r//Avy.v/r/./-;,s, ///STORIES, MKMOIRS. 



459 



what he had ascertained from trustworthy sources. He was not, perhaps, a 

 man of very deep learning, but ho was endowed with judgment and intelli- 

 gence. He possessed, moreover, the qualities which are so often wanting 

 in historians good faith, candour, and the desire to be impartial. His 

 style, though by no means correct and almost uncouth, is not devoid of 

 colour, though simple and artless, and some of his descriptions are traced 

 with great power. Gregory of Tours, who had read Virgil, Sallust, and 

 Pliny, doubtless sought to imitate them in an age when the study of literature 

 was almost extinct. Nor is he to be blamed for introducing into his work 

 the legends and miracles of which all his contemporaries were full. 



Fig. 357. The Seven Sainta of Brittany. Fac-eimile of a Wood Engraving from the "Chroniqucs 

 de Brctagne," by Alain Bouchard (Paris, Galliot da Pre, 1514, in 4to). In the Library of 

 M. Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Paris. 



This work, priceless and unique of its kind, was more often to be found in 

 the libraries of the monasteries than in the archives of the Merovingian kings, 

 and it must have had a great notoriety upon the death of its author in 593, 

 for the best historian of the seventh century, Fre'de'gaire, surnamed the 

 Scholastic, continuing his history borrowed from Eusebius, Julius Africanus, 

 and other Greek and Latin chroniclers, composed for the third book of this 

 Chronicle an analytical abridgment of Gregory of Tours' book. Fredegaire, 

 who was apparently a Burgundian, brought his story up to his death in 660. 



