their country; they oftentimes regale us with anecdotes, as well as legends and sagas illustrating the mental tendencies of that time, and depict with keen observation, lifelike touch, and fresh colours the morals of the epoch, the life of the clergy, of the orders, and the doings at the court.

Above all others, John of Salisbury was conspicuous for his learning and culture. He had laid in Chartres and Paris the groundwork of his knowledge of the classics, of philosophy and theology. He was the friend, confidant, and biographer of Thomas Beket, was later bishop of Chartres, and died in 1180. His greatest work, called Polycraticus, was produced in about the years 1156-1159. It is remarkable for the vast reading displayed, which includes the writings of Plato and Aristotle, as far as they were then accessible to the author in translations; for the spirit pervading and illuminating the massive and not inartistically ordered material;, and finally, for a graphic style in thoroughly good Latin. Beginning with an account of the follies and immoralities of the court, the author proceeds to the most important investigations, notably in politics and philosophy. In the latter field he discusses the different systems of ancient philosophy, and closes the subject with an exposition of his own essentially ethical system. John's Metalogicus, written in 1159, deals with logic, and here he duly puts down an opponent who had taunted him on account of his studies in philosophy. The famous Walter Map, John's contemporary, was less subtle and profound, was more secular, and more harsh and sharp in the expression of his satirical moods, but he had learning and classical knowledge, was a man of great intellectual power, and genuine moral sense. He took a high place at the English court, often accompanied the king on his journeys, and died soon after 1196 as archdeacon of Oxford. Posterity has connected with his name a great number of Latin and French works; among these are romances of Arthur and the Graal in prose, and rollicking student songs. His De nugis curialium gives us a true image of his personality. This, as the title shows,1 was suggested by the Polycraticus, but is not to be compared with it in scientific importance. Yet it contains much more circumstantial description of the English court and English society, A sub-title of the Polycraticus is De nugis curialium.

and its anecdotes and tales, its occasional comments, its spice of satire, directed especially against the Cistercians offer rich material to the historian of culture.

The letters of Peter of Blois, the outcome of much art and erudition, cast a welcome light upon the history of the time. He, too, was an archdeacon, first of Bath, and later of London, having acted meanwhile (1191-1193) as secretary to Queen Eleanor. He survived Map but a few years. In his youth, he had written love-poems; he regretted this later without being able quite to forget his pleasure in thein. They are lost as well as Peter's work, De gestis Henrici.

William of Newbury, who lived from 1136 to 1208, wrote the history of his time down to the year 1197, in an attractive style, influenced by the manner of William of Malmesbury. The age was beginning to make demands of the historian, which could not but spur him to raise his art above the level of dry annal writing, but which could easily allure him into paths not compatible with the seriousness of history. Above all were demanded interesting details, piquant tales, legends, and the like.

This taste explains the appearance of such works as the Otia imperialia of Gervase of Tilbury, a layman high in favour with the German emperor, Otto IV. This book was written in 1212 for the emperor's amusement. It is a re

markable mixture of material from general history, geography, natural philosophy, popular traditions, and legendary lore, a book, too, that, to this day, can attract and hold the reader. In earlier years Gervase had written a book of anecdotes (Liber facetiarum) for the young King Henry, who died in the year 1183.

The historian of culture likewise finds a rich treasure of varied material in the numerous writings of Gerald de Bary (died 1217). He was the son of a Norman father, and a mother related to the Welsh princes. He was brought up, as a youth, in Wales, and is known by the name of Giraldus Cambrensis. He was a man of comprehensive, many-sided Knowledge, and great persuasiveness; he was not without vanity and ambition; with all his keenness of intellect and quick observation, he was rather superstitious, although he rejected with contempt the fictions of Geoffrey of Monmouth. His writings treat theology, politics, topography,

history, lives of the saints, and other subjects, and their style is ever lucid and pleasant, oftentimes pathetic and eloquent. His Topographia Hiberniae, to which he added a work on the conquest of Ireland (Expugnatio Hiberniae), as well as his Topographia Cambriae, are a mine for the antiquarian and the student of history and folk-lore. His autobiography (De gestis Giraldi laboriosis) is also interesting, and still more, perhaps, his Speculum Ecclesiae, a violent satire against the monks and the Roman curia.

Although less pleasing and more dry than these, the De vita et gestis Henrici II. et Ricardi I. is an invaluable historical authority for the period from 1170 to 1192. It probably appeared in the north of England. Formerly connected with the name of the abbot Benedict of Peterborough, it has been ascribed (probably incorrectly) by some recent investigators to Bishop Richard of London (died 1198), the son of Nigel. This Richard wrote a history of his time in three rubrics, (including, 1. ecclesiastical history, 2. political history, 3. miscellaneous matter), whence the title Tricolumnis or Tricolumnus. This work was apparently lost, but, by the scholars alluded to, it is considered identical with a part of the Gesta Henrici II. Another work of Richard, royal treasurer from about 1158 to his death, is preserved; this is the Diologus de scaccario, dating from the year 1178, and it reats, in animated style, but in barbaric Latin, of the constitution and conduct of the exchequer. About ten years later the lord chief-justice Ranulph of Glanvilla wrote his Tractatus de legibus Angliae.

