otony were not by association a
question-begging word, it might be applied with much justice to both:
and it is consequently not necessary to have read every Icelandic saga
in the original, every Provencal lyric with a strictly philological
competence, in order to appreciate the literary value of the
contributions which these two charming isolations made to European
history.

Yet again, the production of Spain during this time is of the
smallest, containing, perhaps, nothing save the _Poem of the Cid_,
which is at once certain in point of time and distinguished in point
of merit; while that of Italy is not merely dependent to a great
extent on Provencal, but can be better handled in connection with
Dante, who falls to the province of the writer of the next volume. The
Celtic tongues were either past or not come to their chief
performance; and it so happens that, by the confession of the most
ardent Celticists who speak as scholars, no Welsh or Irish _texts_
affecting the capital question of the Arthurian legends can be
certainly attributed to the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries. It
seemed to me, therefore, that I might, without presumption, undertake
the volume. Of the execution as apart from the undertaking others must
judge. I will only mention (to show that the book is not a mere
compilation) that the chapter on the Arthurian Romances summarises,
for the first time in print, the result of twenty years' independent
study of the subject, and that the views on prosody given in chapter
v. are not borrowed from any one.

I have dwelt on this less as a matter of personal explanation, which
is generally superfluous to friends and never disarms foes, than in
order to explain and illustrate the principle of the Series. All its
volumes have been or will be allotted on the same principle--that of
occasionally postponing or antedating detailed attention to the
literary production of countries which were not at the moment of the
first consequence, while giving greater prominence to those that were:
but at the same time never losing sight of the _general_ literary
drift of the whole of Europe during the whole period in each case. It
is to guard against such loss of sight that the plan of committing
each period to a single writer, instead of strapping together bundles
of independent essays by specialists, has been adopted. For a survey
of each time is what is aimed at, and a survey is not to be
satisfactorily made but by o