which could not fail to be a favorite with the royal patron, among those French books, which he loved. Fertile in invention, it is however of the old stock; fresh meads and delicious gardens, ladies in arbors, magical trials of armed knights on horses of steel, which, touched by a secret spring, could represent a tourney. We strike the shield at the castle-gate of chivalry, and we view the golden roof of the hall, lighted up by a carbuncle of prodigious size; we repose in chambers, walled with silver, and enamelling many a story. There are many noble conceptions among his allegorical gentry. She, whom Graunde Armour first beheld was mounted on her palfrey, flying with the wind, encircled with tongues of fire, and her two milk-white greyhounds, on whose golden collars are inscribed in diamond letters, Grace and Governance. She is fame, her palfrey is Pegasus, and her burning tongues are the voice of Posterity! There are some grotesque incidents, as in other romances; a monster wildly created, the offspring of Disdain and Strangeness a demon composed of the seven metals! We have also a dwarf who has to encounter a giant with seven heads; and our subdolous David mounts on twelve steps cut in the rock; and to the surprise of the giant, he discovered in "the boy whom he had mocked," his equal in stature, and his vanquisher, notwithstanding the inconceivable roar of his seven heads.

Warton transcribed a few lines to show his "harmonious versification and clear expression ;" but this short specimen may convey an erroneous notion. Our verse was yet irregular, and its modulation was accidental rather than settled; the metrical lines of Hawes, for the greater part, must be read rhythmically, it was a barbarism that even later poets still retained, He also affected an ornate diction; and Latin and French terms cast an air of pedantry, more particularly when the euphony of his verse is marred by closing his lines with his elongated polysyllables; he probably imagined that the dimensions of his words necessarily lent a grandeur to his thoughts. With all these defects,

Hawes often surpasses himself, and we may be surprised, that in a poem composed in the court of Henry the Seventh, about 1506, the poet should have left us such a minutely finished picture of female beauty, as he has given of La Pucel; Hawes had been in Italy, and seems with an artist's eye to have dwelt on some picture of Raphael, in his early manner, or of his master Perugino, in his hard but elaborate style.

"Her shining hair, so properly she dresses,
Aloft her forehead, with fayre golden tresses;
Her forehead stepe, with fayre browés ybent;
Her eyen gray; her nosé straight and fayre;
In her white cheeks, the faire bloudé it went
As among the white, the reddé to repayre;

Her mouthe right small; her breathe sweet of ayre;
Her lippes soft and ruddy as a rose;

No hart alive but it would him appose.

With a little pitte in her well-favoured chynne;
Her necke long, as white as any lillye,

With vaynés blewe, in which the bloud ranne in;
Her pappés rounde, and thereto right pretýe;
Her armés slender, and of goodly bodye;

Her fingers small, and thereto right long,
White as the milk, with blewé vaynes among;
Her feet propér; she gartred well her hose;
I never sawe so fayre a créatúre."

The reign of Henry the Seventh was a misty morning of our vernacular literature, but it was the sunrise; and though the road be rough, we discover a few names by which we may begin to count, as we find on our way a milestone, which, however rudely cut and worn out, serves to measure our distances.

22*

FIRST SOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY.

SOCIETY must have considerably advanced ere it could have produced an historical record; and who could have furnished even the semblance but the most instructed class, in the enjoyment of uninterrupted leisure, among every people? History therefore remained long a consecrated thing in the hands of the priesthood, from the polytheistical era of the Roman pontiffs who registered their annals, to the days that the history of Christian Europe became chronicled by the monastic orders.* Had it not been for the monks, exclaimed our learned Marsham, we should not have had a history of England.

The monks provided those chronicles which have served both for the ecclesiastical and civil histories of every European people. In every abbey the most able of its inmates, or the abbot himself, was appointed to record every considerable transaction in the kingdom, and sometimes extended their view to foreign parts. All these were set down in a volume reserved for this purpose; and on the decease of every sovereign these memorials were laid before the general chapter, to draw out a sort of chronological history, occasionally with a random comment, as the humor of the scribe prompted, or the opinions of the whole monastery sanctioned.

