As the dividing-point of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries approaches, the interest of literary work increases, and requires less and less allowance of historical and accidental value. This allowance, indeed, is still necessary with the verse chronicle of Robert of Gloucester,[98] the date of which is fixed with sufficient certainty at 1298. This book has been somewhat undervalued, in point of strict literary merit, from a cause rather ludicrous but still real. It will almost invariably be found that those mediaeval books which happen to have been made known before the formal beginning of scholarship in the modern languages, are underrated by modern scholars, who not unnaturally put a perhaps excessive price upon their own discoveries or fosterlings. Robert of Gloucester's work, with the later but companion Englishing of Peter of Langtoft by Robert Manning of Brunne, was published by Hearne in the early part of the last century. The contemporaries of that publication thought him rude, unkempt, "Gothick": the moderns have usually passed him by for more direct _proteges_ of their own. Yet there is not a little attraction in Robert. To begin with, he is the first in English, if not the first in any modern language, to attempt in the vernacular a general history, old as well as new, new as well as old. And the opening of him is not to be despised-- "Engeland is a well good land, I ween of each land the best, Yset in the end of the world, as all in the West: The sea goeth him all about, he stands as an isle, His foes he dares the less doubt but it be through guile Of folk of the self land, as men hath y-seen while." [Footnote 98: Edited with Langtoft, in 4 vols., by Hearne, Oxford, 1724; and reprinted, London, 1810. Also more lately in the Rolls Series.]