study of Nature. His nephew, interested also in the causes of things, asked Athelard for an account of his Arabian studies, and the book was his answer. He had left his nephew, seven years ago, a youth in his class at Laon. It had been agreed then that the uncle should seek knowledge of the Arabs, and the nephew be taught by the Franks. The nephew doubted the advantage of his uncle's course of study. What could he show for it? To give proof of its value, Athelard proceeded to results: "And because," he said, "it is the inborn vice of this generation to think nothing discovered by the moderns worth receiving; whence it comes that if you wish to publish anything of your own you say, putting it off on another person, It was Somebody who said it, not I—so, that I may not go quite unheard, Mr. Somebody is father to all I know, not I." He then proposed and discussed sixty-seven Questions in Nature, beginning with the grass, and rising to the stars, the nephew solving problems in accordance with the knowledge of the West, the uncle according to knowledge of the East, where the Arabians were then bringing a free spirit of inquiry to the mysteries of science. Athelard of Bath wrote also on the Abacus and the Astrolabe, translated an Arabic work upon Astronomy, and was the first bringer of Euclid into England by a translation, which remained the text-book of succeeding mathematicians, and was among the works first issued from the printing-press.

7. Athelard of Bath expressed his love of science in a little allegory, De Eodem et Diverso-"On the Same and the Different" -published before 1116. The taste for allegory was now gathering strength in Europe. It had arisen in the early Church, especially among the Greek Fathers, with ingenious interpretation of the Scriptures. Bede, following this example, showed how in Solomon's Temple the windows represented holy teachers through whom enters the light of heaven, and the cedar was the incorruptible beauty of the virtues. When the monasteries passed from their active work as missionary stations into intellectual strife concerning orthodoxy of opinions, volleys of subtle interpretation and strained parallel were exchanged continually by the combatants. As the monasteries became rich, wealth brought them leisure and temptation of the flesh, but still they were centres of intelligence; and as, in Southern Europe, along the coasts of the Mediterranean, contact with tuneful rhyming Arabs was awakening a soft strain of love music, the educated men of leisure in the monasteries must also exercise their skill,

TO A.D. 1147]

GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH

47

Love, it was said, after the Arabs, is the only noble theme of song. We also, said the church-bound, obey poet's law and sing of love; but when we name a lady we mean Holy Church, or we mean the Virgin, or we mean some virtue. It is earthly love to the ear, but there is always an underlying spiritual sense. Thus we shall find, in a few generations more, the taste for allegory colouring almost the whole texture of European literature, and then remaining for a long time dominant. Athelard's little allegory is the hrst example in our literature of what afterwards became one of the commonest of allegoric forms. He represents Philosophy and Philocosmia, or love of worldly enjoyment, as having appeared to him, when he was a student on the banks of the Loire, in the form of two women, who disputed for his affections until he threw himself into the arms of Philosophy, drove away her rival with disgrace, and sought the object of his choice with an ardour that carried him in search of knowledge to the distant Arabs.

8. We now pass from the literature of the reign of Henry I. to that of Stephen (1135-1154), remembering that the last seven years of the work of Ordericus Vitalis and William of Malmesbury, and some years of the work of Athelard of Bath, fall within Stephen's reign. Five years after Orderic and William of Malmesbury had ceased to write, Geoffrey of Monmouth completed his Latin History of British Kings. The patron of William of Malmesbury was the patron also of Geoffrey of Monmouth; the "History of the Kings of England" and the "History of British Kings" are both dedicated to Robert Earl of Gloucester. In one of these works William of Malmesbury brought chronicle writing to perfection; in the other Geoffrey of Monmouth produced out of the form of the chronicle the spirit that was to animate new forms of literature, and opened a spring of poetry that we find running through the fields of English Literature in all after time.

Geoffrey was a Welsh priest, in whom there was blood of the Cymry quickening his genius. He had made a translation of the Prophecies of Merlin, when, as he tells us, Walter Calenius, Archdeacon of Oxford, found in Brittany an ancient History of Britain, written in the Cymric tongue. He knew no man better able to translate it than Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had credit as an elegant writer of Latin verse and prose. Geoffrey undertook the task, and formed accordingly his History of British Kings in four books, dedicated to Robert Earl of Gloucester.

