In the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg, the hero comes all unknowing and unknown to the court of his uncle, King Mark, and charms the company there assembled by the melody of the music he makes on a harp.

Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes
Of diverse aventures maden layes,
Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge;
Which layes with hir instruments they songe,
Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce;
And oon of hem have I in remembraunee,
Which I shal seyn with good wil as I can.
Chaucer: Prologue to the Frankeleyn's Tale.

Dr. Johnson said of Pope's Imitations of the Satires and Epistles of Horace that they “cannot give pleasure to common readers; the man of learning may be sometimes surprised and delighted by an unexpected parallel; but the comparison requires knowledge of the original, which will likewise often detect strained applications. Between Roman images and English manners there will be an irreconcileable dissimilitude, and the works will be generally uncouth and party-coloured; neither original nor translated, neither ancient nor modern.” It is not necessary to refute, what no one now maintains, that these Imitations cannot give pleasure to common readers, that they appeal only to men of learning by their unexpected parallels to the original, or that they are generally uncouth. It remains, then, to discover how far the rest of this criticism holds good as well as to investigate Pope's methods in rendering his original.

At Hageby, two Swedish miles from Upsala, there is preserved a runic stone originally standing at Møjebro in Hageby Socken and Hagunda Hærad. It is of the hardest red quartz and feldspar, 8 1/2 Swedish feet high and 5 Swedish feet at broadest. Cut into one side is the figure of a man mounted on a horse, with rein and saddle cloth. He has on a sort of corselet and is brandishing a sword in his right hand—not the left, as sometimes stated. The face is turned slightly away from the observer, who sees the left side and the back of the horseman. On the inside of the arm, just above the elbow, is a peculiar round protuberance. Above the figure is the inscription, running from edge to edge of the stone. All the letters but the lowest one at the right are distinct, and all are normal with the exception of the dotted cross. Stephens gives (Runic Monuments, i, p. 179, 180, and Handbook, p. 11, 12) both the old inferior cut, drawn about the middle of the 17th century and publisht in Göransson's Bautil in 1750, and the superior reproduction, drawn by Prof. Carl Säve, of Upsala, in 1862. My cut is after the latter, with the correction of the first letter, as explained below.

To the mass of romances current during the Middle English period of our literature, the contribution of purely Germanic tradition was a relatively meagre one. The spirit which had produced the earlier epic was at this time extinct. A solitary offshoot of the earlier epic seems to have survived in the story of the dragon-killing Wade with his famous boat, Guingelot. But even this story is lost to us save in occasional references, and from these we must infer that all definite idea of its origin was lost, since it is associated, now with Weyland, now with Horn and Havelok, now with Launcelot. To these earlier tales, such as those of Beowulf and possibly of Wade, having a popular, epic origin, succeeded in the Middle English period a mass of tales and romances of the most diverse origin imaginable. Even in the popular romances of Guy of Warwick and Bevis of Hampton, which are supposed to contain a kernel of genuine English tradition, the original story is almost lost amid the mass of mythical, imaginary, or purely conventional matter later added. The historical events in the lives of Waldef and Hereward are embellished with much of the conventional romantic matter, and the late romance of Richard Coeur de Lion consists very largely of the purely conventional.

This paper was begun with the expectation of dealing somewhat fully with one large division of Pendennis, but as the investigation proceeded, ample material was found for a report of usual length in the one topic of characterization; hence, other topics have been omitted. The word ‘beginning’ is used technically to include the early part of the book up to the point where the chief opposing elements of the entire action face each other. If the essence of a story consists in a conflict of forces, the beginning cannot logically end with the introduction of one set of these forces, nor is it extended into the active struggle between them, for this makes the middle of the action. The point of juxtaposition of the two sets, therefore, if not the point of opposition, must form the end of the beginning.