[15] _Owain Miles_, edited from the unique MS. by Turnbull and Laing, Edinburgh, 1837. _The Purgatory of Saint Patrick_ will be found in Horstmann’s Southern Legendary. I have given a modern English rendering of part of _Owain Miles_ in my _Chief Middle-English Poets_, published by Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, U.S.A. [16] Cf. _op. cit_. pp. 148 _et seq_. [17] _Op. cit_. pp. 155 and 254. CHAPTER XIV The Author [1] Cf. Mead, _Thrice Greatest Hermes_, Vol. III. p. 295. On this point the still untranslated _corpus_ of Bardic poetry may possibly throw light. [2] _The Quest of The Holy Grail_ (_Quest_ series, Bell, 1913). [3] On the point that Chrétien was treating an already popular theme, cf. Brugger, _Enserrement Merlin_, I. (_Zeitschrift für Franz. Sprache_, XXIX.). [4] That is, the relationship is due to romantic tradition, not to Mystery survival, as Dr Nitze maintains. [5] Cf. _Romania_, Vol. XXXIII. pp. 333 _et seq_. [6] Cf. _Legend of Sir Perceval_, Vol. I. Chap. 12, for the passages referred to, also article in _Romania_, XXXIII. [7] Cf. my _Quest of the Holy Grail_, pp. 110 _et seq_. [8] Cf. _Tristan_ (Bédier’s ed.), Vol. I. l. 2120. [9] A critic of my _Quest_ volume remarks that “we have as little faith in Wauchier’s appeal to a Welshman Bleheris as source for his continuation of Chrétien’s ‘_Perceval_’ as we have in Layamon’s similar appeal to Bede and St Austin at the beginning of the ‘_Brut_.’” The remark seems to me singularly inept, there is no parallel between the cases. In the first place Layamon does not refer to Bede and St Austin as _source_, but as _models_, a very different thing. Then the statement is discredited by the fact that we possess the writings of these men, and know them to be of another character than Metrical Chronicles. In the case of Wauchier his reference does not stand alone; it is one of a group, and that group marked by an extraordinary unanimity of statement; whoever Bleheris may have been he was certainly possessed of two definite qualifications—he knew a vast number of tales, and he possessed a remarkable gift of narration, _i.e._, he was a story-teller, _par excellence_. Thus he was, _a priori_, a probable source for that section of Wauchier’s work which is attributed to him, a section consisting of short, picturesque, and mutually independent tales, which formed part of a popular collection. It is misleading to speak as if Wauchier refers to him as general source for his _Perceval_ continuation; the references are clearly marked and refer to _Gawain_ tales. Apart from the fact that Wauchier’s reference does not stand alone we have independent evidence of the actual existence of such a group of tales, in our surviving _Gawain_ poems, certain of which, such as _Kay and the Spit_, and _Golagros and Gawayne_ are versions of the stories given by Wauchier, while the author of the _Elucidation_ was also familiar with the same collection. If evidence for the identity of