But when we come to the Legend proper, and to its most important and most interesting characteristics, to its working up, to that extraordinary development which in a bare half-century (and half a century, though a long time now, was a very short one seven hundred years ago) evolved almost a whole library of romance from the scanty _faits et gestes_ of Arthur as given by Geoffrey,--then I must confess that I can see no evidence of Celtic forces or sources having played any great part in the matter. If Caradoc of Lancarvan wrote the _Vita Gildae_--and it is pretty certainly not later than his day, while if it was not written by him it must have been written by some one equally well acquainted with traditions, British and Armorican, of St Gildas--if he or any one else gave us what he has given about Arthur and Gildas himself, about Arthur's wife and Melvas, and if traditions existed of Galahad or even Percivale and the Graal, of the Round Table, most of all of Lancelot,--why in the name of all that is critical and probable did he not give us more? His hero could not have been ignorant of the matter, the legends of his hero could hardly have been silent about them. It is hard to believe that anybody can read the famous conclusion of Geoffrey's history without seeing a deliberate impishness in it, without being certain that the tale of the Book and the Archdeacon is a tale of a Cock and a Bull. But if it be taken seriously, how could the "British book" have failed to contain something more like our Legend of Arthur than Geoffrey has given us, and how, if it existed and gave more, could Geoffrey have failed to impart it? Why should the Welsh, the proudest in their way of all peoples, and not the least gifted in literature, when they came to give Arthurian legends of the kind which we recognise, either translate them from the French or at least adapt and adjust them thereto? On the other hand, the supposition that the fashioning, partly out of vague tradition, partly it may be out of more definite Celtic tales like that of Tristram, partly from classical, Eastern, and other sources, belongs to the English in the wide sense--that is to say, the nation or nations partly under English rule proper, partly under Scottish, partly under that of the feudatories or allies of the English kings as Dukes of Normandy--has to support it not merely the arguments stated above as to the concentration of the legend proper between Troyes and Herefordshire, between Broceliande and Northumbria, as to MS. authority, as to the inveteracy of the legend in English,--not only those negative ones as to the certainty that if it were written by Englishmen it would be written in French,--but another, which to the comparative student of literary history may seem strongest of all.