The Works of Gildas and Nennius

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MR. GUNN'S PREFACE. The Editor, some years since, during a residence in Rome, obtained permission to search the library of the Vatican palace, for manuscripts relating to the history and affairs of this country. In the course of this interesting employment, an ancient exemplar of the " His- toria Brittonum" was discovered. Presuming that one which dates much higher than any hitherto known, might be free from the inaccuracies and interpolations long complained of in those of more recent date, a copy was procured; and it is this work to which the attention of the reader is solicited. The original is on parchment, fairly written in double columns, and fills ten pages of a miscellaneous volume, of the folio size. Great care has been taken to obtaina faithful transcript of it; the orthography, however erroneous, is preserved, the capital and small letters correspond with the original; there is the same division of paragraphs; the forms of the points, and the location of them, though no guide to the sense, have one common resemblance; nor, except in a few instances, are any orthographical corrections attempted. So dry and abrupt is the style, as to set a literal version at defiance; in that now offered, the meaning of the author is, I trust, preserved. I once entertained a doubt as to the propriety of one, since the perusal of the work will be limited to that description of readers, who will never refer to a translation as an authority, when the original is before them. Consisting of ninety-three pages. The first eighteen contain —" Nitardi Angelherti opus de rebus gallicis ;"—from p. 19 to 46, " Frodoardi Chronicon ah obitu Karoli magni ad annum 978;"—from p. 47 to 57, the present work;—the genealogy of Karolus magnus, consisting of nine lines, then follows; and from p. 57, t...