neglected by the classical scholar as an epoch of decadence, whilst the attention of the theologian was concentrated almost wholly upon the primary monuments of the new faith. Down to 1750 scholarship implied familiarity with the third century a.d. as well as with the fifth-fourth centuries B.C.,—with all the products of Christian as well as of Pagan Antiquity. But throughout the greater part of the nineteenth century it was possible to attain first rank as a student of Classical Antiquity or early Christianity whilst remaining confined to the literature of one particular century. Within the last thirty years a marked change for the better has taken place; a series of great scholars, trained in the strictest methods of classical philology, have devoted themselves to the elucidation not only of the Canonical Writings, but of the illustrative, apocryphal, hagiological, heretical, and controversial literature. In particular the products of syncretism, the essays at amalgam and compromise, have received close attention. Of this tendency, as far as regards its bearing upon folklore studies in the narrower sense, Hermann Usener has been the most illustrious exponent.
When, in 1877, the first serious survey of the Grail cycle was made by Dr. Birch-Hirschfeld, Usener's influence had not yet made itself felt. The borderland between Paganism and Christianity was far more of a terra incognita than it is now. In especial the two provinces were more sharply delimited; conceptions were Christian or non-Christian, and the extent of pre-Christianity in contributing to the completed Christian fabric, as well as the influence of anti-Christianity in modifying the outlines of that fabric, were realised in a far less measure than to-day. Necessarily Dr. Birch-Hirschfeld, who championed the theory of the Christian origin of the Grail legend, was affected by the prevailing attitude of scholarship. He would not now, I think, hold that the presence of definite apparently Christian elements in a mediaeval legend necessarily entailed the solely Christian origin of that legend; he would, probably, be ready to admit that the Christian element itself might be not homogeneous, but analysable into further combinations of material, some of them derived from a pre-Christian past, and that, in this way, resemblances might be accounted for without recourse to
