[18] See vol. i., p. 314.  Dr. Joyce was for some years a resident of Boston, where his “Ballads of Irish Chivalry” were published in 1872.  His “Deirdre” received high praise from J. R. Lowell.  Tennyson’s “Voyage of Maeldune” (1880) probably had its source in Dr. P. W. Joyce’s “Old Celtic Romances” (1879) (Collins’ “Illustrations of Tennyson,” p. 163).  Swinburne pronounced Ferguson’s “Welshmen of Tirawley” one of the best of modern ballads.

[19] For a survey of this department of romantic literature the reader is referred to “A Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue.”  Edited by Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolleston (New York, 1900).  There are a quite astonishing beauty and force in many of the pieces in this collection, though some of the editors’ claims seem excessive; as, e.g., that Mr. Yeats is “the first of living writers in the English language.”

[20] Robert Stephen Hawker was vicar of Morwenstow, near “wild Tintagil by the Cornish Sea,” where Tennyson visited him in 1848.  Hawker himself made contributions to Arthurian poetry, “Queen Gwynnevar’s Round” and “The Quest of the Sangreal” (1864).  He was converted to the Roman Catholic faith on his death-bed.

[21] Given in Palgrave’s “Golden Treasury,” second series.  Rossetti wrote of Dobell’s ballad in 1868:  “I have always regarded that poem as being one of the finest, of its length, in any modern poet; ranking with Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the other masterpieces of the condensed and hinted order so dear to imaginative minds.”  The use of the family name Keith in Rossetti’s “Rose Mary” was a coincidence.  His poem was published (1854) some years before Dobell’s.  He thought of substituting some other name for Keith, but could find none to suit him, and so retained it.

[22] Cf. Matthew Arnold’s “St. Brandan,” suggested by a passage in the old Irish “Voyage of Bran.”  The traitor Judas is allowed to come up from hell and cool himself on an iceberg every Christmas night because he had once given his cloak to a leper in the streets of Joppa.

[23] “Ballads and Songs,” London, 1895.

[24] “New Ballads,” London, 1897.

[25] “Victorian Poets.”  By E. C. Stedman.  New York, 1886 (tenth ed.), p. 155.

[26] This famous lyric, one of the “inserted” songs in “The Princess,” was inspired by the note of a bugle on the Lakes of Killarney.

[27] See vol. i., pp. 146-47.  Dryden, like Milton, had designs upon Arthur.  See introduction to the first canto of “Marmion”: 

        “—­Dryden, in immortal strain,
  Had raised the Table Round again,
  But that a ribald king and court
  Bade him toil on, to make them sport.”

[28] For a discussion of these and similar matters and a bibliography of Arthurian literature, the reader should consult Dr. H. Oskar Sommer’s scholarly reprint and critical edition of “Le Morte Darthur.  By Syr Thomas Malory,” three vols., London, 1889-91.