h tolerable
elegance, but too often at the cost of necessary detail. Yet still we
must place him at the head of the middle age historians, for he was
diligent and critical, though perhaps not always impartial; and in
matters connected with Romish doctrine, his testimony is not always to be
relied upon without additional authority; his account of those who held
opinions somewhat adverse to the orthodoxy of Rome is often equivocal; we
may even suspect him of interpolating their writings, at least of Alfric,
whose homilies had excited the fears of the Norman ecclesiastics. His
works were compiled from many sources now unknown; and from the works of
Bede, the Saxon chronicles, and Florilegus, he occasionally transcribes
with little alteration.

But is it not distressing to find that this talented author, so superior
in other respects to the crude compilers of monkish history, cannot rise
above the superstition of the age? Is it not deplorable that a mind so
gifted could rely with fanatical zeal upon the verity of all those foul
lies of Rome called "Holy" miracles; or that he could conceive how God
would vouchsafe to make his saints ridiculous in the eyes of man, by such
gross absurdities as tradition records, but which Rome deemed worthy of
canonization; but it was then, as now, so difficult to conquer the
prejudices of early teaching. With all our philosophy and our science,
great men cannot do it now; even so in the days of old; they were brought
up in the midst of superstition; sucked it as it were from their mother's
breast, and fondly cradled in its belief; and as soon as the infant mind
could think, parental piety dedicated it to God; not, however, as a light
to shine before men, but as a candle under a bushel; for to serve God and
to serve monachism were synonymous expressions in those days.

The west of England was honored by many a monkish bibliophile in the
middle ages. The annals of Gloucester abbey record the names of several.
Prior Peter, who became abbot in the year 1104, is said to have enclosed
the monastery with a stone wall, and greatly enriched it with many books
"_copia librorum_."[323] A few years after (A. D. 1113), Godeman the
Prior was made abbot, and the Saxon Chronicle records that during his
time the tower was set on fire by lightning and the whole monastery was
burnt; so that all the valuable things therein were destroyed except a
"few books and three priest's mass-hackles."[324] Abbot Gamage gav