Pathos was a strong solvent in the Middle Ages. It belongs especially, though not exclusively, to the later Middle Ages, to the romantic, not the epic age; not to the matter of fact and stubborn people who fought on foot with swords and battle-axes, but to the showy knights of the Crusades, and the times when the world was full of ideals and fantasies.

In England there is one curious instance of the way in which pathos might be multiplied upon pathos. The Ancren Riwle (thirteenth century) is a practical book of instruction and advice. addressed to a small household of nuns. It is not at all monotonous; a good deal of it is kindly, humorous and homely; some of it is merely technical, dealing with the order of religious services; some of it is moralising; some of it is devotional. One part of it, the Wooing of the Soul, is beyond all praise for its pathetic grace and beauty. It was not left alone in its seriousness and its reserve. The theme was taken up again and treated with a dissolute ostentation of sentiment, with tears and outcries. The Wooing of Our Lord, as compared with the passage in the Ancren Riwle, may stand as one indication of the sensibility and its accompanying rhetoric that corrupted late medieval literature in many ways.

There is so much good prose in Europe between the time of Alfred and the time of Elizabeth that one may easily forget the enormous difficulties that stood in the way of it. Long after Alfred there still remained, as a disturbing force, the natural antipathy of the natural man to listen to any continuous story except in verse. The dismal multitude of versified encyclopedias, the rhyming text-books of science, history, and morality, are there to witness of the reluctance with which prose was accepted to do the ordinary prose drudgery. The half-poetical prose of Ælfric's Lives of Saints is to be explained as a concession to the sort of popular taste which, later, gave a hearing to prodigies like the Cursor Mundi, or, to take the last of the rhyming encyclopedias, written by a man who ought to have known better, the Monarchy of Sir David Lyndesay. The audience expected something finer than spoken language, and the taste that accepted the alliterative homilies may be compared with that which preserves the gaudy poetical patches in the Celtic traditional fairy stories, or that which requires from Welsh preachers that half of each sermon should be sung.

Besides the popular disrelish for plain prose, there were other

distracting and degrading influences.

The Latin models were

not always as good as Boetius or Bede. Even Orosius, guiltless as he is of any brilliant extravagance, has his tirades of complaint, helping to spread the sentimental contagion; and even Boetius, by providing pieces of verse for King Alfred to turn into prose, encouraged an over-poetical manner of phrasing. The Latin Bible also, by its prose versions of poetical books, its parallelism of construction, its solemn rhythms, its profusion of metaphor, did much, unfortunately, to embolden the rhetoricians of the Church. The secular Latin literature, though it showed marvellous powers of recovering its decorum, yet was always prone to fall back into the wantonness that attacked it after the close of the Augustan age, when the poetical treasury was profaned and ransacked by magnificent prodigals like Apuleius. Even the later Greek Euphuism of the Greek romances found its way to England, through the Latin romance of Apollonius of Tyre, and ensnared an Anglo-Saxon man of letters, just as Heliodorus attracted the novelists of France, England, and Spain five hundred years later. The wonder is that any simplicity remained at all.

It is a long way from the tenth or thirteenth century to the sixteenth, yet in the age of Elizabeth the general conditions determining the growth of prose were not greatly different from those that obtained at the beginning. Latin literature was still the model, and still, in some cases, the too-absorbing model, of prose. Still there remained the old temptation to excess of ornament, to poetical gaudiness; and though the Elizabethan rhetoric is different from Ælfric's, there is more than a chance likeness between the Anglo-Saxon Apollonius and the sugared descriptions of the Euphuists. And it was still possible for a strong-minded original man like Latimer to discard the conventions of bookish tradition and write the spoken language.

A great deal of prose was written between the Ancren Riwle and the Repressour, between the Repressour and the Ecclesiastical Polity, but the general conditions do not greatly alter. There was always Latin literature at the back of everything, with Boetius coming clear through the Middle Ages, to be translated by Queen Elizabeth in her turn, after Chaucer and King Alfred. There was always French literature to control and give direction to the English.

This volume of selections, beginning in the fourteenth century with Wycliffe, Chaucer, and the book called Mandeville, does not

begin with any early improvisings of a style. The style of these writers is fully formed-a common pattern of style, common over all the countries of Europe. The reason for beginning here and not earlier is a reason not of style, but of vocabulary. The fourteenth century is not in prose what it is in poetry. There is no great revolution, like that which through the agency of Chaucer brought English poetry out of its corners and bye-ways, and made it fit to be presented at the King's court. English prose, which had been decent and respectable hundreds of years before Chaucer, continued to be respectable after him. Prose was not affected in Chaucer's time by the revival of classical taste in Italy. The lessons of artistic construction which Chaucer learned from the poems of Boccaccio were not paralleled by any imitations in his prose of the classical elegances of the Decameron. The styles of the earliest authors in this book are to be taken as specimens of that general level of composition which was the property of medieval Christendom, and one of the outward signs of the uniformity of its culture.

