with as startling a success. Maine, Anjou, and Touraine passed with little resistance into his hands, and the death of Eleanor was followed by the submission of the bulk of Aquitaine. Little was left save the country south of the Garonne; and from the lordship of a vast empire that stretched from the Tyne to the Pyrenees John saw himself reduced at a blow to the realm of England. On the loss of Château-Gaillard in fact hung the destinies of England, and the interest that attaches one to the grand ruin on the heights of Les Andelys is, that it represents the ruin of a system as well as of a camp. From its dark donjon and broken walls we see not merely the pleasant vale of Seine, but the sedgy flats of our own Runnymede.

CHAPTER III.

THE GREAT CHARTER, 1204-1265.

Section I.-English Literature under the Norman and Angevin Kings.*

T is in a review of the literature of England during the period that we have just traversed that we shall best understand the new English people with which John, when driven from Normandy, found himself face to face.

In his contest with Beket, Henry the Second had been powerfully aided by the silent revolution which now began to part the purely literary class from the purely clerical. During the earlier ages of our history we have seen literature springing up in ecclesiastical schools, and protecting itself against the ignorance and violence of the time under ecclesiastical privileges. Almost all our writers from Bæda to the days of the Angevins are clergy or monks. The revival of letters which followed the Conquest was a purely ecclesiastical revival; the intellectual impulse which Bec had given to Normandy travelled across the Channel with the new Norman abbots who were established in the greater English monasteries; and writing-rooms or scriptoria, where the chief works of Latin literature, patristic or classical, were copied and illuminated, the lives of saints compiled, and entries noted in the monastic chronicle, formed from this time a part of every religious house of any importance. But the literature which found this religious shelter was not so much ecclesiastical as secular. Even the philosophical and devotional impulse given by Anselm produced no English work of theology or metaphysics. The

Authorities. For the general literature of this period, see Mr. Morley's" English Writers from the Conquest to Chaucer," vol. i. part ii. The prefaces of Mr. Brewer and Mr. Dimock to his collected works in the Rolls Series give all that can be known of Gerald de Barri. The Poems of Walter Map have been edited by Mr. Wright for the Camden Society; Layamon, by Sir F. Madden.

CHOICE EXAMPLES OF EARLY PRINTING AND

ENGRAVING.

Fac-similes from Rare and Curious Books.

A PAGE FROM THE PRAYER-BOOK OF THE EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN.

The Prayer-Book was printed in 1514 by Johann Sel versperger, of Augsburg, for the especial use of the Emperor, who was a steady and munificent patron of the newly developed art of printing. There was a great disposition on the part of some of the German printers, especially Albrecht Dürer, to adopt the rounded. Italian type. Others preferred the crisp ngularity of the Gothic black-teter, oven bar general purposes, while for books of devotion it appears to have been deemed the more orthodox, the Italian style of type being deemed an innovation,