wholly uneducated. He had been submitted to the monastic teaching, as all Hild's dependents were, and had received enough to stir his intellect and emotion. An elaborate education unmakes rather than makes a poet. Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, Wordsworth, Burns, Keats, Byron, Shelley, were not great scholars, and the best of them all had no education at all save what came in the air to him. I have sometimes wished that Milton had not been so good a scholar. Burns followed the plough along the mountain side, and may be set side by side with Caedmon who tended the horses on the night that a Divine One spoke to him. Nor does it follow, that because Baeda says that he had the care of the cattle that night, that he was a herdsman at all. He was one of the secular attendants on the monastery, and may have been as good a gentleman as Halbert Glendinning. When Baeda says "on that night" it seems as if it were not Caedmon's regular habit to look after the cattle; but that he took it in his turn. But even if he were a herdsman, it is as good a beginning for English poetry to have Caedmon a herdsman as it was for Hebrew poetry to have David a shepherd. Whatever the man was, he had genius and, sleeping long, it awoke at last. How it awoke, and what it produced, either of itself, or in the hands of those whom it influenced, is now our business. CHAPTER XV CAEDMON CAEDMON, as he is called, is the first Englishman whose name we know who wrote poetry in our island of England; and the first to embody in verse the new passions and ideas which Christianity had brought into England. The date of his birth is unknown, but Baeda tells us that he died in 680, and as he began to write when he was well forward in years, his poem is loosely dated about 670. Hild had been some time at Streoneshalh' when he sang his first song, for we are certain that her abbacy began in 658. It ended in 680. Between these twenty-two years was laid the first stone of that majestic temple of English Poetry within whose apse, row after row, the great figures of the poets of England have taken their seats, one after another, for more than 1200 years. We knew of Caedmon's life and work from Baeda, but nothing more was known of his verse to modern England until the time of Milton. A similar chance to that which gave us our single manuscript of Beowulf and Judith gave us our single copy of the set of poems which has been connected with the 1 Streones-halh. Baeda translates this "the bay of the Beacon," and it has been taken to mean that there was a light of some kind either on the cliff or at the entrance of the bay. But streon is not an English word, or this is the only place where it occurs; and healh or halh is a word of doubtful meaning, and when it seems to occur in the charters has never the meaning of angle, or corner or bay. Baeda, however, may be supposed to know of what he was writing, and it is most probable-as Mr. Gollancz has suggested to me- that Streoneshalh is a local name which the English found already given to the place, and that this name meant Beacon-bay. The origin of the name Whitby, "the white town," which the Danes gave to the place, is as obscure as that of Streoneshalh. It could not be called so from the colour of the cliffs, which are of dark lias shale. But the little harbour may have been surrounded by fishermen's dwellings, whitened with lime, and such a village would gleam brightly against the darkness of the cliff. I do not know whether the English whitened their wooden huts, but this is the only conjecture I can make to fit in with the Danish name; unless we were to imagine that White or wit was the name of the Dane who led the raid against the place, or of some other who settled there in after days. name of Caedmon. Archbishop Ussher, hunting in England for books and manuscripts with which to enrich the library of Trinity College, Dublin, found this manuscript and gave it to Francis Dujon, a scholar of Leyden, who is known in literature as Junius, and from whom the manuscript derives its name of the Junian Caedmon. Junius, who was a great lover of Anglo-Saxon, was then librarian to Lord Arundel, and when he left for the Continent in 1650, took care to have the manuscript printed at Amsterdam. He published it as the work of Caedmon, and soon afterwards brought it back to England, where it finally found a home in the Bodleian. It is a small folio of 229 pages divided by a difference of handwriting into two parts. The first part, said to be in fine handwriting of the tenth century, is illustrated with rude pictures, and contains the Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. The second part, in different and perhaps more modern handwriting, contains the poem to the several subjects of which the name of Christ and Satan has been given. It includes verses on the Fall of the Rebel Angels, the Harrowing of Hell, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Pentecost, the Last Judgment, and the Temptation. Since the time of Junius critics have found in the separate parts of this manuscript so many various elements, and so much diversity of style, that they not only allot different writers to these separate parts, but also hesitate to attribute any one part to Caedmon. Indeed some have declared that Caedmon did not write a single line of it. It would be wearisome to give an account of all the theories and conjectures made about the authorship of this set of poems. They will be found collected with admirable skill by Wülker in his Grundriss für Geschichte der Angelsächsischen Literatur. The two things which interest us most are first, whether we may impute any part of the poems we have to Caedmon, the monk of Whitby of whom Baeda tells the story; and secondly, the poetry itself. With regard to the first, there is no doubt a general