history of “inauspicious stars” which hardly any man, of the many who have handled it in prose and verse, has been able to spoil.  Our Middle English form is not consummate, and is in some places crude in manner and in sentiment.  But it is notable that the exaggerated and inartistic repulsiveness of Mark, resorted to by later writers as a rather rudimentary means of exciting compassion for the lovers, is not to be found here; in fact, one of the most poetical touches in the piece is one of sympathy for the luckless husband, when he sees the face of his faithless queen slumbering by her lover’s side with the sun on it.  “And Mark rewed therefore.”  The story, especially in its completion with the “Iseult of Brittany” part and the death of Tristram, gives scope for every possible faculty and craftsmanship of the most analytic as of the most picturesque novelist of modern times.  There is nothing in the least like it in ancient literature; and to get a single writer who would do it justice in modern times we should have to take the best notes of Charles Kingsley, and Mr. Blackmore, and Mr. Meredith, leaving out all their faults, and combine.  It is not surprising that, in the very infancy of the art, nobody in German or French, any more than in English (though the German here is, as it happens, the best), should have done it full justice; but it is a wonder that a story of such capacities should have been sketched, and even worked out in considerable detail, so early.

Of the far greater story of which Tristram is a mere episode and hardly even that—­a chantry or out-lying chapel of the great cathedral—­the Arthurian Legend, the earlier English versions, or rather the earlier versions in English, are, as has been said, not only fragmentary but disappointing.  There is nothing in the least strange in this, even though (as the present writer, who can speak with indifferent knowledge, still firmly holds) the conception of the story itself in its greatest and unifying stage is probably if not certainly English.  The original sources of the story of Arthur are no doubt Celtic; they give themselves out as being so, and there is absolutely no critical reason for disbelieving them.  But in these earlier forms—­the authority of the most learned Celticists who have any literary gift and any appreciation of evidence is decisive on this point—­not only are the most characteristic unifying features—­the Graal story and the love of Lancelot and Guinevere—­completely wanting, but the great stroke of genius—­the connection of these two and the subordination of all minor legends as to the dim national hero, Arthur, with those about him—­is more conspicuously wanting still.  Whether it was the Englishman Walter Map, the Norman Robert de Borron, or the Frenchman Chrestien de Troyes, to whom this flash of illumination came, has never been proved—­will pretty certainly now never be proved.  M. Gaston Paris failed to do it; and it is exceedingly unlikely that,