from generation to generation, like the poetical traditions of every people in primitive times. There can be no doubt that Geoffrey collected a number of these old stories and wove them into his narrative. Thus, the story of King Lear and his daughters has the ring of a genuine popular tradition about it, though the dates and pseudo-historical setting were probably supplied by Geoffrey. Again, there were certainly prophecies attributed to Merlin current in Geoffrey's time. But one may suspect Geoffrey of doing a good deal more than translate the prophecies of Merlin; he adapted them; one may even suspect him of parodying them. "After him shall succeed the boar of Totness, and oppress the people with grievous tyranny. Gloucester shall send forth a lion and shall disturb him in his cruelty in several battles. The lion shall trample him under his feet ... and at last get upon the backs of the nobility. A bull shall come into the quarrel and strike the lion ... but shall break his horns against the walls of Oxford." "Then shall two successively sway the sceptre, whom a horned dragon shall serve. One shall come in armour and ride upon a flying serpent. He shall sit upon its back with his naked body, and cast his right hand upon its tail.... The second shall ally with the lion; but a quarrel happening they shall encounter one another ... but the courage of the beast shall prevail. Then shall one come with a drum, and appease the rage of the lion. Therefore shall the people of the kingdom be at peace, and provoke the lion to a dose of physic!" Then as to Arthur. In Geoffrey's history he appears mainly as a great continental conqueror--a kind of Welsh Charlemagne. "Many of the most picturesque and significant features of the full-grown legend (as Professor Lewis Jones points out)[1] are not even faintly suggested by Geoffrey. The Round Table, Lancelot, the Grail were unknown to him, and were grafted on the legend from other sources." But he made the Arthurian legends fashionable; he opened for all Europe the hitherto unknown and inexhaustible well of Celtic romance; and it may be said without exaggeration that "no mediæval work has left behind it so prolific a literary offspring as the History of the Kings of Britain." The value of Geoffrey is not in his fictions about past history, but in his influence on the literature and ideas of the future. He stands at the beginning of a new age: he is the first spokesman of the Age of the new Chivalry. Read his glowing account of Arthur's court, where "the knights were famous for feats of chivalry, and the women esteemed none worthy of their love but such as had given proof of their valour in three several battles. Thus was the valour of the men an encouragement for the women's chastity, and the love of the women a spur to the knight's bravery." Or, as an old French version has it, "Love which made the women more chaste made the knights more valorous and famous." We have here a new conception of love which has profoundly influenced life and thought ever since--love no longer a weakness 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 mediæval 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, and it is singular that he does not notice any place of learning in Wales in all his writings. He studied at Gloucester, and then at Paris, the greatest mediæval university. We have it on his own authority that he was a model student. "So entirely devoted was he to study, having in his acts and in his mind, no sort of levity or coarseness, that whenever the Masters of Arts wished to select a pattern from among the good scholars, they would name Gerald before all others." Later he lectured at Paris on canon law and theology; his lectures, he tells us, were very popular. He returned thence in 1172, two years after the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, whose example and struggle for the rights of the Church made a deep and lasting impression on him. Gerald soon obtained preferment: he held three livings in Pembroke, one in Oxfordshire, and canonries at Hereford and St. David's. His energy soon made itself felt. He excommunicated the Welshmen and Flemings who would not pay tithes; and then attacked the sins of the clergy. Most of the Welsh clergy were married, contrary to the laws of the Church. Gerald hated a married priest even more than he hated a monk. The Welsh priest, he says, was wont to keep in his house a female (_focaria_) "to light his fire but extinguish his virtue." "How can such a man practice frugality and self-denial with a house full of brawling brats, and a woman for ever extracting money to buy costly robes with long skirts trailing in the dust?" Gerald hated women--the origin of all evil since the world began: observing that in birds of prey the females are stronger than the males, he remarks that this signifies "the female sex is more resolute in all evil than the male." Among the married clergy he attacked was the Archdeacon of Brecon; and the old man, being forced to choose between his wife and his archdeaconry, preferred his wife. Gerald was made Archdeacon of Brecon. In later years he had qualms of conscience about the part he took in this business. Between 1180 and 1194 he was often at Court and employed in the king's affairs. Henry II. selected him as a suitable person to accompany the young prince John to Ireland in 1185, and the result was his two great works--"The Topography," and "The Conquest of Ireland," which are the chief and almost the only authorities for Irish history in the Middle Ages. The former work he read publicly at Oxford on his return; it was a great occasion: we must tell it in his own words. "When the work was finished, not wishing to hide his candle under a bushel, but wishing to place it in a candlestick, so that it might give light, he resolved to read it before a vast audience at Oxford, where scholars in England chiefly flourished and excelled in scholarship. And as there were three divisions in the work, and each division occupied a day, the readings lasted three successive days. On the first day, he received and entertained at his lodgings all the poor people of the town; on the second, all the doctors of the different faculties and their best students; and on the third, the rest of the students and the chief men of the town. It was a costly and noble act; and neither present nor past time can furnish any record of such a solemnity having ever taken place in England." In 1188 he accompanied the Archbishop of Canterbury in his tour through Wales to preach the Third Crusade. With this we shall deal later. He was abroad with Henry II. at the time of the old king's death, and has left a valuable account of his later years in the book "On the Instruction of Princes." His connection with the Court gave him opportunities for studying the great characters of the time at close quarters, and we have from his pen graphic sketches of many of them. Take this description of Henry II.: "He had a reddish complexion, rather dark, and a large round head. His eyes were gray, bloodshot, and flashed in anger. He had a fiery face; his voice was shaky; he had a deep chest, and long muscular arms, his great round head hanging somewhat forward. He had an enormous belly--though not f