nature of the critic would not suffer him long to act a feigned part, and the inborn depravity of the man burst out in a furious attack upon the second book, the plain object of which was to discredit the whole work by showing the falsity of a part. Who this lineal ancestor of the able editor of modern times was, Giraldus does not tell us; but he lets us know that his contemptible objections were directed against the marvellous character of the stories contained in the Topography. The critic found fault with specific statements made in the work, such as that of a wolf talking with a priest; of a man with the extremities of an ox; of a goat and of a lion in love with a woman. To petty cavils like these, Giraldus could make a triumphant reply. "You," he says, addressing this miscreant, who had presumed to criticise him, "you who profess to be so disgusted with these stories, have you not read in the book of Numbers the conversation that took place between Balaam and his ass?" He then goes on to hurl at the presumptuous critic the work of the Fathers, with all the marvels and miracles contained in them. These certainly were full of facts wonderful enough to crush utterly the unbelief of any ordinary doubter. But not content with these, Giraldus appealed likewise to classical writers, and left not a particle of ground for the unhappy sceptics to stand on either in the Christian or pagan world.

But our author was not one to be satisfied merely with negative efforts to defend the veracity of his work; he took a peculiar measure of his own to extend its reputation. Lucian has preserved or invented a tale in regard to Herodotus; how the Father of History, anxious to make known the results of his labors, had seized upon the occasion furnished by the Olympic games. There in the lower part of the temple he had recited in the presence of assembled Greece the story of the Persian war. There he had been crowned with the admiration of all; there his books had been honored with the names of the nine Muses. This was an incident calculated of itself to fire the heart of a man like Giraldus, and he resolved to reproduce in the modern world a counterpart to the famous scene which antiquity had presented. He tells us that when his work had been completed and corrected, he made up his mind that his light should no longer be hid under a bushel, but should be

set upon a candle-stick lofty enough to send a good deal of light into the darkness which still surrounded him and his writings. Therefore he determined to recite himself his treatise at Oxford, and to do this in the presence of the assembled inhabitants. That place he fixed upon because of the number of the clergy dwelling there, and because of their great superiority in learning. As his work was divided into three books, so the recitation of it was spread over three successive days. On the first he called together all the poor of the town to the reading; and to be sure of their taking to the intellectual food furnished to them, he supplied them also with food of a more substantial nature. It is not hard to believe that under such circumstances the recitation was numerously attended, and the production itself met with unqualified praise. Certainly no surer method could be taken to stop the mouth of adverse criticism than filling it with meat. On the second day he received all the instructors in the various departments, and scholars of greatest knowledge and reputation. On the third day the rest of the students were invited, with the soldiers of the town and many of the citizens. The whole affair, according to his statement, was noble and magnificent, and recalled the memory of the ancient time of the poets, when the world paid homage to its intellectual rulers as well as to its temporal ones. Nothing like it had ever taken place in England in his age; nor did history recall any such proceeding in the past.

It was but a short time after the publication of the Topography of Ireland, that the History of its Conquest-the Expugnatio Hibernica-appeared. Of this, he does not speak, however, in his autobiography; and it may possibly be that he did not regard it as a work redounding to his credit. Certainly in one of the prefaces to it, he gives incidentally a curious picture of the view that was taken during his time of literature in general, and in particular of historical writings. He seems to see the reader, he tells us, when he finds everything clear and simple, turning up the nose of derision, protruding the lip of contempt, and making that general disarrangement of his features which would be most highly representative of disgust; and finally giving still more visible expression to his mean opinion of the work by hurling the book away. It

