Such, as related by the author himself, was the origin of William’s first historical work, the _Gesta Regum Anglorum_ or _Acts of the English Kings_, followed a few years later by a companion volume devoted to the acts of the bishops. He was stirred by the same impulse of revived national sentiment which stirred Florence of Worcester to undertake his version of the Chronicle. But the impulse acted very differently on two different minds. William’s _Gesta Regum_ were first published in 1120, two years after the death of Florence. The work of Florence, although he never mentions it, had doubtless reached him by this time, and must certainly have been well known to him before he issued his revised edition in 1128. To William, indeed, the Chronicle had no need of a Latin interpreter; and he probably looked upon Florence in no other light. He set before himself a loftier aim. In his own acceptation of the word, he is the first English historian since Bæda; he is in truth the founder of a new school of historical composition. William’s temper, as displayed in his works, might form the subject of a curious psychological study. It is a temper which, in many respects, seems to belong rather to a man of the world in our own day than to a monk of the twelfth century. He has none of the narrowness of the cloister; he has little of the prejudices common to his profession or his age; he has still less prejudice of race. The Norman and the English blood in his veins seem completely to neutralize each other; while Florence colours the whole story not only of the Norman but even of the Danish conquest with his violent English sympathies, William calmly balances the one side against the other, and criticizes them both with the judicial impartiality of a spectator to whom the matter has a purely philosophical interest. The whole bent of his mind indeed is philosophical, literary, artistic, rather than political. With him the study of history is a scientific study, and its composition a work of art. His aim is to entertain his readers quite as much as to instruct them. He utterly discards the old arrangement of events “by the years of our Lord,” and groups his materials in defiance of chronology on whatever plan seems to him best adapted to set them in the most striking and effective light. He never loses sight of his reader; he is always in dread of wearying him with dry political details, always seizing an opportunity to break in upon their monotony with some curious illustration, some romantic episode, some quaint legend, or--when he reaches his own time--some personal scandal which he tells with all the zest of a modern newspaper-writer. His love of story-telling, his habit of flying off at a tangent in the midst of his narrative and dragging in a string of irrelevant tales, sometimes of the most frivolous kind, is positively irritating to a student bent only upon following the main thread of the history. But in William of