A manual of English literature

HISTORY

ENGLISH LITERATURE.

PRELIMINARY CHAPTER.

SECTION I.

ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD.

ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE forms of itself a special department of study. It is one of those exceptional products of the human mind, working with scanty materials, imperfect tools, and under adverse circumstances, which, like stars scattered over a dark portion of the sky, stud the dreary period that intervenes between the break-up of the ancient civilization and literature, and the rise of those of modern times. It is a thing apart, like the Irish or the Icelandic literature, and requires to be studied in connection with the fossil remains of other extinct cognate languages, such as the Old Saxon, the Mosogothic, and the Frisian. It is a chapter in Palæontology. Yet, since the present English tongue is in its essential elements derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and since the existence of an Anglo-Saxon literature probably stimulated our earliest English writers to persist in the use of the vernacular, when interest, fashion, and the torrent of literary example would have led them to adopt the Norman French, it

seems desirable to commence with a brief sketch of that literature.

We know of no Anglo-Saxon composition, produced in England, that can be traced back with certainty to the times of Paganism. We must not look to the dwellers on the muddy Elbe, or the inhabitants of the plains of Holstein, for the teeming imagination which characterized the Northmen of Iceland and Scandinavia, and whichages before the stirring stimulus of Christianity was applied to them-produced the wonderful mythology of the Edda. In 596, St. Augustine, sent by Gregory the Great, brought the faith to the Anglo-Saxon tribes; and the moral ferment which the introduction of this new spiritual element occasioned, acting upon a towardly and capable race, full of dormant power and energy of every kind, induced also such intellectual exertion as the times permitted, and as the partial communication by the missionaries of the literature of the ancient world tended to enkindle and to sustain. The Angles of Northumbria received Christianity, not from Rome, but from Iona, the island-monastery of the Culdees, or servants of God,' founded by Columba, an Irish saint, in 565. monk of Iona, having come into Northumbria about the year 635, at the invitation of the pious king Oswald, converted great numbers of the Angles, and fixed his episcopal see at Lindisfarne or Holy Isle. From this period until the Norman Conquest (and in one memorable instance beyond it), the Anglo-Saxon mind was ever labouring, so far as intestine war and Danish inroad would allow, and executed a very creditable amount of work. Its chief successes, it is true, were obtained through the medium of the Latin, then and long after the common language of Europe, and which a generous and expansive mind, sick of irrational or semi-rational local usages, and material isolation, would rejoice to employ.

1 Bede, Eccl. Hist. book iii. ch. 5.

Aidan, a

The Venerable Bede (673-735), in whom the Saxon intellect culminated, wrote all his extant works in Latin. Incomparably the most valuable of these is his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which gives us professedly a connected history of the Church and religion of England down to his own times, and incidentally throws a flood of light upon the secular history also. Among his other works may be named, De Ratione Temporum, a Martyrology, the Life of St. Cuthbert, a poem in leonine verse on St. Justin's martyrdom, Commentaries both on the Old and on the New Testament, and a sort of chronicle of universal history called De Sex Etatibus Sæculi. Alcuin, Eddi Stephanus, and Ethelwerd also wrote in Latin. But the rough vernacular was employed in popular poetry, and in all such prose writings as had a didactic purpose which included the laity within its scope. Such writings were naturally for the most part translations, since it was evidently safer and wiser to gain an insight into, and acquaintance with, the wisdom of antiquity, before essaying, under less favourable conditions, to make conquests in the realm of original thought.

I. Poetry. Of Anglo-Saxon poetry there remains to us on the whole a considerable mass. By far the larger portion of it dates, both in original conception and in extant form, from a period subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. One poem, of 143 lines, The Gleeman's Song, bears on the face of it that the writer lived in the time of Attila, in the early part of the fifth century; nor does there seem any sufficient reason to doubt that such was the fact. Another, Beowulf, the longest and most important of all, though in its present form manifestly the composition of a Christian writer, points to, and proves the existence of, an earlier poem or poems, containing the substance of the narrative, which must have been produced in pre-Christian times. In others, again, as Andreas and Elene, or Judith, although the narrative

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