citations. from the Bible; as where in the Arthurian legend the mysterious delivery of captives in an unearthly place beyond the Bridge of Dread is celebrated as it might be in a chivalrous Pilgrim's Progress with the verses of a spiritual song: "Gawain turned. and looked back; and behold, across the river, all the streets of the place were filled with men and. women, rejoicing and singing in carol-wise: The people that sat in darkness have beheld a great light."

There is another delivery of captives to which the same song belongs more properly, the story of The The Harrowing Harrowing of Hell in the Gospel of Nicodemus, which is everywhere known in the Middle Ages, and everywhere the source of poetic in

of Hell.

spiration and of that wonder which does not belong exclusively to St Brandan and his fellows. No adventure of heroes in the land of the dead is told with more complete imaginative sense of the drama of Light and Darkness than this of The Harrowing of Hell. It makes one of the noblest passages in Piers Plowman; and it is nothing to the discredit of the author that he has repeated what no length of study could improve, the order of events as they stand in the original Gospel and as they were kept in the drama of the Passion played in various towns in England. As a piece of composition the story has the great advantage over other heroic legends of war against Hell that it begins not from the side of the hero but with the captives in darkness. They see the light far off, they hear the confusion and boastful preparation of the fiends, and the light when it strikes in at the everlasting gates in the name of the King of Glory encounters and defeats a darkness which has held the reader in its tyranny along with the spirits in prison. It is more terrible in that way than if one entered in the company of the triumph. The many later versions of The Harrowing of Hell may generally be judged according as they observe this original design or lose the effect of it by beginning the story from the other side, as some of them feebly do.1

The romance of Alexander attracted to itself a vast amount of mythology from unknown sources in the East: it is impossible to say how old the stories are

1 The story is finely given from the Gospel of Nicodemus in Mr Raleigh's Milton.

Alexander.

that gathered round Alexander, or to trace their influence exactly in the new lands of the West. The romance as distinct from the sufficiently wonderful true history had its rise in Egypt: the motive was to find in Alexander the true successor of the ancient Egyptian line: Alexander is the son not of Philip but of Nectanebus king of Egypt.1 The Greek book ascribed to Callisthenes, really written about 200 A.D., was translated into Latin and became popular in the version of Julius Valerius; and besides that book, the letter of Alexander to Aristotle on the wonders of India, and the colloquy of Alexander with Dindimus the Brahmin, circulated independently, and led to separate works in the different vernaculars. Probably there is little invention in all the romance: it drew to itself the fragments of many mythologies. It may be that Irish or German readers of the Alexander book found themselves in possession of something in which they had hereditary right, for many things in the story resemble passages in Celtic and Teutonic myth; it may be that the adventures of Alexander come from the same antique original as the voyages of Arthur against the uncouth fortresses named in the old Welsh poem, or the expeditions of Thor against the trolls. It is not impossible either that some of the resemblances may be due to early Western borrowing from the Alexander legend. Dr Zimmer has pointed out that Loeg, the charioteer of Cuchulinn, is described in the oldest Irish documents. of that cycle as wearing a garment presented by 1 See The Flourishing of Romance, c. iv.