olls Series, with elaborate introductions tracing the literary
history of the work and a magnificent index. The _Historia Minor_ has
been published in three volumes by Sir F. Madden in the Rolls Series.
Paris also wrote the lives of the abbots of his house up to 1255, a
work not now extant, and the basis of the later _Gesta Abbatum S.
Albani_, compiled by Thomas Walsingham (d. 1422?) and likewise issued
in the Rolls Series. The thirteenth century biographies have some
original value. Paris's _Life_ of _Stephen Langton_ is printed in
LIEBERMANN'S _Ungedruckte Anglo-Normannische Geschichtsquellen_ (1870).

Paris, perhaps the greatest historian of the Middle Ages, has literary
skill, a vivid though prolix style, a keen eye for the picturesque,
bold and independent judgment, wonderful breadth and range, and an
insatiable curiosity. He was a man of the world, a courtier and a
scholar; he took immense pains to collect his facts from documents and
eye-witnesses, and had great advantages in this respect through the
intimate relations between his house and the court. Henry III himself
contributed many items of information to him. His details are
extraordinarily full, and he tells us almost as much about continental
affairs as about those of his own country. He wrote with too flowing a
pen to be careful about precision, and had too much love of the
picturesque to resist the temptation of embellishing a good story. His
narrative of continental transactions is in particular extremely
inexact. But the chief cause of his offending also gives special value
to his work; he was a man of strong views and his sympathies and
prejudices colour every line he wrote. His standpoint is that of a
patriotic Englishman, indignant at the alien invasions, at the
misgovernment of the king, the greed of the curialists and the
Poitevins, and with a professional bias against the mendicants. His
writings make his age live.

The falling off in the St. Alban's work of the next generation is
characteristic of the decay of colour and detail which makes the
chroniclers of the age of Edward I. inferior to those of his father's
reign. The years after 1259 were briefly chronicled by uninspired
continuators of Matthew Paris, and the reputation of St. Alban's as a
school of history led to the frequent transference of their annals to
other religious houses, where they were written up by local pens. This
led to the dissemination of the series of jejune compilations