readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and
his three daughters; Cymbeline; Gorboduc, the subject of the earliest
regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562;
Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen and his daughter Sabrina, who gave her
name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in
Milton's _Comus_ and became the heroine of the tragedy of _Locrine_,
once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther
Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace, the author
of the _Roman de Rou_, turned Geoffrey's work into a French poem
entitled _Brut d'Angleterre_, "brut" being a Welsh word meaning
chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished by Layamon, a
priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon's _Brut_
is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but
written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. The style is
rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. Wace had amplified
Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions,
derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border. In
particular, the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like
fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the
unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever, and the treachery of his
nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great battle between Arthur
and Modred; of the wounding of the king--"fifteen fiendly wounds he had,
one might in the least three gloves thrust"--; and of the little boat
with "two women therein, wonderly dight," which came to bear him away to
Avalun and the Queen Argante, "sheenest of all elves," whence he shall
come again, according to Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all
this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his _Passing of
Arthur._

This new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman