t taken from the same
sources.

The _Annales Cambrenses_ contain few or no facts directly bearing upon
the ethnology of Great Britain, except so far as the existence of a
literary composition, of a given antiquity, is the measure of the
civilization of the country to which it belongs.

One of its entries, however, has an indirect bearing. The value of
Gildas depends upon the time at which he wrote. We have already seen
that a small piece of autobiography in his history tells us that he was
born in the year of the _Bellum Badonicum_. Now the date of this is got
from the Annales Cambrenses, A.D. 516. There is no reason to believe it
other than accurate.

It were well if such a composition as the _Annales Cambriae_ were called
(what it really is) a list of dates; since the word _chronicle_ has a
dangerous tendency to engender a very uncritical laxity of thought. It
continually gets mistaken for a _register_; yet the two sorts of
composition are wholly different. That the habit of making
cotemporaneous entries of events as they happen, just as incumbents of
parishes, each in his order of succession, enter the births, deaths, and
marriages of their parishioners, should exist in such institutions as
religious monasteries or civil guild-halls, is by no means unlikely.
But, then, on the other hand, there is an equal likelihood of nothing of
the sort being attempted. Hence, when a work reaches posterity in the
shape of a chronicle or annals, its antiquity and value must be judged
on its own merits, rather than according to any preconceived opinions.

In mechanics _nothing is stronger than its weakest part_, and it would
be well if a similar apothegm could be extended to the criticism of such
compositions as the Annales Cambriae, and the Saxon Chronicle. It would
be well if we could say that in chronological tables _nothing was
earlier than the latest entry_. In common histories we do this. The
common historian is always supposed to have composed his work subsequent
to the date of the latest event contained in it--a few exceptions only
being made for those authors whose works treat of cotemporary actions.
So it is with the annalist whose Annals, more ambitious in form than the
bare chronicle, emulate, like those of the great Roman historian, the
style of history. But it is not so when the notices pass a certain
limit, and become short and scanty. They then suggest a comparison with
the parish register, or the Olympic records,