Page:The Chronicle of Henry of Huntingdon.djvu/22

 events connected with their causes, and developed in their effects, and the lines of individual character fully and vigorously drawn. Huntingdon's colouring is often florid, but he was too much of a chronicler to fall into the error of some of our most esteemed modern historians, who, under a specious guise, and in polished sentences, convey a very small amount of exact information. The genius, however, which enabled him to form the plan of his extended work, distributing it into the successive periods of the Roman, the Saxon, the Danish, and the Norman occupations of England, and the sagacity of his observations, while tracing the origin of some of these revolutions, distinguish him from the mere recorder of passing events. The climax of the long series of events is wrought out with dramatic effect, when, in glowing language, but without losing sight of historical truth, he pictures England as panting for a deliverer from her ruined and distracted state, hailing, with exultation, the accession of Henry II., and entering on an era of peace and prosperity, the anticipation of which forms a happy conclusion to the work.

The freedom with which he canvasses the conduct of the great men of the time, both in his History and his "Letter to Walter," not sparing even his patron, King Henry I., and the two Williams, his immediate predecessors, gives a favourable idea of our author's independence of character, and exhibits, what we should call, the liberty of the press, in a light we should hardly have expected under the iron sway of the Norman kings. But suspicion is thrown on parts of his narrative which are unsupported by concurrent testimony. That would, however, be a singular canon of criticism which should, on such ground, discard the statements of an old writer, whose general credit is unimpeachable, where there is no improbability in the circumstances related; and Huntingdon's History contains several incidents, unnoticed by other contemporaneous writers, which we should be reluctant to surrender. No one could have clearer views of the duty of an historian, as we have