‘When after having related any event, he gains further knowledge concerning it, he immediately informs his readers of it, and either adds to or retrenches from his former narration, conformably to the last information he had received. Froissart acted in a similar manner; and Montaigne praises him for it. ‘The good Froissart,’ says he, ‘proceeds in his undertaking with such frank simplicity that having committed a mistake he is no way afraid of owning it, and of correcting it at the moment he is sensible of it.’[5] We ought certainly to feel ourselves obliged to these two writers for their attention in returning back to correct any mistakes; but we should have been more thankful to them if they had been pleased to add their corrections to the articles which had been mistated, instead of scattering their amendments at hazard, as it were, and leaving the readers to connect and compare them with the original article as well as they can. ‘This is not the only defect common to both these historians. The greater part of the chronological mistakes, which have been so ably corrected by M. de Sainte Palaye in Froissart, are to be found in Monstrelet; and what deserves particularly to be noticed, to avoid falling into errors, is, that each of them, when passing from the history of one country to another, introduces events of an earlier date, without ever mentioning it, and intermix them in the same chapter, as if they had taken place in the same period,—but Monstrelet has the advantage of Froissart in the correctness of counting the years, which he invariably begins on Easter-day and closes them on Easter-eve. ‘To chronological mistakes must be added the frequent disfiguring of proper names,—more especially foreign ones, which are often so mangled that it is impossible to decipher them. M. du Cange has corrected from one thousand to eleven hundred on the margin of his copy of the edition of 1572, which is now in the imperial library at Paris, and would be of great assistance, should another edition of Monstrelet be called for.[6] Names of places are not more clearly written, excepting those in Flanders and Picardy, with which, of course, he was well acquainted. We know not whether it be through affectation or ignorance that he calls many towns by their latin names, frenchifying the termination: for instance, Aix-la-Chapelle, Aquisgranie; Oxford, Oxonie,—and several others in the like manner. ‘These defects are far from being repaid, as they are in Froissart, by the agreeableness of the narration: that of Monstrelet is heavy, monotonous, weak and diffuse. Sometimes a whole page is barely sufficient for him to relate what would have been better told in six lines; and it is commonly on the least important facts that he labours the most.