fifteen or sixteen years after Malory wrote his epilogue. It is
clear that the author was then dead, or the printer would not
have acted as a clumsy editor to the book, and recent discoveries
(if bibliography may, for the moment, enlarge its bounds to
mention such matters) have revealed with tolerable certainty when
Malory died and who he was. In letters to The Athenaeum in July
1896 Mr. T. Williams pointed out that the name of a Sir Thomas
Malorie occurred among those of a number of other Lancastrians
excluded from a general pardon granted by Edward IV. in 1468,
and that a William Mallerye was mentioned in the same year as
taking part in a Lancastrian rising. In September 1897, again,
in another letter to the same paper, Mr. A. T. Martin reported
the finding of the will of a Thomas Malory of Papworth, a hundred
partly in Cambridgeshire, partly in Hunts. This will was made on
September 16, 1469, and as it was proved the 27th of the next
month the testator must have been in immediate expectation of
death. It contains the most careful provision for the education
and starting in life of a family of three daughters and seven
sons, of whom the youngest seems to have been still an infant.
We cannot say with certainty that this Thomas Malory, whose last
thoughts were so busy for his children, was our author, or that
the Lancastrian knight discovered by Mr. Williams was identical
with either or both, but such evidence as the Morte Darthur
offers favours such a belief. There is not only the epilogue
with its petition, ``pray for me while I am alive that God send
me good deliverance and when I am dead pray you all for my
soul,'' but this very request is foreshadowed at the end of chap.
37 of Book ix. in the touching passage, surely inspired by
personal experience, as to the sickness ``that is the greatest
pain a prisoner may have''; and the reflections on English