Malory’s prose is remarkably simple and direct.  Even in the impressive scene where Sir Bedivere throws the dying King Arthur’s sword into the sea, the language tells the story simply and shows no straining after effect:—­

“And then he threw the sword as far into the water as he might, and there came an arm and an hand above the water, and met it, and caught it, and so shook it thrice and brandished, and then vanished away the hand with the sword in the water...  ’Now put me into the barge,’ said the king; and so he did softly.  And there received him three queens with great mourning, and so they set him down, and in one of their laps King Arthur laid his head, and then that queen said, ‘Ah, dear brother, why have ye tarried so long from me?’”

After the dusky barge has borne Arthur away from mortal sight, Malory writes:  “Here in this world he changed his life.”  A century before, Chaucer had with equal simplicity voiced the Saxon faith:—­

  “His spirit chaunged hous."[1]

Sometimes this prose narrative, in its condensation and expression of feeling, shows something of the poetic spirit.  When the damsel on the white palfrey sees that her knightly lover has been killed, she cries:—­

“O Balin! two bodies hast thou slain and one heart, and two hearts in one body, and two souls thou hast lost.’  And therewith she took the sword from her love that lay dead, and as she took it, she fell to the ground in a swoon.”

[Illustration:  MALORY’S MORTE D’ARTHUR. From De Worde’s Ed., 1529.]

Malory’s work, rather than Layamon’s Brut, has been the storehouse to which later poets have turned.  Many nineteenth-century poets are indebted to Malory.  Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Matthew Arnold’s Death of Tristram, Swinburne’s Tristram of Lyonesse, and William Morris’s Defense of Guinevere were inspired by the Morte d’Arthur.  Few English prose works have had more influence on the poetry of the Victorian age.

Scottish Poetry.—­The best poetry of the fifteenth century was written in the Northern dialect, which was spoken north of the river Humber.  This language was just as much English as the Midland tongue in which Chaucer wrote.  Not until the sixteenth century was this dialect called Scotch.

James I. of Scotland (1406-1437) spent nineteen years of his youth as a prisoner in England.  During his captivity in Windsor Castle, he fell in love with a maiden, seen at her orisons in the garden, and wrote a poem, called the King’s Quair, to tell the story of his love.  Although the King’s Quair is suggestive of The Knightes Tale, and indeed owes much to Chaucer, it is a poetic record of genuine and successful love.  These four lines from the spring song show real feeling for nature:—­

  “Worshippe, ye that lovers be, this May,
    For of your bliss the kalends are begun,
  And sing with us, ’Away, Winter, away,
    Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!’”