criticism from the day they were written to our own times. They
were assailed at the time, as Gerald himself tells us, for their
unconventionality, for their departure from established custom, for
the freedom and colloquialism of their style, for the audacity of
their stories, and for the writer's daring in venturing to treat the
manners and customs of a barbarous country as worthy the attention
of the learned and the labours of the historian. Irish scholars,
from the days of Dr. John Lynch, who published his "Cambrensis
Eversus" in 1622, have unanimously denounced the work of the
sensational journalist, born out of due time. His Irish books are
confessedly partisan; the "Conquest of Ireland" was expressly
designed as an eulogy of "the men of St. David's," the writer's own
kinsmen. But in spite of partisanship and prejudice, they must be
regarded as a serious and valuable addition to our knowledge of the
state of Ireland at the latter end of the twelfth century. Indeed,
Professor Brewer does not hesitate to say that "to his industry we
are exclusively indebted for all that is known of the state of
Ireland during the whole of the Middle Ages," and as to the
"Topography," Gerald "must take rank with the first who descried the
value and in some respects the limits of descriptive geography."

When he came to deal with the affairs of state on a larger stage,
his methods were still that of the modern journalist. He was always
an impressionist, a writer of personal sketches. His character
sketches of the Plantagenet princes - of King Henry with his large
round head and fat round belly, his fierce eyes, his tigerish
temper, his learning, his licentiousness, his duplicity, and of
Eleanor of Aquitaine, his vixenish and revengeful wife, the
murderess of "Fair Rosamond" (who must have been known to Gerald,
being the daughter of Walter of Clifford-on-the-Wye), and of the