It was by this ideal and representative character that the Arthurian legend had such an astonishing prestige throughout the whole world.  Had Arthur been only a provincial hero, the more or less happy defender of a little country, all peoples would not have adopted him, any more than they have adopted the Marco of the Serbs, [Footnote:  A Servian ballad-hero.] or the Robin Hood of the Saxons.  The Arthur who has charmed the world is the head of an order of equality, in which all sit at the same table, in which a man’s worth depends upon his valour and his natural gifts.  What mattered to the world the fate of an unknown peninsula, and the strife waged on its behalf?  What enchanted it was the ideal court presided over by Gwenhwyvar (Guinevere), where around the monarchical unity the flower of heroes was gathered together, where ladies, as chaste as they were beautiful, loved according to the laws of chivalry, and where the time was passed in listening to stories, and learning civility and beautiful manners.

This is the secret of the magic of that Round Table, about which the Middle Ages grouped all their ideas of heroism, of beauty, of modesty, and of love.  We need not stop to inquire whether the ideal of a gentle and polished society in the midst of the barbarian world is, in all its features, a purely Breton creation, whether the spirit of the courts of the Continent has not in some measure furnished the model, and whether the Mabinogion themselves have not felt the reaction of the French imitations;[Footnote:  The surviving version of the Mdbinogian has a later date than these imitations, and the Red Book includes several tales borrowed from the French trouveres.  But it is out of the question to maintain that the really Welsh narratives have been borrowed in a like manner, since among them are some unknown to the trouveres, which could only possess interest for Breton countries] it suffices for us that the new order of sentiments which we have just indicated was, throughout the whole of the Middle Ages, persistently attached to the groundwork of the Cymric romances.  Such an association could not be fortuitous; if the imitations are all so glaring in colour, it is evidently because in the original this same colour is to be found united to particularly strong character.  How otherwise shall we explain why a forgotten tribe on the very confines of the world should have imposed its heroes upon Europe, and, in the domain of imagination, accomplished one of the most singular revolutions known to the historian of letters?

If, in fact, one compares European literature before the introduction of the Cymric romances, with what it became when the trouveres set themselves to draw from Breton sources, one recognises readily that with the Breton narratives a new element entered into the poetic conception of the Christian peoples, and modified it profoundly.  The Carlovingian poem, both by its structure and by the means which it employs, does