The greatest are Beowulf, an epic imported from the Continent, and re-written in parts by a Christian Englishman; and Cædmon's Paraphrase of the Bible, written about 670, and for us the beginning of English poetry. Of scattered pieces after Cadmon, all Christian in tone, the finest are Judith, The Ruin, and The Grave. The war poetry, sung from feast to feast and in the halls of kings, dies out after the English are trodden down by the Normans. English literature-in a state of languishing depression at the Conquest-is thereafter displaced by the romance, in which, as favorite heroes, Arthur, Alexander, and Charlemagne, dressed as feudal knights, slay dragons and giants, storm enchanted castles, set free beautiful ladies, and perform other wondrous deeds. Not, however, till nearly a century has passed away-when Norman noble and English yeoman, Norman abbot and English priest, are welded into one-is the rhyming romantic poetry of France naturalized. In its rise under Edward I, native genius, in the vernacular, is poetical. The poetry is religious, story-telling, and lyric, typified in the Ormulum, the Brut, the Owl and Nightingale. As a whole the literature is characterized by reality, directness, and truth to nature. Elevated in tone, eminently practical in aim,-owing in a considerable degree to its insular position, it contrasts strongly with much of the contemporaneous expression of Continental genius, which is less the reflection of earnest, active life, than a magic mirror showing forth the unsubstantial dreams of an idle, luxurious, and fantastic people.

Latin is the key to erudition,- the prevailing language of the learned professions, of law and physic, as well as of divinity, in all their grades. French, the language of romance, lives upon the lips of royalty, rank, and beauty. In the storm of national calamity English ceases to be generally either written or read; and when in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it begins to raise its diminished head, it has been converted, substantially, from an inflectional to a non-inflectional tongue, a natural mutation accelerated by the Norman invasion. The Chronicle, the Brut, and the Ormulum prove its continuity and victory.

The enthusiasm of the Crusades is succeeded by an enthusiasm of study, imprisoned and limited by the scholastic logic and metaphysics, under whose ascendancy elegant literature pales.

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Scholasticism reveals already the dominant tendencies of English thought, subordination of theory to practice, in John of Salisbury; scepticism as to ultimate philosophical questions, in Scotus; devotion to physical science as a thing of demonstrative and practical utility, in Bacon.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries are the seed-time of all modern language and literature. The former is the great turning point of the European intellect. Then it is that a general revival of Latin literature takes place; then-the first time for many centuries-the long slumber of untroubled orthodoxy is broken by hydra-headed heresies; then the standard of an impartial philosophy is first planted by Abelard; then the passion for astrology and its fatalism revives with the revival of pagan learning, and penetrates into the halls of nobles and the palaces of kings; men are learning to doubt, without learning that doubt is innocent, compelled, by the new mental activity, to a variety of opinions, while the old credulity persuades them that all opinions but one are suggestions of the devil. The latter is a decisive epoch, not more for the constitutional history of England than for its intellectual progress. Its general activity and ardor are shown by the great concourse of students to the universities, by the number and eminence of the schoolmen, by religious and political satires, by that flame of zeal which sweeps the masses from their native soil to hurl them upon Holy Land. Then the French romantic poetry with its craving for excitement, begins to be transfused into a medium intelligible throughout England; then, above all, a definite language is formed, and there is room for a great writer.

Slowly, step by step, the England of the Doomsday Book, the England of the Curfew, the England of crusaders, monks, astrologers, serfs, and outlaws, is becoming the England of liberty, knowledge, and trade, the England that spreads her dominion over every quarter of the globe, and scatters the seeds of empires and republics in the jungles of India and the forests of America.

In Robert's Chronicle of England, the infusion of Norman words is still not more than four or five per cent, while it represents the language in a decidedly more advanced stage. He distinctly states the prevalence of French in his own day:

'Vor bote a man couthe French, me tolth of him well lute
For unless a man know French, one talketh of him little;

Ac lowe men holdeth to Englyss, and to her kunde speche zute
But low men hold to English, and to their natural speech yet.'

Let us omit The Lay of Havelok the Dane, an orphan who marries an English princess; King Horn, who, thrown into a boat when a lad, is wrecked upon the coast of England, and, becoming a knight, reconquers the kingdom of his father; Sir Guy, who rescues enchanted knights, cuts down a giant, challenges and kills the Sultan in his tent; Alexander, the great hero of the heathen world, whose forgotten glory, after the downfall of the Empire, was revived on the Levantine shores of the Mediterranean, and then in Western Europe; - all which are of the thirteenth century, and restored or adapted from the French; all which, while they serve to illustrate the continuity of the English tongue, the growth of the French romantic manner of story-telling as the years grow nearer to 1300, and the demand of the Middle Age for glare and startling events, are utterly without power in delineating character or unity of conception in plan and execution.

In the midst of the story-tellers are satirists who, writing mostly in French or Latin, censure political abuses and Church corruptions, sometimes in a tone of mournful seriousness, as if the degradation to which the profession was reduced by the depravity of the higher clergy was deeply felt; sometimes with more force than respect or elegance. Thus an English poem of the Land of Cockaigne,- from coquina, a kitchen,—a form of satire current in many parts of Europe:

'List, for now my tale begins,
How to rid me of my sins,
Once I journey'd far from home,
To the gate of holy Rome.

