opinion on current events worth record. Old notes would be used, fresh ones jotted down by snatches, changes of arrangement and interpolations would sometimes be made. The work was in five divisions ("distinctiones"). Its editor has pointed out that a chapter of the first division was written in 1187, when the news had arrived of Saladin's capture of Jerusalem; but that the latter part of a chapter in the fourth book was written in 1182, immediately after the accession of Pope Lucius, while the earlier part of the same division of the work was written in a later year. In a single chapter, the sixth, of the fifth division, Henry II. is spoken of in earlier sentences as being dead, and in a later sentence as being alive. Thus we see how the notes grew. The opening allegory which finds in the court a Tartarus with its Tantalus, its Sisyphus, Ixion, Tityus, and birds of night, is simply the ingenious introduction to the subject whereby Map establishes a shape and title for the work; an introduction that amused with its satire the men whom court affairs concerned, the 'sort of men who were then almost its only readers, and that accounted to the satisfaction of the taste of his day for the natural form of the work as a memorandum-book, and not a laboured treatise. The true reason for the adoption of that form was, I think, the instinctive sense of a good artist, that no other was as fit. The true reason for his writing of its matter was, I think, a manly intellectual sense of the value of such notes. Thus Map sketches vividly the life of his day when he tells how the poet Gischard de Beaulieu became a monk of Cluny, and when his son Imbert had lost, through his own weakness and the strength of enemies, all the land left in his hands, came out of the monastery, appeared in arms, compelled restitution, and went back to the fulfilment of his vows. The Penitent Monk. Of another monk of Cluny, recalled by like needs to the world, Map tells us that he was overpowered but not overcome, "whether his enemies fled or resisted, unwearied he stuck to them like glue" (adhærebat ut glutinum). But he was caught when resting, hot after a victorious summer battle, with his armour off, under the shade of a vineyard, and by a treacherous enemy in guise of a friend struck with a mortal wound. Then he dictated to a boy, who alone happened to be near, the performance of the priestly office for the dying. The boy said that he was of the laity, and knew nothing. "But the monk, eager in all that he did, and eager in penitence, said, 'Enjoin me by the mercy of God, dearest son, that in the name of Jesus Christ my soul lie in hell repenting till the day of judgment, and that the Lord then have pity on me, that I may not see with the impious His face of wrath.' Then the boy said to him, with tears, 'Master, I enjoin on you the penance which your lips have here spoken before the Lord.' And he, in words and countenance assenting, devoutly received it and died. Here let there be recalled to memory the word of mercy, which says, In whatsoever hour the sinner repenteth, he shall be saved. How this man could repent and not be saved if he omitted any of the contingents, let there not be dispute among us, and may God have mercy on his soul." There is singular tact shown always in Map's manner of teaching, and something far higher than the mere professional impulse to lead other men to put a soul into their daily thoughts. So courteous and cheerful, so pleasantly at home in the world, full of good stories, quick at repartee, all seem to have acknowledged his rare genius, and relished his society without regarding it as that of a preacher. His less earnest comrades never felt that the mainspring of his power was a sacred earnestness. They laughed when he flashed his witty scorn at a wine-bibbing Golias bishop, and they were right, although they did not look far down into the pure spiritual nature of their pleasant friend, who drew Sir Galahad, the stainless knight, for his ideal. When Walter Map preaches as he writes, his sermon is but a few lines long, and it is fastened upon some worldly incident of which the interest is strong. Probably many chapters of Map's common-place book were, like his poems, copied and circulated when the occasion was fresh that produced them. J-VOL. III. ADELPH His longest incidental sermon-indeed the chapter of his book "De Nugis Curialium," in which it is contained, might have been preached at court by such a chaplain-is on occasion of the public consternation at the capture of Jerusalem by the great Saladin in 1187, and the extinction of the feeble Christian rule that had been there maintained. "On Saladin's Capture of Jerusalem. "The feet of many," he said, "have moved hence, and the steps have poured out of many not considering that this is not our Jerusalem. But we, not so; but we who seek our way to the future Jerusalem, the more the little worth of this world becomes manifest, the more we are chafed by it, the faster we journey thither, the better our hope for the future, and the freer from the cares of earth. The horse, the ox, the camel, and the ass, and every animal makes