of a love-interest for the Arthurian
story being felt, and, according to the manner of the time, it being
felt with equal strength that the lover must not be the husband, it
was needful to look about for some one else. The merely business-like
self-surrender to Mordred as the king _de facto_, to the "lips that
were near," of Geoffrey's Guanhumara and Layamon's Wenhaver, was out
of the question; and the part of Gawain as a faithful nephew was too
well settled already by tradition for it to be possible to make him
the lover. Perhaps the great artistic stroke in the whole Legend, and
one of the greatest in all literature, is the concoction of a hero who
should be not only

"Like Paris handsome, and like Hector brave,"

but more heroic than Paris and more interesting than Hector,--not only
a "greatest knight," but at once the sinful lover of his queen and the
champion who should himself all but achieve, and in the person of his
son actually achieve, the sacred adventure of the Holy Graal. If, as
there seems no valid reason to disbelieve, the hitting upon this idea,
and the invention or adoption of Lancelot to carry it out, be the work
of Walter Mapes, then Walter Mapes is one of the great novelists of
the word, and one of the greatest of them. If it was some unknown
person (it could hardly be Chrestien, for in Chrestien's form the
Graal interest belongs to Percevale, not to Lancelot or Galahad), then
the same compliment must be paid to that person unknown. Meanwhile the
conception and execution of Lancelot, to whomsoever they may be due,
are things most happy. Entirely free from the faultlessness which is
the curse of the classical hero; his unequalled valour not seldom
rewarded only by reverses; his merits redeemed from mawkishness by his
one great fault, yet including all virtues that are themselves most
amiable, and deformed by no vice that is actually loathsome; the soul
of goodness in him always warring with his human frailty;--Sir
Lancelot fully deserves the noble funeral eulogy pronounced over his
grave, and felt by all the elect to be, in both senses, one of the
first of all extant pieces of perfect English prose.

[Sidenote: _The minor knights._]

But the virtues which are found in Lancelot eminently are found in all
but the "felon" knights, differing only in degree. It is true that the
later romances and compilations, feeling perhaps the necessity of
shade, extend to all the sons of Lot and Margause, exce