ceased and creative impulse began!  In any case the work of the individual lived on only as the ideal possession of the aggregate body of the people, and it soon lost the stamp of originality.”

When Geoffrey wrote, this period of national poetry was drawing to a close; but it was not yet closed.  Alfred Nutt, in his ’Studies in the Legend of the Holy Grail,’ speaking of Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote his ‘Parzival’ about the time that the ‘Nibelungenlied’ was given its present form (i.e., about a half-century after Geoffrey), says:—­“Compared with the unknown poets who gave their present shape to the ‘Nibelungenlied’ or to the ‘Chanson de Roland,’ he is an individual writer; but he is far from deserving this epithet even in the sense that Chaucer deserves it.”  Professor Rhys says, in his ’Studies in the Arthurian Legend’:—­“Leaving aside for a while the man Arthur, and assuming the existence of a god of that name, let us see what could be made of him.  Mythologically speaking, he would probably have to be regarded as a Culture Hero,” etc.

To summarize this discussion of the difficulties of the theme, there are now existing, scattered throughout the libraries and the monasteries of Europe, unnumbered versions of the Arthurian legends.  Some of these are early versions, some are late, and some are intermediate.  What is the relation of all these versions to one another?  Which are the oldest, and which are copies, and of what versions are they copies?  What is the land of their origin, and what is the significance of their symbolism?  These problems, weighty in tracing the growth of mediaeval ideals,—­i.e., in tracing the development of the realities of the present from the ideals of the past,—­are still under investigation by the specialists.  The study of the Arthurian legends is in itself a distinct branch of learning, which demands the lifelong labors of scholarly devotees.

There now remains to consider the extraordinary spread of the legend in the closing decades of the twelfth century and in the century following.  Though Tennyson has worthily celebrated as the morning star of English song—­

     “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler, whose sweet breath
       Preluded those melodious bursts that fill
     The spacious times of great Elizabeth
       With sounds that echo still.”

yet the centuries before Chaucer, far from being barren of literature, were periods of rich poetical activity both in England and on the Continent.  Eleanor of Aquitaine, formerly Queen of France,—­who had herself gone on a crusade to the Holy Land, and who, on returning, married in 1152 Henry of Anjou, who became in 1155 Henry II. of England,—­was an ardent patroness of the art of poetry, and personally aroused the zeal of poets.  The famous troubadour Bernard de Ventadorn—­“with whom,” says Ten Brink, “the Provencal art-poesy entered upon the period of its florescence”—­followed