of the Romans from Troy; but we need not wonder that in later days, when the Homeric legends were worked up into tales of Christian chivalry, Hector, and not Achilles, became the model of a Christian knight. When the great Italian poet drew his character of Orlando, as a type of chivalry, he had the Trojan hero in his mind.
One of the earliest and most curious travesties of the Iliad—for it is hardly more, though made in all good faith, according to the taste of the times—was the work of an English troubadour, Benedict de St Maur, of the time of Henry II. It was reproduced, as a prose romance, in Latin, by Guido de Colonna, a Sicilian; but is better known—so far as it can be said to be known at all—as the 'History of the Warres of the Greeks and Trojans,' by John Lydgate, monk of Bury St Edmunds, first printed in 1513. The writer professedly takes Colonna as his original. The heroes of the Iliad reappear as the knights of modern chivalry; they fight on horseback, observe all the rules of medieval courtesy, and "fewtre their speres" at each other exactly in the style of the Companions of the Round Table. Agamemnon is very like Arthur, and Achilles Sir Lancelot, under other names. But Hector is here also plainly the favourite hero. Thersites figures as a dwarf, with all the malice and mischief peculiar, and in some degree permitted, to those imaginary types of humanity. The closing lines of Lydgate's third book will give some idea of the strange transformation which Homer's story undergoes in the hands of our medieval poet, and is a curious instance of the way in which the zealous churchman "improves" his pagan subject. He is describing the funeral rites of Hector:—
