an traditions about it, made it persistently
regarded as a kind of Earthly Paradise. Arthur, after being slain at
Lyonesse, is carried here, as if to heaven. Here the pilgrim planted his
staff in the soil; and it took root as a tree that blossoms on Christmas
Day.

A mystical materialism marked Christianity from its birth; the very soul
of it was a body. Among the stoical philosophies and oriental negations
that were its first foes it fought fiercely and particularly for a
supernatural freedom to cure concrete maladies by concrete substances.
Hence the scattering of relics was everywhere like the scattering of
seed. All who took their mission from the divine tragedy bore tangible
fragments which became the germs of churches and cities. St. Joseph
carried the cup which held the wine of the Last Supper and the blood of
the Crucifixion to that shrine in Avalon which we now call Glastonbury;
and it became the heart of a whole universe of legends and romances, not
only for Britain but for Europe. Throughout this tremendous and
branching tradition it is called the Holy Grail. The vision of it was
especially the reward of that ring of powerful paladins whom King Arthur
feasted at a Round Table, a symbol of heroic comradeship such as was
afterwards imitated or invented by mediaeval knighthood. Both the cup and
the table are of vast importance emblematically in the psychology of the
chivalric experiment. The idea of a round table is not merely
universality but equality. It has in it, modified of course, by other
tendencies to differentiation, the same idea that exists in the very
word "peers," as given to the knights of Charlemagne. In this the Round
Table is as Roman as the round arch, which might also serve as a type;
for instead of being one barbaric rock merely rolled on the others, the
king was rather the keystone of an arch. But to this tradition of a
level of dignity was added something unearthly that was from Rome, but
not of it; the privilege that inverted all privileges; the glimpse of
heaven which seemed almost as capricious as fairyland; the flying
chalice which was veiled from the highest of all the heroes, and which
appeared to one knight who was hardly more than a child.

Rightly or wrongly, this romance established Britain for after centuries
as a country with a chivalrous past. Britain had been a mirror of
universal knighthood. This fact, or fancy, is of colossal import in all
ensuing affairs, especially the af