Excerpt from The Anglo-Latin Satirical Poets and Epigrammatists of the Twelfth Century, Vol. 1 We must depend upon them for facts, and without them it would be difficult to form with any satisfaction a continuous chronicle. They furnish the materials for the substance of history, but we must seek other mate rials in order to throw life and colour into this dry sub stance, and show the feelings and motives which set it to work. Such materials are less generally evident than the others. When any one wants to relate a historical event he naturally goes for his authority to the chronicle, filling it up with anecdotes and historical information from different sources, but the bare skeleton thus created, for it is no more, wants, to make it understood and appreciated, materials procured from other sources, many of which do not strike us at the first thought. Among these may be mentioned contemporary poetry, and, espe cially, contemporary satire. The poet paints the events over which he rejoices and exults in the warmest colours given to them by contemporaries, the satirist condemns them in the spirit of contemporary prejudice and dislike, and both lead'us more or less deeply into the more inti mate feelings and principles by which the historical events were moved and guided. A single passage of the satirist or poet will sometimes throw more light over the character of historical events than whole pages of research and discussion. Our classical scholars know well how much of history may often be learnt fi Degreesom a pointed sentence of J uvenal Or Persius, or a sharp epi gram of Martial, and this remark holds equally true of the poets and satirists and epigrammatists of a later period. It is for this reason that I have proposed to publish in a manner and form to make them as much as possible useful the texts of the principal satirical poets belonging to an important period of the early history of our own land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.