reign of Arthur may be supposed to represent the
culmination of a national revival among the British Celts; and,
--this is the detail I was pleased to come upon,--according to
Geoffrey, Camlan was fought in 542;--a matter of thirteen decades
(and two years) after the expulsion of the Romans. So that, I
say, it looks as if there were some cyclic reality behind it.
Geoffrey of Monmouth did not know that such periods of national
revival do last as a general rule for thirteen decades. He had
some other guide to help him to that 542 for Camlan.

History knows practically nothing about fifth-century Britain.
It has been looking at it, since scientific methods came in,
through Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon) or Latin eyes; and seen
very little indeed but confusion. Britain like the rest of the
western empire, suffered the incursions of northern barbarism;
but unlike most of the rest, it fought, and not as a piece of
Rome, but as Celtic Britain;--fought, and would not compromise
nor understand that it was defeated. It took eight centuries of
war, and the loss of all England, and the loss of all Wales, to
teach, it that lesson; and even then it was by no means sure.
In the twelve-eighties, when last Llewelyn went to war, he
was still hoping, not to save Wales from the English, but to
re-establish the Celtic Kingdom of Britain, Arthur's Empire, and to
wear the high crown of London. The men that marched to Bosworth
Field under Harri Tudor, two centuries later, went with the same
curious hope and assurance. It was a racial mold of mind, and
one of extraordinary strength and persistence,--and one totally
unjustified by facts in what were then the present and future.
But I do not believe such molds can ever be fudged up out of
nothing: _ex nihilo nihil_ is as true here as elsewhere. So we
must look for the cause and formation of this mold in the past.
Something, I think, within that first cycle of Welsh history must
have impressed it on the Welsh mind: some national flowering;
some great figure, one would say.--Arthur? He is like Vikramaditya
of Ujjain; no one know whether he existed at all. There is
no historic evidence; but rather the reverse. But then
there are all those mountains and things named after him, "from
the top of Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the
North"; and, there is the Arthurian Legend, with such great
vitality that it drove out the national Saxon legends from
England, and quenched