The fables of Geoffrey have been clothed in rhyme by Robert of Gloucester, a monk of the abbey of Gloucester. He has left a poem of considerable length, which is a history of England in verse, from Brutus to the reign of Edward the first. His rhyming chronicle is, however, destitute either of art or imagination, and Geoffrey’s prose, frequently has a more poetical air than this author’s verses. It was evidently written after the year 1278, as the poet mentions king Arthur’s sumptuous tomb, erected in that year, before the high altar of Glastonbury abbey, and he declares himself a living witness of the remarkably dismal weather which distinguished the day on which the battle of Evesham was fought in the year 1265. From these and other circumstances this piece appears to have been composed about the year 1280. It is full of Saxonisms, which indeed abound more or less, in every writer before Gower and Chaucer. Geoffrey was also copied by an old French poet, called Maister Wace, or Gasse, from which Robert de Brunne in his metrical chronicle of England translated that part which extends from Æneas to the death of Cadwallader. Wace’s poem is commonly called Roman de Rois d’Angleterre, and is esteemed one of the oldest of the French Romances. With respect to the materials this chronicle has afforded to other writers, I will here give an instance or two. Tyrrel, in his history of England, acknowledges that his first book is an epitome of Geoffrey’s pretended history; but at the same time says that if it had not been more for the diversion of the younger sort of readers, and that the work would have been thought to be imperfect without it, he should have been much better satisfied in wholly omitting it. In the preface to Stow’s chronicle, (folio, 1631) the editor observes that Neubrigensis had written several invectives against Geoffrey, but more out of spleen than judgment. He charges that writer with maliciously endeavouring to destroy the credit of Geoffrey, because he himself having been a supplicant for the bishoprick of St. Asaph, had been rejected by the Prince of Wales, and had thus become the opponent of the Welsh history. His observations, Stow says, have been confuted by Sir John Price, Dr. Powel, and also by Lambard, in his perambulations of Kent. Stow then mentions John of Whethamsted, Polydore Virgil, and others, who have written against Geoffrey, and afterwards enumerates a long list of writers, as having uniformly supported him, or in other words, who have copied his history into their own chronicles.—Hume occasionally refers to Geoffrey, as an authority for some matters respecting the Saxon period of his history.