the later royal house of Wessex into a romance that too often only serves to darken the true character of the period which it professes to illustrate. What it does illustrate is not the tenth century but the twelfth. It helps us to learn something of the attitude of the national revival towards the national past, by showing us the England of Æthelstan and Eadmund, of Eadgar and Dunstan, not as it actually was, but as it appeared to the England of Henry I. and Roger of Sarum,--to the England of Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon and William of Malmesbury. [220] Will. Malm. _Gesta Pontif._, l. v. c. 190 (Hamilton, p. 336). We must not take William as an average specimen of the monastic culture and intelligence of his day. In any age and in any circumstances he would probably have been a man of exceptional genius. But his outward life and surroundings were those of the ordinary monk of his time; and those surroundings are set in a very striking light by the fact, abundantly evident from his writings, that such a man as William could feel himself thoroughly at home in them, and could find in them full scope for the developement of his powers. It was in truth precisely his monastic profession which gave him opportunities of acquiring by personal experience, even more than by wide reading, such a varied and extensive knowledge of the world as could hardly be obtained in any other circumstances. A very slight acquaintance with William is enough to dispel all notions of the medieval monk as a solitary student, a mere bookworm, knowing no more of the world and of mankind than he could learn from the beatings of his own heart and within the narrow circle of the brotherhood among whom he dwelt. A community like that of Malmesbury was in active and constant relations with every rank and class of society all over the kingdom. Its guest-hall stood open alike to king and bishop, to Norman baron or English yeoman, to the high-born pilgrim who came back from a distant shore laden with relics and with tales of the splendours of Byzantium or the marvels of Holy Land, to the merchant who came to sell his curious foreign wares at the local fair and to pay his devotions, like S. Godric, at the local shrine, as well as to the monk of another house who came, perhaps, to borrow a book from the library, to compare notes with the local history, or to submit some literary question to the judgement of the great local scholar, whoever he might happen to be. All the political news, all the latest intellectual speculations, all the social gossip of the day, found its way thither by one or other of these channels, and was discussed within the safe shelter of the inviolable convent-walls with a boldness and freedom impossible amid the society of the outside world, fettered by countless bonds of custom, interest, and mutual dependence. The abbot ranked as a great noble who sat among earls and bishops in the meetings of the Great Council, whom they