The Round Table stories, merely as such, illustrate Valour; the Graal stories, Religion; the passion of Lancelot and Guinevere with the minor instances, Love.

All these have their [Greek: amarthia]--their tragic and tragedy-causing fault and flaw.

The knight wastes his valour in idle bickerings; he forgets law in his love; and though there is no actual degradation of religion, he fails to live up to the ideal that he does not actually forswear.

To throw the presentation--the _mimesis_--of all this into perfectly worthy form would probably have been too much for any single genius of that curious time (when genius was so widely spread and so little concentrated) except Dante himself, whose hand found other work to do.

To colour and shape the various fragments of the mosaic was the work of scores.