The Dublin Review

2. The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, from 1066 to 1176, now first translated, with Notes and an Abstract of the subsequent History of the Establishment. By MARK ANTONY LOWER, M.A., Member of the Societies of Antiquaries of Normandy and of America, and of the Academy of Sciences of Caen. London: John Russell Smith. 1851.

LARGE picture requires innumerable studies of detail. Every head, every hand, each figure and each ornament must be thought over and sketched and studied as if the artist's object was, in each case, to show how it, and it alone, stood in the original scene. painter has thus two great departments into which his labour divides itself. The study of minute, separate parts, and then the combination of all these details into one harmonious whole.

The

The work of the historian contains a similar division. Unless he has felt that nothing can be too small, too insignificant for his attention, he does not deserve to be allowed to use the pen of the writer of history. His broad views will be bold fallacies, and his sweeping generalizations will simply mislead. In ordinary life, we should be incapable of giving an account of any complicated chain of events unless we had noticed with accuracy and care each succeeding circumstance. We are quite unable to give a truthful sketch of the character of any one with whose daily, and even trivial, actions we are not familiar. It is just so

VOL. XLIX-No. XCVII,

with the historian. His studies must condescend to the minutest particulars, if his " philosophy of history" is to deserve the name. What can he tell us of the tendencies of an epoch or the causes of its events, if he is not familiar with the great men of the time? And how can he become familiar with a great man unless he follows his career step by step? The work, therefore, of the biographer is the necessary antecedent of the historian-it is of a humbler order, but without it history cannot exist. To this we are becoming fully awake, and the work of our time seems to be acknowledged in the main to be, the accumulation of materials by which those who come after us may re-write the history that, erring in sins, partly of omission and partly of commission, has been mistaught to those before us. Thus kings and queens, and princesses, chancellors and chief justices, statesmen and artists, every one of note and many of none, have now their biographers. It is to be hoped that the writers of true history that are to come, who are to read and digest all these things, will not omit the Lives of the Saints from the elements with which they have to deal, as has been too much done in times gone by, And we hope that the saints may find worthy biographers from time to time, as the ancient records are exhumed and the old manuscripts deciphered; for as fresh discoveries are made our books become almost as antiquated and out of date as "Brown Bess" is beside the modern armes de precision.

St. Thomas of Canterbury has, we are thankful to remember, been by no means forgotten in our time. Both in periodical literature and in more permanent works he has been treated of with a happy frequency that reminds one of the astonishing number of biographers that took it in hand to record his actions soon after his death. We are glad of it for many reasons, and not least for this, that unless his life and character be thoroughly appreciated, it is impossible that the history can be understood, not only of England under Henry II., but of Christendom under Pope Alexander III. But the work has by no means been permanently accomplished. Further materials for the biographer must necessarily from time to time be discovered which it is his business to assimilate and work up ready for the hand of the future historian. Indeed we have heard rumours and received accounts which show that some such additions to our sources of information have been made

even since the appearance of the most recent lives of St. Thomas of Canterbury. The wonderfully interesting French metrical Life by Garnier de Pont Sainte Maxence, completed as he tells us within four years of the martyrdom, and speaking to us in the very language of the time of St. Thomas, has been used, it is true, by Professor Stanley, by Canon Morris, and by Canon Robertson, in their respective compilations, but they have by no means exhausted the information it has to afford. The edition printed by Immanuel Bekker (Berlin 1838), has been completely supplanted by the charming little volume that we owe to M. Hippeau, Professeur a la Faculté des Lettres a Caen.

Of all ancient sources of information none surpass letters in value and interest. Although we have in Dr. Giles's disorderly collection perhaps 1,000 letters of the time, all more or less relating to the controversy, it is with the liveliest pleasure that we have heard that Mgr. Liverani, a Roman prelate, has discovered 112 others hitherto unpublished. Of these, one only is from the pen of the Saint himself; a short letter of no consequence, recommending some one whom he was sending to Rome. But its presence in the collection suggests to us that these are Roman copies of letters that have escaped Alan of Tewskesbury and the other English collectors. The other letters, we are told, are a medley-many refer to the questions about St. Thomas, and amongst the writers are Gilbert Ffoliot, Bishop of London, Hilary Bishop of Chichester, Roger, the Archbishop of York, the Abbot of Malmesbury, the Bishop of Le Mans, the Archbishop of Rouen; and there is one of Henry II., relating as many others of the collection do, to the Canonization of St. Edward. There are also letters of Alexander III., and one of Victor IV., the Antipope, which is described as being the most interesting letter of the series, its purport being to invite the English to acknowledge him. On this subject, the nearness of England and especially of Henry II. to schism, we may expect in the course of time more information. We are not aware that any Life of St. Thomas or of Henry II. has quoted the Act of the schismatical Barbarossa, recording the Canonization of Charlemagne at Aix-laChapelle, sedula petitione carissimi amici nostri Henrici

* Paris, chez Auguste Aubry, 1859.

Regis Angliae inducti, assensu et auctoritate Domini Paschalis, the Antipope. For further light on this and kindred subjects, we anxiously look for the publication of these letters by Mgr. Liverani, feeling sure, from the five volumes he has recently published on the Life and Letters of John X. and Honorius II., that we may expect scholarly and careful editing.

Of ancient biographies of St. Thomas two are most assuredly to be classed inter desiderata. Of the works of Benedict of Peterborough, and William of Canterbury, only those fragments have yet been published which are found in the curious Mosaic, made up of five old writers, and called the Quadrilogus. Benedict wrote an account of the martyrdom of which he was a witness, as well as the most curious and singularly interesting catalogue of miracles at the shrine. The book on the Miracles has been published; it is the still more valuable work on the martyrdom that we are anxious to obtain. Perhaps the hint or conjecture contained in one of Mr. Morris's notes may be useful to any one who has access to libraries of old manuscripts that have not yet fully yielded up their treasures; that "judging by Joscelin (Hearne's Avesbury, 280), it probably begins with the words Cum apud hominum fidelium mentes.

Of William of Canterbury, personally, little or nothing has hitherto been known. Dr. Giles says that "he is probably the prior of Canterbury who occurs as the writer of one of the letters, but this is simple conjecture.

This most careless editor might have taken the trouble, when publishing the extracts from this writer contained in the Quadrilogus, to have separated those portions which were clearly not his, inasmuch as they appear in their proper context in the works of other writers. Several pages out of the thirty-three, attributed to William, are extracts from Herbert de Bosham. The remainder show us that the work of William of Canterbury is not inferior in graphic

Life and Martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket. By John Morris, Canon of Northampton, 1859, p. 398.

Vita S. Thomæ, Ed. Giles, Oxon, 1845, vol. ii. p. 7. Has Dr. Giles misunderstood a passage in an author of the next generation? "Monachi Willermus atque Rogerus, quorum prior Cantuariensis, Pontiniacensis vero alter." (tom. cit. p. 52.)

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