mation, while most of them have written under some particular bias, political or religious, which has given a colouring to their statements, if it has not led to a perversion of facts. Truth must be sought at the fountain head, and happily for those who desire to form an independent judgment on the earlier periods of our national history, the contemporaneous chronicles which not long since were confined to the libraries of the opulent, and sealed up in the obscurity of a dead language, are now brought within the reach, and opened to the perusal of the general reader.
In the present volume, the transactions of King Stephen's reign will be found recorded by two different authors. They should be read in connection with William of Malmesbury's "Modern History," which embraces the same period. "Taken together," as Dr. Sewell observes, "they constitute a valuable body of history. They reciprocally develope the politics of contending parties; they serve as guides whereby to arrive at the probable springs of action; they supply mutual defects of information, they may serve to correct mutual errors." In comparing Henry of Huntingdon's eighth Book with the "Acts of King Stephen," we have the advantage of considering the history of the times from opposite points of view, Huntingdon being warmly attached to the family of Henry I., while our anonymous author was a partisan of Stephen. But it is satisfactory to find how little their personal feeling was allowed to influence their statements of facts, or their estimates of character. Huntingdon does full justice to the bravery of Stephen, particularly at the battle of Lincoln, of which he has given so spirited a description; while he seldom takes an opportunity of charging the king with those repeated breaches of faith, which were the worst stain on his character, and which the anonymous author freely admits, with the palliation that he was influenced by evil counsels. Both very much agree in their observations on the arrest of the bishops, which, though it might be justified by political expediency, was one of Stephen's most tyrannical acts. But, while Huntingdon remarks that this prepared the way for his eventual ruin, which it probably