There the Pope for my offence,

Bade me straight in penance, thence,
Wandering onward to attain

The wondrous land that hight Cockaigne.'

We are told of a region free from trouble, where the rivers run with oil, milk, wine, and honey; wherein the white and grey monks have an abbey of which the walls are built of pasties, which are paved with cakes, and have puddings for pinnacles.

the active world, in the deep calm of monastic seclusion, he lived and wrought, living for the Unseen alone, and undisturbed by either anxiety or doubt. One of the aspects, is this, in which the monastic period of literature appears eminently beautiful,-freedom from the turmoil and impatience, the vanity and pride, of modern literary life. Slowly wasted by disease, he died in 680, near the hour of midnight, peacefully,

'Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.'

Here, to the inquisitive who would go on knocking, the door is closed. Over the outer history of the man, the accidental circumstances of his life, oblivion 'blindly scattereth her poppy.' Of more worth is the inner history of genius. The Dreamer lives in his dream.

Writings. The Paraphrase, containing, besides other portions of the Bible, the story of the Creation, the Revolt, the Fall, the Flood, and the Exodus. The sole manuscript is of the tenth century; disappearing from visible existence, it was accidentally discovered in the seventeenth, and first published in 1655, a thousand years after its composition.

Filled with the grandeur of his subject, in words of such majesty as were never uttered of human heroes or Scandinavian gods, he sounds the key-note of a new poetic strain:

Most right is it that we, heaven's Guard,

Glory, King of hosts! with words should praise,

With hearts should love. He is of powers the efficacy;

Head of all high creations;

Lord Almighty! In Him beginning never

Or origin hath been; but He is aye supreme
Over heaven-thrones, with high majesty
Righteous and mighty!'

A concrete of exclamations from a strong, barbarous heart; a song of a servant of Odin, tonsured now, and clad in the habiliments of a monk. Then follow the rebellion of Satan, the expulsion of the angels, and their confinement in the fiery gulf. The Hebrew Tempter, transformed by the German sense of might of individual manhood, becomes a republican, disdainful of vassalage to God:

"Wherefore," he said, "shall I toil?

No need have I of master. I can work
With my own hands great marvels, and have power
To build a throne more worthy of a God,
Higher in heaven! Why shall I, for His smile.

edition, as Robin Hood, Chevy Chase, and the Nut-Brown Maid.

Enough. The Saxon stock, stripped of its buds by the Norman axe, grows, though feebly. An occasional shoot displays genuine England to the light, as a vast rock crops up here and there from beneath the soil.

Prose. When the preservation of literary compositions by writing has given opportunity for their patient study, the next step is possible, the use of prose; and histories, rude and meagre, serving rather to fix a date than to illuminate it, are its principal products. Nature makes men poets,-art makes them philosophers and critics.

English prose looks fondly back to Alfred, in his translations of Bede, for its true parentage. As Whitby, in the person of Cadmon, is the cradle of English poetry, so Winchester is that of English prose. Failing soon after, it is revived in Elfric, who, turning into English the first seven books and part of Job, becomes the first large translator of the Bible; repressed by the Danes, and again by the Normans, it dies in the death of the Saxon Chronicle, nor lives again in any extended form till the reign of Edward III.

There may be mentioned a curious work in the vernacular, belonging to the latter part of the twelfth century, the Ancren Riwle, that is, the Anchoresses' Rule, a code of monastic precepts for the guidance of a small nunnery, or rather religious society of ladies:

Ye ne schulen eten vleschs ne seim buten ine muchele secnesse; other hwoso is euer feble eteth potage blitheliche; and wunieth on to lutel drunch. . . . Ye, mine leone sustren, ne schulen babben no best, bute kat one. . . . Nexst fleshe ne schal mon werien no linene cloth, bute yif hit beo of herde and of greate heorden. Stamin habbe hwose wule; and hwose wille mei beon buten. Ye schulen liggen in on heater, and i-gurd. . . . Ower schone beon greate and warme. Ine sumer ye habbeth leane norto gon and sitten barnot. . . . Ye ne schulen senden lettres, ne underuon lettres, ne writen, buten leane. Ye schulen beon i-dodded four sithen ithe yere, norto lihten ower heaued; and ase ofte i-leten blod; and oftere yif neod is; and hwoso mei beon ther withuten, ich hit mei wel i-tholien.' 1

1 Ye shall not eat flesh nor lard but in much sickness; or whoso is ever feeble may eat potage blithely; and accustom yourselves to little drink. . . . Ye, my dear sisters, shall have but one cat. . . . Next the flesh ye shall wear no linen cloth, but if it be of hard and of coarse canvas. Whoso will may have a shirt of woolen and linen, and whoso will may be without. Ye shall lie in a garment and girt. . . . Let your shoes be large and warm. In summer ye are permitted to go and sit bare-foot. ... Ye shall not send letters, nor receive letters, nor write without leave. Ye shall be cropped four times in the year, to lighten your head; and as often bled, oftener if need be; but whoso may dispense with this, well.