Читать книгу History of English Literature from "Beowulf" to Swinburne - Andrew Lang, Robert Kirk - Страница 41

By no means so lively, though useful in its day, is the very long metrical chronicle (about 1300) of Robert of Gloucester, whether it be by two hands or by one. One, at least, named Robert, was living at the dates of a great Oxford town and gown row, which he describes, and of the battle of Evesham (1265). He was fortunately not nearer than a distance of thirty miles from that stricken field, and records his own fear of a dense darkness which prevented the monks from reading service in church. Robert dwelt in Gloucester, as his minute local allusions prove. He began his chronicle by versifying the fabulous work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but put into it not a glimmer of the poetry of Layamon. For the rest, till he reached his own time, he copied Henry of Huntingdon, William of Malmesbury, and "Lives of the Saints".

Robert's learned modern editor, Mr. Aldis Wright, outworn by all the tediousness which the poet bestows on us, says "as literature, the book is as worthless as twelve thousand lines of verse without one spark of poetry can be". But Robert's praises of England, "a wel god loud," and of English folk, so clean and handsome, have a sound spontaneous note of patriotism, and there is a swing in what Mr. Wright cruelly styles his "doggerel verse in ballad metre," which is not to be despised. To be sure he has, without knowing it, several different sorts of verse, and is nearly as irregular as Layamon himself, in his measures. His readers would not be offended by these defects, and they learned from him, with a great deal of inaccurate history, a sense of pride in their country, and to speak English, though the nobles and gentry, he says, spoke French.