correspondence between the lines which stand now at the beginning of the Genesis and the words which Baeda says Caedmon sang, and of which he gives the sense in Latin. There is, moreover, a correspondence between the subjects of which Baeda says the poet sang and the subjects treated of in the Junian Manuscript; and these two correspondences make it somewhat probable that we have in this manuscript, along 1 "Finding a substantial agreement between the first lines of the MS. and the Latin abstract which Baeda made of the verses Caedmon sang in his dream," he assumes that the whole set of poems were by Caedmon. with poems written by other persons, some at least of the verses of Caedmon. If so, we must also add that they have suffered from interpolations and corruptions, and from their translation out of the Northumbrian into a West Saxon dialect. On the whole I am inclined to hope that we may have the pleasure of binding up the story in Baeda with some of the poems we possess; and if the severe Muse of History permit this to us, it is a great gain to sentiment. But the authorship of the several poems shall be discussed as we come to them, one after another. Before I enter on that task I must say something about Milton and Caedmon, and tell the story of Caedmon himself as it is given by Baeda. When Junius brought the printed book back to England he showed it, no doubt, to his literary friends. One of these friends was Milton, and certain resemblances on which, in my opinion, too much stress has been laid, make it a curious question as to whether Milton had Caedmon's work before him when he was writing Paradise Lost. It is most probable that Junius translated the poem to Milton. Milton knew his Baeda well, and it would be strange if he were not enough interested in the story of Caedmon, his first predecessor in the art of poetry, to be eager to hear what he was supposed to have written concerning Milton's own subjects of the fall of the rebel angels and of man. It is also probable that Milton, who borrowed thoughts from every side for his Epic, retained in his ear some of the more vivid expressions of the poem Junius translated to him; that their spirit entered into him and took a Miltonic form in scattered places of his poem. But the resemblances are slight, and less important than they would be if the subject were any other than that of the Fall of Man. We must remember that this subject had been treated of a hundred times in the mysteries and miracle plays; that dramas and poems had been written on it in every literature in Europe; that a number of ideas and phrases and descriptions used in writing of it had become conventional; and that the lines on which it was treated, and on which the characters of Satan, Adam, and Eve were drawn were similar through all this European work, if not frequently the same. The originality of Milton's poem does not lie in the subject or in its general treatment, but in the form of it and the poetry; and these, which are the main matters, are, in Milton's hands, as far superior to all the efforts of his predecessors as the Zeus of Pheidias was to all other images of the God. 1 I have noted hereafter, in their proper place, extracts from Milton which resemble passages in the Genesis. All we can say then is, that Milton had, it is likely, heard the Genesis translated to him, and that he got from the writer a suggestion or a phrase, here and there, which he used as he would use a suggestion or a phrase from Homer or Virgil, from Dante or Spenser. But, nevertheless, we may well imagine the romantic interest the blind old man would have when, sitting in some summer parlour, he listened to the song, a thousand years old, which the first poet of his race had sung concerning his own subject of " Man's first disobedience." The story of Caedmon, as Milton read it in Baeda, is well known, but it will bear repetition; and it should be the first lesson taught to every English child, for when the glory of England's wealth, science, and arms has become but a subject for an historical essay, her poetry will still inspire and console mankind. Empires die, but Poetry lives on, and the story of the origin of English song in this land is the foremost of all English stories. It begins in the Abbey of Whitby. Hild, the Abbess, under whose rule Caedmon wrote, had already lived thirtythree years with great nobleness, when she took on her the monastic life. Aidan placed her at this age on the banks of the Wear, and then transferred her to Hartlepool. Nine years afterwards, and on the same wild coast, she established the double Monastery of Streoneshalh, and dedicated it to St. Peter. Here, under this famous and beloved woman, Caedmon lived, attached in a secular habit to the monastery. It was not till he was well advanced in years that he learned anything of the art of poetry, wherefore, whenever at feasts it was agreed, for the sake of mirth, that all should sing in turn and the harp came towards him, he rose from the table and returned to his house. One evening, having done this, he went to the stables, for the care of the cattle had been for that night entrusted to him, and as he slept one stood by him, saluted him, and called him by his name, "Caedmon, sing me something." He answered, "I know not how to sing, and for this cause I left the feast, because I could not sing." Then the other who talked with him said, “ All the same, you have to sing for me."-"What shall I sing?" Caedmon answered. "Sing," said the other, "the beginning of things created." Whereupon he immediately began to sing in praise of God, the world's upbuilder, verses which he had not heard before, and of which this is the sense: "Now 1 We have at the end of an old MS. of the Historia Ecclesiastica a Northumbrian version of this dream-song of Caedmon. Here it is, and it is per |