The age of verse precedes that of prose, and song was part of the very life of our bygone days. At the court of Hrothgar in our English Beowulf the banquet is no more complete without the song of the scóp, than was that of Alcinous in the Odyssey without the voice of the sacred singer, grave Demodocus.' And not only was there the professional poet-gleóman or courtly scóp— but the King himself, like the Hebrew David, could touch the glee-wood,' wake its sweet note, and 'tell well a wondrous tale:'* even among peasants the harp passed from hand to hand, as the legend of Cædmon shows; the churchman Aldhelm would sing to the crowds on the bridge at Malmesbury; and the saintly scholar Bæda died with a note of song on his lips. For linguistic purposes the Gothic gospels of Wulfila take us several centuries further back, but no early Teutonic poetic remains can compare with our own. The German fragment of The Song of Hildebrand,† found, like that of the Fight at Finnsburg and the first mention of Chaucer, on a scrap of parchment in the binding of a book, is the only other specimen. But it is a mere fragment of less than sixty lines; our Beowulf contains over three thousand. As our older English language differs from that of modern days, so does the structure of old English verse. Coleridge in his Christabel claimed to make an 'innovation' in modern poetry which may partly serve as an illustration. In justifying himself from the charge of irregularity, he states in his Preface that the metre was 'founded on a new principle, namely, that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in each line the accents will be found to be only four.' This 'new principle' was but one main feature of a verse system which belonged to the antiquity of all Germanic races ;' ‡ for Old English verse is based on rhythm, not on metre. Each line has four accented syllables, the accents coinciding, as in Christabel, with the natural word-stress. But to give a clearer idea of the rhythm of our older verse, the lines of Christabel should have a well-defined cæsura clearly dividing the line into two half lines, each having two accents. Further, these accented syllables would have to be inseparably connected by means of 'alliteration:' both the accented syllables in the first half line and the first of the two in the second half must begin with the same consonant or group of consonants. Oldest English Texts, and has made many of them accessible in his small Clarendon Press ed. called A Second Anglo-Saxon Reader, Archaic and Dialectic. Beowulf, 2107-2110. A translation will be found in Morley's English Writers, 1887, i. 259, 260. Ten Brink, Early English Literature, Pt. I. Kennedy's translation, p. 21. If the alliteration were on vowels these vowels would differ.* Still further: Christabel is in rhyme: classical Old English verse knows no rhyme, its metre is blank verse.' Only one regularly rhyming poem-and that of but eighty-seven lines-exists in Old English, and it is a late work, due to Scandinavian influence. Rhyme appears in some of the later poems, but its presence is a sign of decadence. 'The measure,' if we may adapt Milton's words concerning his own metre, 'is English heroic verse without rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and of Virgil in Latin; rime being no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse, in longer works especially.' Coleridge also claims for Christabel that the variation in the number of syllables is 'not introduced wantonly... but in correspondence with some transition in the nature of the imagery or passion.' A like freedom was used by our old poets, who at times employedas in the Cadmonian poems and in Judith-lengthy 'expanded' lines; while even in the shorter lines the system of alliteration is not always uniformly carried out. A strophic arrangement is clear in one short poem, The Lament of Deor, each strophe of which ends with the same refrain; and conjectural strophic divisions have been sought in various other poems. 3. The Epic Poetry.