208 ROMANCE. 
invited all his barons to the celebration of a great festival, 
which he proposed holding annually at Carduel. 
“ As the knights had obtained permission from his majesty 
to bring their ladies along with them, the beautiful Yguerne 
accompanied her husband, the duke of Tintadiel, to one of 
these anniversaries. The king became deeply enamoured of the 
duchess, and revealed his passion to Ulsius, one of his coun¬ 
sellors. Yguerne withstood all the inducements which Ulsius 
held forth to prepossess her in favour of his master; and ulti¬ 
mately disclosed to her husband the attachment and solici¬ 
tations of the king. On hearing this, the duke instantly 
withdrew from court with Yguerne, and without taking leave 
of Uter. The king complained of this want of duty to his 
council, who decided, that the duke should be summoned 
to court, and if refractory, should he treated as a rebel. As 
he refused to obey the citation, the king carried war into the 
estates of his vassal, and besieged him in the strong castle of 
Tintadiel, in which he had shut himself up. Yguerne was 
confined in a fortress at some distance, which was still more 
secure. During the siege, Ulsius informed his master that 
he had been accosted by an old man, who promised to con¬ 
duct the king to Yguerne, and had offered to meet him for 
that purpose on the following morning. Uter proceeded 
with Ulsius to the rendezvous. In an old blind man whom 
they found at the appointed place, they recognized the 
enchanter Merlin, who had assumed that appearance. He 
bestowed on the king the form of the duke of Tintadiel, 
while he endowed himself and Ulsius with the figure of his 
grace’s two squires. Fortified by this triple metamorphosis, 
they proceeded to the residence of Yguerne, who, uncon¬ 
scious of the deceit, received the king as her husband. 
“ The fraud of Merlin was not detected, and the war 
continued to be prosecuted by Uter with the utmost vigour. 
At length the duke was killed in battle, and the king, by 
the advice of Merlin, espoused Yguerne. Soon after the 
marriage she gave birth to Arthur, whom she believed to be 
the son of her former husband, as Uter had never commu¬ 
nicated to her the story of his assumed appearance. 
« After the death of Uter, there was an iterregnum in 
England, and it was not known that Arthur was his son. 
This prince, however, was at length chosen king, in conse¬ 
quence of having unfixed from a miraculous stone, a sword 
which two hundred and one of the most valiant barons in 
the realm had been singly unable to extract. At the begin¬ 
ning of his reign, Arthur was engaged in a civil war; as the 
mode of his election, however judicious, was disapproved 
by some of the barons; and when he had at length over¬ 
come his domestic enemies, he had long wars to sustain 
against the Gauls and Saxons. 
“ In all these contests, the art of Merlin was of great ser¬ 
vice to Arthur, as he changed himself into a dwarf, a harp 
player, or a stag, as the interest of his master required ; or 
at least threw on the by-standers a spell to fascinate their eyes, 
and cause them to see the thing that was not. On one occa¬ 
sion he made an expedition to Rome, entered the king’s 
palace in the shape of an enormous stag, and in this cha¬ 
racter delivered a formal harangue, to the utter amazement 
of one called Julius Caesar—not the Julius whom the knight 
Mars killed in his pavilion, but him whom Gauvaine slew, 
because he defied King Arthur. 
“ At length this renowned magician disappeared entirely 
from England. His voice alone was heard in a forest, where 
he was enclosed in a bush of hawthorn: he had been entrap¬ 
ped in this awkward residence by means of a charm he had 
communicated to his mistress Viviane, who, not believing in 
the spell, had tried it on her lover. The lady was sorry for 
the accident; but there was no extracting her admirer from 
' his thorny coverture. 
“The earliest edition of this romance was printed at 
Paris in 1498. It has been attributed to Robert de Borron, 
to whom many other works of this nature have been assigned; 
’ but it is not known at what time this author existed ; and 
indeed he is believed by many, and particularly by Mr. 
Ritson, to be entirely a fictitious personage." 
