Doubtless a similar statement from some leading scholar among the many who hold views differing from Professor Foerster will be forthcoming; in the meantime the present study appears to me to offer an excellent opportunity for the re-statement of certain principles, and the reiteration of certain facts, which cannot safely be left out of consideration in such a study, and which Professor Foerster's argument practically ignores. To understand the position of Chrétien de Troyes to his sources, whatever they may have been, we must, in the first place, have possessed ourselves of the answer to two leading questions. (_a_) What is the nature of the Arthurian tradition itself? (_b_) What was the popular form assumed by that tradition at the time Chrétien wrote? These are the main points, but they, of course, involve subsidiary issues. Generally speaking, the tendency of the school represented by Professor Foerster is to regard the Arthurian tradition as divided into two branches, historic and romantic. The former branch being _primarily_ represented by the _Historia_ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, the popularity of which practically introduced Arthur to the literary world, and _secondarily_ by certain passages in the earlier prose romances. This branch contains features of _insular_ origin, reminiscences of the historic Arthur and his fights with the Saxons; but the second and far more important branch, the romantic, is of purely _continental_ origin. Arthur, as a romantic hero, is the product of Breton tradition and folk-lore; Armorica, and not Wales, is the cradle of Arthurian (romantic) legend; and it was Geoffrey's _Historia_ which gave the requisite impulse to the formation of this tradition. So much for theory, what now are the facts? Without in any way minimising the popularity and influence of Geoffrey's work, either in its original form or in the translation of Wace, it is quite clear (_a_) that it did not represent _all_ the historic tradition current concerning Arthur; (_b_) that his popularity was of considerably earlier date. A comparison with the _Brut_ of Layamon[52] will prove the first point; for the second, we have already noted Professor Rajna's discovery of Arthurian names in Italian documents as proving that such names must have been popular in Italy at the end of the eleventh century. Further, from the testimony of the bas-relief at Modena we see that the traditions associated with the British king were not purely historic, but that he and his knights were already the heroes of tales which have not descended to us. We cannot, therefore, fix with any approach to certainty the date at which Arthur became a romantic hero, but evidence points to a period anterior to that generally admitted.