of Tristram which he relates incidentally only, and not for its own sake, in “The Last Tournament.”  Balin’s simple faith in the ideal chivalry of Arthur’s court is rudely dispelled when he hears from Vivien, and sees for himself, that the two chief objects of his reverence, Lancelot and the queen, are guilty lovers and false to their lord; and in his bitter disappointment, he casts his life away in the first adventure that offers.  Moreover, in consonance with his main design, Tennyson seeks, so far as may be, to discard whatever in Malory is merely accidental or irrational; whatever is stuff of romance rather than of epic or drama—­whose theatre is the human will.  To such elements of the wonderful as he is obliged to retain he gives, where possible, an allegorical or spiritual significance.  There are very strange things in the story of Balin, such as the invisible knight Garlon, a “darkling manslayer”; and the chamber in the castle of King Pellam, where the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in state, and where there are a portion of the blood of Christ and the spear with which his heart was pierced, with which spear Sir Balin smites King Pellam, whereupon the castle falls and the two adversaries lie among its ruins three days in a deathlike trance.  All this wild magic—­which Tennyson touches lightly—­Swinburne gives at full length; following Malory closely through his digressions and the roving adventures—­most of which Tennyson suppresses entirely—­by which he conducts his hero his end.  This is the true romantic method.

As Rossetti for the Italian and Morris for the Scandinavian, Swinburne stands for the spirit of French romanticism.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century France, the inventor of “Gothic” architecture and chivalry romance, whose literature was the most influential of mediaeval Europe, still represented everything that is most anti-mediaeval and anti-romantic.  Gerard de Nerval thought that the native genius of France had been buried under two ages of imported classicism; and that Perrault, who wrote the fairy tales, was the only really original mind in the French literature of the eighteenth century.  M. Brunetiere, on the contrary, holds that the true expression of the national genius is to be found in the writers of Louis XIV.’s time—­that France is instinctively and naturally classical.  However this may be, in the history of the modern return to the past, French romanticism was the latest to awake.  Somewhat of the chronicles, fabliaux, and romances of old France had dribbled into England in translations;[63] but Swinburne was perhaps the first thoroughpaced disciple of the French romantic school.  Victor Hugo is the god of his idolatry, and he has chanted his praise in prose and verse, in “ode and elegy and sonnet.” [64] Gautier and Baudelaire have also shared his devotion.[65] The French songs in “Rosamond” and “Chastelard” are full of romantic spirit.  “Laus Veneris” follows a version of the tale given in Maistre Antoine