patronage of Æthelbald and after him of Offa, who, beginning his reign (757) over Mercia in some obscurity, had become, before his death in 796, the greatest king that England had as yet seen; but whose power went out, after his death, like a dying candle. We might imagine that this great prince whose charters are "more numerous than those of any other king of his age," who was the friend of learned persons like Alcuin, who had relations of close correspondence with the court of Charles at a time when Charles was patronising and advancing learning, would have created around him some kind of literature. This is so natural a conjecture that some persons have either asserted or suggested it. Professor Earle conjectures that Hygberht, the sole Archbishop of Lichfield, whom Offa set up as a rival of Canterbury, was the writer of the existing poem of Beowulf. Others seem to suggest that Cynewulf was a Mercian or of a Mercian school. But there is no evidence of any literary school, capable of producing poems like Beowulf and the Elene, in the court or kingdom of Offa. The fabulous tales, however, which had collected round the ancient hero of the continental England, round Offa the son of Wermund -tales which were part of a legend common to England and Scandinavia — were mixed up with Offa of Mercia. They make him thus one of the subjects of literature, but they obscure all his early history. His life was a life of wars and eager policy. His patronage of the Church was for his own ends, and St. Albans was founded by him as a make-weight against an immoral life which had, by the evil example it gave, a bad effect on the monasteries and therefore upon their learning. At his death Mercia lost all power, and in 828 it was swallowed up by Ecgberht. Not many years after Ecgberht's death, the whole of Mercia was fought over by the heathen. All the monasteries perished; learning and the materials of learning were for the most part destroyed. Middle as well as Southern England was drowned in ignorance. Yet we must not forget that the popular lays, the ballads, and the war-songs still continued. The wandering minstrel still went from hamlet to hamlet; the Scôp still made his verses in the camp, and the legend which tells how Ælfred sang to the harp in the tents of his foes, tells us that when the Muse has been driven from the seats of learning, she finds a shelter among the people. 1 The western part of Mercia was not, however, harried so mercilessly as the rest of it. There seems to have lingered there some of the means for building up, when peace came, a new home for learning. In 873 Werfrith was made Bishop of Worcester, and he seems to have been able to establish a school in that city, and to develop it after the peace of Wedmore. But this, and the help he gave to Ælfred, does not belong to the present history. CHAPTER XIV LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA Ir was in Northumbria that English literature, as distinguished from Latin literature in England, arose, and it reached in that northern land a remarkable and varied development. It was also in the same region that Latin learning and literature, written by English folk, attained its highest excellence. The English literature began with Caedmon of Whitby, and he created, as we hear from Baeda, a school of poetry, and this is one of the earliest vernacular literatures of which we know in modern Europe. The Latin literature is fully represented by the work of Baeda, and his work was the greatest done in Europe at the time, and may be said to be the foundation or impulse of all mediæval learning. Thus in the seventh century, in our own land, the dance of the modern Muses began. Those of them who recited their thoughts in the Latin tongue the Muse of History and of divine Philosophy - ceased in England after a brief period their noble speech, but found their voice afresh, when many centuries had passed, in our native tongue. Those who sang in English, the Muses of Poetry of epic, tragic and lyric strains, sang for too short a time in the ears of all, then also ceased or seemed to cease in England. Their song was still heard, but only on the lips of warriors and wandering bards, in camp and village. Lowlier and lowlier was its sound, but its hour came at last. Again the Muses took up the English lyre for all the world to hear, and their first strains were coincident with the time of the Great Charter. As the people grew in freedom and in power so swelled the Muses' voice, ever louder and sweeter and in more varied music, from century to century, until the present hour. It is the beginning of this poetic life in our own England which we have now to consider. Its early life in Northumbria lasted not much more than a century, from about 670 to about the year 800. The poetry is remarkable for two things which do not generally characterise the earlier efforts of song - for a comparative excellence and for variety of range. The excellence is only comparative: we get more art in the poetry than we expect, more originality, more happy surprises, more personal feeling well expressed than we should imagine possible in the childhood of a literature; but when we look at the poetry by itself alone, it is not, with a few exceptions, of a high class. When we consider its variety of range, we can speak with a less uncertain tone. From this point of view it deserves high attention. During the short time it lasted, it tried and touched, as if driven to extend its swelling life in all directions, a great number of different modes of poetry. All we have of it is contained in the MS. of Beowulf; in two books, one kept at Exeter and another found at Vercelli; in the Chronicle and in a few other MSS. They are all of no great length: a man might read them through in a few days, but in their narrow space there is an astonishing variety,and variety of methods and subjects prove a keen individuality and an eager life in the poets of a people. Beowulf took its shape, at least so I believe, in Northumbria, and Beowulf has some relation to an epic. The three books of Judith that remain to us out of twelve are, like an epic poem, freely invented and imaginatively developed from existing legends. Out of the paraphrasing of the Bible which Caedmon began, arose a narrative poetry which treated episodes of the Bible as if they were lays in a Saga. Hymns, songs of praise and prayer were certainly written by Caedmon, as well as poetic narrative. The religious lyric was born. If we should dare to impute to Caedmon or his school the long epsiode of the Fall