Caxton’s preface to the _Morte Darthur_ has here been taken as a sort of preliminary text, not only because that famous work is, by general consent, the fullest and the most fascinating presentment in English of the great congeries of tales that make up the so-called Arthurian “cycle,” but also because Caxton’s own words, as already hinted, serve to raise, in a peculiarly suggestive way, most of the questions with which the critical student of the Arthurian legends and their origin has to deal to-day. The _Morte Darthur_ itself, it has become a commonplace to say, remains unchallenged, in spite of its inconsequences and inconsistencies, the supreme Arthurian “prose epic” in English. The work is not, of course, “epic” in any strict sense, but it was issued by Caxton to the readers of his day as pre-eminently an English _Arthuriad_. Arthur alone of “the Nine Worthies” had not had justice done to him in his own country. The two other Christian “worthies,” Charlemagne and Godfrey of Boulogne, had been adequately celebrated abroad, and Caxton himself had contributed to spread the latter’s fame in England. Why should the great English “Christian king” remain unhonoured in his own land? It was, therefore, with the patriotic object of blazoning the fame of the greatest of _English_ heroes that Caxton undertook the publication of Malory’s book. Now, the historical Arthur, so far as we know him, is not English at all, but a “British” hero, who fought against the Saxons, and whose prowess is one of the jealously treasured memories of the Celtic peoples, and particularly of the Welsh. By what process of transformation had this British warrior become, by Caxton’s time, the ideal “Christian king” of England? And why, again, should he be singled out as pre-eminently one of the three _Christian_ kings of the world, and his name linked with “the noble history of the Saint Greal”? Here we come at once upon one of the disturbing influences in what ought to be a straightforward record of the doings of a fighting chieftain of early Britain. The quest of the Holy Grail had, originally, nothing to do with Arthur.[7] But, by Caxton’s time, the mystic, or religious, element in Arthurian romance had become so prominent as to make it impossible to think of Arthur except in association with the “high history” of the Grail. A further complication meets us when we are told that Malory took his material for his narrative of the deeds of the paramount English, or British, hero “out of certain books of French.” Why should Malory so constantly refer to “the French book” as his authority, and have so little to go upon that had been written in English, or in Welsh? Why is it that to-day, after four centuries of diligent search in both private and public libraries, the amount of extant British literature of an indubitably ancient date dealing with Arthur’s exploits is so scanty? For Caxton’s statement still remains substantially true that,