any but the most remote and partial sense, of the Arthurian Romances
on the _Mabinogion_[50] alone. The posteriority of these as we have
them need not be too much dwelt upon. We need not even lay great
stress on what I believe to be a fact not likely to be disputed by
good critics, that the reading of the French and the Welsh-English
versions one after the other, no matter in what order they be taken,
will leave something more than an impression that the French is the
direct original of the Welsh, and that the Welsh, in anything at all
like its present form, could not by any possibility be the original of
the French. The test to which I refer is this. Let any one read, with
as open a mind as he can procure, the three Welsh-French or
French-Welsh romances of _Yvain-Owain_, _Erec-Geraint_, and
_Percivale-Peredur_, and then turn to those that are certainly and
purely Celtic, _Kilhwch and Olwen_, the _Dream of Rhiabwy_ (both of
these Arthurian after a fashion, though quite apart from our Arthurian
Legend), and the fourfold _Mabinogi_, which tells the adventures of
Rhiannon and those of Math ap Matholwy. I cannot conceive this being
done by any one without his feeling that he has passed from one world
into another entirely different,--that the two classes of story simply
_cannot_ by any possibility be, in any more than the remotest
suggestion, the work of the same people, or have been produced under
the same literary covenant.

[Footnote 50: Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, 2d ed., London,
1877.]

[Sidenote: _The Legend itself._]

Let us now turn to the Legend itself. The story which ends in Avalon
begins in Jerusalem. For though the Graal-legends are undoubtedly
later additions to whatever may have been the original Arthurian
saga--seeing that we find nothing of them in the early Welsh
traditions, nothing in Nennius, nothing in Geoffrey, nothing even in
Wace or Layamon--yet such is the skill with which the unknown or
uncertain authors have worked them into the legend that the whole
makes one indivisible romance. Yet (as the untaught genius of Malory
instinctively perceived) when the Graal-story on the one hand, and the
loves of Lancelot and Guinevere with which it is connected on the
other, came in, they made comparatively otiose and uninteresting the
wars with Saxons and Romans, which in the earlier Legend had occupied
almost the whole room. And accordingly these wars, which still hold a
very large part of the field