t tired of nursery rhymes, or their elders turn away
from "Punch and Judy," though the same little play has been
performed for centuries. As for inventing stories about real
people, that may well have seemed permissible in an age when
historians recorded mere hearsay as actual fact. Richard III.,
perhaps, had one shoulder higher than the other, but within a few
years of his death grave historians had represented him as a
hunchbacked deformity.

The romances connected with King Arthur and his knights went on
steadily growing in number until the fifteenth century; of them,
some have survived to the present day, but undoubtedly many have
been lost. Then, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the
most famous of all the Arthurian stories was given to the world in
Sir Thomas Malory's _Morte D'Arthur_. By good luck, the great
printer who made it one of his first works, has left an account of
the circumstances that led to its production. In the reign of
Edward IV., William Caxton set up his printing-press (the first in
England) in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. There he was
visited, as he himself relates, by "many noble and divers gentlemen"
demanding why he had not printed the "noble history of the Saint Grail
and of the most-renowned Christian King ... Arthur." To please them,
and because he himself loved chivalry, Caxton printed Sir Thomas
Malory's story, in which all that is best in the many Arthurian
romances is woven into one grand narrative.

Since then, in our own days, the story of Arthur and his knights
has been told in beautiful verse by Lord Tennyson; but for the
originals of some of his poems it would be useless to look in
Malory. The story of Geraint and Enid, Tennyson derived from a very
interesting collection of translations of ancient Welsh stories
made by Lady Charlotte Guest, and by her called _Mabinogion_,[1]
although not all Welsh scholars would consider the name quite
accurate.

[Footnote 1: Meaning the apprentices of the bards.]

And now it is time to say something about the stories themselves.
The Arthur of history was engaged in a life-long struggle with an
enemy that threatened to rob his people of home, of country, and of
freedom; in the stories, the king and his knights, like Richard
Coeur-de-Lion, sought adventure for adventure's sake, or, as in the
case of Sir Peredur, took fantastic vows for the love of a lady.
The Knights of the Round Table are sheathed from head to foot in
pla