Lancelot was introduced by the French-writing English romancers of the
Lionheart's time (so far as I know), into the Arthur tales. The fact of
Mordred's being Arthur's son, begotten by him on his sister, King Lot's
wife, is also omitted; so that the story is just that of a British king
founding the Round Table, conquering Scotland, Ireland, Gothland, and
divers parts of France, killing a giant from Spain, beating Lucius the
Emperor of Rome, and returning home to lose his own life, after the
battle in which the traitor whom he had trusted, and who has seized his
queen and his land, was slain.

"He that will more look,
Read on the French book,"

says our verse-writer: and to that the modern reader must still be
referred, or to the translations of parts of it, which we hope to print
or reprint, and that most pleasantly jumbled abstract of its parts by
Sir Thomas Maleor, Knight, which has long been the delight of many a
reader,--though despised by the stern old Ascham, whose Scholemaster was
to turn it out of the land.--There the glory of the Holy Grail will be
revealed to him; there the Knight of God made known; there the only true
lovers in the world will tell their loves and kiss their kisses before
him; and the Fates which of old enforced the penalty of sin will show
that their arm is not shortened, and that though the brave and guilty
king fights well and gathers all the glory of the world around him, yet
still the sword is over his head, and, for the evil that he has done,
his life and vain imaginings must pass away in dust and confusion.

Of the language of the Poem there is little to say: its dialect is
Southern, as shown by the verbal plural _th_, the _vyve_ for five, _zyx_
for six, _ych_ for I, _har_ (their), _ham_ (them), for _her_, _hem_;