Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/164

 too, to Leyser's Bibliotheca Poetica we find many names of English poets, Englishmen, that is, who wrote Latin verses, but of whom little else is really kaown, and whose verses are neither in manner nor matter so good as the poorest prose of the period. Geoffrey Vinsauf, who no doubt was the best known Latin poet of the time, has left no personal history; his work, framed on the Epistle to the Pisos, is by no means to be despised as a guide to the medieval idea of Latin poetry, nor is it a mean work in itself. But the average of the poetry, with that exception and the Trojan War of Joseph of Exeter, is low, whether we look at the classical forms followed by these writers and some of the satirists or at the rhymed Latin poems of which Walter Map was so fertile a producer. A great many of the good prose writers, however, attempted versification. We have, starting with Henry of Huntingdon, a generation earlier, a fair list of good scholars who thought verse the best medium of enthusiastic panegyric. John of Salisbury mingles encomium and sarcasm in his Entheticus, a book in which he has described in enigmatic language most of the courtiers of the time, with praise or dispraise. William Fitz-Stephen, the biographer of Becket, courted the ear of Henry II with a poem which he presented to him at Brill, and which seems to have been so far successful that the king pardoned him for his adherence to the archbishop; Giraldus Cambrensis wrote epigrams, Walter Map hymns and poems of edification as well as satires; the author of the Dialogus de Scaccario and the Latin biographer of Richard I both run into what would be doggerel if it were not Latin, apparently out of the very glee of their hearts and devotion to their subject-matter.

But as every one who could write prose thought that he could write verse, and as good Latin verse required a somewhat higher strain than passable Latin prose, it is not surprising that the verse has been mostly forgotten. The question then which this point seems to suggest, to what did it all come, what amount of real, critical, and literary culture does this great mass of Latin writing truly imply? must be answered thus: The Latin of the twelfth century is fairly good and