22 APRIL 1865, Page 22

Le Morte Arthur. Edited from the Harleian MS. 2,252 in

the Brtiish

Museum. By F. J. Furnivall, M.A. (Macmillan and Co.)—,This menu- , script is unquestionably well edited, and to students of philology and de- votees of the cycle of legends which make up the story of Arthur and his knights it will prove attractive. We sincerely hope, too, that "it may attract a sufficient number of readers to pay the cost of printing it," but we scarcely expect that it will attract more. The public admires Mr. Tenn3rson's klylls of the King. And it has become the fashion to write in terms of admiration about Sir Thomas Malory's compilation, but in private life the enthusiastic critic frequently confesses that for his part he could not get through it. Bat people can scarcely be expected, even with the aid of Mr. Furnivall's capital glossary, to pound through 3,969 line's like the following :—

" Lordingis, thet ar leff And dare, lystenyth, and I shalle you toile, By olde dives what minters were Amonge oure eldris that by-f elle."

Their literary merit is not sufficient to recompense one for the trouble. In fact the legends of Arthur seem to be pretty well worked out, anti we cannot help wishing that men like Mr- Furnivall would go a little further afield. Isaac Disraeli in his Amenities of Literature speaks with admiration of the manuscript copy of The Romance of Alexander the Great in the Bodleian, and our older writers, Sir John Mande- ville, for instance, are full of allusions to it. Why does not some one do for this—which has never been printed—what Sir Thomas Malory did for the romance of King Arthur ? Is there even a printed edition of the legends of Charlemagne and his Peers? Mr. Furnivall's work is well done, but it might, we t 'hank, have been better bestowed. There is an interesting comparison of the legend of Arthur as it appears in Sir T. Malory's work and in Geoffrey of Monmouth, from the pen of the late Herbert Coleridge, prefixed to this poem.