The various stages in the romantic use and adaptation of the Arthurian legends, mainly by French writers, are not difficult to trace. First of all, we get the metrical chronicles,--attempts to put Geoffrey’s quasi-historical record into a poetical form which much better suited its heroic theme than the sober garb of Latin prose. Wace’s _Brut_, completed in the year of Geoffrey’s death, is our earliest extant example of this poetical treatment of Arthurian story, and his work, as we have seen, was written with a much more deliberate purpose of pleasing courtly readers than Geoffrey’s. The tastes and requirements of such readers, regarded solely from the standpoint of their interest in knight-errantry and romantic love, determine the character of the second and the third phase which Arthurian literature assumes. The metrical, and the prose, French romances began to be written about the same time, and from the same motive. It is generally held, however, that the poetical romancers were in the field before the prose writers: at any rate, the most famous of the metrical romances--those of Chrétien de Troyes--are earlier than any prose romances which have come down to us. Chrétien, in whom his admirers find the greatest mediæval poet before Chaucer, wrote for the Norman aristocracy, and especially for ladies, what were practically the fashionable novels of the day. He dedicates his _Chevalier de la Charrette_ to the countess Marie of Champagne, whose interest in everything appertaining to the French cult of _l’amour courtois_ is well known; and all his poetical ‘novels’ are largely designed for the entertainment of women eager for literature of a more sentimental appeal than sagas of monster-slayers and warriors. The sudden appearance of the immortal love-stories of Tristan and Iseult, and of Lancelot and Guinevere, shows how triumphantly the French romancers responded to the demands made of them.