Harold | Page 6

correct; but because we take from our
neighbours the Scotch, not only the word thane, but the sense in which
we apply it; and that sense is not the same that we ought to attach to the
various and complicated notions of nobility which the Anglo-Saxon
comprehended in the title of thegn. It has been peremptorily said by
more than one writer in periodicals, that I have overrated the erudition
of William, in permitting him to know Latin; nay, to have read the
Comments of Caesar at the age of eight.--Where these gentlemen find
the authorities to confute my statement I know not; all I know is, that in
the statement I have followed the original authorities usually deemed
the best. And I content myself with referring the disputants to a work
not so difficult to procure as (and certainly more pleasant to read than)
the old Chronicles. In Miss Strickland's "Lives of the Queens of
England," (Matilda of Flanders,) the same statement is made, and no
doubt upon the same authorities.
More surprised should I be (if modern criticism had not taught me in all
matter's of assumption the nil admirari), to find it alleged that I have
overstated not only the learning of the Norman duke, but that which
flourished in Normandy under his reign; for I should have thought that
the fact of the learning which sprung up in the most thriving period of
that principality; the rapidity of its growth; the benefits it derived from
Lanfranc; the encouragement it received from William, had been
phenomena too remarkable in the annals of the age, and in the history
of literature, to have met with an incredulity which the most moderate
amount of information would have sufficed to dispel. Not to refer such
sceptics to graver authorities, historical and ecclesiastical, in order to
justify my representations of that learning which, under William the

Bastard, made the schools of Normandy the popular academies of
Europe, a page or two in a book so accessible as Villemain's "Tableau
du Moyen Age," will perhaps suffice to convince them of the hastiness
of their censure, and the error of their impressions.
It is stated in the Athenaeum, and, I believe, by a writer whose
authority on the merits of opera singers I am far from contesting but of
whose competence to instruct the world in any other department of
human industry or knowledge I am less persuaded, "that I am much
mistaken when I represent not merely the clergy but the young soldiers
and courtiers of the reign of the Confessor, as well acquainted with the
literature of Greece and Rome."
The remark, to say the least of it, is disingenuous. I have done no such
thing. This general animadversion is only justified by a reference to the
pedantry of the Norman Mallet de Graville--and it is expressly stated in
the text that Mallet de Graville was originally intended for the Church,
and that it was the peculiarity of his literary information, rare in a
soldier (but for which his earlier studies for the ecclesiastical calling
readily account, at a time when the Norman convent of Bec was already
so famous for the erudition of its teachers, and the number of its
scholars,) that attracted towards him the notice of Lanfranc, and
founded his fortunes. Pedantry is made one of his characteristics (as it
generally was the characteristic of any man with some pretensions to
scholarship, in the earlier ages;) and if he indulges in a classical
allusion, whether in taunting a courtier or conversing with a "Saxon
from the wealds of Kent," it is no more out of keeping with the
pedantry ascribed to him, than it is unnatural in Dominie Sampson to
rail at Meg Merrilies in Latin, or James the First to examine a young
courtier in the same unfamiliar language. Nor should the critic in
question, when inviting his readers to condemn me for making Mallet
de Graville quote Horace, have omitted to state that de Graville
expressly laments that he had never read, nor could even procure, a
copy of the Roman poet--judging only of the merits of Horace by an
extract in some monkish author, who was equally likely to have picked
up his quotation second-hand.

So, when a reference is made either by Graville, or by any one else in
the romance, to Homeric fables and personages, a critic who had gone
through the ordinary education of an English gentleman would never
thereby have assumed that the person so referring had read the poems
of Homer themselves--he would have known that Homeric fables, or
personages, though not the Homeric poems, were made familiar, by
quaint travesties [7], even to the most illiterate audience of the gothic
age. It was scarcely more necessary to know Homer then than