the Charlemagne legend in France, and made
itself master of the mind of western Europe in the Middle Ages;--
I imagine there would have been an Arthur. Some chieftain
who won battles; held up the Saxon advance for a long time,
probably; and reminded his people of some ancient hero, or
perhaps of a God Artaios, thought to be reincarnate in him.

Not that I believe that the mold of mind of which we have
been speaking could have been created in the fifth and sixth
centuries. Whoever Arthur was--the Arthur of that time,--however
great and successful, he could but have reigned over some part of
Britain, precariously resisting and checking the barbarians; but
tradition tells of a very Chakravartin, swaying the western
world. No; that mold certainly was a relic of the lost Celtic
empire. It had grown dim during the Roman domination; but it
had survived, and the coming in of the Crest-Wave had put new
life into it. Nothing could have put new life into it, it seems
to me, but such a coming in of the Crest-Wave,--to make it endure
and inspire men as it did. I think it is certain the Crest-Wave,
--a backwash of it, a little portion of it, but enough to
make life hum and the age important,--was among the Welsh between
410 and 542. The wave was receding towards the Western Laya-Center;
and gathered force as it rolled from Ausonius' Gaul to Taliesin's
Wales, and from Tallesin's Wales to Ireland.

Let us look at the probabilities in Britain in 410, seeing what
we can. Three hundred years of Roman rule had left that
province, I cannot doubt, rich and populous, with agriculture in
a better condition than it has been since:--remember the corn
Julian brought thence to feed Gaul. We must think of a large
population, Roman and Romanized, mixed of every race in the Roman
world, in the cities; and of another population, still Celtic,
in the mountains of northern England, in the western Scottish
Lowlands, and especially in Wales. It was the former element,
the cities, that appealed to Aetius for help against the Picts
and Scots; the latter, dwelling in less accessible places,
fought as soon as they felt the invaders' pressure. Wales itself
had never been all held by the Romans. The legions had covered
the south from Caerleon in Monmouthshire to Saint Davids in
Penfro, a region held by Silures and Gaelic Celts. They
had marched along the northern coast to the island of Mona,
establishing, just as Edward the Conqueror did in hi