Este vus Johan le deue Duce Johanne agnomine Vers dyuelyn tut serre, the Wode ... viri Vers la cite od sa gent bellicosi ... ordinatis En dreite la porte del orient, turmis ad portam orientalem * * * * muros invadunt. La cite unt dunc asaillie. Then, marching round till he reached the rear of the assailants, he fell on them suddenly with a mighty shout, and the Northmen, caught between his brother and himself, wavered at last in their attack. The Danish axe still whirled in the hands of ‘John the Mad,’ cleaving its way, as of old, through helm and coat of mail: De une hache ben tempre Militis quoque coxa ferro Cosuit le ior un chevaler utrinque vestita uno securis Que la quisse lui fist voler; ictu cum panno loricæ præcisa. Od tut la hache de fer blanc Lui fist voler la quisse al champe. But John himself fell at last; and the sons of the wikings fled to their ships. Hasculf, their king, captured alive, hurled at his captors words of scorn, and was by them promptly beheaded, “pur son orgoil e ses fous dis,” or, as Giraldus tersely puts it, “insolenti verbo.” If Dr. Liebermann’s theory be accepted, it would involve, as he reminds us, the important consequence that we have in our poem and the ‘Expugnatio’ not two independent authorities, but narratives drawn from a common source. The discrepancies, however, between the two are so numerous and so significant that we cannot accept this new view as at all satisfactorily proved. But turning to a third source of information, known as “the Book of Howth,” I have no hesitation in saying that its nature has been quite misunderstood. It is difficult to render clear, within a short compass, the hopeless confusion that surrounds the subject, and that is, virtually, all to be traced to an error of that ardent collector, but most untrustworthy antiquary, Sir George Carew, whose voluminous MSS. at Lambeth include both the ‘Regan’ poem and the Book of Howth, and to whom we should have felt more grateful if he would only have left them alone. But the worst offender was Professor Brewer, whose work it is the fashion to rate very highly indeed, though I have found it by no means unimpeachable even in his calendars of the state papers of Henry VIII.[343] Now the Professor ought to have been quite at home on this Irish subject, for it fell to his lot to edit the first four volumes of Giraldus as well as the Book of Howth; yet he not only stereotyped and carried further Carew’s original error, but found fault, somewhat unjustly, with Mr. Dimock’s remarks in his preface to the ‘Expugnatio.’