f Gaul, the other towards the Irish Sea, and ended in
two lesser rays." He proceeds to say, that Merlin, the magician, being
called on to explain this portent, declared that the dragon represented
Uther, the brother of King Ambrose, who was destined himself soon to
become king; that the ray extending towards Gaul indicated a great son,
who should conquer the Gallic Kingdoms; and that the ray with two lesser
rays indicated a daughter, whose son and grandson should successively
reign over Britain. Uther, in consequence, when he came to the throne,
had two gold dragons made, one of which he placed in the cathedral of
Winchester, which it brightly illuminated; the other he kept, and from
it gained the name of _Pendragon_. The powerful ray represented his
great son Arthur, destined to become the flower of chivalry, and the
favorite hero of mediaeval romance.

This is history as Geoffrey of Monmouth understood it, but hardly so in
the modern sense, and Arthur remains as mystical a figure as Achilles,
despite the efforts of various writers to bring him within the circle of
actual kings. After the Romans left Britain, two centuries passed of
whose history hardly a coherent shred remains. This was the age of
Arthur, one of the last champions of Celtic Britain against the
inflowing tide of Anglo-Saxon invasion. That there was an actual Arthur
there is some, but no very positive, reason to believe. After all the
evidence has been offered, we still seem to have but a shadowy hero
before us, "a king of shreds and patches," whose history is so pieced
out with conjecture that it is next to impossible to separate its facts
from its fancies.

The Arthur of the legends, of the Welsh and Breton ballads, of the later
_Chansons de Geste_, of Malory and Tennyson, has quite stepped out of
the historic page and become a hero without time or place in any real
world, a king of the imagination, the loftiest figure in that great
outgrowth of chivalric romance which formed the favorite fictitious
literature of Europe during three or four of the mediaeval centuries.
Charlemagne, the leading character in the earlier romances of chivalry,
was, in the twelfth century, replaced by Arthur, a milder and more
Christian-like hero, whose adventures, with those of his Knights of the
Round Table, delighted the tenants of court and castle in that
marvel-loving and uncritical age. That the stories told of him are all
fiction cannot be declared. Many of them may