of the burning coal," or a mighty mountain or river, “ a mountain of God," or a "river of God," required the Saxon to call his spear, his "wood of strength," or the tapestries of his chamber, "the web of the walls." A man renowned for prowess, was a "deed-bold man ;" and the leader of a naval engagement was "the Fleet-king." Modernized in its grammar, but with little change in the words themselves, it is in fact the language of Byron, of Shakespear, and last, but not least, of the majestic and apostolic Bunyan. The first furnishes us with many fine examples in his "Childe Harold."—

"Not in the air shalt these my words disperse

Though I be ashes.

A far hour shall wreak,

The deep, prophetic fulness of my verse,

And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse :

-That curse shall be-Forgiveness. Have I not-
(Hear me, my mother earth! Behold it heaven!
Have I not had to wrestle with my lot ?)

Have I not suffered things to be forgiven?

Have I not had my mind seared, my heart riven,
Hopes sapped-name blighted—life's life lied away?
And only not to desperation driven,

Because not altogether of such clay

As rots into the souls of those whom I survey."

The Saxon literature, therefore, was of that kind which will bear anatomizing: it was literature calculated to lay hold of, permeate and modify the public mind; but unfortunately, there was either no public mind to influence, or nothing in that mind that could appreciate or even understand, such writings. Saxon masses were barbarians unable to read or write.

The

The arrival of William on our shores, and the system of government he adopted, were not likely favorably to affect the literature of England. We accordingly find that it not only languished, but the very instrument of its transmission-the language itself, passed, in some of its dialects, into a crude, crabbed, unintelligible jargon. Had any books, therefore, been written for the people, they would scarcely have been generally intelligible, owing to this diversity of character, so well described by an author of the thirteenth century. "Some use

strange, wlaffing, chytryng, harring, garrying and grysbyting. The languages of the Northumbres, and specyally at Yorke, is so sharpe, slytyng, frotyng and unshape, that we sothern men may unnethe understonde that language."

But books in the vernacular, were then almost unknown, and the costliness and uninfluential character of those that existed, effectually shut them out from the public, or popular use. The clergy wrote in Latin, and as the Court and the educated classes spoke in French, their essays in authorship, were usually n the same language.

As characteristic of the times, it may be mentioned, that the three principal works of Gower, the friend of Chaucer, were written severally in Latin, French, and English. And even the Voiage and Travaille of Sir John Mandeville, Knight, a work calculated for extensive popularity, issued in 1366, was originally written in Latin, and then (to use the author's own words) "put out of Latin into French, and ayen out of French into Englishe."

With a Latin and French literature, therefore, and a people still clinging with a noble obstinacy to the old Saxon, little good was likely to be effected, and we consequently find the masses sunk in the grossest ignorance. "Vertue is gone," says the author just quoted; "the church is underfoot, the clergie is in error, the Devil reigneth, and simonie beareth the sway." Yet England did not want its learned men. The higher classes, even among the early Anglo-Normans, studied at the university of Paris, but their attention was mainly directed to curious and unprofitable questions in logic, metaphysics, theology, and the Aristotelian Philosophy. The students of those days were mere schoolmen, and not utilitarians. Erudition was the summum bonum of their wishes; and even this comparatively useless form of scholarship, was sought mainly for its own sake, and as a monopoly that was to distinguish them from the unlettered and ignorant, constituting the great bulk of the nation.

These statements are necessary to correct any erroneous inferences, naturally deducible from the fact, that between the middle of the thirteenth, and the middle of the fourteenth century, seven colleges had been founded in Oxford, and nine

in Cambridge. But colleges are not for the people; and though no less than thirty thousand students belonged at one time to the former university, the public mind owed little to their labors. Many of them, indeed, are described as mere "varlets who pretended to be scholars." "When," says a quaint old writer, "they went to perform any mischiefs, then would they be accounted scholars, that they might free themselves from the jurisdiction of the burghers." In his "Clerk of Oxenford,” Chaucer has graphically described one of the most exemplary of this class of students, whose profession it was said to be “to possess no wealth," and whose recluse habits, and learned labors were little likely to be extensively or popularly useful.

