Poems, Knickerbocker Magazine, vol. 37, p. 292.

There is a want of artistic finish about Anglo-Norman poetry; but the main conception of the "Quest of the Sangreal," and the chief traits of the story, entitle its author, Walter de Mapes, to the rank of an epic poet. Had those romances ever been remodeled by a Dante, instead of a Malory, the world would have judged the middle ages more truly.—PEARSON, CHARLES H., 1867, History of England During the Early and Middle Ages, vol. I, p. 608.

Walter was one of two remarkable men who stand before us as the representatives of a sudden outburst of literary, social, and religious criticism which followed the growth of romance and the appearance of a freer historical tone in the court of the two Henries.. . He only rose to his fullest strength when he turned from the fields of romance to that of Church reform, and embodied the ecclesiastical abuses of his day in the figure of his "Bishop Goliath."-GREEN, JOHN RICHARD, 1874, A Short History of the English People, ch. iii, sc. i.

Walter Map was no trivial jester, although the misreading of a piece of his most scathing satire has attached to him the cant name of "the jovial Archdeacon." Undoubtedly he had a lively wit, could make even an abbot blush, and send table companions out of doors to explode in laughter at his broad contemptuous jest against a blasphemous hypocrisy. He was a wit somewhat of Chaucer's pattern, ready against cowled hypocrites, and striking, as Chaucer often did, after the manner of his time, with a coarse jest out of the strength of a clean heart. It was the wit also of a true poet. Among the high dignitaries of the Roman Church he was an entirely orthodox divine, and looked down from the heights of theological scholarship upon what seemed to him the ignorant piety of the Waldenses. But the first Church reform concerned Church morals more nearly than theology, and in this sense, by his Latin verse and prose, Walter Map represents the chief of the Reformers before Wyclif. In French, then the vernacular tongue of English literature, he it was who gave a soul to the Arthurian romances, writing, most probably, the Latin original of Robert

Borron's introductory romance of the Saint Graal, and certainly Lancelot of the Lake, the Quest of the Saint Graal, and the Mort Artus. Unassuming as Chaucer, and, before Chaucer, the man of highest genius in our literature, Map was a frank man of the world with ready sympathies, a winning courtesy, warm friendships, and well-planted hatreds.--MORLEY, HENRY, 1888, English Writers, vol. III, p.

120.

In the first place, he was an essayist; the "De Nugis Curialium" is not primarily an historical document, but a collection of the essays and miscellaneous papers. The papers often consist of a mere paragraph containing an anecdote or squib, not what we should be justified in calling an essay; but it is the air of immediate contact with the reader which distinguishes the essayist, though it may take other matters to furnish forth the essay, and on the other hand many of Map's subjects are all that a Lamb or Leigh Hunt would require. The essay in Map's time had no precedents, and consequently no recognized literary form; but all the essential qualities of it are found in the "De Nugis Curialium," and Map will be better understood under this name and view of him than any other.-COLTON, ARTHUR W., 1893, The First English Essayist: Walter Map, Poet-Lore, vol. 5, p. 538.

Walter Map's undoubted literary remains are scarcely commensurate with the reputation which he has almost continuously enjoyed. KINGSFORD, C. L., 1893, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. XXXVI, p. 110.

This Welshman has the vivacity of the Celts his compatriots; he was celebrated at the court of Henry II., and throughout England for his repartees and witticisms, so celebrated indeed that he himself came to agree to others' opinion, and thought them worth collecting. He thus formed a very bizarre book, without beginning or end, in which he noted, day by day, all the curious things he had heard "ego verbum audivi"-- and with greater abundance those he had said, including a great many puns. Thus it happens that certain chapters of his "De Nugis Curialium," a title that the work owes to the success of John of Salisbury's, are real novels, and have the smartness of such; others are

real fabliaux, with all their coarseness; others are scenes of comedy, with dialogues, and indications of characters as in a play; others again are anecdotes of the

East, "quoddam mirabile," told on their return by pilgrims or crusaders.-JUSSERAND, J. J., 1895, A Literary History of the English People, p. 190.

