own notions, the material he received from his teachers; the prowess of the great heroes would become more and more astonishing, more and more calculated to keep awake the feasted nobles who listened to the song.  In an age when writing, if it exists at all, is a rare and secret art, the mists of antiquity descend after a very few generations.  There is little chance of the songs of the bards being checked by recorded actuality; for if anyone could write at all, it would be the bards themselves, who would use the mystery or purposes of their own trade.  In quite a short time, oral tradition, in keeping of the bards, whose business is to purvey wonders, makes the champions perform easily, deeds which “the men of the present time” can only gape at; and every bard takes over the stock of tradition, not from original sources, but from the mingled fantasy and memory of the bard who came just before him.  So that when this tradition survives at all, it survives in a form very different from what it was in the beginning.  But apparently we can mark out several stages in the fortunes of the tradition.  It is first of all court poetry, or perhaps baronial poetry; and it may survive as that.  From this stage it may pass into possession of the common people, or at least into the possession of bards whose clients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomes the poetry of cottages and taverns.  It may survive as this.  Finally, it may be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greater sophistication and nicety than it was in either of the preceding stages.  But each stage leaves its sign on the tradition.

All this gives us what is conveniently called “epic material”; the material out of which epic poetry might be made.  But it does not give us epic poetry.  The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always.  Instances are our own Border Ballads and Robin Hood Ballads; the Servian cycles of the Battle of Kossovo and the prowess of Marko; the modern Greek songs of the revolt against Turkey (the conditions of which seem to have been similar to those which surrounded the growth of our riding ballads); the fragments of Finnish legend which were pieced together into the Kalevala; the Ossianic poetry; and perhaps some of the minor sagas should be put in here.  Then there are the glorious Welsh stories of Arthur, Tristram, and the rest, and the not less glorious Irish stories of Deirdre and Cuchulain; both of these noble masses of legend seem to have only just missed the final shaping which turns epic material into epic poetry.  For epic material, it must be repeated, is not the same thing as epic poetry.  Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, loosely related, sometimes contradictory, each piece of comparatively small size, with no intention beyond hearty narrative.  It is a heap of excellent stones,