AN ITER ANGLICUM. [VII. the scraps of conversation of Ranulf Glanville, the great justiciar, who discussed, as he was riding out, the decay of valour among the French; the amusing exaggerations of Giraldus when he criticises the colloquial Latin of Hubert Walter; the most interesting details of the friendship between S. Hugh of Lincoln and Henry II; and very much that enlivens such books as the Polycraticus of John of Salisbury, the de Nugis Curialium of Walter Map, the de Institutione Principum and other discursive productions of Giraldus, the Otia Imperialia of Gervase, and the Satires of Nigel of Canterbury. It is true indeed that men professedly literary would most naturally, I am afraid I, cannot say necessarily or invariably, preserve such scraps as might be supposed to have a literary or historical interest ; and therefore that such anecdotes may not be a fair specimen of the ordinary conversations of the educated classes of the time. Granting that, it is at least pleasant to find that amidst the great and varied mass of literary remains there is so very little, hardly anything, that would show the prevailing tone to have been coarse or base. There is some profanity, not a little hardness and narrowness, but very little indeed of the foolish and inconvenient jesting which later on becomes the mark of all courtly literature. If now we were to imagine a foreign scholar visiting England at the period of which we are speaking, either, like Mabillon or Pertz, making an Iter Anglicum to collect materials for history, or like Solon simply, β^ωρίψ «««ν, to see what the world was like, or like the admirable Crichton to air his own erudition and try the mettle of English scholars in literary tournaments, or like John of Salisbury to gather all the knowledge that he could, how would he fare ? He would land, we suppose, at Dover and be lodged in the Benedictine Priory there, where he would find that his visit was recorded among the visits of kings and ambassadors in a precious