If we consider his diligence, his knowledge of antiquity, and his religious strictness of veracity, he may be considered as having surpassed not only the rude historians of the preceding ages, but even what could have been expected of himself. If to that fidelity, which is the first quality of a historian, he had joined a little more elegance of Latin style, he might have stood the first among the authors of that class.-LELAND, JOHN, 1542? Works, Allibone's Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 898.

He is the chiefest (if not sole) LayHistorian of his age; who, being neither Priest nor Monk, wrote a "Chronicle of England," beginning where Bede ended, and continuing the same until the fourth of King John. When King Edward the First layed claim to the Crown of Scotland, he caused the "Chronicles" of this Roger to be diligently searched, and carefully kept many authentical passages therein tending to his present advantage. -FULLER, THOMAS, 1662, The Worthies of England, ed., Nichols, vol. II, p. 513.

His most meritorious work was, his annals of England, from A. D. 731, when Bede's ecclesiastical history ends, to A. D. 1202. This work, which is one of the most voluminous of our ancient histories, is more valuable for the sincerity with which it is written and the great variety of facts which it contains, than for the beauty of its style, or the regularity of its arrangement. -HENRY, ROBERT, 177190, The History of Great Britain, vol. VI, p. 141.

On many accounts one of the most valuable historical writers of this age. WRIGHT, THOMAS, 1846, Biographia Britannica Literaria, vol. II, p. 410.

Hoveden is of all our old chroniclers the most of a matter-of-fact man; he indulges occasionally in an epithet, rarely or never in a reflection, his one notion of writing history seems to be to pack as many particulars as possible into a given space, giving one the notion in perusing his close array of dates and items that he had felt continually pressed by the necessity of economizing his paper or parchment. It is true that he has no notion of the higher economy of discrimination and selection; but among the multitude of facts of all kinds that crowd his pages are many that are really curious and illustrative. CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. I, p. 109.

Roger of Hoveden's Chronicle was based first upon a compilation made probably at Durham between the years of 1148 and 1161, and known as the "Historia Saxonum vel Anglorum post obitum. Bedæ." This chronicle was compiled from the histories of Simeon of Durham and Henry of Huntingdon. Roger of Hoveden added to this an account of the miracles of Edward the Confessor; an abstract of a charter of William the Conqueror,granting Heminburgh and Brackenholm to Durham; a copy of a charter by which Thomas I., archbishop of York, released Durham churches in his diocese from customary payments to the Archbishop; a list in French of warriors at the siege of Nice; and about eight other additions. The part of Hoveden's Chronicle which extends from 1148 to 1170 is not founded upon any written authority except the chronicle of MelThe Melrose Chronicle was

rose.

based upon Simeon of Durham until the year 1121, and was then continued until 1169 with contemporary record. Between 1163 and 1169 Roger of Hoveden draws largely from the lives of Becket in the record of his quarrel with the king. .

From 1169 to the spring of 1192 Roger of Hoveden's Chronicle embodies, with occasional divergence, and addition of documents, chiefly northern, that of Benedict of Peterborough; and from 1192 to 1201, at which date the chronicle ends, the addition of documents especially

relating to the north of England becomes a marked feature of the work. This is the part of the chronicle in which Roger of Hoveden is historian of his own time, and his work is of the highest value. The reputation of the chronicle was in its own time so good that Edward I. is said to have caused diligent search to be made for copies of it in the year 1291, in order that on its evidence he might adjust the disputes as to homage due to him from the Crown of Scotland.-MORLEY, HENRY, 1888, English Writers, vol. III, pp. 193, 194.

Layamon's versification also is no less remarkable than his language. Sometimes he seems anxious to imitate the rhymes, and to adopt the regular number of syllables which he had observed in his original; at other times he disregards both; either because he did not consider the laws of metre, or the consonance of final sounds, as essential to the gratification of his readers, or because he was unable to adopt them throughout so long a work, from the want of models in his native language on which to form his style. The latter is, perhaps, the most probable supposition; but, at all events, it is apparent that the recurrence of his rhymes is much too frequent to be the result of chance; so that, upon the whole, it seems reasonable to infer that Layamon's work was composed at or very near the period when the Saxons and Normans in this country began to unite into one nation, and to adopt a common language. ELLIS, GEORGE, 1790-1845, Specimens of the Early English Poets, vol. 1, p. 60.

