But if the journey achieved nothing for the Holy Land, it did much for the modern historian. Gerald was no dry analyst, but a man who knew instinctively how to write. No such vivid descriptions, and no such sketches of character were penned in Britain throughout the Middle Ages. Gerald is a veritable prose Chaucer. He possessed a seeing eye, and was always quick to seize upon a trait of character, and to note an interesting custom. He was also tremendously fond of gossip; and the more marvellous the tale the greater his delight in relating it. His attitude towards the Welsh people was somewhat supercilious; he regarded them with a queer mixture of sympathy and contempt. Nevertheless the picture which he paints is not an unpleasing one. They were a people well advanced in civilization, though decidedly less polished and cultivated than the Normans. Their chief pursuits were pastoral; and for recreation they preferred fighting to aught else, and next to that {60} hunting. They delighted in music and oratory. They were brave, frugal, hospitable, and witty. Their reverence for religion, and for everything which bore the stamp of antiquity, was extreme. But side by side with these virtues were vices of a by no means amiable character. They were careless of truth, unreliable, lacking in persistence, quarrelsome, litigious, and intensely superstitious. In fact the pages of Giraldus are the _locus classicus_ of the "perfidious Welshman" who has been the butt of shallow writers in modern times.