certainly more pleasant to read than) the old Chronicles. In Miss
Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of England," (Matilda of Flanders,)
the same statement is made, and no doubt upon the same authorities.

More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in
all matter's of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that
I have overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that
which flourished in Normandy under his reign; for I should have
thought that the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most
thriving period of that principality; the rapidity of its growth; the
benefits it derived from Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from
William, had been phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age,
and in the history of literature, to have met with an incredulity
which the most moderate amount of information would have sufficed to
dispel. Not to refer such sceptics to graver authorities, historical
and ecclesiastical, in order to justify my representations of that
learning which, under William the Bastard, made the schools of
Normandy the popular academies of Europe, a page or two in a book so
accessible as Villemain's "Tableau du Moyen Age," will perhaps suffice
to convince them of the hastiness of their censure, and the error of
their impressions.

It is stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose
authority on the merits of opera singers I am far from contesting but
of whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of
human industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, "that I am much
mistaken when I represent not merely the clergy but the young soldiers
and courtiers of the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with
the literature of Greece and Rome."