We want something to account for this, which is not Saxon, not
Norman, not French, not Teutonic generally, not Latin, not Eastern;
and I at least am unable to discover where this something comes from
if it is not from the Celtic fringe of England and of Normandy.

But when we come to the Legend proper, and to its most important and
most interesting characteristics, to its working up, to that
extraordinary development which in a bare half-century (and half a
century, though a long time now, was a very short one seven hundred
years ago) evolved almost a whole library of romance from the scanty
_faits et gestes_ of Arthur as given by Geoffrey,--then I must confess
that I can see no evidence of Celtic forces or sources having played
any great part in the matter. If Caradoc of Lancarvan wrote the _Vita
Gildae_--and it is pretty certainly not later than his day, while if it
was not written by him it must have been written by some one equally
well acquainted with traditions, British and Armorican, of St
Gildas--if he or any one else gave us what he has given about Arthur
and Gildas himself, about Arthur's wife and Melvas, and if traditions
existed of Galahad or even Percivale and the Graal, of the Round
Table, most of all of Lancelot,--why in the name of all that is
critical and probable did he not give us more? His hero could not have
been ignorant of the matter, the legends of his hero could hardly have
been silent about them. It is hard to believe that anybody can read
the famous conclusion of Geoffrey's history without seeing a
deliberate impishness in it, without being certain that the tale of
the Book and the Archdeacon is a tale of a Cock and a Bull. But if it
be taken seriously, how could the "British book" have failed to
contain something more like our Legend of Arthur than Geoffrey has
given us, and how, if it existed and gave more, could Geoffrey have
failed to impart it? Why should the Welsh, the proudest in their way
of all peoples, and not the least gifted in literature, when they came
to give Arthurian legends of the kind which we recognise, either
translate them from the French or at least adapt and adjust them
thereto?

On the other hand, the supposition that the fashioning, partly out of
vague tradition, partly it may be out of more definite Celtic tales
like that of Tristram, partly from classical, Eastern, and other
sources, belongs to the English in the wide sense--that is to say, the
nation or nations p