LATIN POEMS. [VII. 174 importance of the lost leaves of the Gesta Stephani or the Draco Normannicus. I have, you may observe, given prominence in this lecture to certain names and certain sorts of names. I have given them prominence because it was desireable, even at the risk of repetition, to impress them on the memory, even if it should prove impossible to form or fix any individual conception of them : they are the greatest names, and the names of those who have left the most precious books behind them.. But they are very far from all ; a reference to some such book as Mr. Wright's Biographia Britannica Literaria would furnish a long list of names of men who have places in the bibliographies ; both historians, philosophers and naturalists, ' according to the idea of those days. If we turn, 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 known, 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 ideal 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