ar verse, with bell-like tinklings. The style is
limpid, simple, transparent: it flows like those wide rivers without
dykes, which cover immense spaces with still and shallow water.[162]

In the following century the most remarkable work is the biography in
verse of William le Marechal, earl of Pembroke, one of those knights of
proud mien who still appear to breathe as they lie on their tombs in
Temple Church. This Life is the best of its kind and period; the
anonymous author who wrote it to order has the gift, unknown to his
predecessors, of condensing his subject, of grouping his characters, of
making them move and talk. As in the Temple Church, on the monument he
erects to them, they seem to be living.[163]

Another century passes, the fashion of writing history in French verse
still subsists, but will soon die out. Peter de Langtoft, a true
Englishman as his language sufficiently proves, yet versifies in French,
in the fourteenth century, a history of England from the creation of the
world to the death of Edward I. But the times are changing, and Peter,
last representative of an art that is over,[164] is a contemporary of
that other Englishman, Robert of Gloucester, first representative of an
art that begins, a distant ancestor of Gibbon and Macaulay. In sedate
and manly, but somewhat monotonous strains, Robert tells in his turn the
history of his country; differing in this respect from the others, he
uses the English tongue; he is by no means cosmopolitan, but only and
solely English. In the very first lines he makes this characteristic
declaration: "England is a very good land; I ween the best of any....
The sea goes all about it; it stands as in an isle; it has the less to
fear from foes.... Plenty of all goods may be found in England."[165]

The way to heaven is taught, after the Conquest, in innumerable French
works, in verse and prose, paraphrases of the psalms and gospels, lives
of the saints, manuals of penitence, miracles of Our Lady, moralised
tales, bestiaries, and sermons.[166] The number of the French-speaking
population had so increased in the kingdom that it was not absurd to
preach in French, and some of the clergy inclined all the more willingly
to so doing that many of the higher prelates in the land were Frenchmen.
"To the simple folk," says, in French, an Anglo-Norman preacher, "have I
simply made a simple sermon. I did not make it for the learned, as they
have enough writings and discourses. Fo