something about the way they have been built up, as one writer after
another has taken the material left by predecessors, and has worked
into it fresh conceptions of things brave and true. First there was
the old Latin chronicle of Nennius, the earliest trace of Arthurian
fact or fancy, with a single paragraph given to Arthur and his twelve
great battles. This chronicle itself may have been based on yet
earlier Welsh stories, which had been passed on, perhaps for centuries,
by oral tradition from father to son, and gradually woven together into
some legendary history of Oldest England in the local language of
Brittany, across the English Channel. This original book is referred
to by later writers, but was long ago lost. Geoffrey of Monmouth says
it was the source of his material for his "Historia Britonum."
Geoffrey's history, in Latin prose, written some time about the middle
of the twelfth century, remains as the earliest definite record of the
legends connected with King Arthur.

Only a little later Geoffrey's Latin history was translated by Wace and
others into Norman French, and here the Arthur material first appeared
in verse form. Then, still later in the twelfth century, Walter Map
worked the same stories over into French prose, and at the same time
put so much of his own knowledge and imagination with them, that we may
almost say that he was the maker of the Arthur romances.

Soon after the year twelve hundred,--a half century after Geoffrey of
Monmouth first set our English ancestors to thinking about the
legendary old hero of the times of the Anglo-Saxon conquest--Layamon,
parish priest of Ernly, in Worcestershire, gave to the English language
(as distinct from the earlier Anglo-Saxon) his poem "Brut." This was a
translation and enlargement of Wace's old French poem having Arthur as
hero. So these stories of King Arthur, of Welsh or Celtic origin, came
through the Latin, and then through French verse and prose, into our
own speech, and so began their career down the centuries of our more
modern history.

After giving ideas to generation after generation of romance writers of
many countries and in many languages, these same romantic stories were,
in the fifteenth century, skilfully brought together into one connected
prose narrative,--one of the choicest of the older English classics,
"Le Morte Darthur," by Sir Thomas Malory. Those were troublous times
when Sir Thomas, perhaps after having himself fo