He was very excusably but very unluckily ignorant of what
may be called the comparative panorama of English and European
literature during the Middle Ages, and was apt to assign to direct
borrowing or imitation those fresh workings up of the eternal
_donnees_ of all literary art which presented themselves. As the
theory has been more recently presented with far exacter learning and
greater judgment by his successor, Mr Courthope,[67] it is much
relieved from most of its disabilities. I have myself no doubt that
the Greek romances (see chap. ix.) _do_ represent at the least a stage
directly connecting classical with romantic literature; and that the
later of them (which, it must be remembered, were composed in this
very twelfth century, and must have come under the notice of the
crusaders), _may_ have exercised a direct effect upon mediaeval Romance
proper. I formed this opinion more than twenty years ago, when I first
read _Hysminias and Hysmine_; and I have never seen reason to change
it since. But these influences, though not to be left out of the
question, are perhaps in one respect too general, and in another too
partial, to explain the precise matter. That the Arthurian Romances,
in common with all the romances, and with mediaeval literature
generally, were much more influenced by the traditional classical
culture than used at one time to be thought, I have believed ever
since I began to study the subject, and am more and more convinced of
it. The classics both of Europe and the East played a part, and no
small part, in bringing about the new literature; but it was only a
part.

[Footnote 67: In his _History of English Poetry_, vol. i., London,
1895, and in a subsequent controversy with Mr Nutt, which was carried
on in the _Athenaeum_.]

[Sidenote: _The English or Anglo-Norman pretensions._]

If, as I think may fairly be done, the glory of the Legend be chiefly
claimed for none of these, but for English or Anglo-Norman, it can be
done in no spirit of national _pleonexia_, but on a sober
consideration of all the facts of the case, and allowing all other
claimants their fair share in the matter as subsidiaries. From the
merely _a priori_ point of view the claims of England--that is to say,
the Anglo-Norman realm--are strong. The matter is "the matter of
Britain," and it was as natural that Arthur should be sung in Britain
as that Charlemagne should be celebrated in France. But this could
weigh nothing against po