work into eight books, to which he added "Merlin's Prophecies," translated out of Cymric verse into Latin prose. The history, as finally completed by him in 1147, is in twelve books, and the whole work was a romance of history, taking the grave form of authentic chronicle. Geoffrey closed his budget with a playful reference to more exact historians, to whom he left the deeds of the Saxons, but whom he advised to be silent about the kings of the Britons, since they have not that book in the British language, which Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, brought out of Brittany." There is a sly vein of banter in this reference to the mysterious book upon which Geoffrey fathered his ingenious invention of a list of British kings who did wonderful deeds, gave their names to this place and that, reigned each of them exactly so many years and months, and made an unbroken series from Brut, great-grandson of Æneas, through King Arthur, to Cadwallo, who died in the year 689. "It was Somebody who said it, not I." We first read, in this fiction, of Sabrina, "virgin daughter of Locrine;" of Gorboduc, whose story was the theme of the earliest English tragedy; of Lear and his daughter; and, above all, of KING ARTHUR as the recognized hero of a national romance. Geoffrey obtained the by-name of Arturus, and was said to have made the little finger of his Arthur stouter than the back of Alexander the Great." So wrote a painstaking, unimaginative chronicler of the next generation, William of Newbury, who, considering "how saucily and how shamelessly he lies almost throughout," and not caring to specify "how much of the acts of the Britons before Julius Cæsar that man invented, or wrote from the inventions of others as if authentic," said of Geoffrey, "As in all things we trust Bede, whose wisdom and sincerity are beyond doubt; so that fabler with his fables shall be straightway spat out by us all." Far from it. The regular chronicler was scandalized at the pretensions of a perfectly new form of literature, a work of fancy dressed in the form of one of his own faithful records of events. But the work stirred men's imaginations. 6. The two chroniclers just mentioned wrote their books in Latin; but the chronicler now to be spoken of, Wace, wrote his most important book in French. He was born at Jersey,

educated at Caen, and was a reading-clerk and a romancewriter at Caen in the latter part of Stephen's reign. He shared the enthusiasm with which men of bright imagination received Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Chronicle," and reproduced it as a French metrical romance, the "Brut," in more than 15,000 lines. Sometimes he translated closely, sometimes paraphrased, sometimes added fresh legends from Brittany, or fresh inventions of his own. His work was completed in 1155, immediately after the accession of Henry II., who gave him a prebend at Bayeux. Wace afterwards amplified a Latin chronicle of the deeds of William the Conqueror, by William of Poitiers, that king's chaplain, into a "Roman de Rou." But there was no continuance of royal favor; and he died, unprosperous, in England, probably in 1184.

7. Although these three chroniclers are the most noteworthy, it may be well to place here at least the names of others of less importance. They are Turgot, who wrote a "Historia Dunelmensis Ecclesiæ;" Florence of Worcester, who wrote "Chronicon ex Chronicis ab Initio Mundi usque ad Annum Christi 1117 deductum;" Eadmer of Canterbury, who wrote "Historia Novorum;" Alfred of Beverley, who wrote an abridgment of Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Chronicle; " Geoffrey Gaimar, who wrote a French metrical translation of the same "Chroniele," and added to it the series of Saxon kings; Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote a "Chronicon" in eight books; William of Newbury, who wrote "Historia Rerum Anglicarum;" Roger of Hoveden, who wrote "Annales," from 732, where Bede left off, to 1201; Gerald of Wales, otherwise called Gerald du Barri, or Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote "Expugnatio Hiberniæ;" Roger of Wendover, who wrote "Flores Historiarum;" Matthew Paris, who wrote "Historia Major;" John of Oxnead, who wrote a "Chronicon" from 449 to 1292; Nicholas Trivet, who wrote "Annales Sex Regum Angliæ," ending in 1307; Peter Langtoft, who wrote in French verse a “Chronicle of England,” ending in the same year; John of Trokelowe, who wrote "Annales," from 1867 to 1323; and Robert of Avesbury, who wrote "De Mirabilibus Gestis Edwardi III.," ending with 1356.

8. This long series of chronicles written by Englishmen. chiefly in Latin, is fittingly closed in the "Polychronicon," written in Latin by Ralph Higden, a Benedictine monk, who, in his earlier life, is thought to have written the first miracleplays in English. His " Polychronicon," in seven books, was so called, he says, because it gave the chronicle of many

times. Its first book described the countries of the known world, especially Britain; its second book gave the history of the world from the creation to Nebuchadnezzar; the next book closed with the birth of Christ; the fourth book carried on the chronicle to the arrival of the Saxons in England ; the fifth proceeded to the invasion of the Danes; the sixth, to the Norman Conquest; and the seventh, to Higden's own time in the reign of Edward III., his latest date being the year 1342. He died about 1363; and long after his death the "Polychronicon" stood in high credit as a sketch of universal history, with special reference to England.