No work shews more satisfactorily than his Chronicle," the benefits which

66

English poetry and literature have derived from the Anglo-Norman. In this composition we see a poem substantially Anglo-Saxon, but with none of that peculiar style of Anglo-Saxon mind and phrase which were its pervading characteristics; it is the simple style of the Anglo-Norman poetry transferred into the AngloSaxon: Hence, it presents to us the first state of our vernacular English poetry, divested of the inversions, transitions, obscurities, and metaphors of the Anglo-Saxon school, and approaching that form of easy and natural phrase which has been the nurse of our truest poetry and cultivated intellect.-TURNER, SHARON, 1814-23, The History of England During the Middle Ages, vol. v, p. 212.

It is a remarkable circumstance, that we find preserved in many passages of Layamon's poem the spirit and style of the earlier Anglo-Saxon writers. No one can read his descriptions of battles and scenes of strife, without being reminded of the Ode on Ethelstans victory at Brunanburh. The ancient mythological genders of the sun and moon are still

unchanged; the memory of the witenagemot has not yet become extinct, and the neigh of the hængest still seems to resound in our ears. Very many phrases are purely Anglo-Saxon, and with slight change, might have been used in Cædmon or Elfric. A foreign scholar and poet, versed both in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature, has declared, that tolerably well read as he is in the rhyming chronicles of his own country and of others, he has found Layamons beyond comparison the most lofty and animated in its style, at every moment reminding the reader of the splendid phraseology of Anglo-Saxon

verse.

It may also be added, that the colloquial character of much of the work renders it peculiarly valuable as a monument of language, since it serves to convey to us, in all probability, the current speech of the writers time as it passed from mouth to mouth.-MADDEN, SIR FREDERIC, 1847, ed. Layamon's Brut, Preface, vol. 1, p. xxiii.

His poem has more spirit and fire, in the Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon style than had been supposed. Upon the whole, Layamon must be reckoned far more of the older than the newer formation: he is an eocene, or at most a miocene; while his contemporaries, as they seem to be, belong philologically to a later period.HALLAM, HENRY, 1847, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. i, par. 50,

note.

Here is evidently a considerable amount of true poetic life in the conception, and also, as far as the apparent rudeness of the language will admit,-if we ought not perhaps rather to say as far as the imperfect knowledge of its laws now attainable enables us to form a judgment, consider

able care and aptness of expression.CRAIK, GEORGE L., 1861, A Compendious History of English Literature and of the English Language, vol. 1, p. 209.

He seldom conforms closely to the text of Wace, and his comparative elevation of diction, of thought, and of imagery, entitles his work to a higher rank than that of his original, and stamps it as a production of some literary merit.

.

His merits as a translator seem to be greater than his power as an original writer.MARSH, GEORGE P., 1862, The Origin and History of the English Language, etc., pp. 155, 158.

Sometimes happens to rhyme, sometimes fails, altogether barbarous and childish, unable to develop a continuous idea, babbling in little confused and incomplete phrases, after the fashion of the ancient Saxon.-TAINE, H. A., 1871, History of English Literature, tr. Van Laun, vol. I, p. 76.

As one man from the banks of the Severn, born of a foreign father, living in a foreign land, writing in a foreign tongue, never lost his English heart, his love for England and her history, so it was another man by the banks of the Severn who first taught the English tongue to bear witness against itself, who degraded it to become the channel of those wretched fables which in the minds of so many Englishmen have displaced alike the true history and the worthier legends of our fathers. legends of our fathers. The opposite to Orderic of Ettingsham is Layamon of Ernley. He had read the English book of Bæda and the Latin book of Austin, but he turned from them to the book that a French clerk made that was hight Wace. Wace truly well could write; we blame not him for writing, nor do we blame the noble Eleanor, that was Henry's Queen the high King's, for hearkening to what he wrote. It was something that the Duchess of Aquitaine and the Canon of Bayeux should seek to know something of the past days of the conquered island; and, if ill luck threw the monstrous fables of Geoffrey in their way, the blame was his and not theirs. It was no crime in Wace to write a Brut in French; it was treason against the tongue and history of his race for Layamon to translate that Brut into English.-FREEMAN, EDWARD A., 1876, The History of the Norman Conquest of England, vol. v, p. 590.

