Malory, SIR THOMAS, is immortal in his work, the Morte Darthur, while of himself but little is known. We learn from Caxton's preface that Malory was a knight, that he finished his work in the ninth year of the reign of Edward IV. (1470), that he 'reduced' it from some French book, and that he was a servant of Jesus both day and night—a statement which has needlessly led to the inference that he was a priest. In Leland's Itinerary the name occurs in Yorkshire, and the century after in Burton's Description of Leicestershire, but there is no evidence to connect the writer with either county. Caxton's impression was finished in 1485, and is a black-letter folio, of which but two copies now exist. An accurate and altogether admirable edition of it was reprinted in 1889 by the care of Dr H. Oskar Sommer. The editor's Introduction followed in 1890; his Treatise on the Sources and Andrew Lang's Essay on Malory's Prose Style in 1891. There were twelve preceding editions, including those of Wynkyn de Worde, W. Copland, Hazlewood (1816), Southey (1817), Thomas Wright (1856), and Sir E. Strachey (the Globe edition, 1868). The last three have admirable introductions.
Sir Thomas Malory's work 'is indisputably,' says Scott, 'the best prose romance the English language can boast of.' It was due to an attempt to work up and give an epic unity and harmony to the whole mass of French romance, and the result shows that its author was no slavish copyist or compiler merely, but that he turned much that was dross into pure gold, and stamped upon the whole the impress of his own individuality as Shakespeare did with his Holinshed and Plutarch. And this no less in the events than the characters of the story as the modern reader realises them glorified through the medium of Tennyson's stately verse. The story moves forward with dignity to its tragic close, the inevitable issue of the guilty loves of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.