There are many questions, and some of them may be insoluble, which are concerned with or arise out of the legend of Merlin, but there is perhaps one only which enters at all deeply into the collateral legend of the Graal; it is why the British prophet, partly magician and enchanter, but in part also God's messenger, with his consequent strange mixture of motives, should have been selected in the mind of romance, or in any more withdrawn mind, as the promulgator of the Graal Mystery in Great Britain--perhaps more correctly--as the semi-supernatural power which was at work in connection therewith; why also it was he who brought about the institution of the Third Symbolical Table, and set up that Siege Perilous which was, in the first place, to terminate the enchantments of Britain, and, in the second, by the alternative intervention of the adventurous times, to make void--but this is long after he has himself passed away--the high mystery of chivalry so far as the Round Table was concerned. The Didot Perceval intervened in respect of the latter vocation, with results which we have seen already, but in this respect it is scarcely the voice of the literature.
There are those who maintain that the late prophecies