Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/80

the printed results of which I have not seen, but some part of which I saw in MS., brought out of the note-books and diaries of the cardinals of the Elizabethan period, not merely some most important personal and chronological details relative to the English episcopate, but revealed an almost unsuspected web of papal intrigue underlying the better known public action of the popes. Where Dr. Brady, who was working with a definite purpose and not very impartial judgment, stumbled on so much that was valuable, surely much more would be found by a fully equipped investigator. The prizes of this initial research have not fallen to English scholars. Rome is a long way off; English scholars are looked on with suspicion there; even Dr. Todd was not left to work freely and alone in the Vatican: English visitors on a holiday have far too much else to do; the endowment of research has not yet advanced far enough to send searchers thither. So it was left for Cardinal Mai to discover and edit the long-lost and long-lamented Draco Normannicus, the poetical biography of the Empress Matilda, which was printed by him apparently without any knowledge of its history, bat was not published until seventeen years after his death, and in 1871, owing to a review by Dr. Pauli in the Academy, was introduced to English scholars. It was a German that discovered, and it is French scholars who are editing that early French poem on the Crusade of Richard I which is said, I believe with certainty, to be the original upon which the Latin author of the Itinerarium Regis Ricardi based his work. Just so it was the labours of Dr. Pertz and his agents that unearthed the Historia Pontificalis of John of Salisbury among the MSS. of the Bern Library, as he had espied the long-lost Encomium Emmae in the library of the Duke of Hamilton. No doubt luck is an element in these discoveries, but a far more powerful element of success was the educated eye, the larger opportunity, the knowledge how to look, and what sort of things to look for. I should not despair of discovering even the lost Antiocheis, the poem of Joseph of Exeter on the first Crusade, when the Vatican has proved a safe refuge for a Latin poem on the prophecies of Merlin and for the fragments of Giraldus Cambrensis.