In the fourteenth century one need not be surprised to find that a good deal of the prose of all the countries of Europe is a little monotonous and jaded. For the general character of progress had been a levelling down of national distinctions, and a distribution over the whole field of the same commonplaces, so that one finds the same books current everywhere, the same stories the popular learning in the vernacular tongues became almost as clear of any national or local character as the philosophy of the schools. Naturally there was some loss of vigour in the process, and the later medieval writers are exhausting sometimes with their want of distinctive peculiarities, their contented rehearsals of old matter in a hackneyed phraseology. Prose literature taught and preached so much that it lost all spring and freshness; it suffered from an absorbing interest in the weaker brethren, and became too condescendingly simple. The childlike simplicity of medieval prose is sometimes a little hypocritical and fawning. Prose had been too long accustomed to talk down to its audiences.

In the fifteenth tion of old forms. fresh and new

century there is something more than repeti

There are two argumentative books which are Bishop Pecock's Repressour and Sir John Fortescue on the Governance of England. It is a relief to come to these books which require thinking, after all the homilies and

moral treatises which require merely to be listened to. The great prose achievement of the fifteenth century, and indeed of the whole time before the Advancement of Learning, is a book in many ways less original than those of Pecock and Fortescue. | But Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur, antique though its matter be, is singular in its qualities of style; and if the books of the Bishop and the Judge are remarkable for the modern good sense of their arguments, the Morte D'Arthur has its own place apart from them in a region of high imaginative prose.

Many things about the Morte D'Arthur are perplexing and even irritating. It is a free version of some of the finest stories ever made, and is based on versions of the multiform Arthurian romance, which in some respects are beyond comparison the best. Yet Malory has rejected some of the best things in the "French book" which he followed. There is nothing in Malory corresponding to the truth and the dramatic sincerity of the first interview between Lancelot and the Queen-the passage which Dante could not forget. Malory never rises, as his original here does, out of romance into drama. His refusal to finish the story of Tristram is as hard to understand as to forgive, and as hard to forgive as the Last Tournament. But when all is said that the Devil's advocate can say, it all goes for nothing compared with what remains in Malory untouched and unblemished by any hint of dispraise.

Malory accomplished one of the hardest things in literature. He had to rewrite in English some of the finest of medieval French prose, full of romance, and of the strangest harmonies between the spirit of romance and the spirit of confessors, saints, and pilgrims. What could be done in those days by adapters and abridgers one knows well enough.

Caxton himself tried his hand on some others of the Nine Worthies; they did not fare as Arthur did. To know what Malory really is, it is enough to turn to Caxton's Lyf of Charles the Grete or Recuyell of the Histories of Troy. Malory kept in English all the beauty of the Queste del St. Graal, that strange confusion of Celtic myth with Christian dreams, the most representative among all the books of the thirteenth century. The story suffers no wrong in the English version; there as well as in the French may be heard the melancholy voices of the adventurers who follow the radiance of Heaven across the land of Morgan le Fay. The time in which Malory wrote was not favourable to pure imaginative literature-poetry was all

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but extinguished—yet Malory was able to revive, by some wonderful gift, the aspirations and the visionary ardour of the youth of Christendom-little in agreement, one might fancy, with the positive and selfish world described in the Paston letters. He did more than this also, as may be seen by a comparison of the French book, or books, with his own writing. The style of his original has the graces of early art; the pathos, the simplicity of the early French prose at its best, and always that haunting elegiac tone or undertone which never fails in romance homily to bring its sad suggestions of the vanity and transience of all things, of the passing away of pomp and splendour, of the falls of princes. In Malory, while this tone is kept, there is a more decided and more artistic command of rhythm than in the Lancelot or the Tristan. They are even throughout, one page very much like another in general character: Malory has splendid passages to which he rises, and from which he falls back into the even tenour of his discourse. In the less distinguished parts of his book, besides, there cannot fail to be noted a more careful choice of words and testing of sounds than in the uncalculating spontaneous eloquence of his original.

Malory has been compared to Herodotus, and in this the resemblance may be made out; while, in both authors, the groundwork of their style is the natural simple story-teller's loose fabric of easy-going clauses, in both there is a further process of rhetoric embroidering the plain stuff. Neither Herodotus nor Malory can be taken for the earliest sort of prose artist. Both of them are already some way from the beginning of their art, and though in both of them the primitive rhetoric may be found by analysis, they are not novices. Though they have preserved many of the beauties of the uncritical childhood of literature, they are both of them sophisticated; it is their craft, or their good genius, that makes one overlook the critical and testing processes, the conscious rhetoric, without which they could not have written as they did. Malory's prose, and not Chaucer's, is the prose analogue of Chaucer's poetry; summing up as it does some of the great attainments of the earlier Middle Ages, and presenting them in colours more brilliant, with a more conscious style, than they had possessed in their first rendering. The superiority of Chaucer's Troilus over the early version of the Norman trouvère is derived through Boccaccio from a school that had begun to be critical and reflective. Malory, in a similar way, rewrites