Photo: R. Webber, Boscastle ] KING ARTHUR’S CASTLE AND EXECUTION ROCK, TINTAGEL [ Frontispiece THE LOST LAND OF KING ARTHUR BY J. CUMING WALTERS “On the one hand we have the man Arthur, ... on the other is a greater Arthur, a more colossal figure, of which we have, so to speak, but a torso, rescued from the wreck of the Celtic Pantheon.”— Professor Rhys. “There is truth enough to make him famous besides that which is fabulous.”— Bacon. WITH SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON CHAPMAN AND HALL, Ltd. 190

Within a small area in the West Country may be found the principal places mentioned in the written chronicles of King Arthur—places with strange long histories and of natural charm. In these pages an impressionist view is given of the region once called Cameliard and Lyonnesse. We have ventured into by-ways seldom entered, and we trust to have gathered a few details which may not be wholly without interest in their place. Facts are meagre about King Arthur, and romance has so overlaid reality th

“What an enormous camera-obscura magnifier is Tradition! How a thing grows in the human Memory, in the human Imagination, when love, worship, and all that lies in the human Heart, are there to encourage it!”— Carlyle. No pretence can be made that a complete or exhaustive history of King Arthur is given in this and the following chapters. Only parts of his story and parts of the story of his most illustrious knights are woven into this mosaic of fact and fiction. Sometimes only a few threads of t

“I betook me among those lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of knighthood founded by our victorious kings, and from hence had in renown over all Christendom.... Even these books proved to me so many incitements to the love and steadfast observation of virtue.”— Milton. Drayton. No matter how far the chroniclers of old departed from fact in the details of their narratives, they grouped the incidents around a central figure, a magnificent ancient hero; and, more tha

The Birth of Merlin , Act III. sc. iv. The fact that the name Art(h)us does not occur in the Gildas manuscript has led to the inference that the king was unknown to that chronicler; and the assumption that he is alluded to as Ursus (the Bear) tends to confirm the theory of those who would affirm that he is no more than a solar myth. It must be understood that the Arthur of romance, as we now know him, was a character ever increasing in importance and prominence as the history was re-written and

R. S. Hawker. R. S. Hawker. Cornwall, the horn-shaped land, far removed from the great centres of progress and industry, the land of giants, of a separate people who until the last century spoke its own language; [15] the land of holy wells and saints, of hut circles, dolmens, and earthwork forts, memorials of extreme antiquity; the land of many stone crosses indicating the early influence of Christianity; the land of so-called giants’ quoits, chairs, spoons, punch-bowls, and mounds, sometimes t

“Old Caerleon-upon-Usk” is the enchanted capital of the kingdom called Romance. Its domes of fretted gold, its countless pinnacles, its seventy churches, its gorgeous palace, and its giant tower— by the wonder-working art of poets and old-time chroniclers have a reality for us to-day, though they may never have been visible. But the city of the Hero-King is a city seen through a veil. The glittering spires show through the mists of time; in a half-shadow we discern the lofty turrets, and mark th

Lovers of the Arthurian legend might feel a sense of disappointment if they were told that King Arthur never founded a Round Table, and that all tradition on that subject was belied. But the closest students of the ancient story are compelled to come to the conclusion that, even granting King Arthur “made a realm and reign’d,” his Round Table existed only in the imagination of later chroniclers and the weavers of the romances. The evidence in favour of the Round Table is of no substantial charac

Those who press the question, where is many-tower’d Camelot, where is the royal mount rising between the forest and the field, where is the flashing city of the marvellous gate, may be referred by the veracious historian to a village in France, or by the unromantic antiquary to a hamlet in Scotland. Time has razed the real city, wherever it was, and the poet can invest it with charms and environ it with wonders which it never possessed. The simple lover of the legend will be content to find King

Spenser. About a mile from Tintagel, along the hilly road leading to Boscastle, and passing the wonderful little Bossiney cove with its elephant-shaped rock, there is a small rapid stream which winds through the Rocky Valley and falls like a torrent at low tide into the sea. The Rocky Valley, with its three huge boulders, its narrow walk now leading to the side of the stream and now mounting far above it, and ending only where the iron cliffs beetle above the roughest of bays, is one of the most

Wharton , The Grave of King Arthur . Wharton , The Grave of King Arthur . Percy Reliques. Sheer over the bleak Cornish hills, fifteen miles from Launceston, lies a small white-looking town with a precipitous highway along which the principal houses and one or two poor-looking public buildings are ranged. It is a town without a church, and, except on market day, without the signs of stirring life and business; a remote and isolated little place which nevertheless once had its own Parliamentary re

“And so they rowed from the land; and Sir Bedivere beheld all the ladies go with him. Then Sir Bedivere cried, Ah my Lord Arthur, what shall become of me now ye go from me, and leave me here alone among mine enemies? Comfort thyself, said the King. For I will go into the vale of Avilon, to heal me of my grievous wound. And if thou never more hear of me, pray for my soul.”— Malory. Percy Reliques. A quaint old-world look is upon the face of the city of many legends, King Arthur’s “isle of rest.”

BRIGHTON: Its History, Its Follies, and its Fashions By LEWIS MELVILLE Author of “The First Gentleman of Europe,” etc., etc. With Portraits, Caricatures, Views, etc. Demy 8vo, 10s. 6d. net. This is a book dealing with the history of Brighton on its social side, and full of stories of the romances, adventures, quarrels, duels, etc., which have taken place in that city since the time when it became fashionable under the Georges. It will be extremely entertaining. PICCADILLY: Past and Present By AR

[1] Aneurin was born about the year 500, and as “a monarch of bards” was of much repute in Manan Gododin, a part of Cymric Scotland. The Welsh Britons included all the Lowlands in their territory, and, as is well known, the names familiar in Arthurian romance can be traced to Scotland, the West of England, and France alike, as will afterwards be shown in these pages. Aneurin’s nationality, however, is particularly well worth recalling in view of the theory that Arthur was Scotch. [2] A Badon in