The Chronica Majora has been excellently edited by Dr. H.R.  Luard in seven volumes for the Rolls Series, with elaborate introductions tracing the literary history of the work and a magnificent index.  The Historia Minor has been published in three volumes by Sir F. Madden in the Rolls Series.  Paris also wrote the lives of the abbots of his house up to 1255, a work not now extant, and the basis of the later Gesta Abbatum S. Albani, compiled by Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422?) and likewise issued in the Rolls Series.  The thirteenth century biographies have some original value.  Paris’s Life of Stephen Langton is printed in LIEBERMANN’S Ungedruckte Anglo-Normannische Geschichtsquellen (1870).

Paris, perhaps the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, has literary skill, a vivid though prolix style, a keen eye for the picturesque, bold and independent judgment, wonderful breadth and range, and an insatiable curiosity.  He was a man of the world, a courtier and a scholar; he took immense pains to collect his facts from documents and eye-witnesses, and had great advantages in this respect through the intimate relations between his house and the court.  Henry III himself contributed many items of information to him.  His details are extraordinarily full, and he tells us almost as much about continental affairs as about those of his own country.  He wrote with too flowing a pen to be careful about precision, and had too much love of the picturesque to resist the temptation of embellishing a good story.  His narrative of continental transactions is in particular extremely inexact.  But the chief cause of his offending also gives special value to his work; he was a man of strong views and his sympathies and prejudices colour every line he wrote.  His standpoint is that of a patriotic Englishman, indignant at the alien invasions, at the misgovernment of the king, the greed of the curialists and the Poitevins, and with a professional bias against the mendicants.  His writings make his age live.

The falling off in the St. Alban’s work of the next generation is characteristic of the decay of colour and detail which makes the chroniclers of the age of Edward I. inferior to those of his father’s reign.  The years after 1259 were briefly chronicled by uninspired continuators of Matthew Paris, and the reputation of St. Alban’s as a school of history led to the frequent transference of their annals to other religious houses, where they were written up by local pens.  This led to the dissemination of the series of jejune compilations which in the ages of Edward I. and II. were widely spread under the name of Flores Historiarum.  Dr. Luard has published a critical edition of these Flores in three volumes of the Rolls Series, which range from the creation to 1326, with an introduction determining their complicated relations to each other.  They are of no real value before 1259, and for the next