The _gradual growth_ of what are generally regarded as the _spontaneous_ products of the imagination, in the region of art, is well expressed in Mr. Tylor's admirable work on "Primitive Culture." He says--"Amongst those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge, to be dispelled by a little more, is the belief in the almost boundless creative power in the human imagination. The superficial student, mazed in a crowd of seemingly wild and lawless fancies, which he thinks to have no reason in nature nor pattern in the material world, at first concludes them to be new births from the imagination of the poet, the tale-teller, and the seer. But little by little, in what seemed the most spontaneous fiction, a more comprehensive study of the source of poetry and romance begins to disclose a cause for each fancy, an education that has led up to each train of thought, a store of inherited materials from out of which each province of the poet's land has been shaped and built over and peopled. Backward from our own times, the course of mental history may be traced through the changes wrought by modern schools of thought and fancy upon an intellectual inheritance handed down to them from earlier generations. And through remote periods, as we recede more nearly towards primitive conditions of our race, the threads which connect new thought with old do not always vanish from our sight. It is in large measure possible to follow them as clues leading back to that actual experience of nature and life which is the ultimate source of human fancy." Perhaps no finer illustration, at least in English literature, of the truthfulness of this position can be cited than the Arthurian art-products with which I am dealing. In them we have embodied thoughts and fancies of the earlier myth-makers of our common Aryan race, legends and quasi-historical traditions of mediæval times, the more artistic romances of a relatively recent and more highly-cultured period, and, lastly, the lyrics of Morris and others, and the splendid capital which worthily crowns this truly historic _literary_ column, in the exquisitely felt and gracefully wrought "Idylls of the King," by the laureate of the Victorian age, Alfred Tennyson. The last named says-- Lancelot spoke And answered him at full, as having been With Arthur in the fight which all day long Rang by the white mouth of the violent Glem: And in the four wild battles by the shore Of Douglas. (_Idylls, p. 162._)