There was also another class of early chroniclers throughout Europe; men who filled the office of a sort of royal historiographer, who accompanied the king and the army in their progress, to note down the occurrences they deemed most honourable or important to the nation. But incidents written down by a monk in his cell, or by a diarist pacing the round with majesty, would be equally warped, by the views of the monastery in the one case, or by a flattering subservience to the higher power in the other. In this manner the early history of Europe was written; the more ancient part was stuffed with fables; and when it might have become useful in recording passages and persons of the writer's own times, we have a one-sided tale, wherein, while half is suppressed, the other is disguised by flattery or by satire. Such causes are well known to have corrupted these first origins of modern history, a history in which the commons and the people at large had very little concern, till the day arrived, in the progress of society, when chronicles were written by laymen in the vernacular idiom for their nation. FOOTNOTES: [1] Archbishop Plegmund superintended the Saxon Annals to the year 891. The first Chronicles, those of Kent or Wessex, were regularly continued by the Archbishops of Canterbury, or by their directions, as far as 1000, or even 1070.--"The Rev. Dr. Ingram's preface to the Saxon Chronicle." These were our earliest Chronicles; the Britons possibly never wrote any. [2] We have a remarkable instance among the Italian historians of this period. Giovanni Villani wrote about 1330; Muratori discovered that Villani had wholly transcribed the ancient portion of his history from an old Chronicle of Malespini, who wrote about 1230, without any acknowledgment whatever. Doubtless Villani imagined that an insulated manuscript, during a century's oblivion, had little chance of ever being classed among the most ancient records of Italian history. Malespini's "Chronicle," like its brothers, was stuffed with fables; Villani was honest enough not to add to them, though not sufficiently so not silently to appropriate the whole chronicle--the only one Dante read.--"Tiraboschi," v. 410, part 2nd. [3] We have an elegant modern version of this monk's history by the Rev. J. Sharpe. ARNOLDE'S CHRONICLE.