Beside these meager annals the monasteries had other books more curious than their record of public affairs.

Archbishop Plagmund superintended the Saxon .Annals to the year 891. The first Chronicles, those of Kent or Wessex, were regularly continued by the Archbishops of Canterbury, or by their directions, as far as 1000, or even 1070.-The Rev. Dr. Ingram's Preface to the Saxon Chronicle.

These were our earliest Chronicles; the Britons possibly never wrote any.

These were their Leiger-books, of which some have escaped among the few reliques of the universal dissolution of the monasteries. In these registers or diaries they entered all matters relating to their own monastery and its dependancies. As time never pressed on the monkish secretary, his notabilia runs on very miscellaneously. Here were descents of families, and tenures of estates; authorities of charters and of cartularies; curious customs of counties, cities, and great towns. Strange accidents were not uncommon then; and sometimes, between a miracle or a natural phenomenon, a fugitive anecdote stole in. The affairs of a monastery exhibited a moving picture of domestic life. These religious houses whose gate opened to the wayfarer, and who were the distributors of useful commodities to the neighboring poor, for in their larger establishments they included workmen of every class, did not however maintain their munificence untainted by mundane passions. Forged charters had often sealed their possessions, and supposititious grants of mortuary donations silently transferred the wealth of families. These lords of the soil, though easy landlords, still cast an "evil eye" on the lands of their neighbor. Even rival monasteries have fought in meadows for the ownership; the stratagems of war and the battle-array of two troops of cudgelling monks might have furnished some cantoes to an epic, less comic perhaps than that of "The Rape of the Bucket."

In the literary simplicity of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, while every great monastery had its historian, evchronicle derived its title from its locality; thus, among ery others, were the Glastonbury, the Peterborough, and the Abingdon Chronicles: and when Leland, so late as the reign of Henry the Eighth, in his search into monastic libraries, discovered one at St. Neot's he was at a loss to describe it otherwise than as "The Chronicle of St. Neot's." The famous Doomsday Book was originally known as "Liber de Winton," or "The Winchester Book," from its first place of custody. The same circumstance occur

red among our neighbors, where Les grandes Chroniques de Saint Denys were so called from having been collected or compiled by the monks of that abbey. An abstract notion of history, or any critical discrimination of one chronicle from another, was not as yet familiar even to our scholars; and in the dearth of literature the classical models of antiquity were yet imperfectly contemplated.

It is not less curious to observe that, at a time when the literary celebrity of the monachal scribe could hardly pass the boundaries of the monastery, and the monk himself was restricted from travelling, bound by indissoluble chains, yet this lone man, as if eager to enjoy a literary reputation however spurious, was not scrupulous in practising certain dishonest devices. Before the discovery of printing, the concealment of a manuscript for the purpose of appropriation was an artifice which, if we may decide by some rumors, more frequently occurred than has been detected. Plagiarism is the common sin of the monkish chronicler, to which he was often driven by repeating a mouldy tale a hundred times told; but his furtive pen extended to the capital crime of felony. I shall venture to give a pair of literary anecdotes of monkish writers.

Matthew of Paris, one of these chroniclers, is somewhat esteemed, and Matthew of Westminster is censured, for having copied in his "Flores Historiarum" the other Matthew; but we need not draw any invidious comparisons between the two Matthews, since Matthew the first had himself transcribed the work of Roger the Prior of Wendover. The famous "Polychronicon," which long served as a text-book for the encyclopedic knowledge of the fourteenth century, has two names attached to it, and one, however false, which can never be separated from the work, interwoven in its texture. This famed volume is ascribed to Ranulph or Ralph Higden of St. Werberg's Monastery, now the Cathedral of Chester. Ralph, that he might secure the tenure of this awful edifice of universal history for a thousand years, most subdolously contrived that the initial