ity, to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he
said, by a certain Walter, archdeacon of Oxford. Here appeared that
line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern
readers in the plays of Shakspere and the poems of Tennyson: Lear and
his {22} three daughters; Cymbeline, Gorboduc, the subject of the
earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in
1562; Locrine and his Queen Gwendolen, and his daughter Sabrina, who
gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite
song in Milton's _Comus_, and became the heroine of the tragedy of
_Locrine_, once attributed to Shakspere; and above all, Arthur, the son
of Uther Pendragon, and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155 Wace,
the author of the _Roman de Rou_, turned Geoffrey's work into a French
poem entitled _Brut d' Angleterre_, "brut" being a Welsh word meaning
chronicle. About the year 1200 Wace's poem was Englished by Layamon, a
priest of Arley Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Layamon's
_Brut_ is in thirty thousand lines, partly alliterative and partly
rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words.
The style is rude but vigorous, and, at times, highly imaginative.
Wace had amplified Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Layamon made much
larger additions, derived, no doubt, from legends current on the Welsh
border. In particular the story of Arthur grew in his hands into
something like fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the
wizard; of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen, Guenever; and the
treachery of his nephew, Modred. His narration of the last great
battle between Arthur and Modred; of the wounding of the king--"fifteen
fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least {23} three gloves
thrust--"; and of the little boat with "two women therein, wonderly
dight," which came to bear him away to Avalun and the Queen Argante,
"sheenest of all elves," whence he shall come again, according to
Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons; all this left little, in
essentials, for Tennyson to add in his _Death of Arthur_. This new
material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman romancers.
The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afloat.
Walter Map, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II., in two French prose
romances, connected with it the church legend of the Sangreal, or holy
cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph
of