The praise of the knights of the Round Table, he adds in another place, was loud throughout the world. Again, Wace adds considerably to Geoffrey’s description of the passing of Arthur. The king is not only taken to Avalon “to be cured of his wounds,”--the Bretons confidently expect his recovery, and look for his return. “He is still there; the Bretons await him; they say that he will come back and live again.” Wace’s metrical chronicle formed the basis of the still more elaborate, and the more poetical, metrical _Brut_ of the Englishman, Layamon,--the most remarkable English contribution to Arthurian literature until we come to _Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight_. Here we have a brave attempt to do what Caxton long afterwards desired,--to make Arthur the best “remembered among Englishmen before all other Christian kings.” Wace’s poem was a contribution to the polite literature of the Normans; Layamon’s, though his matter is so largely borrowed from Wace, is a patriotic English epic. It was his aspiration, as we learn from the opening lines of his _Brut_, “to tell the noble deeds of England,” and in his record of those deeds Arthur, who had been all but denationalised by the romancers, is restored to his fatherland and duly figures as the great “Christian king of England.” But Layamon was a poet no less than a patriotic chronicler, and could not help listening to the blowings of “the horns of Elfland.” Arthur’s prowess and royal attributes were such as could not be explained except for the intervention of superhuman powers. Elves surrounded him when he came into the world; it was from them that he derived the gifts which made him the best of knights and the mightiest of kings.[90] Again, at his passing, Arthur says that he is about to go to the splendid elf, Argante (Morgain, or Morgan, _la fée_); “she will heal me of all my wounds, and shall make me all hale; and afterwards I shall come to my kingdom and dwell among the Britons with mickle joy.”[91] Arthur’s byrnie was made for him by Wygar, “the elvish smith”; his spear by Griffin, of the city of the wizard Merlin (Kaermerddin); his sword, Caliburn, was wrought with magic craft in Avalon; the Round Table was constructed by a strange carpenter from oversea. Layamon’s account of the Round Table is much fuller than that of Wace, and is evidently based upon popular legends of wizardry. It was in Cornwall, when there was a quarrel among his knights, that Arthur met the stranger from beyond the sea who offered to “make him a board, wondrous fair, at which sixteen hundred men and more might sit.”[92] Though it was so large, and took four weeks to make, the table could, by some magic means, be carried by Arthur as he rode, and placed by him wherever he chose. Layamon had evidently heard more about the Round Table, “of which the Britons boast,” than he cares to disclose in his poem; but “the Britons,” he tells us at the end of his description of the Table,