_Major Historia Wintoniae_, the anonymously written _Annales de Wintonia_, and others. Prominent among these various chroniclers was Geoffrey of Monmouth, who, romancist and fabricator as he was, has yet rendered valuable service by preserving the British legends as they survived among the Brythonic folk, and has given us--and let us be duly grateful--the Arthurian legend in all its suggestive elusiveness and mystery, centring round Winchester and Silchester, with Arthur the Christian King, Merlin the Mage, Dubric the High Saint, and many another--a legend which passed through many languages and many lands, gathering store of added marvels on the way, the customary guerdon of such literary wanderings, to reappear in strange unwonted guises, as in Layamond’s _Brut_ and the _Morte d’Arthur_ of Malorie. And the legendary lore of Winchester is far from being her least attractive literary asset: we have dealt with this subject fairly fully already--some may perhaps deem too fully,--yet is not legend but the _alter ego_ of history, and are not myth and legend, sober fact and imaginative creation, after all merely the multicoloured strata in the complete rainbow of presentment of vital truth, passing and repassing each into other by nice gradation and imperceptible advance? But all these are but prehistoric as it were, when English as a language was not, and monastic Latin and Anglo-Saxon the muddy media of literary communication. The Winchester stream in English literature begins to flow at first with feeble current--a distich or so of uncouth verse, or a casual reference, as in _Piers Plowman_, Leland, Camden, or elsewhere. Drayton, in his _Polyolbion_, has some twenty lines or so on the Itchen, referring to the Round Table of Arthur at Winchester, and the towns on her course, speaking of ... that wondrous Pond whence she derives her head, And places by the way, by which shee’s honoured, (Old Winchester, that stands neere in her middle way, And Hampton, at her fall, into the Solent Sea), and Ken and Walton, in later Stuart days, come upon the scene. Ken is a real Winchester possession--educated at Winchester College, and later on, Prebendary of the Cathedral, he wrote his well-known and still widely-used _Manual of Prayer_ for the use of the scholars of Winchester College, and his _Morning and Evening Hymns_ breathe the same spirit of the inner religious life afterwards so beautifully reflected in Keble’s _Christian Year_. His preferment to the see of Bath and [Illustration: WINCHESTER FROM ST. GILES’S HILL From St. Giles’s Hill, where in mediaeval days the world-famous Fair of St. Egidius or St. Giles was held, an unequalled view of Winchester city can be obtained. The Cathedral, Wolvesey, the College, the Guildhall, the High Street, the Alfred Statue, the Old Guildhall, the Westgate, can all be seen. The dark clump of trees on the sky-line is the so-called Oliver’s Battery.]