as his blood.  The form and style of his writings show the influence of those classical studies which were now reviving throughout Christendom.  Monk as he is, William discards the older ecclesiastical models and the annalistic form.  Events are grouped together with no strict reference to time, while the lively narrative flows rapidly and loosely along with constant breaks of digression over the general history of Europe and the Church.  It is in this change of historic spirit that William takes his place as first of the more statesmanlike and philosophic school of historians who began to arise in direct connexion with the Court, and among whom the author of the chronicle which commonly bears the name of “Benedict of Peterborough” with his continuator Roger of Howden are the most conspicuous.  Both held judicial offices under Henry the Second, and it is to their position at Court that they owe the fulness and accuracy of their information as to affairs at home and abroad, as well as their copious supply of official documents.  What is noteworthy in these writers is the purely political temper with which they regard the conflict of Church and State in their time.  But the English court had now become the centre of a distinctly secular literature.  The treatise of Ranulf de Glanvill, a justiciar of Henry the Second, is the earliest work on English law, as that of the royal treasurer, Richard Fitz-Neal, on the Exchequer is the earliest on English government.

[Sidenote:  Gerald of Wales]

Still more distinctly secular than these, though the work of a priest who claimed to be a bishop, are the writings of Gerald de Barri.  Gerald is the father of our popular literature as he is the originator of the political and ecclesiastical pamphlet.  Welsh blood (as his usual name of Giraldus Cambrensis implies) mixed with Norman in his veins, and something of the restless Celtic fire runs alike through his writings and his life.  A busy scholar at Paris, a reforming Archdeacon in Wales, the wittiest of Court chaplains, the most troublesome of bishops, Gerald became the gayest and most amusing of all the authors of his time.  In his hands the stately Latin tongue took the vivacity and picturesqueness of the jongleur’s verse.  Reared as he had been in classic studies, he threw pedantry contemptuously aside.  “It is better to be dumb than not to be understood,” is his characteristic apology for the novelty of his style:  “new times require new fashions, and so I have thrown utterly aside the old and dry method of some authors and aimed at adopting the fashion of speech which is actually in vogue to-day.”  His tract on the conquest of Ireland and his account of Wales, which are in fact reports of two journeys undertaken in those countries with John and Archbishop Baldwin, illustrate his rapid faculty of careless observation, his audacity, and his good sense.  They are just the sort of lively, dashing letters that we find in the correspondence of a modern journal.  There