resource but the most disgraceful flight. This, however, was attended by the advantage that they were thus enabled to live to fight another day; and accordingly, undiscouraged by past failures, they were always ready for new enterprises; and as a result of this characteristic, while they were easily conquered in battle, they were with difficulty conquered in war. Seldom, indeed, have the military qualities of the Celtic races been described more accurately and impartially than by this churchman of the twelfth century who had devoted himself to scholastic studies. But there are plenty of passages scattered through the volumes on both Ireland and Wales which give the reader a high idea of the justness of the views of Giraldus whenever he comes to speak of the method of dealing with turbulent and discontented populations. His administrative qualities, so far as they find expression in his writings, must have been of a high order. Had he been placed in a position of responsibility, he might have acted the part of a politician; but the views to which he gives utterance are almost invariably the views of a statesman.

Our author, who noticed everything and introduced everything, whether related to his subject or not, in both of the treatises on Wales, calls attention to the close resemblance existing between words of different languages, especially between the Latin, the Greek, and the Welsh. The similarities in the two last he can account for easily. Though Giraldus speaks contemptuously of the fabulous history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, yet he was clearly a full believer in the Trojan descent of the Britons, and that part of the story which represents the ancestors of the latter people as having been long resident in Greece was not doubted by him in the slightest. As their forefathers had dwelt in that country so long, it was not unnatural that they should have picked up many Greek words. But it was by no means to these two tongues that our author confined his observations. He traces the word salt through the Greek, Welsh, Irish, Latin, French, English, and what he calls the Teutonic language, which seems here to mean the Low-Dutch. It is apparently on the strength of one or two statements of this kind that Mr. Freeman calls Giraldus "the

father of comparative philology."* If this be the reason, no

* Contemporary Review, September, 1878, p. 216.

But it is pos

one ever founded a new science with more ease. sible there may be another explanation for giving him this title, which will, at any rate prevent the work of Bopp from being entirely anticipated, even if the laurels of that scholar are to be stripped from his brow. There may be a better reason for ascribing to our author the paternity of the science of comparative philology than the fact that he found that the word denoting salt bore a close resemblance in half-a-dozen different languages. This is the manly stand which he took in regard to the name that belonged by right to his native country. Men persisted in calling it Wales; whereas its real and only proper designation was Cambria. On this point Giraldus was very earnest. He recurred to it again and again. In his eyes he who styled Cambria Wales was but little better than one of the wicked; though there is no evidence that such a one was to him so completely enveloped by that atmosphere of depravity which clothes as a garment the ignorant, the stupid, and the iniquitous who still speak of the oldest form of our language as Anglo-Saxon.

It is not to be supposed that while writing these treatises Giraldus was resting from other occupations. He continued to be employed in public affairs, and it is by no means improbable that his advice and assistance were both needed and sought in dealing with the unquiet and refractory population of Wales. According to his own account he refused two bishoprics in his native country, which fell vacant, that of Bangor and that of Llandaff. We may suspect, however, that the offers if seriously made were not pressed upon him with the most irresistible urgency. Four in all, of such offers, he tells us, he had now refused; two in Ireland and two in Wales: for as he assures us, striving for nothing of that kind, he had with a serene and lofty mind scornfully trodden under foot every proposal of that nature; for at that time he neither desired nor sought for anything further. To his studies his whole heart was given; and though a follower of the court he nevertheless found leisure to write histories. His labors did not cease with the hours of the day; for at night he was poring over his books and preparing his works by the light of the lamp. Still for some cause he was not altogether satisfied; and the reasons

which he gives are not in absolute harmony with that love of calm and undisturbed study which he asserts to have been then the ruling feeling of his life. For it, to be sure, he left the court; but he gives as the considerations which induced him to leave it, that all hopes from it were at an end; that its promises were kept to the ear only; that no promotions took place in it according to merit. It seems, in fact, that like many who start out with the idea of leading their lives in accordance with the theory that virtue is its own reward, he had come in process of time to be dissatisfied with the wages he was to receive. At any rate, for the reasons given above, he tells us in his own grand style that he determined to quit the court, to abandon the tumult of its stormy seas, to retire within himself, and to seek the seclusion of the schools as a secure and tranquil haven for his tempest-tossed soul. He could not go to Paris because war was then going on between Richard and Philip Augustus; so to Lincoln he betook himself, where the famous scholar, William de Monte, was teaching theological science. There he remained for several years pursuing his studies.

