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the various characters introduced into the foregoing tale, none is more strictly and successfully maintained than that of Arthur. In him we see the dignified and noble-hearted sovereign, the stately warrior, and the accomplished knight, courteous of demeanour and dauntless in arms. And whilst the lofty bearing of the monarch himself excites our admiration, we are scarcely less struck with the devoted attachment evinced towards him by his knights, who are ever solicitous that he should be the last to encounter danger, and ever ready themselves to dare the most perilous adventures to uphold the dignity of his crown. But it is not merely the consistency observed in these several characters that arrests our attention in this and similar compositions professing to record the achievements of Arthur and his knights; we are also forcibly struck with the powerful influence which those legends exercised over society, and the ascendancy which their principal hero so decidedly maintained. Nor can we withhold our wonder at the singular destiny which has awaited this extraordinary being. Whilst by some his very existence has been called in question, his name has become celebrated throughout the civilised world; and his exploits, whether fabulous or real, have afforded the most ample and interesting materials to the poet, the antiquary, and the historian. To this very day the memory of the mighty warrior, "whose sword extended from Scandinavia to Spain," exercises a power over our imagination which we are as unable as we are unwilling to dispel. His image adorned our earliest visions of Chivalry and Romance, and though the weightier cares of maturer age must supervene, they serve but to deepen, not to efface the impression; and while in the eddying stream of life we pause to look back upon the days when Caerlleon and its Round Table formed to us an ideal