Nor tower nor donjon could he spy, Darkening against the morning sky.-P. 59. 1. 17, 18. "We now gained a view of the Vale of St John's, a very narrow dell, hemmed in by mountains, through which a small brook makes many meanderings, washing little inclosures of grass-ground, which stretch up the rising of the hills. In the widest part of the dale you are struck with the appearance of an ancient ruined castle, which seems to stand upon the summit of a little mount, the mountains around forming an amphitheatre. This massive bulwark shews a front of various towers, and makes an awful, rude, and Gothic appearance, with its lofty turrets and ragged battlements; we traced the galleries, the bending arches, the buttresses. The greatest antiquity stands characterized in its architecture; the inhabitants near it assert it is an antediluvian structure. "The traveller's curiosity is roused, and he prepares to make a nearer approach, when that curiosity is put upon the rack by his being assured, that, if he advances, certain genii who govern the place, by virtue of their supernatural art and necromancy, will strip it of all it sbeauties, and, by enchantment, transform the magic walls. The vale seems adapted for the habitation of such beings; its gloomy recesses and retirements look like haunts of evil spirits. There was no delusion in the report; we were soon convinced of its truth; for this piece of antiquity, so venerable and noble in its aspect, as we drew near changed its figure, and proved no other than a shaken massive pile of rocks, which stand in the midst of this little vale, disunited from the adjoining mountains, and have so much the real form and resemblance of a castle, that they bear the name of the Castle Rocks of St John."-HUTCHINSON'S Excursion to the Lakes, p. 121. The Saxons to subjection brought.-P. 60. 1. 10. Arthur is said to have defeated the Saxons in twelve pitched battles, and to have achieved the other feats alluded to in the text. There Morolt of the iron mace, &c.—P. 62. 1. 17. The characters named in the following stanza are all of them more or less distinguished in the romances which treat of King Arthur and his Round Table, and their names are strung together according to the established custom of minstrels upon such occasions; for example, in the ballad of the marriage of Sir Gawaine : Sir Lancelot, Sir Stephen bolde, Soe did Sir Banier, and Sir Bore, And Lancelot, that evermore Look'd stol'n-wise on the queen.-P. 63. 1. 10, 11. Upon this delicate subject hear Richard Robinson, citizen of London, in his Assertion of King Arthur: But as it is a thing sufficiently apparent that she (Guenever, wife of King Arthur) was beautiful, so it is a thing doubted whether she was chaste, yea or no. Truly, so far as I can with honestie, I would spare the impayred honour and fame of noble women. But yet the truth of the historie pluckes me by the eere, and willeth me not onely, but commandeth me to declare what the ancients have deemed of her. To wrestle or contend with so great authoritie were indeed unto me a controversie, and that greate.”—Assertion of King Arthure. Imprinted by John Wolfe, London, 1582. There were two who loved their neighbours' wives, And one who loved his own.-P. 68. 1. 9, 10. "In our forefathers' tyme, when papistrie, as a standyng poole, covered and overflowed all England, fewe books were read in our tongue, savyng certaine bookes of chevalrie, as they said, for pastime and pleasure; which, as some say, were made in the monasteries, by idle monks or wanton chanons. As one for example, La Morte d'Arthure; the whole pleasure of which book standeth in two speciall poynts, in open manslaughter and bold bawdrye; in which booke they be counted the noblest knightes that do kill most men without any quarrell, and commit fowlest adoulteries by sutlest shiftes; as Sir Launcelot, with the wife of King Arthur, his master; Sir Tristram, with the wife of King Marke, his uncle; Sir Lamerocke, with the wife of King Lote, that was his own aunt. This is good stuffe for wise men to laugh at, or honest men to take pleasure at, yet I know when God's Bible was banished the court, and La Morte d'Arthure received into the prince's chamber."-ASCHAM's Schoolmaster. valiant Carodac, Who won the cup of gold.-P. 68. 1. 13, 14. See the comic tale of the Boy and the Mantle, in the third volume of Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry, from the Bre ton or Norman original of which Ariosto is supposed to have taken his Tale of the Enchanted Cup. |