Excerpt from English Literature Medieval With the Morte d'arthur. But it may occur to him to ask about the French book from which Malory got his adventures of the Knights of King Arthur; he may want to know how the legend of the Grail came to be mixed up with the romances of: the Round Table; and so he will be drawn on, trying to find out as much as possible and plunging deeper and deeper into the Middle Ages. The same kind of thing happens to the reader of Dante; Dante is found all through his poem acknowledging obligations to earlier Writers; he is not alone or independent in his thought and his poetry; and so it becomes an interest ing thing to go further back and to know some thing about the older poets and moralists, and the earlier medieval world in general, before it was all summed up and recorded in the imagination of the Divine Comedy. Ex amples of this way of reading may be found in the works of Ruskin and in Matthew Arnold: Matthew Arnold, rather late in his life (in the introductory essay to Mr. T. H. Ward's English Poets), shows that he has been reading some old French authors. He does not begin with old French when he is young. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.