Of the metrical romances of the Charlemagne class, the 
most ancient appear to be “ Huon de Bourdeaux,'* and 
“ Fierabras.” The former is famous as having served Wie- 
land with a foundation for his Oberon; the latter for having 
bean the favourite subject of Robert Bruce’s recitations to his 
companions. It might be expected that the prose composi¬ 
tions that refer to Charlemagne would contain more his¬ 
torical truth than those concerning Arthur; since the former 
relate to a well-known monarch and conqueror, the latter to 
a personage of a very doubtful and shadowy existence. But 
the romances concerning both are equally fabulous. Charles 
had, indeed, an officer named Roland, who was slain with 
other nobles in the field of Roncesvalles, fighting, not against 
the Saracens or Spaniards, but against the Gascons. This is 
the only point upon which the real history of Charlemagne 
coincides with that invented for him by romancers. Roland 
was prefect of Bretagne, and his memory was long preserved 
in the war-song which bore his name. A fabulous chro¬ 
nicler, calling himself Turpin, compiled, in or about the 
eleventh century, a romantic history of Charlemagne; but 
it may be doubted whether, in some instances, he has not 
availed himself of the fictions already devised by the early 
romancers, while to those who succeeded them, his annals 
afforded matter for new figments. The personal character of 
Charlemagne has suffered considerably in the hands of the 
romantic authors, although they exaggerated his power and 
his victories. He is represented as fond of flattery, irritable 
in his temper, ungrateful for the services rendered him by his 
most worthy Paladins, and a perpetual dupe to the treacher¬ 
ous artifices of Count Gan, or Ganelon, of Mayence; a 
renegade to whom the romancers impute the defeat at Ron¬ 
cesvalles, and all the other misfortunes of the reign of Charles. 
This unfavourable view of the Prince, although it may bear 
some features of royalty, neither resembles the real character 
of the conqueror of the Saxons and Lombards, nor can be 
easily reconciled with the idea, that he was introduced to 
flatter the personal vanity of the princes of the Valois race, 
by a portrait of their great predecessor. 
The circumstance, that Roland was a lieutenant of Brit¬ 
tany, and the certainty that Marie borrowed from that coun¬ 
try the incidents out of which she composed her lays, seems 
to fortify the theory, that the French minstrels obtained from 
that country much of their most valuable materials; and 
that, after all that has been said and supposed, the history 
of Arthur probably reached them through the same channel. 
Romance never flourished long nor grew vigorously in 
England. The Saxons had no doubt bardic songs of a 
similar caste to the Scandinavian poems, and Mr. Turner 
has preserved a relic in one entitled Caidmon. In this the 
hero attacks, conquers, and finally slays an evil being named 
Grenfel, who seems to bear some analogy to a gothic 
demon. Then follow the Romances written for the court of 
England, where French was longspoken. When the two lan¬ 
guages began to assimilate together, and to form the mixed dia¬ 
lect termed the Anglo-Norman, we have good authority for 
saying that it was easily applied to the purpose of romantic 
fiction, and recited in the presence of the nobility. Of this 
we have proof in the Sir Tristram of Thomas Erceldoune, 
edited by Sir W. Scott; according to whose hypothesis the 
said Thomas, surnamed the Rhymer, composed his work near 
the borders of the old kingdom of Strath-Clyde (which had 
long preserved the legends of the Britons driven north by 
their invaders), early in the 13th century. In this poem, 
though much of the Norman romance language remains, the 
poem maybe denominated Saxon, not only for the language, 
but for the studied alliteration, and complicated measures of 
the verse. Yet it was so far from being popularly under¬ 
stood, that Robert de la Brunne complains that this work 
is written in such quainte Inglis, “ that many wate (wot) 
not what it is.” 
Besides Sir Tristram, there remain two other examples 
of “ gestes written in quaint Inglis,” composed accord¬ 
ing to fixed and complicated rules of verse, and with 
much attention to the language, though the effect produced 
is far from pleasing. They are both of Scottish origin, which 
may be explained, by recollecting that in the Saxon pro¬ 
vinces 