haste to get out of the mud, or struggles with its whole might to leap up out of a pit. But we choose to remain fastened in the mud." And elsewhere commenting upon the legend of an all-conquering angel who fought at a tournament, in the semblance of a knight who at sound of the chapel bell had turned aside to pray, he writes thus "On the Churchmen Militant in Palestine. "They want nothing but Jerusalem; there they take in defence of Christianity the sword that was prohibited to Peter in defence of Christ. Peter there learnt to seek peace with patience; I know not who has taught these to conquer peace by violence. They take the sword and perish by the sword. Yet they say that all laws and all rights permit force to be repelled by force. But he disapproved such law who, when Peter struck, would not command the legions of the angels. By the Word of the Lord, not at the point of the sword, the Apostles conquered Damascus, Alexandria, and a great part of the world that the sword has lost. And David, when he went out to Goliath, said, 'Thou comest to me with arms, but I come to thee in the name of the Lord, that all this assembly may know that the Lord saveth not with sword and spear." * Distinct. i., cap. xv. Good Churchman as he was, Map was a better Christian, and living in the world with no ostentation of sanctity, ever at work usefully, consorting as a busy man with busy men, doing small things and great with the same pure high motive that was the secret between him and his God, and the last thing in a true man's mind to be made a matter of vainglory, Walter Map was the antithesis of the strict cloistered monk, who was but, as Gerald de Barri said, a barren grain of seed, a seed hidden between stones and withheld from the contact with earth whereby alone it could yield increase. Map's wit spared nothing that was base; not even, faithful servant of Rome as he was, the corruption of the Papal Court. But in such attack, when he has hit home, he recovers his position, and with a stroke of refined humour preserves ecclesiastical decorum. He tells, for example, this of "The Pope's Master. "Jocelin Bishop of Salisbury, when his son, Reginald of Bath, complained that, elected by violence, he was not admitted to consecration at Canterbury, said to him, 'You fool, fly quickly to the Pope, be at ease, don't hesitate, box his ears with a big purse, and he will stagger whithersoever you please.' So he went, he struck, the Pope did stagger and fall. The chief priest rose again and wrote, lying in the Lord, at the head of all his letters; for where he ought to have written, 'By grace of the Purse,' he wrote, 'By grace of God.' Whatever he of the purse willed, he did. Yet let Rome, our mistress and mother, be as a staff broken in the water, and let us not believe that which we see. If we would be sure that we have not misread the spirit of Map's social life, as this book of Court Table-Talk has represented it, we have only to turn to his work on the King Arthur Romances. * Sir Frederic Madden,* accepting the opinion that a In his volume published by the Bannatyne Club, in 1839, entitled, "Sir Gawayne: a collection of Ancient Romance Poems, by Scottish The King mass of popular traditions relating to Arthur and his companions must have existed before Geoffrey of Monmouth's time, circulated first by native Romances. bards, and afterwards by the Anglo-Norman minstrels, holds that the earliest prose romances were based upon these; though he does not agree with Southey, Scott, and Ritson in denying the existence of the Latin original to which, of some chief romances, all the MSS. refer. The romances, he thinks, must have been compiled in the following order, and the first of them at least twenty years after the appearance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History." 1. The Romance of the Saint Graal, sometimes called the Romance of Joseph of Arimathea, by Robert de Borron, called in the printed editions the First Part of the Saint Graal. 2. The Romance of Merlin, by the same. 3. The Romance of Lancelot of the Lake, by Walter Map. 4. The Romance of the Quest of the Saint Graal, also by Walter Map, being in the printed editions the second part of the Saint Graal. 5. The Romance of the Mort Artus, also by Walter Map, and originally a distinct romance, although combined in the printed editions with his Lancelot. 6. The First Portion of the Romance of Tristan, by Luces de Gast (who is said to have been at home near Salisbury). 7. The Rest of Tristan, by Hélie de Borron. 8. The Romance of Gyron le Courtois, by the same. Of these, the first six were written in the latter half of the twelfth century, and the other two in the earlier half of the thirteenth. To these, says Sir F. Madden, must be added the metrical romances composed by Chrestien de Troyes, between the years 1170 and 1195, and the later prose compilations of Rusticien le Pise, and his followers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Metrical Romances of Chrestien de Troyes are founded on and English authors, relating to that celebrated Knight of the Round Table, with an Introduction, Notes, and a Glossary." |