Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/44

Rh British Georgics (1804), The Birds of Scotland (1806), and Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1810). His principal work is The Sabbath a sacred and descriptive poem in blank verse, characterized by a fine vein of tender and devotional feeling, and by the happy delineation of Scottish scenery. He is the Cowper of Scotland, but wants CoAvper s mastery of versification and easy idiomatic vigour of style. The blank verse of Grahame is often hard and constrained, though at times it swells out into periods of striking imagery and prophet-like earnestness. His descrip tion of the solemn stillness and unbroken calm of &quot;the hallowed day &quot; in the rural districts of Scotland, and of the Scottish Sabbath preachings among the hills in times of persecution, when &quot; The scattered few would meet in some deep dell By rocks o er-canopied,&quot; are finished pictures that will never fade from our poetry. In his Georgics he tried the wider field of rural occupations and manners, and produced some pleasing daguerreotypes of nature, for he was a careful as well as loving student, but descended too much into minute and undignified detail. In the notes to his poems he expresses manly and enlight ened views on popular education, the criminal law, and other public questions. He was emphatically a friend of humanity a philanthropist as well as a poet.  GRAHAM'S TOWN, the metropolis of the eastern dis tricts of the Cape Colony, South Africa, is situated in the division of Albany, 80 miles inland from Algoa Bay, 40 miles inland from Port Alfred, and 600 miles from Cape Town. In 1812 the site of the town was first chosen as the headquarters of the British troops engaged in protecting the frontier of the colony from the inroads of the Kaffre tribes, and it was named after Colonel Graham, then com manding the forces. In 1819 an attempt was made by the Kaffres to surprise the place, and a body of 10,000 men attacked it, but were gallantly repulsed by the garrison, which numbered not more than 320 men, infantry and artillery, under Colonel Willshire. From 1820 Graham s Town was the centre of what was termed the &quot; Albany Settlement,&quot; and it soon became the chief emporium of frontier trade. The town is built in a basin of the grassy kills forming the spurs of the Zuurberg mountain range, 1760 feet above sea-level. It is a pleasant place of resi dence, and is regarded as the most English-like town in the colony. The streets are broad, and most of them lined with trees. The principal thoroughfare is the High Street, where stand St George s English Cathedral, built from designs by Sir Gilbert Scott, and Commemoration Chapel, the chief place of worship of the Wesleyans, erected by the British emigrants of 1820. There are no fewer than twelve churches and chapels in Graham s Town Church of England, Roman Catholic, Wesleyan, Presby terian, Baptist, and Independent. It is the seat of the Eastern Districts Court, presided over by a chief judge and two puisne judges. Among the institutions of the town are an excellent public hospital, a lunatic asylum, colleges and grammar schools, a museum and natural history society, a public library, a club, and masonic, templar, and other societies. There is also a botanic garden, in which there is a memorial of Colonel Fordyce of the 74th regiment, who fell in the Kaffre war of 1851. The population of Graham s Town, according to the last census, is 7000. It is the centre of trade for an extensive pastoral and agri cultural country, and has easy communication both with Port Alfred, at the mouth of the Kowie River, and with Port Elizabeth on Algoa Bay.  GRAIL, or (Saint Graal, Seynt Greal, Sangreal, Sank Ryal), the name given to the legendary wonder-working vessel said to have been brought by Joseph of Arimathea to Britain. The correct spelling is &quot; Graal.&quot; In the present article the subject will be considered under the following four heads : (1) the meaning of the Graal conception&thinsp;; (2) the authorship of the conception&thinsp;; (3) the meaning of the word&thinsp;; (4) the spread of the conception from the land of its origin to other countries.

1. The &quot;Saint Graal&quot; was the name given if not originally, yet very soon after the conception was started to the dish, or shallow bowl (in French, escuelle), from which Jesus Christ was said to have eaten the paschal lamb on the evening of the Last Supper with his disciples. In the French prose romance of the Saint Graal, it is said that Joseph of Arimathea, having obtained leave from Pilate to take down the body of Jesus from the cross, proceeded first to the upper room where the supper was held and found there this vessel ; then, as he took down the Lord s dead body, he received into the vessel many drops of blood which issued from the still open wounds in his feet, handy, and side. This last feature, which Tennyson in his beauti ful idyll The Holy Grail has overlooked, is obviously of the essence of the conception. According to Catholic theology, where the body or the blood of Christ is, there, by virtue of the hypostatic union, are His soul and His divinity. That the Graal, such being its contents, should be marvellous divine mysterious, was but logical and natural. The Graal was &quot;the commencement of all bold emprise, the occasion of all prowess and heroic deeds, the investigation of all the sciences,. . . the demonstration of great wonders, the end of all bounty and goodness, the marvel of all other marvels.&quot; Nasciens, taking off the paten which covered the Graal, comprehends innumerable marvels, but is struck blind. By the Graal Joseph s life is sustained in prison during forty-two years without food, while as an oracle it instructs him in heavenly knowledge. Nothing could be more fantastic and extravagant than all this, were the Graal conceived of merely as a relic, however venerable ; but all is altered when it is brought into close relations, according to the design of its inventors, with the mystery of the eucharist.

2. The authorship of the conception involves one of the most difficult of literary questions. Mr Price, in the able and eloquent dissertation prefixed to vol. i. of Warton s History of English Poetry, seems to maintain the view that it can be attributed to no individual, but was the spontane ous outgrowth of a group of widely prevalent superstitions, in all which a magical cup or divining bowl was the central object. Others, as Fauriel, Simrock, and Schulz, find the original home of the legend in Provence. M. Paul in Paris, who has been engag.ed for nearly forty years in the study of Arthurian romance, and whose latest speculations (Romans de la Table Ronde, v. 352) bear the recent date of 1876, is of opinion that the original conception came from some Welsh monk or hermit who lived early in the 8th century ; that its guiding and essential import was an assertion for the British Church of an independent derivation of its Christi anity direct from Palestine, and not through Rome ; that the conception was embodied in a book, called Liber Gradalls or De Gradali ; that this book was kept in abeyance by the British clergy for more than 300 years, from a fear lest it should bring them into collision with the hierarchy and make their orthodoxy suspected ; that it came to be known and read in the second half of the 12th century; that a French poet, Robert de Boron, who probably had not seen the book, but received information about it, was the first to embody the conception in a vernacular literary form by writing his poem of Josephe d Arimathie ; and that, after Boron, Walter Map and others came into the field. Lastly, it is maintained, by English writers. generally, that the conception arose certainly on British ground, but in the 12th century, not in the 8th ; that it was introduced by some master-hand, pro bably that of Walter Map, into every branch of Arthurian 