him of parodying them. "After him shall succeed the boar
of Totness, and oppress the people with grievous tyranny. Gloucester
shall send forth a lion and shall disturb him in his cruelty in
several battles. The lion shall trample him under his feet ... and at
last get upon the backs of the nobility. A bull shall come into the
quarrel and strike the lion ... but shall break his horns against the
walls of Oxford." "Then shall two successively sway the sceptre, whom
a horned dragon shall serve. One shall come in armour and ride upon a
flying serpent. He shall sit upon its back with his naked body, and
cast his right hand upon its tail.... The second shall ally with the
lion; but a quarrel happening they shall encounter one another ...
but the courage of the beast shall prevail. Then shall one come with a
drum, and appease the rage of the lion. Therefore shall the people of
the kingdom be at peace, and provoke the lion to a dose of physic!"

Then as to Arthur. In Geoffrey's history he appears mainly as a great
continental conqueror--a kind of Welsh Charlemagne. "Many of the most
picturesque and significant features of the full-grown legend (as
Professor Lewis Jones points out)[1] are not even faintly suggested by
Geoffrey. The Round Table, Lancelot, the Grail were unknown to him,
and were grafted on the legend from other sources." But he made the
Arthurian legends fashionable; he opened for all Europe the hitherto
unknown and inexhaustible well of Celtic romance; and it may be said
without exaggeration that "no mediaeval work has left behind it so
prolific a literary offspring as the History of the Kings of Britain."

The value of Geoffrey is not in his fictions about past history, but
in his influence on the literature and ideas of the future. He stands
at the beginning of a new age: he is the first spokesman of the Age of
the new Chivalry. Read his glowing account of Arthur's court, where
"the knights were famous for feats of chivalry, and the women esteemed
none worthy of their love but such as had given proof of their valour
in three several battles. Thus was the valour of the men an
encouragement for the women's chastity, and the love of the women a
spur to the knight's bravery." Or, as an old French version has it,
"Love which made the women more chaste made the knights more valorous
and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has
profoundly influenced life and thought ever since--love no longer a
weakn