Indeed,
Professor Brewer Does Not Hesitate To Say That "To His Industry We
Are Exclusively Indebted For All That Is
Known of the state of
Ireland during the whole of the Middle Ages," and as to the
"Topography," Gerald "must
Take rank with the first who descried the
value and in some respects the limits of descriptive geography."
When he came to deal with the affairs of state on a larger stage,
his methods were still that of the modern journalist. He was always
an impressionist, a writer of personal sketches. His character
sketches of the Plantagenet princes - of King Henry with his large
round head and fat round belly, his fierce eyes, his tigerish
temper, his learning, his licentiousness, his duplicity, and of
Eleanor of Aquitaine, his vixenish and revengeful wife, the
murderess of "Fair Rosamond" (who must have been known to Gerald,
being the daughter of Walter of Clifford-on-the-Wye), and of the
fierce brood that they reared - are of extraordinary interest. His
impressions of the men and events of his time, his fund of anecdotes
and bon mots, his references to trivial matters, which more
dignified writers would never deign to mention, his sprightly and
sometimes malicious gossip, invest his period with a reality which
the greatest of fiction-writers has failed to rival. Gerald lived
in the days of chivalry, days which have been crowned with a halo of
deathless romance by the author of "Ivanhoe" and the "Talisman." He
knew and was intimate with all the great actors of the time.
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