over the leaves; lovingly he beheld them--may the Lord be merciful to
him!--pen he took with fingers, and wrote on book-skin, and the true
words set together, and the three books compressed into one. Now
prayeth Layamon, for love of the Almighty God, each good man that
shall read this book and learn this counsel, that he say together
these soothfast words, for his father's soul, who brought him forth,
and for his mother's soul, who bore him to be man, and for his own
soul, that it be the better. Amen!" [11]

With these words Layamon introduces us to his book and to himself; in
fact they contain the sum total of our information about his life. But
they put us at once into sympathy with the earnest, sincere student,
who wrote, not like Geoffrey and Wace, for the favour of a high-born
patron, but for the love of England and of good men and his few
hardly-won and treasured books. Of these books Wace's _Brut_ received
the lion's share of his attention, and he made little or no use of the
others that lay before him.

He followed Wace's poem in outline, but he succeeded in extending its
15,300 verses to 32,241, by giving a free rein to his fancy, which he
often allowed to set the pace for his pen. For Layamon in his retired
parish, performing the monotonous and far from engrossing duties of a
reading clerk,[12] lived in reality a stirring life of the imagination.
Back in the Saxon past of England his thoughts moved, and his mind
dwelt on her national epic heroes. Not only in his language, which
belongs to the period of transition from Anglo-Saxon to Middle
English, but in his verse [13] and phraseology, he shows the
influence of earlier Anglo-Saxon literature. The sound of the _Ode on
Athelstane's Victory_ and of _Beowulf_ is in our ears as we read his
intense, stirring lines. Wars and battles, the stern career of a Saxon