The most recent critics are disposed to prefer Hume's and Gibbon's belief to Milton's scepticism as to the actual existence of Arthur. But upon this question I do not enter. Malory's historical chapters, as they may be called, seem to be mainly taken from the _Historia Brithonum_ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, though much of them is also to be found in the romances[4]. The details of Arthur's march to Rome are so accurate that I think that Malory may have had actual knowledge of the road, which indeed must have been familiar to many men--soldiers, priests, and merchants--in the days of Edward IV. But of the rest of the history and the geography of the book before us we can only say that they are something
'Apart from place, withholding time, But flattering the golden prime'
of the great hero of English romance. We cannot bring within any limits of history the events which here succeed each other, when the Lords and Commons of England, after the death of King Uther at St. Alban's, assembled at the greatest church of London, guided by the joint policy of the magician Merlin and the Christian bishop of Canterbury, and elected Arthur to the throne; when Arthur made Carlion, or Camelot, or both, his head-quarters in a war against Cornwall, Wales, and the North, in which he was victorious by help of the king of France; when he met the demand for tribute by the Roman emperor Lucius with a counter-claim to the empire for himself as the real representative of Constantine, held a parliament at York to make the necessary arrangements, crossed the sea from Sandwich to Barflete in Flanders, met the united forces of the Romans and Saracens in Burgundy, slew the emperor in a great battle, together with his allies, the Sowdan of Syria, the king of Egypt, and the king of Ethiopia, sent their bodies to the Senate and Podestà of Rome as the only tribute he would pay, and then followed over the mountains through Lombardy and Tuscany to Rome, where he was crowned emperor by the Pope, 'sojourned there a time, established all his lands from Rome unto France, and gave lands and realms unto his servants and knights,' and so returned home to England, where he seems thenceforth to have devoted himself wholly to his duties as the head of Christian knighthood.