Whether it was Walter Map, or Chrestien de Troyes, or both, or neither, to whom the glory of at once completing and exalting the story is due, I at least have no pretension to decide. Whosoever did it, if he did it by himself, was a very great man indeed--a man second only to Dante among the men of the Middle Age. Even if it was done by an irregular company of men, each patching and piecing the others' efforts, the result shows a marvellous "wind of the spirit" abroad and blowing on that company. As before, the reader of Malory only, though he has nearly all the best things, has not quite all even of those, and is without a considerable number of things not quite the best, but good. The most difficult to justify of the omissions of Sir Thomas is the early history of the loves of Guinevere and Lancelot, when the knight was introduced to the queen by Galahault the haughty prince--"Galeotto," as he appears in the most universally known passage of Dante himself. Not merely that unforgettable association, but the charm and grace of the original passage, as well as the dramatic and ethical justification, so to speak, of the fatal passion which wrecked at once Lancelot's quest and Arthur's kingdom, combine to make us regret this exclusion. But Malory's genius was evidently rather an unconscious than a definitely critical one. And though the exquisite felicity of his touch in detail is established once for all by comparing his prose narratives of the Passing of Arthur and the parting of Lancelot and the queen with the verse[51] from which he almost beyond question directly took both, he must sometimes have been bewildered by the mass of material from which he had to select, and may not always have included or excluded with equally unerring judgment. [Footnote 51: _Le Morte Arthur_ (ed. Furnivall, London, 1864), l. 3400 _sqq._] [Sidenote: _The Legend becomes dramatic._]