object which he borrows from one of his audience. He reproduced them in superior forms, and showered the results all abroad. His powers of generalization, his insight of all kinds, were infinitely superior to Carte's; and as for his English, Carte's English is to Hume's what worsted is to silk. But what we have specially to remark is, that both men were indebted to the chroniclers. When we read them,—as when we read Lingard or Sir Francis Palgrave, we are still communicating with the good old monks, whether of St. Alban's, Peterborough, Melrose, or elsewhere; whose names and works are as green as ever. The English Historical Society and similar bodies have re-edited them in our time; and they are still being re-edited in the Government series. French translations of them have been made under high patronage; for the French, as in the notable case of our Civil War memoirs, have (thanks to men of the stamp of the illustrious Guizot) done much service to British historical studies. The English translations in Mr. Bohn's Antiquarian Library, though not proof in every part of their plating against the heavy artillery of the Saturday Review, deserve a good word from all who care for such subjects, as readable, portable, pleasant representatives of the often obscure originals. A reader engaged in detailed research, a historical writer or critic, will, of course, take care to consult the originals in their best texts. But for general purposes, the labours of Dr. Giles, Mr. Riley, and their colleagues, are sufficient; and it would be a wise thing for "the general reader" to take a good deal of his history even in that form, so that he might see past ages face to face, were it only through a glass, rather than trust to those echoes of echoes, those hashings-up of other people's philosophy, with which our commonplace histories abound. For it is better to read in ancient times than about them; just as it is better, instead of reading about ancient writers, to read the ancient writers themselves. We venture to say, for instance, that a good vigorous prose translation, as nearly literal as possible, would give the intelligent mechanic or aspiring clerk a better notion of Homer, than any amount of articles upon him.

It has been pointed out that the old chroniclers, however unlike modern historians, are yet essentially historians, and are the original authorities for early English history. The remark is by no means superfluous, when we remember that so able and well-read a man as Mr. Buckle took the wildest parts of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and laid them before the world as fair samples of the historic writing of the middle ages. Now, of the miraculous and legendary in the chroniclers-as we shall see presentlythere is no end. Gulliver's Travels are a joke compared with much that they tell us. But for that very reason, let us do all the more justice to them when they show wisdom, observation, common sense, and humour. And the truth is that they constantly do show these when they are speak ing of the world which they personally know. Dean Dudo of St. Quentin, for example, the earliest Norman chronicler, who lived in the time of Rollo's grandson, tells us strange stories about Rollo's dreams. According to the

Dean, Rou had miraculous visions of his future conversion to Christianity at the time when he was still a piratical rover, eager for hard cash, and not perhaps incapable of roasting a French or Saxon bishop. But ask Dudo what kind of a civil ruler Rollo made, or how he behaved himself after he had acquired Normandy, and the Dean will give you as practical an answer as The Times newspaper could. He will tell you that he encouraged church-building, and agriculture, and suppressed disorder. In fact, we know the characters of those princes and rulers entirely through the power of the chroniclers to seize characteristic points. They will declare that William the Conqueror was stern; that he would not bear opposition; that he was passionately fond of the chase. But they will add that the invasion was admirably organized; that the Conqueror was just between man and man, and kept such order in England that "a girl might go laden with gold from end to end of it;" that he was mild and kindly to ecclesiastics, and that his laws protected the chastity of the poor female serf. And so with monarch after monarch, nay with princes who never succeeded to thrones, like Courthose, of whom it is possible to form as vivid a conception as one has of Prince Frederick, the heir of George the Second, or Prince Henry, the heir of James the First. His daring and humour; his talent for leading, and his want of talent for governing; his natural good sense useful to everybody but himself; the extravagance which on some occasions compelled him to lie in bed in Rouen, till the hose, so famous for their brevity, were repaired-all this is brought before us with thorough vividness by Ordericus Vitalis and Malmesbury, who perfectly appreciated the lights, shadows, and salient points of the character. Or, take William of Poitou's account of the details of the great invasion of 1066. (Duchesne's Hist. Norm. Script., p. 197, seg.) He tells us that the Conqueror gathered together his invading army at St. Valery, in such order and discipline, that no private property was interfered with, but "the flocks of the country people fed in peace." He is careful to mention that some of the force having been drowned there, the bodies were buried at night to prevent alarms. The most "philosophical" of modern historians could not better select the facts necessary to enable one to judge of the degree of civilization attained, the degree of prudence exerted, by those old warriors. In the same way Florence of Worcester notes that the Normans were "very ambitious of future renown;" and Malmesbury observes it as peculiar to them that "they marry with their vassals; "-two most significant characteristics, and exactly such as a philosopher of our age studying them is glad to learn. The natural inference seems that the chroniclers were men of sense and observation, like our own best writers; that with a child-like simplicity of soul, as to all that related to the invisible or super-sensual world, they combined a manly sagacity and penetrating insight into the world of every-day life.

