extracts from the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle;" all these
characteristics may well earn for the author the title that
Lappenberg has given to him, though under the name of
"Matthew of Westminster," namely, that of the "Verwirrer der
Geschichte." At the same time there is no doubt that he had
access to some materials which we no longer possess: and my
object has been to trace all his statements, where possible,
to their source, and to distinguish any additions that the
compiler has made when they are merely rhetorical
amplifications of his own, or when they are really from some
source not now extant.'--Pref. to vol. i., p. xxxiii.

After all that can be said, the work surprises us by the erudition it
displays. Nor is that surprise lessened when we have gone through the
masterly analysis of its contents, which Dr. Luard has given us in the
Preface to his first vol. Such as it was, it became the great text-book
on which Roger of Wendover founded his own labours when he incorporated
it into the chronicle which he left behind him. Roger of Wendover did
good work, and laboriously epitomized, supplemented and improved, but he
was a mere literary monk after all; a student, a bookworm, simple,
conscientious, and truthful; a trustworthy reporter, 'a picker-up of
learning's crumbs,' a monkish historiographer, in short; but by no means
a historian of large views and of original mind. Roger of Wendover died
in 1236, and Matthew Paris succeeded to his office and work.

From what has been said, the reader may be presumed to have gained
something like an answer to our first question: _What_ was Brother
Matthew? Briefly, he was a representative monk of the most powerful
monastery in England during the 13th century, when that monastery was at
its best, and doing the work which in after times the Universities and
great schools of the country took out of the hands of the religious
houses; work, too, which since those days has been done by the
printing-press, and by many other institutions better fitted to deal
with the requirements of an immensely larger population, and to be the
instruments of diffusing culture and refinement through the nation after
it had outgrown the older machinery.

When we come to look into the personal history of Brother Matthew, the
details of his biography need not detain us long. Sir Henry Taylor's
famous line is only half true, after all;

'The world kno