was clearly regarded as something to an author's discredit that he should write anything easy of comprehension. Giraldus takes some pains to vindicate himself for having followed a course so derogatory. His history, he says, was intended for laymen, for princes that had received little education. It, therefor, had to be composed in a plain and perspicuous style. Indeed he did not stop with this apology for being intelligible. He daringly went so far as to claim that it was justifiable to use the words of the people when the acts of themselves and of their rulers were to be recounted. In fact as he became warm in the discussion of this matter, he assumed the offensive. In the case of all the subjects upon which he had written, he assures us, that abandoning and even spitting upon the hard and austere style of certain authors, he had labored with the greatest zeal to make what he said clear to the comprehension of all, free from doubtful meanings and involved constructions; though he is careful to add that in the pursuit of this object he had not refrained from adding to the weight of matter the ornament of elegant expression. Yet it is plain that in spite of his courageous words he felt that in writing a treatise giving an account of the Irish expedition, he was derogating a little from the dignity of letters. In the dedication to Richard I., then Count of Poitou, he makes a half apology for having undertaken at all a work of this kind. He had been desired by friends to write the famous deeds of his time, which he had seen with his own eyes or learned from the mouths of trustworthy witnesses. So at their request and for the sake of posterity he had determined to put into permanent form the account of their doings; though amid the duties and distraction of court-life it was hard for him to find leisure to compose a work which he himself would have time to revise before it should fall into the hands of unseen and envious critics. The theme selected was, he admitted, narrow in extent, was dry in its nature; it dealt with matters that did not belong to cultivation and refinement. Still he could adorn it, barren as it was, with the graces of his style, and there was for writing it this compensation, that it furnished, as it were, a field of practice upon which his unskilled pen could disport and make trial of itself.

This is not the only place where Giraldus throws light unconsciously upon the sentiment, prevalent in his time in regard to the subjects about which the highest class of minds. could most worthily occupy themselves in writing. The view is so different from the modern one that it will bear further exemplification. In the preface to a later production—the Description of Wales, addressed to Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury,-he enumerates the historical or topographical treatises he had previously written, and he remarks that those who had affection for him had remonstrated with him for spending his time and talents in the production of works that misemployed the one and brought no credit to the other. It is the same, they tell him, as if a great painter such as was Zeuxis, from whom the world waited in anxious expectation for the representation of some magnificent palace or temple, should put forth all the resources of his art to depict a mean hovel or some object contemptible in its very nature. When, therefore, so many illustrious objects existed worthy of his pen, what right had he to adorn with the flowers of rhetoric, and to celebrate with the charm of letters corners of the earth so remote as Ireland, and Wales, and Britain. Others attacked him on a different side. Great powers had been conferred upon him by the gift of the Creator. These should not be spent in treating of earthly objects, but should be directed exclusively to those loftier topics connected with the spiritual world. From God we have received our faculties; therefore to the celebration of him alone should these faculties be exclusively devoted, and not indirectly but directly. Giraldus did not deny the general truth contained in these remonstrances. But vain as he was, he was a good deal less of a fool than most of his contemporaries who were men of letters; at least gleams of sense often lighted up his conduct, though they did not always give a remarkable illumination to his words. He remembered that the fame of Troy, of Thebes, of Athens, and of Rome had been widely celebrated in history. He reflected that to their story it was not in his power to add anything, while he might be able to hand down to posterity the memory of events that were taking place in his time, might rescue noble deeds from the darkness of oblivion; above all he could counterbalance the

meanness of his subject by the majesty of his style. This he felt to be no worthless nor unpraiseworthy undertaking. He did not disguise from himself or his readers that these were topics which were far beneath his abilities. But he looked upon them as the exercise of his youth, by which his mind should first try its powers before venturing upon any more daring venture. And when these sparrow-flights, as it were, of composition should give him strength of wing and confidence in himself-which last to the modern reader seems hardly necessary for him to have waited for-then he would proceed to wing his way to that upper air of speculation in which reason swoons and faith alone can bear up the soul. His, then, should be the treasure of that science of sciences, of that science that alone deserves the name, the effluence of the divine, upon whom the other so-called sciences wait as handmaids, and the very prints of whose feet they with reverent hearts adore.

Even more fortunately for himself than for posterity Giraldus thus came to the conclusion to compose works, which ordinary men could understand before devoting himself to the composition of that most excellent treatise on that most sacred of sciences upon which be expected to rear a permanent name. Were it not for these works which he professed to hold in such slight estimation, it is pretty safe to say that his name would not even have attained to the position it now holds among the illustrious obscure. And it must be acknowledged that his qualifications for writing the history of the invasion of Ireland, or conquest as he called it, were of an exceptional character. He was contemporary with the events which he described. It was in 1169, when he was about one and twenty years old, that the first expedition set sail from Great Britain for Ireland. Its leader was his uncle Robert Fitz-Stephen, and among those who belonged to it were his own brother Robert de Barri, and his cousin Meiler Fitz-Henry. Besides these, many of those that were concerned in this and in later expeditions must have been intimate friends of his own, or at least acquaintances; for the first levies for the Irish invasion were all raised in Wales. But in addition he had in abundance those qualities which make history readable. He was entirely one-sided in his opinions and prejudiced in his feelings, and whatever he