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ing into a general broil, bells clanging to arms,- this is the seething, surging Oxford of mediæval history. Upon the vision of these young and valiant minds flashed, as they thought, the temple of truth, and they rushed at it headlong, as knightly warriors with battle-axe might storm a castle.

Language. The principal literature was in Latin, and, after the Conquest, in French. The former-the only language in which the scholar might hope to address, not merely the few among a single people, but the whole Republic of Letters-was used in books habitually, as the common language of the educated throughout Europe. In it were written, in particular, most works on subjects of theology, science, and history; in the latter, those intended rather to amuse than to instruct, and addressed, not to students, but to the idlers of the court and the gentry, by whom they were seldom read, but only heard as they were recited or chanted. In the thirteenth century, French acquired that widely diffused currency as a generally known and hence convenient common medium which it has ever since maintained. A Venetian annalist of the time composed his chronicle in it, because, to use his own words: 'The French tongue is current throughout the world, and is more delectable to read and hear than any other.' Dante's teacher employed it, and thus apologized for using it instead of Italian:

If any shall ask why this book is written in Romance, according to the patois of France, I being born Italian, I will say it is for divers reasons. The one is that I am now in France; the other is that French is the most delightsome of tongues, and partaketh most of the common nature of all other languages.'

Its frequent use by English writers is to be ascribed, not wholly to the predominance of Norman influence, but, in a considerable degree, to the fact that, for the time, it occupied much the same position as had hitherto been awarded to the Latin as the common dialect of learned Europe.

Of the vernacular, many of the most important terms, ethical and mental, had become obsolete. Of foreign words in it, there were yet relatively few. The whole number of Romance derivatives found in the printed works of authors of the thirteenth century scarcely exceeds one thousand, or one-eighth of the total vocabulary of that era. What would the myriad-minded Shakespeare, with his vast requirement of fifteen thousand, have done

in this age, with its pittance of eight thousand words? The following extract is from the Proclamation of Henry III, addressed in 1258 to the people of Huntingdon, copies being sent to all the shires of England and Ireland. Prepositions, it will be observed, are doing the work of the lost inflections; and the sense is made to depend upon the sequence of the words alone:

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Henry, thurg Godes fultume

King on Englene-loande . . .

send igretinge to all hise

halde ilaerde and ilaewede.

Thaet witen ye wel alle, thaet we
willen and unnen thaet thaet ure raedes-
men alle other, the moare dael of heom,
thaet beoth ichosen thurg us. . . . And
this wes idon act foren ure isworene redes-
men. And al on tho ilche worden is
isend in to aeurihce othre schire over all
thaere kuneriche on Englene-loande and ek
intel Irelande.'

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Henry, through God's grace

king in England.

sends greeting to all his
subjects, learned and unlearned.
This know ye well all, that we

will and grant, that what our council-
lors all or the more deal of them,
that are chosen by us. . . .
And
this was done before our sworn council-
lors. And all in the same words is
sent into every other shire over all
the kingdom in England and eke
into Ireland.'

The popular speech was forcing its way to the throne.

Poetry. In early periods, feeling and fancy, with nations as with children, are strongest. Emotion seeks utterance before logic; and the natural expression of emotion is a chant, a song. There is a real kinship between the waves of excited feeling and. the rhythmical cadence of words which utter it. Early literature, therefore, is almost exclusively one of poetry. Language, too, then picturesque and bold, lives chiefly on the tongue and in the ear; and poetry, by its rhythm, uniting with the charm of music, allows an oral transfer which prose does not. Rhythm-the recurrence of sounds and silences at regular intervals of time, the essential principle of poetry—is the oldest and widest artistic instinct in man; for man is the emotive part of nature, and the movement of nature, it is the grand distinction of modern science to have shown, is rhythmic. Light and heat go in undulations; the seasons, the sun-spots, come and go in correspondencies; the variable stars brighten and pale at rhythmic intervals; the oceantides and trade-winds flow by rhythmic rule; planet, satellite, and comet revolve and return in proportionate periods. The mystic Hindoo's doctrine of the primal diffusion of matter in space, the aggregation of atoms into worlds, the revolution of these worlds, their necessary absorption into Brahma, their necessary rediffusion, again to be aggregated, and again to be absorbed,-ever

Bute folc yt for gulte other yeres the worse be.
For Engelond ys full ynow of fruyt and of tren,
Of wodes and of parkes, that ioye yt ys to sen.
Of foules and of bestes of wylde and tame al so,

Of salt fysch and eche fresch, and sayre ryneres ther to.

