where he failed, any one else will succeed, unless the thrice and thirty times sifted libraries of Europe yield some quite unexpected windfall.  In the works commonly attributed to Chrestien, all of which are well known to the present writer, there is no sign of his having been able to conceive this, though he is a delightful romancer.  Robert is a mere shadow; and his attributed works, as his works, are shadows too, though they are interesting enough in themselves.  Walter not only has the greatest amount of traditional attribution, but is the undoubted author of De Nugis Curialium.  And the author of De Nugis Curialium, different as it is from the Arthurian story, could have finally divined the latter.

But at the time when he wrote, Englishmen, with the rarest exceptions, wrote only in French or Latin; and when they began to write in English, a man of genius, to interpret and improve on him, was not found for a long time.  And the most interesting parts of the Arthurian story are rarely handled at all in such early vernacular versions of it as we have, whether in verse or prose.  Naturally enough, perhaps, it was the fabulous historic connection with British history, and the story of the great British enchanter Merlin, that attracted most attention.  The Arthour and Merlin which is in the Auchinleck MS.; the prose Merlin, published by the Early English Text Society; the alliterative Thornton Morte d’Arthur, and others, are wont to busy themselves about the antecedents of the real story—­about the uninteresting wars of the King himself with Saxons, and Romans, and giants, and rival kings, rather than with the great chivalric triple cord of Round Table, Graal, and Guinevere’s fault.  The pure Graal poems, Joseph of Arimathea, the work of the abominable Lonelich or Lovelich, etc., deal mainly with another branch of previous questions—­things bearable as introductions, fillings-up, and so forth, but rather jejune in themselves.  The Scots Lancelot is later than Malory himself, and of very little interest.  Layamon’s account, the oldest that we have, adds little (though what little it does add is not unimportant) to Geoffrey of Monmouth and Wace; and tells what it has to tell with nearly as little skill in narrative as in poetry.  Only the metrical Morte—­from which, it would appear, Malory actually transprosed some of his most effective passages in the manner in which genius transproses or transverses—­has, for that reason, for its dealings with the catastrophe, and for the further opportunity of comparison with Tennyson, interest of the higher kind.  But before we come to Malory himself it is desirable to turn to the branches—­the chapels, as we have called them, to the cathedral—­which he also, in some cases at least, utilised in the magnum opus of English prose romance.