allowed and expected to repeat what the elders had said before him: the master of the liberal arts incurred no blame for drawing upon Isidorus or any other encyclopedia. The historians also availed themselves, wherever they could, of previous histories, but the nature of their subject forced them to be original. The Latin chroniclers of the Middle Ages, though their language interferes with them, are as various in character as the authors of any other period: the commonplaces of their style, the conventions of respectable grammar, the tedious inherited phrases, are not able to smother up the differences of vision and sentiment. It is possible to take this historical literature and make it a store of specimens to illustrate faults of composition and errors of judgment: it is more cheerful and profitable to see in it a diversity of talent expressing itself vigorously in spite of adverse conditions. There are two opposite points of view, and both are justifiable. Regarded in one way, the historians represent the Dark Ages and all the darkness of them; in another aspect they come out distinct from one another as original minds. There is as great a difference between Gregory of Tours and Bede, or Paulus Diaconus and Einhard, as between Froissart and Commines. Their qualities are felt to be mainly independent of the conditions of their time. Paulus Diaconus was a born storyteller, who only wanted a better language to make him one of the masters of narrative prose. The versatile humour of Liutprand might have worn in another age something different from his Greek-Latin

Lombard motley, but as he is, he is unmistakable and distinct. The genius of Bede is perhaps the clearest demonstration in the whole world of the independence of genius: the sanity and dignity of his mind are his own, and transcend the limitations of his time: he has the historical gift, and he finds its proper application. If the first impression of early medieval Latin history is one of monotony, and if monotony never wholly disappears from the Latin page and its conventional formulas, nevertheless, the true, the ultimate judgment in respect of these authors will see them each for himself, each with characteristics of his own. There is no want of variety among them.

In history there was no commanding authoritative model to interfere with the freedom of individual taste. It is true that Orosius has a place at the beginning of mediæval history to some extent resembling that of Boethius in philosophy: his short history of the world is a prologue to the work of the following centuries which is not allowed to fall out of reputation at the close of the period. But while the two, Boethius and Orosius, are regarded in a similar way as authorities by King Alfred and by Dante, the value of the historian is inferior to that of the philosopher: Boethius not only introduces the course of mediæval speculation but transcends it: he is not refuted his doctrine is as fresh in the fourteenth century as in the sixth, a perennial source of moral wisdom. Orosius is much less important. Although his exposition of the meaning of history, his justification of the ways of Providence, is held in respect,

he does not, like Boethius, command the whole field of operations. His religious view of history and his pathetic sermonisings are followed in spirit and style by many mediæval authors, but the interest of history was too great and varied to be ruled by the formulas of Orosius: the chroniclers generally find their own points of view for themselves, and these in very many cases, fortunately, are not those of the preacher. Orosius could not teach anything to writers who, like Einhard, knew the character and business of a great statesman, or, like Paulus Diaconus, had stories to tell.

III.

Classical literature perished from a number of contributory ailments, but of these none was more Mythology desperate than the want of romance in and Legend. the Roman Empire, and especially in the Latin language. It may have been the original prose of the city of Rome, the disastrous influence of the abstract gods, male and female, whom St Augustine describes satirically-Volupia, Cluacina, Vaticanus, Murcia, and the rest, turba deorum. It may have been the long-engrained habit of rhetoric, an absorption in the formal machinery of literature, that blighted the fancy of the poets, and turned the old mythology into a mere affair of diction. It is true that there were exceptions. Apuleius, with all his rhetorical tastes, was at home in a fanciful world utterly remote from the "hypocritical and hackneyed course of literature" as practised in the schools. He

leaves modern authors of Romance very little to invent in addition to his discoveries. He gives up the accepted Olympian tradition, the deities of the professional epic, and goes to look for new fancies in local superstitions, in old wives' tales, in a strange country, full of terror and laughter, the Thessaly of the Classical Walpurgisnacht.

Lucian also, in emancipation from the traditional literary forms, allows his fancy to play mischievously about the subjects of mythology, and converts them to new uses; he extracts a kind of volatile essence, a new wonder, from their ashes. The incidents of his True History have been found by modern readers to contain another element besides the burlesquea strain of romantic freedom. At the very lowest estimate of his work, he showed that for modern literary purposes the myth is what the author makes it; it is a theme, a suggestion, from which new fancies may rise. But Apuleius and Lucian had no followers, and the promise of a romantic revival died away.

"The Gothic mythology of fairies," as Dr Johnson calls it, was no less the property of Italy than of the North. In any mountain village the poets might have found the great-grandmothers of those storytellers for whom Boccaccio in his Genealogy of the Gods offers a courteous defence. The elves and fays of Italy, Lamiæ, as Boccaccio calls them, might have refreshed the poets. But the old wives and their fairy tales are left unnoticed, except by Apuleius. The poets might praise the country life, but this part of it, known to Shakespeare, Herrick, and Milton,

was hidden from their view. The kind Italian genius, that had saved so many Latin poets from the curse of pedantry and dull magnificence, was still able to do something for Claudian, as his Old Man of Verona is sufficient to show. But while the blessing of light and air and the quiet life was not withheld, there was something that kept the Latin language almost wholly ignorant of fairy tales.

One glory of the Dark Ages and the barbarian tongues is that they made up for this, with results that are not yet exhausted; among other things with rather important results for the reading of Greek and Latin poetry. It is impossible to say how much the modern poetical interpretation of Homer or Virgil is affected by "the Gothic mythology," or by the tone of medieval romance. Ever since the modern nations began to be educated, their study of Greek and Latin has been influenced, for all but the most precise and accurate, by the associations of Northern legend. Not only the medieval readers who calmly accepted Æneas or Ulysses in any sort of byrnie or breeches that happened to be the fashion of their own day, but even more scrupulous and scholarly persons find themselves reading a "Gothic" Homer, whose incidents are sometimes like a border raid, sometimes like the adventures of Tristram or Lancelot. There is seldom, in spite of archæology, any thorough revelation of Greek life untouched, in the reader's mind, with "Gothic" colours. He makes his own scenery from what he knows in his own land:

"And Lochnagar with Ida looks o'er Troy."