But as Giraldus pathetically and parenthetically remarks, nothing upon earth is stable, nothing in the world immutable, nothing in life invariable. No amount of scholastic theology, no investigation of points of spiritual casuistry could ever smother the fire in his nature which was ever ready to burst forth into flame. In 1198, Peter de Laia, bishop of St. David's died. From this point began a controversy which made the next few years of our author's life anything but tranquil and studious ones; though with his constitutional enjoyment of a quarrel it is not impossible that those years were as happy in their way as any he spent.

The story is a long one to tell, and it is told very fully in another work; but the autobiography breaks off almost as soon as it is begun. The essential part of it is that Giraldus was elected to the vacant see by the canons of St. David's, and yielding either to the persuasions of others or to the promptings of his own vanity determined to insist upon its metropolitan rights, and secure the recognition of these from the pope. By this course of conduct he necessarily placed himself in open

hostility to both the court and the church of England. To Rome he journeyed in 1199, in order to prove the independence of St. David's to the head of the Christian world, and to receive directly from him the investiture. Innocent III., the greatest of the successors of St. Peter, was at that time in the second year of his pontificate. To him Giraldus presented six of his books, accompanying the gift with a play upon words, for which English furnishes no precise equivalent, to the effect that while others made their offerings in the form of libras, he made his in the form of libros. The pope was, as is well known, a learned man and a lover of literature; and Giraldus is careful to let us know how profoundly he was impressed with the value of the gift. The books he kept constantly by his bed for about a month, and was never weary of pointing out to the cardinals, who came to see him, the elegance of the style found in them and the excellence of the matter. The competition for their possession was naturally great. To five different cardinals the pope presented five of these books at their earnest entreaty. But there was one, the work entitled Gemma Sacerdotalis that he fancied most of all; and this he could not be persuaded to give up. In the meanwhile a letter came to Rome from Hubert, archbishop of Canterbury, the determined enemy of Giraldus, giving to Innocent the view of the controversy held by the English court and church.

In the very middle of a sentence in this letter the autobiog raphy abruptly breaks off. Whatever else was written has been lost, to all appearance irrecoverably. The details of the great controversy for the restoration of the rights and privileges of St. David's, into which Giraldus plunged with his whole heart, which took up several years of his life, which involved him in troubles and difficulties without end, and which resulted at last in failure, all these are told, as has been said, in another of his works. The story is a most curious and even fascinating one that he relates of his trials, his adventures, his escapes, his perils by land and by sea, in pursuit of this phantom which always eluded his grasp; but to recount it lies outside. of the province of these papers. The result of it gave a deathblow to any hopes he may have had of further ecclesiastical

advancement; and after this he fades from our sight. He was the writer of many other works besides those which have been mentioned, all marked by the peculiarities of a personal vanity always entertaining, of constant quotation from himself, and of excessive credulity. In this last respect it was possible for him to have been worse. He believed everything; he might have believed nothing. As has been intimated, he repeats again and again what he has himself said elsewhere. But he has one advantage over most writers of this kind, that he repeats himself in precisely the same words, so that the conscientious student is saved the necessity of going through twice what is essentially the same thing in order to be absolutely certain that he has not been bored with it once. But after the settlement of the controversy with the archbishop of Canterbury we hear but little more of him, though he seems to have lived on nearly twenty years. In the period which intervened between the close of his struggle for St. David's and the time of his death, he doubtless had many bitter quarrels and controversies which, however trivial in themselves, were important enough in his own eyes; but the record of them, if such there were, has followed the fate which has fallen upon. the memory of the brave men who lived before Agamemnon. He appears to have died somewhere in the neighborhood of 1220. Let us hope he found that rest in the grave which was denied him upon earth; that in the life beyond, that peace was furnished him in abundance, which it was rarely his fortune to have in what we know of his life here.