GEOFFREY OF called also JEFFREY Al' ARTHUR, was b. at Monmouth, and in 1152 was consecrated bishop of St. Asaph. He died about 1154. His chief work, the Chronicon sire Ilistoria Britonum, seems to have been completed about 1128. It is a tissue of the wildest fables, interwoven with some historic traditions. "In later times," says Dr. Lappenberg, " authors seem to have unanimously agreed in an unqualified rejection of the entire work, and have therefore failed to observe that many of his accounts are supported by narratives to be found in writers wholly unconnected with, and independent of Geoffrey. He professes to have merely translated his work from a chronicle in the ritish tongue, called Brut y Brenhined, or History of the Kings of Britain, found in Brittany, and communicated to him by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford [not, as has been supposed, Walter 3Iapes, but an earlier Walter Calenius]. The Brut of Tysilio has, with some probability, been regarded as the original of Geoffrey's work, though it is doubtful whether it may not itself be rather an extract from Geoffrey. That the whole is not a translation appears from passages interpolated, in many places verbatim, from the existing work of Gild us, of whom lie cites another work, De Vita Ambrosii, no longer extant." Geoffrey's work was first printed by Ascensius at Paris
in 1508, and has been reprinted more than once. An English translation, by Aaron Thompson, appeared at London in 1718, reprinted by Dr. Giles in 1842, and in Bohn's antiquarian library, 1848. Whatever its value as a historical record, the chronicle has been of great use to our literature. Versified in the Norman dialect by Wace, and again in English by Layamon, we are indebted to it for the story of Lord Sackville's tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex, for Shakespeare's King Lear, for some. of the finest episodes in Drayton's Polyolbion, and for the exquisite fiction of Sabrina in Milton's masque of Comas. A metrical Life and Prophecies of .Merlin, first printed at Frankfurt in 1603, and reprinted for the Roxburghe club in 1830, has been attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth, but without sufficient grounds.