Let Tristram yield his loyalty and honour For fair Isoud, and die inglorious, Let Launcelot in Guenever's embrace Forget the consecrated vows he swore, And bring dark desolation on the land, My knight must grow the greater through his love, The better for my favour, the more pure!

"Immemorial tradition has asserted that King Arthur, his queen Guenever, his court of lords and ladies, and his hounds were enchanted in some cave of the crags, or in a hall below the castle of Sewingshields, and would continue entranced there until someone should first blow a bugle-horn that lay on a table near the entrance of the hall, and then with the 'sword of the stone' (was this Excalibur?) cut a garter, also placed there beside it.

It was in a sanctuary of Almesbury that queen Guenever took refuge, after her adulterous passion for sir Lancelot was made known to the king.

This being done, Arthur sent three of his knights to Leodogran, to beg the hand of his daughter Guenever in marriage.

This mantle fitted only chaste and virtuous wives; thus, when queen Guenever tried it on One while it was too long, another while too short, And wrinkled on her shoulders in most unseemly sort.

He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever, and the treachery of his nephew, Modred.

Then it miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an adventure only to be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of that Launcelot who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in Geoffrey's history as the paramour of Queen Guenever.