9. It is but a short step from the chronicles of this period to its romances; and of these, the most beautiful as well as the most important are those which may be grouped together under the name of the Arthurian romances. Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Chronicle" had suddenly made King Arthur famous in England. Wace's version of the stories relating to Arthur had quickened the popular interest in his adventures; when it occurred to a very brilliant and very earnest man, named Walter Map, to arrange and harmonize all these exquisite tales, and to put a Christian soul into them. This service of Walter Map's has had enormous influence upon English thought and English literature down to the present moment; and it is right that we should now stop and make some special study of a man so distinguished. Walter Map, sometimes called Mapes, had, like Geoffrey of Monmouth, Celtic blood in his veins. Born about the year 1143, on the borders of Wales, he called the Welsh his countrymen, and England "our mother." He studied in the University of Paris, which was then in the first days of its fame. After his studies there, he came home, and was at court, in attendance on King Henry II., whom he afterward served as judge, as military chaplain, as ambassador to the French king, and as delegate to the Lateran Council of 1179. After his return from Rome, Map was made a canon of St. Paul's, and also precentor of Lincoln. He held also the parsonage of Westbury in Gloucestershire, but still was in attendance on the king, and especially attached to the young Prince Henry after he had been crowned by his father. In the

reign of Richard I., and the year 1196, when his age was about fifty-three, Map was made Archdeacon of Oxford; but beyond that date nothing is known of him.

Walter Map was a bright man of the world, with a high purpose in his life; poet and wit, a spiritual man of genius. He fought with his own weapons against the prevalent corruption of the clergy. While he was at court, there began to pass from hand to hand copies of Latin verse purporting to be poems of a certain Bishop Golias, a gluttonous dignitary, glorying in selfindulgence, his name probably derived from gula, the gullet. The verses were audacious, lively, and so true to the assumed character, that some believed them to come really from a shameless bishop. Here was the corruption of the Church personified, and made a by-word among men. The poems gave a new word to the language, "goliard." Walter Map was the creator of this character; but the keen satire of his lively Latin verse bred imitators, and Father Golias soon had many sons. A fashion for Golias poetry sprang up, and then the earnest man of genius had fellow-laborers in plenty.

Another of Map's books was "De Nugis Curialium" (" On the Trifles of Courtiers "). He had been asked, he says, by a friend, Geoffrey, to write something, as a philosopher and poet, courtly and pleasant. He replied that poetical invention needs a quiet, concentrated mind, and that this was not to be had in the turmoil of a court. But he did accept a lighter commission, and "would endeavor to set down in a book whatever he had seen or heard that seemed to him worth note, and that had not yet been written; so that the telling should be pleasant, and the instruction should tend to morality." His work, therefore, which is in five divisions, is a volume of trustworthy contemporary anecdote by the man who knew better than any other what was worth observing. There is no pedantry at all, no waste of words. There is not a fact or story that might not have been matter of table-talk at Henry's court. Anecdotes on subjects allied to one another are generally arranged together; but there is a new topic in every chapter, and the work is a miscellany rich in illustration of its time, and free enough in its plan to admit any fact, or opinion, or current event, worth

record. It includes bold speaking against crusading zeal that left home-duties unperformed, against the vices of the court of Rome, even against that vice in the kings of England which caused their people to be oppressed by unjust game-laws. Under this head King Henry II. is himself the subject of a warning anecdote.

But Map's great work was that which justified his friend Geoffrey in demanding of him "something as a philosopher and poet." He it was who first gave a soul to the KING ARTHUR legends, and from whom we date the beginning of a spiritual harmony between the life of the English people and the forms given to the national hero by our poets. The Latin races have made no such use of Charlemagne or Roland as we shall find the English to have made of the King Arthur myth. The cycle of the Charlemagne romances offers a wide field for study, bright with life and color derived from the active genius of the trouvères. But these tales remain what those of the Arthurian cycle were before the genius of Walter Map had harmonized them with the spirit of his country. The old tales were tales of animal strength, courage, and passion; the spiritual life was added to them when Walter Map placed in the midst of them the Holy Graal, type of the heavenly mysteries; and that legend itself became the first piece in the series of prose romances, now produced and written to be read aloud, forming the groundwork on which metrical romances afterwards were based.

The series begins with "The Romance of the Holy Graal," sometimes also called “The Romance of Joseph of Arimathæa.” The Graal, according to its legend, was the holy dish (low Latin, gradale) which contained the paschal lamb at the Last Supper. After the supper it was taken by a Jew to Pilate, who gave it to Joseph of Arimathæa. It was used by Joseph of Arimathæa at the taking down of our Lord from the cross, to receive the gore from his wounds; and thus it became doubly sacred. When the Jews imprisoned Joseph, the Holy Graal, placed miraculously in his hands, kept him from pain and hunger for two and forty years. Released by Vespasian, Joseph quitted Jerusalem, and went with the Graal through France into Britain, where it was carefully deposited in the treasury of one of the kings of the island, called the "Fisherman King." The second romance in the series is that of "Merlin" the third is that of "Lancelot of the Lake." In the latter,