a sober history, while
its most considerable contemporaries, the _Ormulum_ and the _Ancren
Riwle_, the former in verse, the latter in prose, are both purely
religious. At the extreme end of the period the most important and
most certain work, Robert of Gloucester's, is, again, a history in
verse. About the same time we have, indeed, the romances of _Havelok_
and _Horn_; but they are, like most of the other work of the time,
translations from the French. The interesting _Poema Morale_, or
"Moral Ode," which we have in two forms--one of the meeting-point of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one fifty years later--is almost
certainly older than its earliest extant version, and was very likely
pure Saxon. Only in Nicholas of Guilford's _Owl and Nightingale_,
about 1250, and perhaps some of the charming _Specimens of Lyric
Poetry_, printed more than fifty years ago by Mr Wright, with a very
few other things, do we find pure literature--not the literature of
education or edification, but the literature of art and form.

[Sidenote: _Layamon._]

Yet the whole is, for the true student of literature, full enough of
interest, while the best things are not in need of praising by
allowance. Of Layamon mention has already been made in the chapter on
the Arthurian Legend. But his work covers very much more than the
Arthurian matter, and has interests entirely separate from it.
Layamon, as he tells us,[89] derived his information from Bede, Wace,
and a certain Albinus who has not been clearly identified. But he must
have added a great deal of his own, and if it could be decided exactly
_how_ he added it, the most difficult problem of mediaeval literature
would be solved. Thus in the Arthurian part, just as we find additions
in Wace to Geoffrey, so we find additions to Wace in Layamon. Where
did he get these additions? Was it from the uncertain "Albinus"? Was
it, as Celtic enthusiasts hold, that, living as he did on Severn bank,
he was a neighbour of Wales, and gathered Welsh tradition? Or was it
from deliberate invention? We cannot tell.

[Footnote 89: Ed. Madden, i. 2.]

Again, we have two distinct versions of his _Brut_, the later of which
is fifty years or thereabouts younger than the earlier. It may be said
that almost all mediaeval work is in similar case. But then the great
body of mediaeval work is anonymous; and even the most scrupulous ages
have not been squeamish in taking liberties with the text of Mr Anon.
But the