[Sidenote: ARTHURIAN ROMANCES]

His work made a sensation. A score of French poets seized upon his
Arthurian legends and wove them into romances, each adding freely to
Geoffrey's narrative. The poet Wace added the tale of the Round Table, and
another poet (Walter Map, perhaps) began a cycle of stories concerning
Galahad and the quest of the Holy Grail. [Footnote: The Holy Grail, or San
Graal, or Sancgreal, was represented as the cup from which Christ drank
with his disciples at the Last Supper. Legend said that the sacred cup had
been brought to England, and Arthur's knights undertook, as the most
compelling of all duties, to search until they found it.]

The origin of these Arthurian romances, which reappear so often in English
poetry, is forever shrouded in mystery. The point to remember is, that we
owe them all to the genius of the native Celts; that it was Geoffrey of
Monmouth who first wrote them in Latin prose, and so preserved a treasure
which else had been lost; and that it was the French _trouveres,_ or
poets, who completed the various cycles of romances which were later
collected in Malory's _Morte d' Arthur._

TYPES OF MIDDLE-ENGLISH LITERATURE. It has long been customary to begin the
study of English literature with Chaucer; but that does not mean that he
invented any new form of poetry or prose. To examine any collection of our
early literature, such as Cook's _Middle-English Reader_, is to
discover that many literary types were flourishing in Chaucer's day, and
that some of these had grown old-fashioned before he began to use them.

[Sidenote: METRICAL ROMANCES]

In the thirteenth century, for example, the favorite type of literature in