-The general character of Old English poetry is distinctly epic, but we have no epos in the strict sense;' our noblest old poem, Beowulf, is but a half-finished epos, as if benumbed in the midst of its growth.'t The word 'epic' inevitably suggests comparison with the works of Homer, Virgil, and Milton, and though the Old English poem falls far beneath these in technique, it still has much that is truly Homeric. The style, indeed, has in one sense a severe directness; the long splendour of the Homeric simile is wholly absent; and abundant as this figure is in contemporary Celtic poetry, there are but four similes in the three thousand lines of Beowulf, and these are brief and obvious. Ccmpensation may be said to be sought in the abundant use of metaphorical or periphrastic speech, in which, for example, the sea becomes the whale-road,' the 'swan-road,' the water-street;' a ship a foamy-necked floater;' the King, a 'ring-distributer,' &c., or a speaker 'unlocks his word-hoard.' Such usage is common to other Teutonic verse, and in Old English an example is found, on an average, in every nine or ten lines. In the later verse this * See Extract I. in Appendix A, and the preceding comment. † Ten Brink. Cf. W. Bode's interesting essay on the subject, Die Kenningar in der Angelsächsischen Dichtung, Darmstadt, 1886. The technical name Kenning-ar is from the Icelandic plural of kenning, 'that by which one knows.' became an unduly developed mannerism, a Euphuistic poetical diction comparable to that against which Wordsworth protested in his famous preface of 1800. Our poetic style was also marked by frequent repetition, similar in a way to the parallelism of Hebrew poetry, but often producing a disjoined, almost interjectional, style. But, allowing for all this, Beowulf as a whole impresses the reader much as the 'Night' or the 'Dawn' of the great Tuscan sculptor. 'Unfinished,' it is like the marble of many of Michael Angelo's noble figures; but are we not still in the presence of power and of beauty? We have vivid life-like characters, simple indeed, but clearly conceived and well sustained; clear-cut pictures of olden life with its mead hall, its feasts and song and loving cup; an atmosphere thoroughly English: a love of the sea and a close observation of nature prophetic at times of Wordsworth and Tennyson, while Beowulf himself is conceived in truly heroic style. A Geat, he sails from Sweden to Denmark to aid King Hrothgar, who is terrorised by the monster Grendel: without weapons he encounters the invulnerable fiend, and with his 'thirty-man grip'. tears an arm from its socket, so that the monster only retreats to die. A second portion tells of his conquest of Grendel's mother at the bottom of a mountain mere. This is weirdly imaginative. After fifty years of kingship, Beowulf at last fights and slays a desolating fire-dragon, the terror of his own land, but dies in the deed. The Hygelac, whom Beowulf succeeded, has been identified with a king who was slain on the Frankish coasts about A.D. 520, so that Beowulf may have been a real hero, about whose name existing mythical legends clustered, as they did later around the names of Arthur and of Charlemagne. Müllenhoff's suggestion that Beowulf's adventures are a form of the Beowa myth, originating in contests with the sea, has found much favour; and criticism, following the lead of Wolf's discussion of the Homeric poems a hundred years ago, has long busied itself in trying to disintegrate and trace the development of the poem.* Brought from the mainland, these heathen legends were sung in northern England in the seventh century; thence they passed to the south, where, modified by Christian touches, they, like other northern poems, assumed the West Saxon dress in which our eleventh century MS. preserves the poem. This was but the first of many 'translations,' for since Beowulf was first printed in 1815 it has donned many another garb. It has appeared See Stopford Brooke's Early English Literature, 1893, i.: Morley's English Writers, 1887, i., gives a summary of some views and a bibliography. Readers of German may consult R. P. Wülcker's invaluable Grundriss, 1885, and Ten Brink's Untersuchungen über Beowulf, 1888. in Latin, Danish, German, French, Italian, and English, in prose and in various forms of verse:-seventeen translations in eighty years, seven of which have appeared in the last decade and a half! The eighth English rendering in sixty years has been that of the author of The Earthly Paradise, by whom it was 'done into English' in 1895.* Few are the poems that can claim such a history. Fifty lines are all that remain of the Fight at Finnsburg, which, like the Tale of Troy sung before Ulysses at Scheria, forms the subject of the song of Hrothgar's scop in Beowulf (11. 1068-1159). Two fragments-sixty lines in all-of Waldere are the sole remains of an epos of Walther of Aquitaine, which two hundred years later was told in Latin hexameters by Ekkehard of St. Gall (d. 973). These fragments also show signs of revision by a Christian hand. 4. The Introduction of Christianity and Learning.