ess as in the ancient world, or a sin as it seemed to the ascetic
spirit of the Church, but a conscious source of strength, an avowed
motive of heroism. And it was round Arthur and his court that the
French poets of the next generation wove their romances inspired by
this conception--the offspring of the union of Norman strength and
Celtic gentleness.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] See his paper on Geoffrey of Monmouth (Transactions of the
Cymmrodorion Society, 1899), to which I am much indebted.

III

GIRALDUS CAMBRENSIS

Gerald the Welshman was certainly one of the most remarkable men of
letters that the Middle Ages produced--remarkable not merely for the
great range of his knowledge, or the voluminousness of his writings,
but for the originality of his views and variety of his interests.

In this lecture I intend to give first a general account of his life,
and then deal in more detail with his Itinerary through Wales.

We know a great deal about Gerald; he was interested in many things,
and not least in himself; he was not troubled by that shrinking sense
of his own worthlessness--with the feeling of being not an individual,
but a part of a community--which is so characteristic of mediaeval
writers, and led them often to omit to mention their own names.

Gerald was born about 1146, at Manorbier, in Pembroke--"the most
delightful spot in Wales." His ancestry is interesting. His father was
a Norman noble, holding of Glamorgan, William de Barri by name; his
mother was the daughter of another Norman noble, Gerald de Windsor of
Pembroke, and the famous Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tudor, the Helen of
Wales. He was cousin of the Fitzgeralds who played so important a part
in the conquest of Ireland, and connected with Richard Strongbow and
the great house of Clare. He thus "moved in the highest circles," and
lived in an atmosphere of great deeds and great traditions.

He was from the first marked out by his own inclinations for an
ecclesiastical career. He tells us that when he and his elder brothers
used to play as children on the sands of Manorbier his brothers built
castles but he always built churches. He received an elementary
education from the chaplains of his uncle, the Bishop of St. David's;
he seems to have been slow at learning when a child, and his tutors
goaded him on not by the birch rod, but by sarcasm--by declining
"_Stultus_, _stultior_, _stultissimus_." His higher education was not
obtained in Wales, a