mon's _Brut_
is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but
written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. The style is
rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative. Wace had amplified
Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much larger additions,
derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh border. In
particular, the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like
fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard; of the
unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever, and the treachery of his
nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great battle between Arthur
and Modred; of the wounding of the king--"fifteen fiendly wounds he had,
one might in the least three gloves thrust"--; and of the little boat
with "two women therein, wonderly dight," which came to bear him away to
Avalun and the Queen Argante, "sheenest of all elves," whence he shall
come again, according to Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all
this left little, in essentials, for Tennyson to add in his _Passing of
Arthur._

This new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman
romancers. The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were
afloat. Walter Map, a gentleman of the court of Henry II., in two French
prose romances connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or
holy cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which
Joseph of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it
miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of knightly
quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an
adventure only to be achieved by the maiden knight, Galahad, the son of
that Launcelot who in the romances had taken the place of Modred in
Geoffrey's history as the paramour of Queen Guenever. In like manner the
love-story of Tristan and Isolde, which came probably from Brittany or
Cornwall, was joined by other romancers to the Arthur-saga.

Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed
shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day
and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a
more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his
_Idyls of the King_, Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. There
were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and
continental French dialects, in English, in German, and