— The arrival of Augustine in 597 A.D. and the advent of the Celtic missionaries in the North make an epoch in our literature. The influence of Pope Gregory, who sent Augustine, was, as we shall see, long felt both on prose and poetry, while centres of learning soon sprang up in which the study of Greek and Latin was pursued with a zeal comparable in its way to that of the Renaissance. Manuscripts of classical authors, neglected through ignorance in other lands, were eagerly purchased by English pilgrims to be treasured in the libraries of Wessex and the North. Ladies shared in the enthusiasm. We have indeed no such vivid picture as that of the sixteenth-century Lady Jane Grey bending over her Plato, but the female correspondents of Boniface wrote in Latin with as much ease as the ladies of the present day write in French,'† and for such ladies Aldhelm produced his Latin De laude Virginitatis. Wilfred, the munificent Archbishop of York, may supply an instance of one form of zeal. His biographer Eddius Stephanus tells how he 'caused the four Evangelists to be written of purest gold on purplecoloured parchments,' similar therefore to the famous Codex Argenteus at Upsala, and that he had a case made for them of gold adorned with precious stones. Augustine (d. 604) founded at Canterbury a school which under Theodore (Archbishop, 668690) and his friend Abbot Adrian became a distinct power. Both of the latter were skilled in Greek and Latin; Adrian, says William Prof. Earle's prose rendering, The Deeds of Beowulf, appeared 1892: this and the two American renderings in verse by J. M. Garnett, 1882, and J. L. Hall, 1892, are cheap accessible editions. Col. Lumsden's translation in ballad metre was issued in 1881 and 1883. The Early English Text Society issued a photographio facsimile of the MS. in 1882, edited by Prof. Zupitza; and in 1894 the Cambridge ed. of the text appeared, edited by A. J. Wyatt. †T. Wright's Biographia Literaria, p. 32. of Malmesbury, being 'a fountain of learning and a river of arts.' Their very birthplaces are typical of the wider influences now brought to bear on England. Theodore came from Tarsus in Asia: Adrian from Africa. From the Canterbury school issued Aldhelm, who founded that of Malmesbury, where he was long Abbot, though he died as Bishop of Sherborne. His English verse, some of which lingered among the people till the twelfth century, is lost: his Latin works remain. Besides other works we have 2,500 hexameter lines in praise of Virginity, and a flowery affected prose treatise on the same subject, while his hundred Ænigmata influenced the later 'Riddles' ascribed to Cynewulf. In the North, Biscop Baduking, better known by his ecclesiastical name of Benedict Biscop, founded the twin cloisters of Wearmouth and Jarrow, and his frequent foreign journeys served to gather books for their libraries. As Aldhelm is the chief name in the South, so is that of Bæda in the North. Born at Wearmouth in 672, he was one of Benedict's first pupils, and passed his quiet student life at Jarrow, where he died in 735. Of himself Bæda said, 'I ever found it sweet to learn or to teach or to write;' and like Bacon he might have added, 'I have taken all knowledge to be my province,' for his forty-five works form an encyclopædia of the learning of his day. During life he was known throughout Europe as the most famous of scholars, and his works were consulted till the late middle ages. His English verse, except for a metrical Life of St. Cuthbert, is lost his Latin verse is not without taste. His Latin prose consists of Scripture commentaries and homilies, a martyrology, a biography of Cuthbert, and works on cosmography, grammar, rhetoric and metre. But by far the most important of all is our first critical history, the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, up to A.D. 731, in five books; clear, simple, truthful, the style of this valuable work is a great contrast to that of Aldhelm. Bæda's friend Archbishop Ecgbert founded the school at York from which Charlemagne took his 'Minister of Public Instruction,' Alcuin (735-804), who has also left Latin works. It was of the famous York Library that Alcuin wrote: Illic invenies veterum vestigia patrum, Quidquid habet pro se Latio Romanus in orbe, John Scotus Erigena, the founder of Scholasticism,' also spent much of his life abroad in the service of Charles the Bald, and there the works which called forth the papal condemnation, |