Nennius is supposed to have compiled another comprehensive history comparable with that of Gildas--_Historia Britonum_--the period embraced being from the days of Brute the Trojan to the year 680 A.D. But so much doubt prevails as to his work, that the history, despite the later date, has been ascribed to Gildas himself. Both may have been forgeries of the tenth or eleventh century. For five or six centuries the story of Arthur was “folk-lore,” and was preserved in snatches of song, a few fragments of which still exist. Such a legend, as Longfellow says, can only-- “Spring at first Out of the hunger and the thirst In all men for the marvellous. And thus it filled and satisfied The imagination of mankind, And this ideal to the mind Was truer than historic fact.” Songs in praise of heroes, real or mythical, always exist among rude peoples--the sagas which nations unwillingly let die. They are the repository of national history, the inspiration of an aspiring and progressive race, the embodiment of its hopes, the treasury of its traditions. Mythology, “the dark shadow which language throws on thought,” is the first outcome of mental activity and percipience--the struggle for human expression of all that is marvellous and memorable. All the early history of races is mixed and engloomed with dim allegories. Intense reverence for divinities, or the awe of them, leads to the making of fables and the reciting of marvels, in which the gods speak and act as men, or men speak and act as gods. The thoughts of primitive peoples are concentrated upon the hero, the commanding figure who typifies their desires, and about whose name cluster legends of victory. Not infrequently, divine qualities are attributed to that hero who thus looms majestically upon the horizon of history, and ultimately becomes a religion. “The gods of fable are the shining moments of great men,” Emerson said, and whether the Arthurs and Odins of mythology were men worshipped as deities, or deities divested of divinity and transformed into historic heroes, the after-ages must always have some difficulty in deciding. What we know is that the interval between language and literature is crowded with shadowy mythological lore, and little of the light flashed back from to-day can illumine the haunted, mystic, twilight time of phantom and superstition.