of polite ways, he was nevertheless simple, pious, and sincere. By a happy accident he was led to the brilliant court of Arthur, and, though at first mocked at by the knights of the Round Table for his rudeness and lack of sophistication, he later amazed them all by his strength of muscle and force of will. For a time his superiors subjected him to discipline and trial, but he soon found occasion to start out on an independent career which was marked by steady progress towards exalted achievement. After older and more accomplished warriors had abandoned the quest of the Grail, he kept pressing on, until finally he solved that holy mystery-and alone arrived at the summit of human

success.

Elizabethan literature may be likened to a mature man who, having inherited a vigorous constitution from robust English parents, was first liberally schooled in France, and then travelled here and there in Europe, lingering with most abandon in the South. By foreign study and cosmopolitan associations his. knowledge increased, his standards became more justly fixed, and his individual powers grew more clearly marked. The years of this gradual enlightenment were most important in shaping his after career, because what he learned then was never forgotten: it stimulated him to lofty undertaking, while at the same time it restrained him from crudity and excess. The Middle Ages were the Wanderjahre of English verse.

"The essential merit of medieval art," an architect has recently said, "lay in the freshness of its instinctive creativeness, in its uncalculating grasp of beauty." And this is true also of popular mediæval poetry. Its call is "the call of incensebreathing morn." The age of chivalry produced men who wrote with freedom and spontaneity, with zest and zeal, with virility and emotion, and they have left us a precious heritage of idealistic example. Such writers, revealing the thought of such an age, will always remain significant to students of the growth of culture, if only as the inspiration of some of the most delightful parts of "that great poem which," as Shelley so finely conceived, "all

poets, like the coöperating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world."

We have here been occupied more with the matter than with the manner of poetry in the Middle Ages, because in the former we find its most real contribution to modern times. But the manner also it is important to regard closely before making a final estimate of the literary power of the period. In another volume the effect of early English verse on the externals of later styles will be more fully discussed. Then, too, more may be said of the quality of the English character as evinced in this its first product-of the wholesomeness of its affections, the freshness of its enthusiasms, the genuineness of its simplicity, the steadiness of its purpose, the vitality of its ideals.

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APPENDICES

APPENDIX I

CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE