t still real. It will
almost invariably be found that those mediaeval books which happen to
have been made known before the formal beginning of scholarship in the
modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not
unnaturally put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries
or fosterlings. Robert of Gloucester's work, with the later but
companion Englishing of Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne,
was published by Hearne in the early part of the last century. The
contemporaries of that publication thought him rude, unkempt,
"Gothick": the moderns have usually passed him by for more direct
_proteges_ of their own. Yet there is not a little attraction in
Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first in
any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history,
old as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not
to be despised--

"Engeland is a well good land, I ween of each land the best,
Yset in the end of the world, as all in the West:
The sea goeth him all about, he stands as an isle,
His foes he dares the less doubt but it be through guile
Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-seen while."

[Footnote 98: Edited with Langtoft, in 4 vols., by Hearne, Oxford,
1724; and reprinted, London, 1810. Also more lately in the Rolls
Series.]

And in the same good swinging metre he goes on describing the land,
praising its gifts, and telling its story in a downright fashion which
is very agreeable to right tastes. Like almost everybody else, he drew
upon Geoffrey of Monmouth for his early history: but from at least the
time of the Conqueror (he is strongly prejudiced in the matter of
Harold) he represents, if not what we should call solid historical
knowledge, at any rate direct, and for the time tolerably fresh,
historical tradition, while as he approaches his own time he becomes
positively historical, and, as in the case of the Oxford town-and-gown
row of 1263, the first Barons' Wars, the death of the Earl-Marshal,
and such things, is a vigorous as well as a tolerably authoritative
chronicler. In the history of English prosody he, too, is of great
importance, being another landmark in the process of consolidating
accent and quantity, alliteration and rhyme. His swinging verses still
have the older tendency to a trochaic rather than the later to an
anapaestic rhythm; but they are, so to speak, on the move, and
approaching the la