Battle Abbey-whose ruins are visited by hundreds every year. A large portion of the old religious house, kept in excellent repair, and very charming with its growth of ivy and its embowering shade, is held in private hands-being the occasional residence of the Duke of Cleveland. Amid the ruins the usher will guide one to a crypt of the ancient chapel whose solid Norman arches date back to the time of the Conqueror, and which is said to mark the very spot on which Harold fell, wounded to the death, on that memorable day of Hastings.

I

CHAPTER II.

RECUR a moment to what was said in our

opening talk as a boy will wisely go back a little way for a better jump forward. I spoke the reader will remember of ringing, Celtic war-songs, which seemed to be all of literature that was drifting in the atmosphere, when we began then there came a gleam of Christian light and of monkish learning thro' St. Augustine in Southern England; and another gleam through Iona, and Lindisfarne, from Irish sources; then came Cadmon's Bible singing, — which had echo far down in Milton's day; next the good old Beda, telling the story of these things; then a thousand years ago, the Great Alfred, at once a book-maker and a King. Before him and after him came a dreary welter of Danish wars; the great Canute-tradition says chirping a song in the middle of them; and last, the slaughter

of Hastings, where the Saxon Harold went down, and the conquering Norman came up.

Geoffrey of Monmouth.

We start to-day with an England that has its office-holding and governing people speaking one language its moody land-holders and cultivators speaking another and its irascible Britons in Wales and Cumbria and Cornwall speaking yet another. Conquered people are never in much mood for song-singing or for history-making. So there is little or nothing from English sources for a century or more. Even the old Saxon Chronicle kept by monks (at Peterboro in this time), does not grow into a stately record, and in the twelfth century on the year of the death of King Stephen, dies out altogether.

But there is a Welsh monk-Geoffrey of Monmouth *-living just on the borders of Wales, and probably not therefore brought into close connection with this new Norman element-who writes

* GEOFFREY OF MONMOUTH (Bishop of St. Asaph), d. 1154. His Cronicon, sive Historia Britonum first printed in 1508 translated into Eng., 1718. Vid. Wright's Essays Arch. Sub., 1861.

(about one hundred years after the Conquest) a halfearnest and mostly-fabulous British Chronicle. He professes to have received its main points from a Walter somebody, who had rare old bookish secrets of history, derived from Brittany, in his keeping. You will remember, perhaps, how another and very much later writer-sometimes known as Geoffrey Crayon-once wrote a History of New York, claiming that it was made up from the MSS. of a certain Diedrich Knickerbocker: I think that perhaps the same sense of quiet humor belonged to both these Geoffreys. Certainly Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle bears about the same relation to British matters of fact which the Knickerbocker story of New York bears to the colonial annals of our great city.

The fables which were told in this old Monmouth Chronicle are more present in men's minds to-day than the things which were real in it: there was, for instance, the fable about King Lear (who does not know King Lear?): then, there were the greater fables about good King Arthur and his avenging Caliburn (who does not know King Arthur?). These two stories are embalmed now in Literature, and will never perish.

King Arthur Legends.

Those Arthur legends had been floating about in ballad or song, but they never had much mention in anything pretending to be history* until Geoffrey of Monmouth's day. There is nothing of them in the Saxon Chronicle: nothing of them in Beda: King Alfred never mentions King Arthur.

But was there ever a King Arthur? Probably : but at what precise date is uncertain: probable, too, that he had his court. as many legends run one time at Caerleon, "upon Usk," and again at Camelot. Caerleon is still to be found by the curious traveller, in pleasant Monmouthshire, just upon the borders of Wales, with Tintern Abbey and the grand ruin of Chepstow not far off; and a great amphitheatre among the hills (very likely of Roman

*Such exception as the name warrants, must be made in favor of NENNIUS, § 50, A. D. 452.

+ Other important Arthurian localities belong to the north and west of England; and whoso is curious in such matters, will read with interest Mr. STUART GLENNIE's ingenious ar gument to prove that Scotland was the great cradle of Ar. thurian Romance. Early English Text Society, Part iii.,

1869.