h Margause. He accepts the false Guinevere and the
Saxon enchantress very readily; and there is other scandal in which
the complaisant Merlin as usual figures. But in the accepted Arthuriad
(I do not of course speak of modern writers) this is rather kept in
the background, while his prowess is also less prominent, except in a
few cases, such as his great fight with his sister's lover, Sir
Accolon. Even here he never becomes the complaisant wittol, which late
and rather ignoble works like the _Cokwold's Daunce_[57] represent him
as being: and he never exhibits the slightest approach to the
outbursts of almost imbecile wrath which characterise Charlemagne.

[Footnote 57: Printed by Hartshorne, _Ancient Metrical Tales_ (London,
1829), p. 209; and Hazlitt, _Early Popular Poetry_ (London, 1864), i.
38.]

[Sidenote: _Guinevere._]

Something has been said of Guinevere already. It is perhaps hard to
look, as any English reader of our time must, backward through the
coloured window of the greatest of the _Idylls of the King_ without
our thoughts of the queen being somewhat affected by it. But those who
knew their Malory before the _Idylls_ appeared escape that danger. Mr
Morris's Guinevere in her _Defence_ is perhaps a little truer than
Lord Tennyson's to the original conception--indeed, much of the
delightful volume in which she first appeared is pure _Extrait
Arthurien_. But the Tennysonian glosses on Guinevere's character are
not ill justified: though perhaps, if less magnificent, it would have
been truer, both to the story and to human nature, to attribute her
fall rather to the knowledge that Arthur himself was by no means
immaculate than to a despairing sense of his immaculateness. The
Guinevere of the original romances is the first perfectly human woman
in English literature. They have ennobled her unfaithfulness to Arthur
by her constancy to Lancelot, they have saved her constancy to
Lancelot from being insipid by interspersing the gusts of jealousy in
the matter of the two Elaines which play so great a part in the story.
And it is curious that, coarse as both the manners and the speech of
the Middle Ages are supposed to have been, the majority of these
romances are curiously free from coarseness. The ideas might shock
Ascham's prudery, but the expression is, with the rarest exceptions,
scrupulously adapted to polite society. There are one or two coarse
passages in the _Merlin_ and the older _Saint Graal_, and I remem