But our main business is with the laureates of England; and the origin of their office is sufficiently obscure, and not the less worthy of consideration for the antiquity that such obscurity implies. It has certainly been associated with our monarchical institutions from very early times; and, for that reason alone, if for no other, we should be disposed, in this antimonarchical fever of the day, to respect the loyalty of the office, however little respect may have been due to some who have held it, and however higher than the office is every true poet, "whose mind to him a kingdom is," and who possesses a royalty of his own, wider than that of Charlemagne. We do not know that the poets cited in the Saxon Chronicle were rhymers more inspired by the mead of the court than of the cloister; but the supposition is not improbable,--for we do know the fondness of Alfred for the gleeman's craft, and that he, "lord of the harp and liberating spear," was himself a gleeman; nor are we unmindful that King Canute honoured verse-men, and that he could even improvise an accordant rhyme, still extant, to the holy chant of the monks of Ely, as his bargemen rowed him down the Ouse, under the chapel wall. It is not apparent that _trouvères_ followed William of Normandy to Sussex _officially_, or celebrated his triumph over Harold,--for the story of Taliefer is hardly a case in point, and we do not hear much about the northern trouvères till somewhat later, though some writers will have it that they are of older standing than the troubadours of the south of France. We do not imagine that William Rufus patronised harmony more intellectual than the blast of the hunting-horn. But so early at least as the twelfth century, in the reign of Richard, "the heart of courage leonine," as Wordsworth calls him, we have a king's versifier in the person of Gulielmus, of whom little is known, except that he produced a poem on the crusade of this romantic, poetical, bones-breaking Richard,--a prince whose Gothic blood (for it must be remembered that he was of the restored Saxon line) might seem to have been tinged with orientalism by some unaccountable process; for, even before his embarkation on his adventure with his red-cross knights, his character exhibited a strange combination of the stout and somewhat obtuse doggedness of the bandog, and the lordliness of the lion--a mixture of Saxon homeliness and Saracenic magnificence. The strength of thews and sinews, and the prowess of mere animal courage, (vulgar glories, for the most part, looked at with civilised eyes,) wear an aspect of redeeming generosity in Richard, that still recommends him to us as a hero of romance, worthy of minstrel praise, in spite of his ferocious temper, his demerits as a son, and his indomitable wrong-headedness as a prince. The poem of Gulielmus is not extant, but it must have been interesting if he possessed any genius. Richard's rough warfare with