But let us lay aside their interested lies, and consider how far they were qualified in other respects to transmit faithful memoirs to posterity.  In the ages I speak of, the barbarous monkish ages, the shadow of learning that existed was confined to the clergy:  they generally wrote in Latin, or in verse, and their compositions in both were truly barbarous.  The difficulties of rhime, and the want of correspondent terms in Latin, were no small impediments to the severe nvarch of truth.  But there were worse obstacles to encounter.  Europe was in a continual state of warfare.  Little princes and great lords were constantly skirmishing and struggling for trifling additions of territory, or wasting each others borders.  Geography was very imperfect; no police existed; roads, such as they were, were dangerous; and posts were not established.  Events were only known by rumour, from pilgrims, or by letters carried In couriers to the parties interested:  the public did not enjoy even those fallible vehicles of intelligence, newspapers.  In this situation did monks, at twenty, fifty, an hundred, nay, a thousand miles distance (and under the circumstances I have mentioned even twenty miles were considerable) undertake to write history—­and they wrote it accordingly.

If we take a survey of our own history, and examine it with any attention, what an unsatisfactory picture does it present to us!  How dry, how superficial, how void of information!  How little is recorded besides battles, plagues, and religious foundations!  That this should be the case, before the Conquest, is not surprizing.  Our empire was but forming itself, or re-collecting its divided members into one mass, which, from the desertion of the Romans, had split into petty kingdoms.  The invasions of nations as barbarous as ourselves, interfered with every plan of policy and order that might have been formed to settle the emerging state; and swarms of foreign monks were turned loose upon us with their new faith and mysteries, to bewilder and confound the plain good sense of our ancestors.  It was too much to have Danes, Saxons, and Popes, to combat at once!  Our language suffered as much as our government; and not having acquired much from our Roman masters, was miserably disfigured by the subsequent invaders.  The unconquered parts of the island retained some purity and some precision.  The Welsh and Erse tongues wanted not harmony:  but never did exist a more barbarous jargon than the dialect, still venerated by antiquaries, and called Saxon.  It was so uncouth, so inflexible to all composition, that the monks, retaining the idiom, were reduced to write in what they took or meant for Latin.