offrey is sure of himself;
he learnedly joins example to precept, he juggles with words; he soars
on high, far above men of good sense. It was with great reason his work
was called the New art of poetry, "Nova Poetria,"[262] for it has
nothing in common with the old one, with Horace's. It is dedicated to
the Pope, and begins by puns on the name of Innocent[263]; it closes
with a comparison between the Pope and God: "Thou art neither God nor
man, but an intermediary being whom God has taken into partnership....
Not wishing to keep all for himself, he has taken heaven and given thee
earth; what could he do better?"[264]

Precepts and examples are in the same style. Geoffrey teaches how to
praise, blame, and ridicule; he gives models of good prosopopoeias;
prosopopoeias for times of happiness: an apostrophe to England
governed by Richard Coeur-de-Lion (we know how well he governed);
prosopopoeia for times of sorrow: an apostrophe to England, whose
sovereign (this same Richard) has been killed on a certain Friday:

"England, of his death thou thyself diest!... O lamentable day of Venus!
O cruel planet! this day has been thy night, this Venus thy venom; by
her wert thou vulnerable!... O woe and more than woe! O death! O
truculent death! O death, I wish thou wert dead! It pleased thee to
remove the sun and to obscure the soil with obscurity!"[265]

Then follow counsels as to the manner of treating ridiculous
people[266]: they come in good time, and we breathe again, but we could
have wished them even more stringent and sweeping. Such exaggerations
make us understand the wisdom of the Oxford regulations prescribing
simplicity and prohibiting emphasis; the more so if we consider that
Geoffrey did not innovate, but merely turned into rules the tastes of
many. Before him men of comparatively sound judgment, like Joseph of
Exeter, forgot themselves so far as to apostrophise in these terms the
night in which Troy was taken: "O night, cruel night! night truly
noxious! troublous, sorrowful, traitorous, sanguinary night!"[267] &c.

IV.

The series of Latin prose authors of that epoch, grave or facetious,
philosophers, moralists, satirists, historians, men of science, romance
and tale writers, is still more remarkable in England than that of the
poets. Had they only suspected the importance of the native language
and left Latin, several of them would have held a very high rank in the
national literature.

Romance is represente