The last theory, that the Legend may be almost if not quite sufficiently accounted for as a legitimate descendant of previous literature, classical and other (including Oriental sources), has been the least general favourite. As originally started, or at least introduced into English literary history, by Warton, it suffered rather unfairly from some defects of its author. Warton's _History of English Poetry_ marks, and to some extent helped to produce, an immense change for the better in the study of English literature: and he deserved the contemptuous remarks of some later critics as little as he did the savage attacks of the half-lunatic Ritson. But he was rather indolent; his knowledge, though wide, was very desultory and full of scraps and gaps; and, like others in his century, he was much too fond of hypothesis without hypostasis, of supposition without substance. He was very excusably but very unluckily ignorant of what may be called the comparative panorama of English and European literature during the Middle Ages, and was apt to assign to direct borrowing or imitation those fresh workings up of the eternal _donnees_ of all literary art which presented themselves. As the theory has been more recently presented with far exacter learning and greater judgment by his successor, Mr Courthope,[67] it is much relieved from most of its disabilities. I have myself no doubt that the Greek romances (see chap. ix.) _do_ represent at the least a stage directly connecting classical with romantic literature; and that the later of them (which, it must be remembered, were composed in this very twelfth century, and must have come under the notice of the crusaders), _may_ have exercised a direct effect upon mediaeval Romance proper. I formed this opinion more than twenty years ago, when I first read _Hysminias and Hysmine_; and I have never seen reason to change it since. But these influences, though not to be left out of the question, are perhaps in one respect too general, and in another too partial, to explain the precise matter. That the Arthurian Romances, in common with all the romances, and with mediaeval literature generally, were much more influenced by the traditional classical culture than used at one time to be thought, I have believed ever since I began to study the subject, and am more and more convinced of it. The classics both of Europe and the East played a part, and no small part, in bringing about the new literature; but it was only a part. [Footnote 67: In his _History of English Poetry_, vol. i., London, 1895, and in a subsequent controversy with Mr Nutt, which was carried on in the _Athenaeum_.] [Sidenote: _The English or Anglo-Norman pretensions._]