In making the comparison, however, care must be exercised to select the modern treatment of the theme which represents correctly the modern ideal.  The Middle Age romances, sung by wandering minstrels, before the invention of the printing press, doubtless expressed the ideals of the age in which they were produced more infallibly than does the possibly individualistic conception of the modern poet; for, of the earlier forms of the romance, only those which found general favor were likely to be preserved and handed down.  This inference may be safely made because of the method of the dissemination of the poems before the art of printing was known.  It is true that copies of them were carried in manuscript from country to country; but the more important means of dissemination were the minstrels, who passed from court to court and land to land, singing the songs which they had made or heard.  In that age there was little thought of literary proprietorship.  The poem belonged to him who could recall it.  And as each minstrel felt free to adopt whatever poem he found or heard that pleased him, so he felt free also to modify the incidents thereof, guided only by his experience as to what pleased his hearers.  Hence the countless variations in the treatment of the theme, and the value of the conclusions that may be drawn as to the moral sentiment of an age, the quality of whose moral judgments is indicated by the prevailing tone of the songs which persisted because they pleased.  Unconformable variations, which express the view of an individual rather than the view of a people, may have come down to us in an accidentally preserved manuscript; but the songs which were sung by the poets of all lands give expression to the view of life of the age, and reveal the morals and the ideals of nations, whose history in this respect may otherwise be lost to us.  What some of these ideals were, as revealed by this rich store of poetic material which grew up about the chivalrous and spiritual ideals of the Middle Ages, and what the corresponding modern ideals are,—­what, in brief, some of the hitherto dimly discerned ethical movements of the past seven hundred years have in reality been, and whither they seem to be tending,—­surely, clear knowledge on these themes is an end worthy the supreme endeavor of finished scholars, whose training has made them expert in interpreting the aspirations of each age, and in tracing the evolution of the ideals of the past into the realities of the present.  And though, as M. Gaston Paris has said, the path of the Arthurian scholar seems at times to be an inextricable maze, yet the value of the results already achieved, and the possibility of still greater results, will doubtless prove a sufficient encouragement to the several generations of scholars which, as Dr. Sommer suggests, are needed for the gigantic task.

[Illustration:  Signature:  Richard Jones]

FROM GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH’S ‘HISTORIA BRITONUM’