Eutydike. So again, Excalibur is, by the hands of the reUictant Sir CHAP.
Bedivere, thrown into the lake from which it had been drawn, as the - — ■ " —•
light of Helios is quenched in the waters from which he sprung in the
morning; and the barge, which had borne away the fair maid of
Astolat and the sister of Sir Percival, brings the three queens (seem-
ingly the weird sisters who have already been seen in another form)
to carry off the wounded Arthur.
But even at the last the story exhibits the influence of the old The death myth. Neither Arthur himself thinks, nor do any others think, that he is really dying. His own words are, " I will unto the vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound." There, in the shadowy valley in which Endymion sinks to sleep, the thought of the renewed life in store for Baldur or Dionyos, Memnon or Sarpedon, or Adonis, showed itself in the epitaph
" Hie jacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus."
Of the story of Arthur and Guinevere, Mr. Campbell says that, Guinevere " when stripped to the bones," it " is almost identical with the love ^aid. '^"^ story of the history of the Feinne," the tradition embodied in the poems which bear the name of Ossian, with not less justice perhaps than the Iliad and Odyssey bear the name of Homer, and the Finnish epic Kalewala that of Wainamoinen.^ To Grainne, the wife of Fionn, Diarmaid stands in the relation of Lancelot to Guinevere, or of Paris to Helen. Guinevere loves Lancelot at first sight : Diar- maid, when first he meets Grainne, " shows a spot on his forehead, which no woman can see without loving him." But if Lancelot follows Guinevere willingly, Grainne compels Diarmaid to run away with her. In the sequel the conduct of Fionn precisely matches that of Arthur, and Diarmaid is as fearless a knight as Lancelot — the conclusion being that "here are the same traditions worked up into wholly different stories, and differently put upon the stage, according to the manners of the age in which romances are written, but the people go on telling their own story in their own way."'^
' For the supposed historical resi- duum in the story of Arthur, see Appendix V. to the Introduction to Comparative Alythology.
- Into the question of the authenti-
city of Macphcrson's Ossian it is alto- gether unnecessary to enter. The matter has been admirably and con- clusively treated by Mr. Campbell in the fourth volume of his Talcs of the JVcst Highlands, and no one probably would for an instant suppose that Mac- phcrson invented the tradition — in other words, the framework of the myth : and with this only we are here concerned. The story of Sir Bevis of Hampton, Mr. Campbell remarks, reflects the same mythology, iv. 267. I must content myself with calling attention to Mr. Campbell's very valuable section on the Welsh stories, iv. 270-299. Taken as a whole, they run precisely parallel to the streams of German, Scandinavian, and Hindu folk-lore, and bring Mr. Campbell to the conclusion that they are "all founded upon incidents which
