iver Forth.

And so, in history, Arthur, the hero of such a mass of romantic
story, is little more than a name, and it is hardly possible to
explain how he attained to such renown as the hero of marvellous
and, sometimes, magical feats, unless on the supposition that he
became confused with some legendary hero, half god, half man, whose
fame he added to his own. Perhaps not the least marvel about him is
that he who was the hero of the Britons, should have become the
national hero of the English race that he spent his life in
fighting. Yet that is what did happen, though not till long
afterwards, when the victorious English, in their turn, bent before
their conquering kinsmen, the Normans.

Now in the reign of the third Norman king, Henry I., there lived a
certain Welsh priest known as Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey seems
to have been much about the Court, and perhaps it was the Norman
love of stories that first made him think of writing his _History
of the British Kings_. A wonderful tale he told of all the British
kings from the time that Brut the Trojan settled in the country and
called it, after himself, Britain! For Geoffrey's book was history
only in name. What he tells us is that he was given an ancient
chronicle found in Brittany, and was asked to translate it from
Welsh into the better known language, Latin. It is hardly likely,
however, that Geoffrey himself expected his statement to be taken
quite seriously. Even in his own day, not every one believed in
him, for a certain Yorkshire monk declared that the historian had
"lied saucily and shamelessly"; and some years later, Gerald the
Welshman tells of a man who had intercourse with devils, from whose
sway, however, he could be freed if a Bible were placed upon his
breast, whereas he was completely under their control if Geoffrey's
_History_ were laid upon him, just because the book was so full of
lies.

It is quite certain that Geoffrey did not write history, but he did
make a capital story, partly by collecting legends about British
heroes, partly by inventing stories of his own; so that though he
is not entitled to fame as an historian, he may claim to rank high
as a romantic story-teller who set a fashion destined to last for
some three centuries.

So popular was his book that, not only in England, but, in an even
greater degree, on the Continent, writers were soon at work,
collecting and making more stories about the greatest of his kings,
Arthur. By