While we are engaged on the question of the literary power of the chroniclers, nothing at once strikes us as more worthy of remark than

their eye for the picturesque,-for colour, dramatic incident, and affecting sentiment, for the scenery as well as the action of the great theatre of human existence. Thus, William of Poitou takes care to narrate that when, after the calm which delayed the sailing of the Norman fleet, the wind arose, it was hailed with a shout and with up-raised hands. Wace, the author of the Roman de Rou, describes the Conqueror's jumping into the saddle of his Spanish horso all clad in armour on the morning of the battle of Hastings, without help of any kind, amidst the applause of the surrounding knights, and describes, too, how, when the fight was done, they gathered round him to look with admiration on the dints made by many a blow upon his helmet and shield. We learn from William of Newbury whom Hearne edited, that after Saladin had recovered the Holy City from the Christians, he purified the templo with rose-water (aqua rosea), and silenced all bells (bells were essentially Christian,) wherever his power extended. Naturally, the chroniclers of the Crusades have no lack of startling and brilliant details. Courthose, during the First Crusade, clove a pagan to the middle with the terrible exclamation, “I commend your soul to all the devils of hell!" The Archbishop of Aix relates how, in the march across the Burnt Phrygia, the hawks died on their masters' wrists, and the dogs at their feet; how the Saracens hung up at their tent doors the heads of those whom they had slain,—with many curious stories of the same kind. When we come to the later crusado of Richard, we find him the centre figure of many a picture, the colours and figures of which have been borrowed for romance and song. In his favourite galley Trench-the-Mer, he sent a Turkish vessel to the bottom of the sea after a sharp sea-fight,-the first at which a King of England had been present since the days of Alfred. When he captured Cyprus, he fettered the ruler, whom he deposed, with silver chains. The acquisition of that island gave a spur to the joy with which he was received by the armies before Acre in the Pentecost week of 1191,—a joy thus characteristically described by one of the old writers under review:

The very calmness of the night was thought to smile upon them with a purer air; the trumpets clanged, horns sounded, and the shrill intonations of the pipe, and the deeper notes of the timbrel and harp, struck upon the ear; and soothing sympathies were heard like various voices blended in one; and there was not a man who did not, after his own fashion, indulge in joy and praise, either singing popular ballads, to testify the gladness of his heart, or reciting the deeds of the ancients stimulating by their example the spirit of the moderns. Some drank wine from costly cups to the health of the singers, while others mixing together, high and low, passed the night in As a further proof of the exultation of their hearts, and to illumine the darkness of the night, wax torches and flaming lights sparkled in profusion, so that night seemed to be usurped by the brightness of day, and the Turks thought the whole valley was on fire.*

constant dances.

Geoffrey de Vinsauf (or Richard the Canon ?-see Wright's Biog. Lit., p. 415), in the Bohn Library,

In Lord Lindsay's pleasant Letters from the Holy Land, after he has been talking of Acre and Ibrahim Pasha's doings there, he not unnaturally breaks out with," Ibrahim Pasha! Why not a sigh for the olden time, when the standard of England streamed from St. George's Mount, and the chivalry lay encamped around it, and the young knights stood and listened to Blondel's lay!" The recollection of this pretty little crusading picture makes us say a word of the more poetical of the traditions about Cœur de Lion,-traditions so characteristic of that old literature. Who does not remember how Mr. Tennyson has embodied one of them ?—

What can it matter, Margaret,

What songs below the waning stars

The Lion-Heart Plantagenet

Sang, looking through his prison-bars ?

