palatable forms. Our castle-living forefathers were not
so abundantly favored. They had no books,--and could not have read them
if they had,--but the wandering minstrel took with them the place of the
modern volume, bearing from castle to court, and court to castle, his
budget of romances of magic and chivalry, and delighting the
hard-hitting knights and barons of that day with stirring ballads and
warlike tales to which their souls rose in passionate response.

In the "Morte Darthur" is preserved to us the pith of the best of those
old romances, brought into a continuous narrative by one who lived when
chivalry yet retained some of its vital hold on the minds of men, and
who, being a knight himself, could enter with heartfelt sympathy into
the deeds of the knights of an earlier age. Certainly many of the
readers of modern fiction will find a pleasure in turning aside awhile
from the hot-pressed thought of the nineteenth-century novel to this
fresh and breezy outcrop from the fiction of an earlier day; with the
double purpose of learning on what food the minds of our ancestors were
fed, and of gaining a breath of wild perfume from the far-off field of
the romance of chivalry. That the story of Arthur and his Knights can
arouse in modern readers the intense interest with which it was received
by mediaeval auditors is not to be expected. We are too far removed in
time and manners from the age of knight-errantry to enter deeply into
sympathy with its unfamiliar ways. Yet a milder interest may still be
awakened in what gave our predecessors such enthusiastic delight, and
some at least may turn with pleasure from the most philosophic of modern
novels to wander awhile through this primitive domain of thought.

To such we offer this work, which we have simply sought to make easy
reading, with little further liberty with Malory's quaint prose than to
put it into a modern dress, and with the hope that no such complete
divorce exists between the world of the present and that of the past as
to render the exploits of King Arthur and his Round Table Knights dull,
wearisome, and profitless reading, void of the human interest which they
once possessed in such large and satisfying measure.

KING ARTHUR
AND THE
KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE.

BOOK I.

HOW ARTHUR WON THE THRONE.