Latin poetry was no less cultivated in England in the second half of the twelfth century than it had been in the first. Nearly all of the notable Latinists whom we have considered wrote Latin verses-we name here only John of Salisbury and Gerald de Bary. Likewise Alexander Neckam (1157-1217), perhaps the greatest polyhistor of his time, bequeathed to us a prose and a poetical natural history, besides many grammatical treatises.

But the most distinguished of all the English poets who ventured to contend for the laurels of the Latin muse was Joseph of Exeter, the singer of the Trojan war; he was the worthy peer of his still more famous French contemporary Walter de Chatillon, who, following Curtius and Justinus,

wrote an Alexandreis in verses that enchanted the Middle Ages.

During the reign of Richard II. the laws of Latin versification were collated, with illustrative examples, and put into verse, by Geoffrey of Vinsauf (de Vinosalvo), also called Galfridus Anglicus. This poem, named Nova poetria, and dedicated to Pope Innocent III., has little intrinsic charm. It was begun in 1193, but not finished until after King Richard's death (1199). Its influence upon the versifiers of the thirteenth century was decisive, and Geoffrey's name had good repute down to Chaucer's time.

Besides the more scholastic poetry, the Middle Ages knew a Latin poetry of another sort, a poetry which moved free and unconstrained in the ancient language, as in undress, and was more closely connected with actual life. This poetry was throughout essentially international, and seems to have been cultivated as early as the tenth century, and to have received a powerful impulse in the eleventh and in the twelfth. The composers of this non-academic poetry came mainly from the younger and elder youth of the schools, the clerks. These, inclined by nature to wandering, roved from land to land in the age of the crusades, and led an adventurous but usually a rather unedifying life, which was reflected in their songs. Their favourite themes were love and wine; in which they foliowed the ancients, but quite independently. In the manner of the late Latin popular poetry and a great part of the ecclesiastical songs, whose forms they took up, they were wont to construct their verses in rhythm merely, without regard to quantity, and to adorn them with rhyme, which they often handled with admirable skill. Their songs were most probably influential in the beginnings of the Romanic love-song, as, in the wider range, there was a reciprocal influence between the poetry of the itinerant clerks and the national poetry of several western nations. They kept aloof from conventional courtly life; their art was the undisguised expression of exuberant youthful force, carried away by classical models to a sort of pantheistic enthusiasm for nature and beauty. Their verses had a fresh, sprightly tone, and sometimes a truly Bacchic strain, as in the famous mihi est propositum in taberna mori. This was a fragment

of a general confession of the "archpoet Walter" (archipoeta Walterus), who seems to have been neither an Englishman nor a Frenchman, though his songs were applauded in those countries no less than in Germany. Like the gleemen, the jongleurs, with whom they often mingled, the vagantes were apparently in many ways intermediary between the courtly and the popular poetry; their hand seems discernible in many a French love and drinking-song, in many a fabliau. As the troubadours had their sirventes as well as their canzone, so the vagantes, or others in their style, sang of serious things, of historical events, as well as of wine, women, and dice. But they loved satire most, and they directed its edge against the clergy, and chiefly against the Roman curia.

A poem from the last quarter of the twelfth century gives a glimpse of life and doings at Salerno and Paris, and especially of the "English nation" at the university of the latter city; this is the Speculum stultorum of Nigellus, which is in spirit most closely related to the songs of the vagantes. The poem is composed in distichs, and its subject-matter is the marvellous adventures of an ambitious ass named Brunellus, who is discontented at the shortness of his tail, and strives for loftier things. He is meant for a type of monachism. The different orders, including the nuns, are sharply scrutinised, and found utterly worthless.

X.

We now pass from the more aristocratic Latin and Romanic world to the sphere where the sound of the English tongue was heard. Its literature took a new impetus toward the beginning of the thirteenth century. At the same time it seems to have unfolded more to the influence of foreign poetry, though but in a limited degree, and in no respect universally.

The venerable form of Lazamon confronts us at the threshold of the century.

Lazamon, son of Leovenath, was a priest of Arley Regis,

1 It is also known by the name Confessio Goliae. The wandering clerks were often called Goliards, which is perhaps connected with the Romanic gaillard, gagliardo. From this they may themselves, in mere wantonness, have formed the name Golias, ag personification of the immoral clergy,