Of all English poets after the Conquest, none approached the Old English epos so closely as he, and hardly any metrical chronicle of the Middle Ages can rival Layamon's "Brut" in poetical worth. The merits of his style appear most brilliantly in the portrayal of battle and strife, and of the combat with the surging sea. Though his diction has none of the copiousness of the ancient epic language, yet in comparison with later times, it must be termed rich, and most graphic and effective. It is highly imaginative, but contains few detailed similes.

A most significant figure, Layamon stands upon the dividing line between two great periods, which he unites in a singular manner. He once more reproduces for us an age that is forever past. At the same time he is the first English poet to draw from French sources, the first to sing of King Arthur in English verse. TEN BRINK, BERNHARD, 1877-83, History of English Literature (To Wielif ), tr. Kennedy, pp. 192, 193.

The "preost Layamon ihoten" makes no inconsiderable additions to the matter embodied by the authorities whom he professes to follow; and his additions are by far the ablest and most spirited portions of his work.-GILMORE, J. H., 1878, The English Language and its Early Literature, p. 94.

Layamon is filled full of illustrations of the shall-and-will idiom. There is hardly a score of lines in which the distinction is not made.-WHITE, RICHARD GRANT, 1880, Every-Day English, p. 354, note.

Layamon was a modest, pious English priest, who loved his country, and enjoyed traditions of its ancient time. Having the true fine natural spirit of a poet and a scholar, he was among the many in almost every part of Europe who had their imagination kindled by Geoffrey of Monmouth's patriotic fictions. He had discoursed much and pleasantly with his neighbours, for his mind was stored with the oral tradition only to be gathered in familiar social talk; and when he translated Wace's "Brut" he added not only fresh legends of his own gathering, but new touches to the old.

From

his work, then, we have a right to infer that this earliest poet in our modern tongue was a devout, gentle, an affectionate parish priest, who loved his home and his country, and was friend as well as spiritual counsellor to the small flock of rustic parishioners, whose boys he taught and whose good will satisfied all but his intellectual wants. - MORLEY, HENRY, 1888, English Writers, vol. III, p. 229.

That monumental testimony to the selfsustaining vigour of our English tongue which, written nearly a century and a half after the Conquest, contains in thirty thousand lines but some fifty words of the Conqueror's language. -TRAIL, H. D., 1894, Social England, Introduction, vol. 1, p. xxxviii.

Layamon, who was stirred thus deeply by the genius of the ancient Saxon poetry, naturally sought to mould his matter in the traditional forms of song. But his metrical style remains a striking monument of the inward changes wrought in the language since it had passed from the lips of the singer to the pen of the literary composer. It was not only that terminations had been assimilated, genders confused, inflections dropped, the weak ending of the preterite tense substituted. for the internal change of the vowel: the whole character of the metrical sentence had been altered by the introduction of the article, by the frequent use of conjunctions, and by the constant association of the preposition "to" with the infinitive. mood. The abrupt, energetic effects of the ancient recitation were modified to

suit the literary style of the historian, and the rhythmical period was broken up by the insertion of numerous wedges, in the shape of small auxiliary words, which pointed the logic of the thought, while they destroyed the compactness of the syntax. In a measure distinctively Teutonic the influence of French verse is of course scarcely perceptible; Layamon's vocabulary contains scarcely more foreign elements than Ormin's. The laws of alliteration, however, are not strictly observed; in many verses the dominant letter is capriciously distributed; in others it is altogether absent; and the alliterative couplet is often replaced by a rhyming one. Compared with "Beowulf," the metrical structure of the "Brut" resembles those debased forms of architecture in which the leading external features are reproduced long after the reason for their invention has been forgotten.-COURTHOPE, W. J., 1895, A History of English Poetry, vol. 1, p. 127.

His alliterative poem-in which now and then a stammer of rhyme is heardbelongs to the threshold of the thirteenth century, and stands at the head of English literature: its author has been called the English Ennius. A qualification is necessary, however; Layamon wrote in a dialect, in the speech of the south of England

one of the three dialects among which English writings are to be divided for the next hundred and fifty years. His language is difficult, no doubt; special preparation is required to understand it, and