Map, of the honour of conceiving it are of no force—­seems to have waited till the fifteenth century—­that is to say the last part of three hundred years—­before Englishmen took it up.  Most popular of all perhaps, on the principle that in novels the flock “likes the savour of fresh grass,” seem to have been the pure romans d’aventures—­quite unconnected or nearly so with each other or with any of the larger cycles.  Those adventures of particular heroes have sometimes a sort of Arthurian link, but they really have no more to do with the main Arthurian story than if Arthur were not.

For the present purpose, however, filiation, origin, and such-like things are of much less importance than the actual stories that get themselves told to satisfy that demand which in due time is to produce the supply of the novel.  Of these the two oldest, as regards the actual forms in which we have them, are capital examples of the more and less original handling of “common-form” stories or motives.  They were not then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now—­the rightful heir kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on the villain.  Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these as vieux jeu, that they have never been really improved upon except by the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of simply reversing some of them, of “turning platitudes topsy-turvy,” as not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief, has it.  Perhaps the oldest of all, Havelok the Dane—­a story the age of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one is undoubtedly taken—­is one of the most spirited of all.  Both hero and heroine—­Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who should be Queen of England—­are ousted by their treacherous guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two.  But the fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child has, at night, a nimbus of flame round his head; renounces his crime and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.  Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes service as a scullion with the English usurper.  This usurper is seeking how to rid himself of the princess without violence, but in some way that will make her succession to the crown impossible, and Havelok having shown prowess in sports is selected as the maiden’s husband.  She, too, discovers his royalty at night by the same token; and the pair regain their respective inheritances and take vengeance on their respective