Now, it so happens that the “British record,” which Wordsworth, with a poet’s licence, so confidently tells us was “long concealed in old Armorica,” has never yet been discovered, and the mystery surrounding it is the chief critical problem which still baffles every student of the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. This problem is deliberately set us by Geoffrey himself at the very beginning of his Chronicle, for he states that he is simply translating into the Latin tongue “a certain most ancient book in the British language,” which,--as he adds in his epilogue,--“Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, brought hither from Brittany.” That he had some “book,” or books, other than Nennius, to supply him with material, is not only highly probable, but almost certain; and, if we are to believe his own statement, that book must have been in “the British language.” But the fact remains that no document, either in Welsh or in Breton, has yet been found even remotely resembling that which Walter, the archdeacon, is said to have brought over from Brittany. It is possible, however, that those who have been searching for it have attached too much importance to the “British” book, and that, even were it to be discovered, its contents would only serve to show how deftly Geoffrey manipulated his material, and how artfully he succeeded in making his story of Arthur just what his Norman patrons, and the new romantic taste of the time, required. No intelligent reader of Geoffrey’s _History_ can, at any rate, escape the conclusion that the work, especially in its treatment of both the Brutus legend and the career of Arthur, was written with a motive. Besides, it is a work _sui generis_ among the chronicle literature of its time, and bears clear evidence of deliberate romantic embellishment. In order to apprehend what Geoffrey’s motive may have been, and how far he is to be regarded as a conscious romancer, it is necessary, first of all, to know something of the writer himself and of the age and the people for whom he wrote; a brief examination of the actual contents of the _History_, and more particularly of its Arthurian portions, may perhaps serve, subsequently, to clear up as much of the rest of the matter as is possible, in the absence of any knowledge of “the British book.”