his classical manuscripts, his
Virgilius, his Flaccus, Ovidius Naso; of course still more, his
Homilies and Breviaries, and if not the Bible, considerable
extracts of the Bible. Then also he has a pleasant wit; and
loves a timely joke, though in mild subdued manner: very amiable
to see. A learned grown man, yet with the heart of a good
child; whose whole life indeed has been that of a child,--St.
Edmundsbury Monastery a larger kind of cradle for him, in which
his whole prescribed duty was to _sleep_ kindly, and love his
mother well! This is the Biography of Jocelin; 'a man of
excellent religion,' says one of his contemporary Brother Monks,
_'eximiae religionis, potens sermone et opere.'_

For one thing, he had learned to write a kind of Monk or Dog-
Latin, still readable to mankind; and, by good luck for us, had
bethought him of noting down thereby what things seemed notablest
to him. Hence gradually resulted a _Chronica Jocelini;_ new
Manuscript in the _Liber Albus_ of St. Edmundsbury. Which
Chronicle, once written in its childlike transparency, in its
innocent good-humour, not without touches of ready pleasant wit
and many kinds of worth, other men liked naturally to read:
whereby it failed not to be copied, to be multiplied, to be
inserted in the _Liber Albus;_ and so surviving Henry the
Eighth, Putney Cromwell, the Dissolution of Monasteries, and all
accidents of malice and neglect for six centuries or so, it got
into the _Harleian Collection,_--and has now therefrom, by Mr.
Rokewood of the Camden Society, been deciphered into clear print;
and lies before us, a dainty thin quarto, to interest for a few
minutes whomsoever it can.

Here too it will behove a just Historian gratefully to say that
Mr. Rokewood, Jocelin's Editor, has done his editorial function
well. Not only has he deciphered his crabbed Manuscript into
clear print; but he has attended, what his fellow editors are
not always in the habit of doing, to the important truth that the
Manuscript so deciphered ought to have a meaning for the reader.
Standing faithfully by his text, and printing its very errors in
spelling, in grammar or otherwise, he has taken care by some note
to indicate that they are errors, and what the correction of them
ought to be. Jocelin's Monk-Latin is generally transparent, as
shallow limpid water. But at any stop that may occur, of which
there are a few, and only a very few, we have the comfortable
assurance th