the castle of King Pellam, where the body
of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of
the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with
which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and
the two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance.
All this wild magic--which Tennyson touches lightly--Swinburne gives at
full length; following Malory closely through his digressions and the
roving adventures--most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely--by which
he conducts his hero his end. This is the true romantic method.

As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburne
stands for the spirit of French romanticism. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century France, the inventor of "Gothic" architecture and
chivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaeval
Europe, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval and
anti-romantic. Gerard de Nerval thought that the native genius of France
had been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault,
who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in the
French literature of the eighteenth century. M. Brunetiere, on the
contrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to be
found in the writers of Louis XIV.'s time--that France is instinctively
and naturally classical. However this may be, in the history of the
modern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake.
Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had
dribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps the
first thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school. Victor Hugo
is the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose and
verse, in "ode and elegy and sonnet." [64] Gautier and Baudelaire have
also shared his devotion.[65] The French songs in "Rosamond" and
"Chastelard" are full of romantic spirit. "Laus Veneris" follows a
version of the tale given in Maistre Antoine Gaget's "Livre des grandes
merveilles d'amour" (1530), in which the Venusberg is called "le mont
Horsel"; and "The Leper," a very characteristic piece in the same
collection, is founded on a passage in the "Grandes Chroniques de France"
(1505). Swinburne introduced or revived in English verse a number of old
French stanza forms, such as the ballade, the sestina, the rondel, which
have sinc