in the Genesis, or the Exodus, or the series of cantatas on the life and triumph of Jesus over Satan, we should be able to refer to Northumbria three other types of poetry; and for my part, I hold that these, however later than Caedmon the critics may put them, were written under the influence, the close influence, of the Northumbrian Master. This poetry is also full of a dramatic manner, and this manner grew in Northumbria. The story in the more ancient Caedmonic poems and in the Judith is often told in dramatic conversations. The Christ of Cynewulf possesses long passages which might be sung at a miracle play. Nor does this exhaust the range of Northumbrian song. The Riddles, of which there are a gathering of eighty-nine, are full, as we have seen, of the poetry of natural description, of nature almost loved for her own sake. Biographies, such as Guthlac's, were also made into poetry, and adorned by pleasant flowers of rhetoric. The wild legends of the saints, as of St. Andrew, were taken up, and woven into supernatural stories; and a Saga subject, like that of the "Invention of the True Cross," was seized, and treated in part like a heathen tale of war and adventure. Allegorical poems, already touched with mediæval mysticism, such as the Phoenix, the Panther, and the Whale, engaged, in an hour of leisure, the poet's hand. An extraordinarily personal poem, of passionate religious autobiography, is founded on a dream of the Holy Rood; and there exists a long threefold poem by Cynewulf, in boldly connected divisions, on the whole of the mission and work of Jesus, which passes through the Incarnation and the Ascension, till it embodies, and with an original and noble treatment, the great subject of the Last Judgment. In the midst of these there are poems concerning the works and fates of men and collections of sententious verses which tell of the proverbial wisdom of men, of their sorrows and their religion; and lastly, there are four elegies, two of which are of excellent quality. arose This is a remarkable range of poetic methods, contained in a small space, and it is, for its time, unique. It presents to us a curious problem. How did it happen that this native poetry - poetry other than the war-song which was universal in Northumbria, and took there so wide and so imaginative a range? What were the elements which nursed this vernacular growth, and did not exist, so far as we know, elsewhere than in Northumbria? The reasons for such a flowering of song ought to be found in the years preceding 670-700. Those that 1 I assume that there was no early West Saxon or Mercian poetry of this excellent and varied kind, and I think one has the right to assume it. It may be said that there was such poetry in Wessex during the seventh century, and we have lost it. It is possible, but then I think we should have had some allusion to it made by Baeda, Ealdhelm, Ælfred, or his biographers. At any rate, we know nothing about such poetry, and our question remains, How did it happen that English verse began in Northumbria? The question becomes more important, if, as I think, Cynewulf and his school, who carried on the work begun by Caedmon, were also Northumbrian, and if Beowulf, as I also believe, was thrown into its present form in Northumbria. But these beliefs are as yet open to discussion. What we can say, in general, is that we know there was a school of vernacular poetry in the north during the latter half of the seventh and the beginning of the eighth century; that we do not know of such a school at this date in the middle or the south of England, and that it is much more probable that poetry should be further developed where it has already existed, than in a country like Mercia where we never hear of poetry, or in a country like Wessex where we only hear of Ealdhelm making a light song or two for singing in the streets. At present the question is, Why did poetry in the seventh century arise in Northumbria? I here suggest can scarcely be called more than conjectures, but at least they place before the mind the question which any historian of Anglo-Saxon literature ought to consider one of the most important questions he has to ask himself. The first of these elements is the early greatness of Northumbria, and the influence its tradition of national splendour had on the minds of men. The pride of country which this awakens has always been an impulse to poetry. The finest poetic times of England are coincident with the sense of national greatness and unity, which, following on an era of splendour, uplifts the people to a high level of constant passion. This was the case in the days of Edward III.; it was still more the case in the time of Elizabeth; it has been the case in our own century. Nor is the outburst of song, which began with Burns, Wordsworth, and Coleridge, and died out with Keats, apart from this experience, though it may seem so. was not a special national glory which then fired the poets, but the glory of the whole of the Nation of Humanity which seemed to their minds to rise suddenly into splendour and unity and brotherhood, and to be filled with immortal hopes. In such times the past sends its impulse into the present and excites it; the present is full of its own eagerness and joy; and the future seems to thrill with expectation. Poetry is then born or if not actually born, the nation is then pregnant with it; and in the times of peace which follow this national triumph the child opens its eyes to the light. It Such conditions prevailed in Northumbria in the seventh century. Æthelfrith, who reigned from 593 to 617, raised his country to great honour; and his victory at Chester secured the supremacy of the English in the North. He was followed by his brother-in-law, Eadwine, whose supremacy was established far beyond Northumbria. Almost the whole of England owned his sway, and every Northumbrian must have felt the pride of country. Then he set up his capital at York, and a touch of the greatness of Rome, for York was the capital of Roman Britain, was linked to his name. This new splendour was imaged in the standard of purple embroidered with gold and in the Roman tufa, the feather tuft on the spear, which were borne before him on his journeys. Added to these things was the profound peace which Eadwine established, and the good government which filled the peace. So widespread was justice that the tradition ran and lasted that a woman with her babe might walk scatheless from sea to sea. When he died then in 633 the sense of national splendour, peace, unity, and over |