GUA1LE 



(.1; AM .MA It 



345 



to him, and who wished to make tlie 

 Mory a \ehidc for moral and religious teaching. 

 Koliert le IJonon alone \\oiked out the conception 

 in a fairly (insistent way ; in the other theological 

 romance-writers e.g. the authors of tin- Oueste, 

 I" tin- Grand St (inial, and Gerbert the Graal in 

 at least is niiirh heathen us Christian. In these 

 romances tin- tendency is rather moral than dog- 

 matic: they are in the main glorifications of 

 a-cetici-iu, and in especial of physical chastin. 

 This latter idea, almost foreign to the earlier 

 works of the cycle, is most fully worked out in 

 the Queste, a new hero, Galahad, being especially 

 rival nl to typify the virtue of virginity. The 

 (.iiii-ste was one of the romances used oy Malory in 

 his Morte Darthur; hence the Galahad story has 

 had a great and abiding influence upon English 

 literatim- through Tennyson and otliers. Wolfram 

 von EftchenbacK, like Robert de Borron and the 

 Kuthor of the Queste, received the story from 

 Chrest ien, and, like them, was dissatisfied with 

 the latter's treatment of it. He, however, has 

 worked out a religious and ethical ideal of a far 

 Holder and truer kind than that found in the 

 < ,>ueste. His conception is based, not upon chastity, 

 luit upon charity, and the Grail becomes with hirn 

 a syml>ol, not of ascetic longing and its unearthly 

 reward, but of human striving and human love in 

 their noblest manifestation. 



Evidence in support of the foregoing contentions, 

 together with full summaries of the romances them- 

 selves, and bibliography and analysis of the inves- 

 tigations of previous students, will be found in the 

 writer's Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, 

 with, especial Reference to the Hypothesis of its 

 Celtic Origin (1888). Compare also M. Gaston 

 Paris's Histoire Litteraire de la France, vol. xxx. 

 (1888); and for alleged Buddhist influence upon 

 the Grail legend, the writer's article in the Archceo- 

 logical Review, June 1889. See also ROMANCES, 

 MAP (WALTER), TENNYSON. 



Graile. See GRADUAL. 



Grain. For grain imports and exports, see 

 FOOD, Vol. IV. p. 720; also the articles WHEAT, &c. 



Grain, as a unit of weight, is supposed to be \ 

 the average weight of a seed or well-ripened ear of 

 wheat ; m such grains 7000 are held to be a pound 

 avoirdupois. The grain is also the 20th part of a 

 scruple in apothecaries' weight, and the 24th part 

 of a pennyweight troy. See also GRAMME. 



Grain Coast. See GUINEA. 



Graining* a kind of dace found in the Mersey 

 and some few English rivers, and in Swiss lakes, 

 distinguished by Pennant and Yarrell as a sepa- 

 rate species (Leiiciscus lancastriensis), but regarded 

 by Giinther as only a local variety of the dace (L. 

 vulqaris). See DACE. 



Grains of Paradise, or MALEGUETTA 

 PXPPKB, an aromatic and extremely hot and 

 pungent seed imported from Guinea. It is the 

 produce of Amamntm (Irana Pnm<iis-i, a plant 

 of the order Zingilieraceie. By the natives these 

 seeds are used as a spice or condiment ; in Europe 

 chiefly in veterinary practice, and fraudulently to 

 increase the pungency of fermented and spirituous 

 liquors. By 56 Geo. III. chap. 58, brewers and 

 dealers in beer in England were prohibited, under 

 a heavy penalty, from even having grains of para- 

 dise in their possession. This drug is much used 

 to give apparent strength to bad gin. The name 

 Maleguetta Pepper, or Guinea Pepper (q.v.), is 

 also given to other pungent seeds from the west of 

 Africa. 



Grakle, the common name of many birds of 

 the Starling family (Sturnidie), all tropical or 

 subtropical. They have very much the habits of 



stai lings, which some of them even excel in their 

 imitative powers, and particularly in the imitation 

 of human ,-peech. This is remarkably the MHO 

 with the Mum Birds or Hills My nan (Cfracuta 

 jiii-niKi), common in India, which are easily tamed 

 and taught. Many graklcs feed on seeds and 

 IMIH-. \\hile others are useful as destroyers of 

 insects. See STAI:UN<;. In the United States 

 the name Grakle or Grackle is applied to several 

 species of the genera Scolecophagus and Quiscalun, 

 omnivorous birds, also called 'blackbirds' and 

 4 boat-tails. ' 



<>rall;r, or GRALLATORES (Lat., 'stilt- 

 walkers'), an old order of wading and running 

 birds, including rails (Rallida-), snipes and curlews 

 ( Scolopacidae ), plovers ( Charadrnda- ), bustards 

 (Otidida-), cranes (Gruida-), herons and bitterns 

 (Ardeidae), storks ( Ciconiidfi- ), and numerous other 

 families. These are grouped by modern ornithol- 

 ogists in a number of smaller orders, while the old 

 order Grallae is abandoned as too Iioj>ele88ly large. 

 They are mostly long-legged marsh or coast birds, 

 generally with long legs and bills. Their distribu- 

 tion is very wide, the four largest families ( rails, 

 snipes, plovers, and herons) being quite cosmo- 

 politan. 



Gram. See CHICK PEA. 



Gramineae. See GRASSES. 



Grammar deals with, the usage of some one 

 form of speech. It may be described as a section 

 of the larger science of language (see article PHIL- 

 OLOGY), which treats of the origin, development, 

 and general character of the principal families of 

 language and of human speech as a whole. In 

 common use, however, grammar means not a branch 

 of science, but a treatise on some one well-defined 

 form of speech as used in the present day, as by 

 French grammar we mean a boolc on the usage of 

 Paris ; by English grammar we mean an account 

 of the language spoken and written by educated 

 men throughout Great Britain, which language, 

 however, is only one dialect of English speech, the 

 East Midland. That dialect by favouring condi- 

 tions has superseded the other dialects, southern and 

 northern, which were once spoken and written, and 

 are still in a lessening degree spoken, in different 

 parts of the island. 



Grammar has two parts. The first descril>e8 

 the forms of a language, the single words which 

 occur in it, its nouns, verbs, &c. ; and its modifi- 

 cations of such forms, the cases of its nouns, the 

 persons and tenses of its verbs, & r c., used to express 

 modifications of the same idea, as 'child,' 'child's,' 

 'children,' 'spring,' 'sprang,' 'sprung,' in English. 

 This is called the morphology of a language, or 

 (more loosely) its etymology. The second part 

 deals with the use of these /onus in combination : 

 their syntax i.e. their arrangement in order of 

 speech. The general principles of this will vary 

 little in the different languages of the same family ; 

 but each language has its idioms, as we call them, 

 its own special refinements of usage, and it is in 

 the clear discrimination of these that the practical 

 value of a grammar lies. 



Grammar in this function may be called special. 

 It does not enter into the history of the forms which 

 it describes ; it is sutlicient if it sets forth what they 

 are at a particular time, without showing how they 

 became such. But it is possible to a considerable 

 extent to trace the history of these forms e.g. we 

 can see how literary English has developed out of 

 the English of Chaucer, and that from the English 

 of an earlier day, how the forms have changed 

 mostly in the direction of uniformity, and how (to 

 a lesser degree) their syntax has altered. To trace 

 this belongs to historical grammar, and some of the 

 results of this science are now commonly given in 



