her to England, and addressed to her his impassioned verse.  Wace, the Norman-French trouvere, dedicated to her his ‘Brut.’  The ruling classes of England at this time were truly cosmopolitan, familiar with the poetic material of many lands.  Jusserand, in his ’English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare,’ discussing a poem of the following century written in French by a Norman monk of Westminster and dedicated to Eleanor of Provence, wife of Henry III., says:—­“Rarely was the like seen in any literature:  here is a poem dedicated to a Frenchwoman by a Norman of England, which begins with the praise of a Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane.”

But the ruling classes of England were not the only cosmopolitans, nor the only possessors of fresh poetic material.  Throughout Europe in general, the conditions were favorable for poetic production.  The Crusades had brought home a larger knowledge of the world, and the stimulus of new experiences.  Western princes returned with princesses of the East as their brides, and these were accompanied by splendid trains, including minstrels and poets.  Thus Europe gathered in new poetic material, which stimulated and developed the poetical activity of the age.  Furthermore, the Crusades had aroused an intense idealism, which, as always, demanded and found poetic expression.  The dominant idea pervading the earlier forms of the Charlemagne stories, the unswerving loyalty due from a vassal to his lord,—­that is, the feudal view of life,—­no longer found an echo in the hearts of men.  The time was therefore propitious for the development of a new cycle of legend.

Though by the middle of the twelfth century the Arthurian legend had been long in existence, and King Arthur had of late been glorified by Geoffrey’s book, the legend was not yet supreme in popular interest.  It became so through its association, a few years later, with the legend of the Holy Grail,—­the San Graal, the holy vessel which received at the Cross the blood of Christ, which was now become a symbol of the Divine Presence.  This holy vessel had been brought by Joseph of Arimathea from Palestine to Britain, but was now, alas, vanished quite from the sight of man.  It was the holy quest for this sacred vessel, to which the knights of the Round Table now bound themselves,—­this “search for the supernatural,” this “struggle for the spiritual,” this blending of the spirit of Christianity with that of chivalry,—­which immediately transformed the Arthurian legend, and gave to its heroes immortality.  At once a new spirit breathes in the old legend.  In a few years it is become a mystical, symbolical, anagogical tale, inculcating one of the profoundest dogmas of the Holy Catholic Church, a bearer of a Christian doctrine engrossing the thought of the Christian world.  And inasmuch as the transformed Arthurian legend now taught by implication the doctrine of the Divine Presence, its spread was in every way furthered by the great power of the Church, whose spiritual rulers made the minstrel doubly welcome when celebrating this theme.