Afterwards he made alterations, and formed the 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 recognised 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 scandalised 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 everts. But the work stirred men's imaginations. It was short as well as lively, the twelve books being no longer than two of the thirteen books of Orderic's Ecclesiastical History. Short as it was,

Alfred of Beverley, charmed with it, in a copy which he had with difficulty borrowed, at once made an abridgment of it, because he had not time to copy all, or money to pay for a full transcript. In the household of Ralph Fitz-Gilbert, a strong baron of the North, lived Geoffrey Gaimar. Constance, the

TO A.D. 1155]

GAIMAR. WACE. HILARIUS

49

baron's wife, could read no Latin, but desired to read the muchtalked of chronicle. Gaimar undertook, therefore, to translate it for her into French verse, and made his translation perhaps from the book written by Geoffrey himself for his patron, since the copy used was obtained through a friendly Yorkshire baron from the Earl of Gloucester himself. Gaimar continued his chronicle, in French or Anglo-Norman verse,. by adding the series of Saxon kings; and this latter part of his work was all that survived when Wace's more popular version of the famous history into French verse for the use of the court, caused that of Gaimar to be neglected by the copyists.

Wace (who has been miscalled Robert Wace through a misunderstanding of five lines in his "Life of St. Nicholas") was born at Jersey, educated at Caen, and was a reading clerk and a romance writer 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 favour, and he died unprosperous in England, in 1184. He was eclipsed at court by Benoit de St. Maure, the author of the "Geste de Troie."

The Welsh priest whose bright invention had thus broken fresh ground in literature was made Bishop of St. Asaph six years after the appearance of his Chronicle. He died in 1154,

about a year after he had obtained his bishopric.

9. It was in the time also of Stephen that there was an Englishman in France, Hilarius, who had gone to be taught by Abelard at Paraclete, and from whom we have our earliest known Miracle Plays. The acting of such plays seems to have been introduced into this country soon after the Conquest. Matthew Paris, a chronicler who lived in the thirteenth century, refers to a miracle-play of St. Katherine, written some years before 1119, by Geoffrey of Gorham, who became afterwards prior, and was in 1119 made Abbot of St. Alban's. Geoffrey had been invited from Normandy by Richard, the preceding abbot, to establish a

school at St. Alban's. He arrived too late, and settled at Dunstable, where there was a school subordinate to that of St. Alban's, while waiting for the possible reversion of the office which had then been given to another. Meanwhile he composed at Dunstable his miracle-play, and, when it was ready, borrowed copes from St. Alban's for the decoration of it. But on the following night his house was bunt, together with the copes and all his books. This is the earliest allusion to the acting of such pieces in this country. They had arisen out of the desire of the clergy to bring leading facts of Bible history and the legends of the saints home to the hearts of the illiterate. A great church was dedicated to some saint. The celebration of the saint's day was an occasion for drawing from afar, if possible, devout worshippers, and offerings to the shrine. Some incidents from the life of the saint, enforcing perhaps his power to help those who chose him for their patron, it was thought good to place, at some part of the Church service of the day, with dramatic ingenuity, before the eyes of the unlettered congregation.

Take, for example, one of the three plays by Hilarius written in France in the time of Stephen, or not later than the beginning of the reign of Henry II. In a church dedicated to St. Nicholas, upon St. Nicholas's Day, the Image of the Saint was removed, and a living actor, dressed to represent the statue, was placed in the shrine. When the pause was made in the service for the acting of the Miracle, one came in at the church door dressed as a rich heathen, deposited his treasure at the shrine, said that he was going on a journey, and called on the Saint to be the guardian of his property. When the heathen had gone out, thieves entered and silently carried off the treasure. Then came the heathen back and furiously raged. He took a whip and began to thrash the Image of the Saint. But upon this the Image moved, descended from its niche, went out and reasoned with the robbers, threatening also to denounce them to the people. Terrified by this miracle, the thieves returned tremblingly, and so, in silence, they brought everything back. The statue was again in its niche, motionless. The heathen sang his joy to a popular tune of the time, and turned to adore the Image. Then St. Nicholas himself appeared, bidding the heathen worship God alone and praise the name of Christ. The heathen was converted. The piece ended with adoration of the Almighty, and the Church service was then continued.