It has been said that few people know the treasures of English romance, yet there is little excuse for ignorance of them.  It is some century since Ellis’s extremely amusing, if sometimes rather prosaic, book put much of the matter before those who will not read originals; to be followed in the same path by Dunlop later, and much later still by the invaluable and delightful Catalogue of [British Museum] Romances by Mr. Ward.  It is nearly as long since the collections of Ritson and Weber, soon supplemented by others, and enlarged for the last forty years by the publications of the Early English Text Society, put these originals themselves within the reach of everybody who is not so lazy or so timid as to be disgusted or daunted by a very few actually obsolete words and a rather large proportion of obsolete spellings, which will yield to even the minimum of intelligent attention.  Only a very small number (not perhaps including a single one of importance) remain unprinted, though no doubt a few are out of print or difficult to obtain.  The quality and variety of the stories told in them are both very considerable, even without making allowance for what has been called the stock character of mediaeval composition.  That almost all are directly imitated from the French is probable enough, that most are is certain:  but this matters, for our purpose, nothing at all.  That the imitation was not haphazard or indiscriminate is obvious.  Thus, though we have some, we have not very many representatives of the class which was the most numerous of all in France—­the chansons de geste or stories of French legendary history, national or family.  Except as far as the Saracens are concerned, they would naturally have less interest for English hearers.  The Matiere de Rome, again—­the legends of antiquity—­though represented, is not very abundant outside of the universally popular Tale of Troy; and the almost equally popular Alexander legend does not occupy a very large part of them.  What is perhaps more remarkable is that until Malory exercised his genius upon “the French book,” the more poetical parts of the “matter of Britain” itself do not seem to have been very much written about in English.  The preliminary stuff about Merlin and Vortigern exists in several handlings; the foreign campaigns of Arthur seem always (perhaps from national vanity) to have been popular.  The “off"-branches of Tristram and Percivale, and not a few of the still more episodic romances of adventures concerning Gawain, Iwain, and other knights, receive attention.  The execrable Lonelich or Lovelich, who preceded Malory a little, had of course predecessors in handling the other parts of the Graal story.  But the crown and flower of the whole—­the inspiration which connected the Round Table and the Graal and the love of Lancelot and Guinevere—­though, so far as the present writer’s reading and opinion are of any weight, the recent attempts to deprive the Englishman, Walter