or lions possessing power of speech.  A period incapable of distinguishing between the natural and supernatural will always indulge in those fancies which are best suited to its temper.  Be the native country never so poor, the long darkness and cold of the winter never so hard to bear, far away in the East, or in Camelot, the kingdom of King Arthur, life was full of beauty and sunshine.  The legends of King Arthur powerfully affected the imagination; they were read, secretly and surreptitiously, in all convents; on a sultry summer afternoon, during the learned discussion of their preceptor, one after another of the pupils would fall asleep; the preceptor, suddenly interrupting himself, would continue after a short pause:  “And now I will tell you of King Arthur,” and all eyes would sparkle as the pupils listened with rapt attention.  Francis of Assisi called one of his disciples “a knight of his Round Table,” and three hundred years later Don Quixote lost his reason over the study of those legends; some of the finest works of art of the present time, Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” “Tristan and Isolde,” and “Parsifal,” take their subject from the inexhaustible treasure of the Celtic epic cycle.  The longing for experience and adventure had laid hold of the imagination to an extraordinary degree.  The recital of wondrous adventures no longer satisfied the listener; he yearned to participate in them.  The young knight, trained in athletics and courtesy, and possessing a little knowledge of biblical history, left his father’s castle to face the unknown world.  There was a sanctuary, mysterious, almost supernal, carefully guarded in the dense forest of an inaccessible mountain.  A knight whose heart was pure, and who had dedicated himself to the lifelong service of the divine, could find it; but he would have to wander for many years, through forests and glens and strange countries, alone and solitary, before his eyes would behold the most sacred relic in the world, the Holy Grail.

The time was ripe for a great event, a universal and overwhelming enterprise which could absorb the passionate longing.  Maybe that the wisdom of the great popes—­half unconsciously, certainly, and under the pressure of the age, but yet led by an unerring instinct—­guided this stream into the bed of the Church; the vague craving found a definite object:  the Crusades were organised.  The Holy Sepulchre, the most sacred spot on earth, was in the hands of the heathens; it was despised and defiled—­what greater thing could a man do than hasten to its rescue and wrest it from the grasp of pagans, giants and sorcerers?  In the fantastic imagination of the men of that period the Lord’s sepulchre was nothing but the earthly realisation of their yearning for the Holy Grail.