older Britain, the foe pressed hard upon their fellow-countrymen, and
drove them into the western limits of the island, into the fastnesses of
Wales, and the rocky parts of Cornwall. Here, and in Northern France,
proud in their defeat and tenacious of the instincts of their race, they
lived and still live, in the imaginative memories of the past. For them
the future held little store of earthly gain, and yet they made the whole
world their debtor.

Even in the courts of the conqueror Saxon their strange and beautiful
poetry won favour, and in a later century the Norman kings and barons
welcomed eagerly the wandering minstrels from Brittany and Wales. But it
was not from these scattered sources that Celtic traditions became a
European possession, as a brief statement of literary history will
clearly show.

The first recorded mention of Arthur's name occurs in a brief and
anonymous _History of the Britons_, written in Latin in the tenth
century, and attributed to Nennius. This history is curiously amplified
in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, first in a story dealing
with the prophecies of Merlin, and later in a _History of the Kings of
Britain_. This book, with its brilliant description of the court of
Arthur, gave the legend a widespread popularity. It was four times
within the same century translated into French verse, the most famous of
these renderings being the version of Wace, called _Le Brut_, which makes
some addition to Geoffrey's original, gathered from Breton sources. In
the same century, too, Chrétien de Troyes, the foremost of Arthurian
poets, composed his famous cycle of poems.

Of all these manifold sources Tennyson was confessedly ignorant. Where
the details are not of his own invention, his _Idylls of the King_ rest