Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/234

 III. MALORY

IR THOMAS MALORY is unique among English writers. His famous "Morte d'Arthur," which came from the press of William Caxton, the first English printer, in 1485, he completed probably in 1470. Thus he wrote at a time when the printing press was beginning to make the various European languages less changeable than they had been when a gentleman's library might consist of but a single parchment manuscript; he was near enough to our own day to be the first English author whose work can now be read with enjoyment and yet without special study. Save for an occasional word which one must look up in a glossary—like the obsolete wood, meaning frenzied—a page of Malory, despite its archaisms of grammar and expression, is as intelligible as one of the latest magazines or novels. Nevertheless, when he wrote, the world of European civilization was still narrow materially and intellectually. The Atlantic was its bound to the west; the Sahara, to the south; the Far East was an almost mythical Cathay. The Renaissance had scarcely made itself felt beyond Italy; to all but a very few scholars, the old worlds of Greece and Rome and Palestine were known solely through stories from poetry and history so metamorphosed that King David, Julius Caesar, and Alexander the Great wore mediæval armor and held splendid court like Capet and Plantagenet kings. In spirit Malory is as much of the Middle Ages as if he had died two hundred instead of two score years before Columbus set out to solve the mystery of the western seas. It is hard to believe that only half a century after his death Englishmen should be reading Homer at Oxford and Cambridge, and Luther translating the New Testament into German; that a few years more, and the leading countries of Europe should be making plans for colonial empire which have resulted in the world-powers of the present. Thanks to his living in just the years that he did, Malory has left us in his "Morte