[Illustration] PONTE ALLE GRAZIE (FLORENCE, LAPO)
[Illustration] PORTA ROMANA GATE, (FLORENCE, N. PISANO)
It was especially in the exploitation of biographical material that the Thirteenth Century chroniclers were at their best. Any one who recalls Carlyle's unstinted admiration of Jocelyn of Brakelonds' life of Abbot Sampson in his essays Past and Present, will be sure that at least one writer in England had succeeded in pleasing so difficult a critic in this rather thorny mode of literary expression. It is easy to say too much or too little about the virtues and the vices of a man whose biography one has chosen to write. Jocelyn's simple, straightforward story { 227} would seem to fulfill the best canons of modern criticism in this respect. Probably no more vivid picture of a man and his ways was ever given until Boswell's Johnson. Nor was the English chronicler alone in this respect. The Sieur de Joinville's biographical studies of the life of Louis IX. furnish another example of this literary mode at its best, and modern writers of biography could not do better than go back to read these intimate pictures of the life of a great king, which are not flattered nor overdrawn but give us the man as he actually was.
The English biographic chronicler of the olden time could picture exciting scenes without any waste of words. A specimen of his work will serve to show the merit of his style. After reading it one is not likely to be surprised that Carlyle should have so taken the Chronicler to heart nor been so enthusiastic in his praise. It is the very type of that impressionism in style that has once more in the course of time become the fad of our own day.
"The abbot was informed that the church of Woolpit was vacant, Walter of Coutances being chosen to the bishopric of Lincoln. He presently convened the prior and great part of the convent, and taking up his story thus began: 'You well know what trouble I had in respect of the church of Woolpit; and in order that it should be obtained for your exclusive use I journeyed to Rome at your instance, in the time of the schism between Pope Alexander and Octavian. I passed through Italy at that time when all clerks bearing letters of our lord the Pope Alexander were taken. Some were imprisoned, some hanged, and some, with nose and lips cut off, sent forward to the pope, to his shame and confusion. I, however, pretended to be Scotch; and putting on the garb of a Scotchman, and the gesture of one, I often brandished my staff, in the way they use that weapon called, a gaveloc, at those who mocked me, using threatening language, after the manner of the Scotch. To those that met and questioned me as to who I was, I answered nothing, but, "Ride ride Rome, turne Cantwereberei." This did I to conceal myself and my errand, and that I should get to Rome safer in the guise of a Scotchman.