occurrences in English of a striking phrase), and the prisoner turns out to be Lunet.  She has been accused of treason by the usual steward (it is very hard for a steward of romance to be good) and two brothers—­of treason to her lady, and is to be burnt, unless she can find a knight who will fight the three.  Ywain agrees to defend her:  but before he can carry out his promise he has, on the same morning, to meet a terrible giant who is molesting his hosts at a castle where he is guested.  Both adventures, however, are achieved on the same day, with very notable aid from the lion:  and Ywain undertakes a fresh one, being recruited by the necessary damsel-messenger, against two half-fiend brother knights.  They stipulate that the lion is to be forcibly prevented from interfering, and he is locked up in a room; but, hearing the noise of battle, he scratches up the earth under the door, frees himself, and once more succours his master at the nick of time.  Even this does not expiate Ywain’s fault:  and yet another task falls to him—­the championship of the rights of the younger of a pair of sisters, the elder of whom has secured no less a representative than Gawain himself.  The pair, unknowing and unknown, fight all day long before Arthur’s court with no advantage on either side:  and when the light fails an interchange of courtesies leads to recognition and the settlement of the dispute.  Now the tale is nearly full.  Ywain rides yet again to the magic fountain and performs the rite; there is no one to meet him; the castle rocks and the inmates quake.  But the crafty Lunet persuades her mistress to swear that if the Knight of the Lion, who has fallen at variance with his lady, will come to the rescue, she will do all she can to reconcile the pair.  Which not ill-prepared “curtain” duly falls:  leaving us comfortably assured that Ywain and his Lady and Lunet and the Lion (one wishes that these two could have made a match of it, and he must surely have been a bewitched knight) lived happily

    “Until that death had driven them down.”

This, it has been said, is a specimen of the pure romance; with little except incident in it, and a touch or two of manners.  It does not, as the others noticed above do, lend itself much to character-drawing.  But it is spiritedly told; though rougher, it is much more vigorous than the French original; and the mere expletives and stock phrases, which are the curse of these romances, do not obtrude themselves too much.  In this respect, and some others, it is the superior of the one coupled above with it, Lybius Disconus, which is closer, except in names, to the Beaumains story.  Still, this also is not a bad specimen of the same class.  The hero of it is a son, not a brother, of Gawain, comes nameless or nicknamed, but as “Beaufils,” not “Beaumains,” to Arthur’s court, and is knighted at once, not made to go through the “kitchen-knave” stage.  Accordingly, the damsel Elene (not Lunet),