Doubtless a great concession to the popular craving was made, when Sir John Mandeville translated his Travels into English "that every man of the nation," as he says "might understand it." Here was a movement in the right direction, and so readily was it responded to, that of no book, with the exception of the Scriptures, can more contemporary manuscripts be found. But what was the tendency of this wonderful book? Simply to build up that puerile and abject trust in relics, pilgrimages and miracles, towards which, the people were already too favorably disposed. The majesty of Chaucer never shews itself to so much advantage, as in contrast to the drivelling absurdities of these Voyages and Travels, which the author tells us, with great complacency, were all "proved for true," by his Holiness the Pope! Yet, independently of those "pious frauds" which it describes, the work exhibits the profoundest ignorance of astronomy, geography, and natural history. We find described in it, men with but one leg, who are yet marvellously swift; horned gentlemen, who "speken nought, but gronten as pigges;" giants with but one eye, “folk of foul stature, without heads, having eyes in their shoulders; mouthless and noseless people, pigmies, and dwarfs, with eyelet holes in their faces, through which they hiss as adders do; some who run on all fours, and others who have ears hanging down to their knees. Of inferior animals, we have olifants, or warks, serpents, dragons, and cockadrilles, that weep over their prey; geese with two heads, hens without feathers, vegetative lambs, centaurs, griffins, larger and stronger than eight

lions, which carry home as a tit bit for their little ones, a horse and two oxen at a time; gerfauntz that may "loken over a great high house," mice as big as dogs, and ants as large as foxes.

This, then, was the character of the only literature accessible to the people, about the middle of the fourteenth century. For though the noble idea of advocating a translation of the Bible into the vernacular, was mooted by Bishop Grosteste, more than a century earlier, the project was then deemed too monstrous, to receive the support even of the great and good men of the day. Richard, of Bury, long afterwards, though himself an immoderate reader, insisted, that the laity had nothing to do with literature; and with so much jealousy was the awakening mind of England watched over by the Romish hierarchy, that Fitz Ralph, Primate of Ireland, complained with much justice, that "no book could stir, whether in divinity, law, or physic, but the friars were able and ready to buy it up."

But supposing that books had been then allowed the free course, which happily now belongs to them, they must have been uninfluential, because in a language unintelligible to the commonalty. Such men as Roger Bacon were well calculated to mould the public mind; but writing as he did, in Latin, it could of course, be none the better for his philosophy. An illustration of this remark results from a comparison of the writings of Mathew Paris, and those of Chaucer. The historian was in the field, a century before the poet, lashing the vices of the great, and denouncing, in no measured terms, the rapacity and worldliness of the Romish clergy: but his writings being in Latin, were comparatively ineffectual. The clergy read them, to be sure, but being all in the same boat, they cared nothing for these thunders, which they well knew could never reach the people. The writings of Chaucer, however, raised a hue and cry through the length and breadth of the land, whose echoes may be still heard to profit, in the camp of the Puseyites.

The noble triumvirate to which popular literature in England is mainly indebted, combines the great names of Wiclif, Chaucer, and Langland, the author of the Visions of Piers Plowman.

Of Chaucer we need not say much, as his merits are already well known. The verses of Langland are exceedingly rugged and uncouth, retaining much of the transition character of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. His object, indeed, seems to have been to restore to the language its original archaisms; but the phraseology of Wiclif, and especially his translation of the Bible, is at once harmonious, majestic, and readily appreciable even in our own day. Whether the simple sublimity of his object, a desire that the common people might hear and read, in their own tongue, the wonderful truths of inspiration, animated him to extraordinary exertion, or whether the genius and spirit of his mother-tongue werc admirably calculated to convey the full force and beauty of the original Scriptures, it were perhaps useless to enquire, but the fact is certain that his English Bible comes nearer to the matchless standard of our own authorized version than we could have supposed possible at that remote period.

To him we are certainly indebted for the removal of those unwholesoms restrictions which had so long fettered that free trade in thought which is the birthright of Englishmen. It was Wiclif who not only thus practically advocated a full and free supply of mental and moral aliment for the masses, but opened up a medium for its diffusion through the length and breadth of the land, by giving to its language all that popular character, and all those elements of power and pathos which it exhibits at the present day. The same gift of utterance was remarkable in Luther, when he realized his majestic project of reformation; and the language of Germany is just as much indebted to his influence, as that of England to the labors of Wiclif.

Up to this period men seem to have written usually without a purpose. Literature had been regarded as the end, rather than the means; and a pharasaic monopoly of scholarship was all that appears to have been contemplated. To make the world wiser or better through the medium of books was an idea scarcely entertained by any. But now the knell of this monopoly was struck, and those noble spirits to whom we have referred, came forward to rouse up the slumbering energies of the nation, and to stimulate and direct a pressure from without, which would at once oversweep the ruins of feudal tyranny, and dermine the monstrous image of Papal usurpation.