reference to which is a commonplace of the subject—­from which it was taken, let them; they have not yet.  If they point out (as they can) French and English books from which parts of it were taken, similar things may be done with Dante and Chaucer, with Shakespeare and Milton, and very probably could have been done with Homer.  It is what the artist does with his materials, not where he gets them, that is the question.  And Malory has done, with his materials, a very great thing indeed.  He is working no doubt to a certain extent blindly; working much better than he knows, and sometimes as he would not work if he knew better; though whether he would work as well if he knew better is quite a different point.  Sometimes he may not take the best available version of a story; but we must ask ourselves whether he knew it.  Sometimes he may put in what we do not want:  but we must ask ourselves whether there was not a reason for doing so, to him if not to us.  What is certain is that he, and he only in any language, makes of this vast assemblage of stories one story, and one book.  He does it (much more than half unconsciously no doubt) by following the lines of, as I suppose, Walter Map, and fusing the different motives, holding to this method even in parts of the legend with which, so far as one knows, Map cannot have meddled.  Before him this legend consisted of half a dozen great divisions—­a word which may be used of malice prepense.  These were the story of Merlin, that of Arthur’s own origin, and that of the previous history of the Graal for introduction; the story of Arthur’s winning the throne, of the Round Table, and of the marriage with Guinevere, also endless branchings of special knights’ adventures, and of the wars with the Saxons and the Romans, and the episode of the False Guinevere—­with whom for a time Arthur lives as with his queen—­for middle; and the story of the Graal-quest, the love of Lancelot for the Queen, and the rebellion of Mordred with its fatal consequences, for close.  Exactly how much of this Malory personally had before him we cannot of course say:  but of any working up of the whole that would have spared him trouble, and robbed him of credit, we do not know.  In fact the favourite term “compiler” gives up the only dangerous point.  Now in what way did Malory compile?  In the way in which the ordinary compiler proceeds he most emphatically does not.  He cuts down the preliminaries mercilessly:  but they can be perfectly well spared.  He misses almost all the wars with the Saxons, which are the most tedious parts of the originals.  He adopts, most happily, the early, not the late, placing of those with the Romans.  He drops the false Guinevere altogether, which is imperative, that the true one may have no right to plead the incident—­though he does not represent Arthur as “blameless.”  He gives the roman d’aventures side of the Round Table stories, from the great Tristram and Palomides romances through the Beaumains episode downwards, because they