to have met with an incredulity which the most moderate
amount of information would have sufficed to dispel. Not to refer such
sceptics to graver authorities, historical and ecclesiastical, in order
to justify my representations of that learning which, under William the
Bastard, made the schools of Normandy the popular academies of Europe, a
page or two in a book so accessible as Villemain's "Tableau du Moyen
Age," will perhaps suffice to convince them of the hastiness of their
censure, and the error of their impressions.

It is stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose
authority on the merits of opera singers I am far from contesting but of
whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of human
industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, "that I am much mistaken when
I represent not merely the clergy but the young soldiers and courtiers of
the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with the literature of
Greece and Rome."

The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous. I have done no such
thing. This general animadversion is only justified by a reference to
the pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville--and it is expressly stated
in the text that Mallet de Graville was originally intended for the
Church, and that it was the peculiarity of his literary information, rare
in a soldier (but for which his earlier studies for the ecclesiastical
calling readily account, at a time when the Norman convent of Bec was
already so famous for the erudition of its teachers, and the number of
its scholars,) that attracted towards him the notice of Lanfranc, and
founded his fortunes. Pedantry is made one of his characteristics (as it
generally was the characteristic of any man with some pretensions to
scholarship, in the earlier ages;) and if he indulges in a classical
allusion, whether in taunting a courtier or conversing with a "Saxon from
the wealds of Kent," it is no more out of keeping with the pedantry
ascribed to him, than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to rail at Meg
Merrilies in Latin, or James the First to examine a young courtier in the
same unfamiliar language. Nor should the critic in question, when
inviting his readers to condemn me for making Mallet de Graville quote
Horace, have omitted to state that de Graville expressly laments that he
had never read, nor could even procure, a copy of the Roman poet--judging
only of the merits of Horace by an extract in some monkish