The influence on the literature began later, but it has been very marked and continuous down to the present day. Three periods stand out as particularly potent. The first begins from the end of the twelfth century and extends to the Reformation. The second, taking its impetus from the Forty-five and the Ossianic revival, carries us forward to the time of Tennyson. And the third, coeval with the modern Celtic renaissance, reaches from Tennyson to the present time. Though the different branches of the Celtic people had been producing a literature from the sixth century, that literature does not seem to have affected English authorship, until in the Middle Ages it created the captivating Arthurian romances. Then, like the other Continental literatures, the English for the first time fell under the sway of the Celtic imagination. The earliest great poem written in the English language after the Norman Conquest owes its inspiration and theme entirely to that source. In the opening passage the author introduces himself thus: “There was a priest in the land, whose name was Layamon; he was son of Lovenath; may the Lord be gracious unto him! He dwelt at Ernley at a noble church on Severn’s bank, good it seemed to him, near Radstone, where he read books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would of England tell the noble deeds, what the men were named, and whence they came, who first had English land.” This Layamon, travelling widely over the land in search of information, found three valuable books on which he based his tale—an English translation of Bede, a Latin book made by St. Albin and the fair Austin, and the French one by Wace. His own poem he called the “Brut,” after the fabulous Brutus, the great-grandson of Aeneas, who, according to Welsh writers, became the ancestor of the Kings of Briton. It deals chiefly with the materials of Wace, but it gives the story of Uther Pendragon and his famous son Arthur in much fuller detail. For example, while Wace’s “Brut” contains 15,300 lines, Layamon’s has 32,250, more than double, and the composition is characterised by a somewhat rude attempt at alliteration and rhyme. There are two MSS. still extant of this interesting work, both of them in the British Museum. The oldest is held to have been written not later than 1205, and the language is so purely English, notwithstanding its source, that less than fifty words of French origin have been found in it by Sir Frederick Madden, who in 1847 first edited these texts. Almost a hundred years pass after Layamon wrote before another English book of the kind appears. And this time it is the rhyming chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, who goes over some of the ground of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and brings the history down to 1272. A fascinating study for critics is the wonderful way in which the Arthurian romance seems to have developed from a small beginning. This gradual evolution can in the main be traced.