They were not then, be it remembered, quite such common-form as now--the rightful heir kept out of his rights, the usurper of them, the princess gracious or scornful or both by turns, the quest, the adventure, the revolutions and discoveries and fights, the wedding bells and the poetical justice on the villain.

Let it be remembered, too, if anybody is scornful of these as _vieux jeu_, that they have never been really improved upon except by the very obvious and unoriginal method common in clever-silly days, of simply reversing some of them, of "turning platitudes topsy-turvy," as not the least gifted, or most old-fashioned, of novelists, Tourguenief, has it.

Perhaps the oldest of all, _Havelok the Dane_--a story the age of which from evidence both internal and external, is so great that people have not quite gratuitously imagined a still older Danish or even Anglo-Saxon original for the French romance from which our existing one is undoubtedly taken--is one of the most spirited of all.

Both hero and heroine--Havelok, who should be King of Denmark and Goldborough, who should be Queen of England--are ousted by their treacherous guardian-viceroys as infants; and Havelok is doomed to drowning by his tutor, the greater or at least bolder villain of the two.

But the fisherman Grim, who is chosen as his murderer, discovers that the child has, at night, a _nimbus_ of flame round his head; renounces his crime and escapes by sea with the child and his own family to Grimsby.
Havelok, growing up undistinguished from his foster-brethren, takes service as a scullion with the English usurper.