despair of the historian.[5] But it is, for that very reason, the paradise of the makers and students of romance; and, as a result, the mass of Arthurian literature of all kinds which exists to-day,--prose and verse romances, critical studies of “origins,” scholarly quests along perilous paths of mythology and folk-lore,--is ponderous enough to appal the most omnivorous reader. The Arthurian legend has indeed been of late, both in Europe and in America, the subject of so much mythological, ethnological and philological speculation as to tempt the unsophisticated lover of mere literature to say, when he contemplates the mounting pile of printed critical matter, that Arthur’s sepulchre, wherever his mortal remains may lie, is at last well on the way to be built in our libraries. There is nothing in literary history quite like the fascination which Arthurian romance has had for so many diverse types of mind. Poets, musicians, painters, religious mystics, folk-lorists, philologists--all have yielded to it. For some people the study of Arthurian nomenclature is as engrossing a pursuit as the interpretation of ‘The Idylls of the King’ is for others, while there are those who derive as much pleasure from investigating the symbolic meanings of the story of the Grail as lovers of music do from listening to the mighty harmonies of _Parzival_ or _Tristan und Isolde_. All this only makes us wonder the more why so obscure and elusive a figure as the historical British Arthur should have become the centre of a romantic cycle which presents so many varied and persistent features of interest. Even in Caxton’s time, as in our own, there were sceptics “who held opinion that there was no such Arthur, and that all books as been made of him be but feigned and fables.” This is not surprising, when it is remembered that even when Geoffrey of Monmouth, some three centuries before, gave to the world his astonishing record of Arthur’s achievements, a few obstinate critics had their doubts about the whole matter, and one of them--the chronicler, William of Newburgh--roundly denounced Geoffrey for having, by his “saucy and shameless lies,” made “the little finger of his Arthur bigger than the back of Alexander the Great.”[6] Caxton’s way with the sceptics is ingenuous and short, but it is curious to note how his preface to the _Morte Darthur_ succeeds, in its own quaint and crude fashion, in suggesting what are still the main problems of constructive Arthurian criticism. It will not do, he says in effect, to dismiss summarily all Arthurian traditions as so many old wives’ tales. They are too widespread and persistent not to have some basis of solid fact underlying them: besides, the people who believe them, love them, and write of them, cannot all be credulous fools. Caxton, in particular, cites the case of the “noble gentlemen” who “required him to imprint the history of the noble king and conqueror, king