Of welles swete and colde ynow, of lesen and of mede.

[pastures

Of seluer and of gold, of tyn and of lede.

Of stel, of yrn and of bras, of god corn gret won.

Of whyte and of wolle god, betere ne may be non.

Wateres he hath eke gode y now, ac at be fore alle other thre
Out of the lond in to the see, armes as thei be.

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Ware by the schippes mowe come fro the se and wende,
And brynge on lond god y now, a boute in eche ende.'

But shall we look upon a desert of stumps, and exclaim, '0 my soul, what beauty!' What is here in these metrical Lives of Saints, rhymed dissertations and chronicles, which are so well prolonged and so void of pleasure? What but poverty of intellect and taste? Wholly destitute of poetical merit, unable to develop a continuous idea, they disregard historical truth without securing the graces of fable by the sacrifice. They are, it is true, of interest to the lover of antiquities, and of importance to the linguist, as are fossil remains to the geologist. They exhibit the physiology of the English speech in its transition or larva and chrysalis states. Thus the Brut, though rendered from the French, contains fewer than fifty Norman words.. A remarkable peculiarity of its grammar is the use of the pronoun his as a sign of the possessive case, as when in more modern English it was not unusual to write John his book. The Ormulum differs from the Anglo-Saxon models in wanting alliteration, and from the Norman-French in wanting rhyme. It contains a few words from the ecclesiastical Latin, but scarcely a trace of Norman influence. It has a peculiar device of spelling, consistent and uniform, the doubling of the consonant after every short vowel,— to indicate what, at a period of great confusion, the author deemed the standard pronunciation. Its immediate purpose, perhaps, was to guide the half-Normanized priests when the verses were read aloud for the good or pleasure of the people. On adherence to its orthography by readers and copyists, it lays great stress:

'And whase willen shall this booke
Eft other sithe writen,

Him bidde icc that he't write right
Swa sum this booke him teacheth."

And whoso shall wish this book
After other time to write,
Him bid I that he it write right,
So as this book him teacheth.

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.

Roasted geese fly about crying, 'Geese all hot'! This is the triumph of gluttony.

Here, also, like prophecies of the perfect bloom, are some bright lyrics, religious, amatory, pastoral, warlike. The chival ric adoration of the sovereign Lady, the real deity of mediæval society, breathes in this pleasing hymn, which bears witness to its origin:

'Blessed beo thu, lavedi,

Ful of hovene blisse;
Sweet flur of parais,

Moder of milternisse . . .
I-blessed beo thu, Lavedi,

So fair and so briht;

Al min hope is uppon the,

Bi day and bi nicht. . .
Bricht and scene quen of storre,

So me liht and lere.

In this false fikele world,

So me led and steore.'

What could be farther from the Saxon sentiment?

A poem

of some interest as the earliest imaginative piece of native invention after the Conquest is The Owl and the Nightingale, in octosyllabic rhyme, composed in the reign of Henry III. It is a dispute between the two birds as to which has the finer voice. After much reciprocal abuse, the question of superiority is referred to the author.

Love of nature is deep and national. To the Frenchman it is a light gladsomeness, soon gone, suggesting only a pleasing couplet as it passes,-Now is winter gone, the hawthorn blossoms, the rose expands, the birds do voice their vows in melody.' To the Englishman, all sad and moral, the circling seasons suggest a spiritual lesson,-chiefly 'vanity of vanities.' So is the following, of the reign of Edward I, truly English in spirit:

'Wynter wakeneth al my care,

Nou this leves waxeth bare,
Ofte y sike ant mourne sare,

When hit cometh in my thoht

Of this worldes joie, hou hit goth al to noht.

Now hit is, and now hit nys,

Also hit nere y-wys,

That moni mon seith soth his ys,

Al goth bote Godes wille,

Alle we shule deye, thath us like ylle.

Al that gren me graueth grene,

Nou hit faleweth al by-dene;

Jhesu, help that hit be sene,

And shild us from helle,

For y not whider y shal, ne hou longe her duelle.'

Yeomen and harpers throw off some spirited products; but their songs, first ignored, then transformed, reach us only in a late

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