sitive balance of argument from the facts on
the other side. The balance, however, does not lie against us. The
personal claim of Walter Map, even if disproved, would not carry the
English claim with it in its fall. But it has never been disproved.
The positive, the repeated, attribution of the MSS. may not be final,
but requires a very serious body of counter-argument to upset it. And
there is none such. The time suits; the man's general ability is not
denied; his familiarity with Welshmen and Welsh tradition as a
Herefordshire Marcher is pretty certain; and his one indisputable book
of general literature, the _De Nugis Curialium_, exhibits
many--perhaps all--of the qualifications required: a sharp judgment
united with a distinct predilection for the marvellous, an
unquestionable piety combined with man-of-the-worldliness, and a
toleration of human infirmities. It is hardly necessary to point out
the critical incompetence of those who say that a satirist like Map
could not have written the _Quest_ and the _Mort_. Such critics would
make two Peacocks as the simultaneous authors of _Nightmare Abbey_ and
_Rhododaphne_--nay, two Shakespeares to father the _Sonnets_ and the
_Merry Wives_. If any one will turn to the stories of Gerbert and
Meridiana, of Galo, Sadius, and the evil queen in the _Nugae_, he will,
making allowance for Walter's awkward Latin in comparison with the
exquisite French of the twelfth century, find reasons for thinking the
author of that odd book quite equal to the authorship of part--not
necessarily the whole--of the Arthurian story in its co-ordinated
form.

Again, it is distinctly noticeable that the farther the story goes
from England and the English Continental possessions, the more does it
lose of that peculiar blended character, that mixture of the purely
mystical and purely romantic, of sacred and profane, which has been
noted as characteristic of its perfect bloom. In the _Percevale_ of
Chrestien and his continuators, and still more in Wolfram von
Eschenbach, as it proceeds eastwards, and into more and more purely
Teutonic regions, it absorbs itself in the _Graal_ and the moonshiny
mysticism thereto appertaining. When it has fared southwards to Italy,
the lawlessness of the loves of Guinevere and Iseult preoccupies
Southern attention. As for Welsh, it is sufficient to quote the
statement of the most competent of Welsh authorities, Professor Rhys,
to the effect that "the passion of Lancelot fo