and change their character
altogether. No longer mere chronological works, emanating from the pen
of a single author, and referrible to some single generation,
subsequent, in general, to a majority of the events set down in them,
they are the productions of a series of writers, each of whom is a
registrar of cotemporary events. By this an undue value attaches itself
to works which have nothing in common with the register but the form.

Now, if genuine traditions are scarce, real registers are scarcer. In
both cases, however, the false wears the garb of the true, and, in both
cases, writers shew an equal repugnance to scrutiny. This is to be
regretted; since with nine out of ten of the chronicles that have come
down to us, it is far more certain that their latest facts are earlier
in date than the author who records them, than that the earliest
possible author can have been cotemporary with the first recorded
events. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle may illustrate this. It ends in the
reign of Stephen; yet the writer of even the last page may have been
anything but a cotemporary with the events it embodies. It begins with
the invasion of Julius Caesar. A cotemporary entry--the essential element
of registration--is out of the question here.

The general rule with compositions of the kind in question is, that they
fall into two parts, the first of which cannot be of equal antiquity
with the events recorded, the second of which may be; and we are only
too fortunate when satisfactory proofs of cotemporary composition enable
us to convert the possible into the probable, the probable into the
certain--the _may_ into the _must_. Even when this is the case, the
proportions of the cotemporary to the non-cotemporary statements are
generally uncertain--a question of _more_ or _less_, that must be
settled by the examination of the particular composition under
consideration.

Whatever may be the other merits of the _Annales Cambriae_, it has no
claim to the title of a register during the sixth century--and, _a
fortiori_ none during the fifth.

Neither has the Saxon Chronicle. We infer this from the extent to which
it follows Beda. We infer it, too, still more certainly from the
following passage--a passage which, if made in the year under which it
is found, would be no record but a prophecy.

A.D. 595.--"This year AEthelbriht succeeded to the kingdom of the Kentish
men, and held it fifty-three years. In his days the Holy Pope Gregory