It was in prison that Blondel found him, and made himself known to him by playing an air that he loved on the harp. And this story about Blondel is, as Mr. Wright has remarked, not later than the thirteenth century. But, if we owe to the chroniclers so much beautiful matter of sentiment, they were, also, far too healthy and natural men not to rejoice equally in hard fact and in jolly humour. Accordingly, we have always liked a passage in Wendover (who died in 1237), which shows that the prison-life of Richard had an exceedingly comic and homely side. "To others," says the chronicler, "I leave the relation of his jokes to his guards, how he made them drunk, and assaulted their huge persons by way of amusement."-(Dr. Giles's Wendover, ii. 127.) A cynic may think that this makes an end of the Blondel story; a sentimentalist may be shocked by it. But both would be wrong, for the essence of those primeval days was the heartiness with which men threw themselves into everything,-passing from blood to wine, from tears to jollity, with a fierceness at once spiritual and animal. way in which legend and plain prose exist about the same persons and events, is produced Richard. Here again Mr. Tennyson, with his fine eye for true poetic material, has been at work. We mean in the passage of his Dream of Fair Women where he deals with Rosamond Clifford and the "dragon eyes of anger'd Eleanor." That Eleanor hated Rosamond and poisoned her, is a standing article in mediaval mythology. We are glad, then, to know that her Majesty was a good Christian For it is certain that, at one period of her life, she made interest with the Pope on behalf of a son of Rosamond's by Henry-Geoffrey, Archbishop of York-who led a life of much trouble and controversy, and at last died in exile in John's reign. The Rosamond attachment was, indeed, a boyish love of King Henry's, and it would have been well for Queen Eleanor, if her husband had only had that sin on his conscience.

woman.

Another illustration of the side by side with each other furnished by the epoch which

But to return for a moment to the descriptive powers of the chroniclers.

A good specimen of it is the sketch of Sir James Douglas, called the Good Sir James, in the Bruce of Archdeacon Barbour :

In visage was he some deal gray,
And had black hair, as I heard say;
But then of limbs he was well made,
With bones great, and shoulders braid.
When he was blythe he was leuzie,
And meek and sweet in company;
But who in battle might him see,
Another countenance had he!

Barbour adds that Sir James had a lisp, which became him "wondrous weel;" which may remind classical scholars of Alcibiades, whose Tpavliouos the Athenians rather liked than otherwise. The chroniclers love all such details of portraiture, whether in dealing with persons or things; not from conscious artistic feeling (though to use them required artistic power,) so much as from the healthy appetite for reality and exact representation proper to the social stage which they had reached. And it is well worthy of remark, that what they did from instinct we are at this very day doing deliberately in the full light of modern culture. Nothing is more significant about our present historical literature than its constant effort to reproduce past times with all their accessories of incident, costume, character, and colour; and it is curious to compare the success attained in this way with that which was sufficient to make a writer of history remarkable in the generation of our great-grandfathers. Dr. Johnson said of Lord Hailes, the founder of critical modern Scottish history, that though his book had not "the painted style now in fashion," there was an accuracy of dates and a punctuality of citation about it, which would always make it valuable. But what is the mere pictorial force of the men Johnson was thinking of -Hume, Robertson, or Gibbon-to that of, say, Mr. Carlyle? What was that of the inferior men to the same power exercised by Lord Macaulay or Mr. Froude-not to meddle with the Frenchmen, like Thierry or Michelet? It has now become a commonplace, and one which tends to be abused, that history ought not to be written only by antiquaries; or, to borrow the hackneyed epithet so often borrowed through Carlyle from Scott, by "Dryasdust." Well, all the movement which takes shape in this demand, and voice in this language, is only an attempt to recur by the help of theory to what was the unconscious practice of the chroniclers. They, guided only by their natural impulse towards full and lively expres sion, anticipated this modern want; and with their own fresh and, so to speak, infantine naïveté, transferred to their pages the life of their times as a whole. They give the conversations of their heroes as they would be given in a play; describe their persons; repeat little anecdotes of them; and go into sketches of their private lives and habits, which modern taste does not like, but which gratify the same human craving for personal knowledge of memorable people which modern taste takes care to get provided for it in its own fashion.