Before his death the _Historia Britonum_ had already become a model and a quarry for poets and chroniclers. The list of imitators begins with Geoffrey Gaimar, the author of the _Estorie des Engles_ (c. 1147), and Wace, whose _Roman de Brut_ (1155) is partly a translation and partly a free paraphrase of the _Historia_. In the next century the influence of Geoffrey is unmistakably attested by the _Brut_ of Layamon, and the rhyming English chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. Among later historians who were deceived by the _Historia Britonum_ it is only needful to mention Higdon, Hardyng, Fabyan (1512), Holinshed (1580) and John Milton. Still greater was the influence of Geoffrey upon those writers who, like Warner in _Albion's England_ (1586), and Drayton in _Polyolbion_ (1613), deliberately made their accounts of English history as poetical as possible. The stories which Geoffrey preserved or invented were not infrequently a source of inspiration to literary artists. The earliest English tragedy, _Gorboduc_ (1565), the _Mirror for Magistrates_ (1587), and Shakespeare's Lear, are instances in point. It was, however, the Arthurian legend which of all his fabrications attained the greatest vogue. In the work of expanding and elaborating this theme the successors of Geoffrey went as far beyond him as he had gone beyond Nennius; but he retains the credit due to the founder of a great school. Marie de France, who wrote at the court of Henry II., and Chretien de Troyes, her French contemporary, were the earliest of the avowed romancers to take up the theme. The succeeding age saw the Arthurian story popularized, through translations of the French romances, as far afield as Germany and Scandinavia. It produced in England the _Roman du Saint Graal_ and the _Roman de Merlin_, both from the pen of Robert de Borron; the _Roman de Lancelot_; the _Roman de Tristan_, which is attributed to a fictitious Lucas de Gast. In the reign of Edward IV. Sir Thomas Malory paraphrased and arranged the best episodes of these romances in English prose. His _Morte d'Arthur_, printed by Caxton in 1485, epitomizes the rich mythology which Geoffrey's work had first called into life, and gave the Arthurian story a lasting place in the English imagination. The influence of the _Historia Britonum_ may be illustrated in another way, by enumerating the more familiar of the legends to which it first gave popularity. Of the twelve books into which it is divided only three (Bks. IX., X., XI.) are concerned with Arthur. Earlier in the work, however, we have the adventures of Brutus; of his follower Corineus, the vanquisher of the Cornish giant Goemagol (Gogmagog); of Locrinus and his daughter Sabre (immortalized in Milton's _Comus_); of Bladud the builder of Bath; of Lear and his daughters; of the three pairs of brothers, Ferrex and Porrex, Brennius and Belinus, Elidure and Peridure. The story of Vortigern and Rowena takes its final form in the _Historia Britonum_;