and Cædmon, receiving some education, was enrolled among the monks, and spent the remainder of his life in writing religious poetry. His dream-song, preserved by Alfred, is more coherent than Coleridge's verses of similar origin, but has none of their fanciful richness.

Other works of his, which we still possess, though probably neither in perfect purity, nor at all complete, are inspired by a noble tone of solemn imagination. Their bulk in all is nearly equal to half of the Paradise Lost; to which some parts of them bear, not only in story but in thought, such a distant resemblance as may exist between the fruits of lofty genius, guided by knowledge and art, and those of genius allied in character if not in degree, but lamed by ignorance and want of constructive skill. They are narrative poems, handling scriptural events, but using the original in most places as loosely as it is used by Milton. Perhaps they were intended to make up one consecutive story: but, as we have them, they present several obvious blanks, and may most conveniently be regarded as falling into no more than two parts, the one dealing with events from the Old Testament, and the other taking up the New.

The First Part, beginning with the Expulsion of the Rebel Angels, follows the Bible History from the Creation and the Fall of Man till it reaches the Offering up of Isaac. It then passes suddenly to a full narrative of the Exodus from Egypt, and thence, with like abruptness, to the Life of Daniel. At this point we may hold the First Part as coming to a close. The Second Part is much shorter, and its divisions are so ill-connected that we can hardly suppose it to be more than a fragment. It opens with a conference of Lucifer and his attendant Spirits, held in their place of punishment. Miltonic in more features than one, this very animated scene is introduced with a very different purpose, and breathes a very different spirit, from the corresponding scene in our great Epic. The speakers are full of horror and despair: their last hope has been shattered by the Incarnation: and the passage serves merely as a prelude to the next narrative, which represents the Saviour's Descent to Hades, an event long holding a prominent place in the popular theology of our ancestors. The Deliverer reascends, bearing with him redeemed souls from Adam to the time of the Advent; and among these it may be noticed, Eve for a moment lingers behind to confess her sin, just as in Michael Angelo's celebrated picture of the Last Day, she hides her face from the Judge. The poem next describes briefly the Saviour's stay on earth after the resurrection: and it closes with the Ascension, and a kind of prophetic delineation of the Day of Judgment.

5. Both the versification of the Anglo-Saxon poetry and its style, are too peculiar to be left altogether unnoticed.

The melody is regulated, like that of our modern verse, by syllabic emphasis or accent, not by quantity, as in the classical metres. The feet oftenest occurring are dactyls and trochees, a point of difference from the modern tongue, whose words fall most rapidly into iambics. Rhyme is used in but few of the surviving pieces. Instead of it, they have what is called alliteration, which consists in the introduction, into the same stanza, of several syllables beginning with the same letter. It seems to be a universal law of the system, that each complete stanza shall be a couplet containing two verses or sections, in each of which there must be at least one accented syllable beginning with the same letter which begins one of those in the other: while more usually the first verse has two of the alliterative syllables. The length of the couplets varies much; but most of them have from four to six accents.

The style is highly elliptical, omitting especially the connecting particles. It is full of harsh inversions and of obscure metaphors: and there occurs, very frequently, an odd kind of repetition, which has been shown to depend, in many instances, on a designed parallelism between the successive members of the

sentence.

None of these features owed its origin to the Anglo-Saxons. Both the alliterative metres, and the strained and figurative diction, were derived from their continental ancestors, and are exhibited, though less decidedly, in the older poetry of the Northmen.

ANGLO-SAXON PROSE.

6. The metrical composition of the Anglo-Saxons is not more remarkable for its anxious and obscure elaboration, than their prose for its straightforward and perspicuous simplicity. The uses, indeed, to which prose writing was put among them, were almost always of a practical cast.

The preference of the Anglo-Saxon tongue over the Latin was very marked, especially after the impulse had been given by Alfred, to whose time, and those that succeeded, belong almost all our extant specimens of prose. Matters of business, which would not have been recorded in the language of the time in any other country, then or for centuries afterwards, were almost always so recorded in England. This was the case with charters, leases, and the like documents, it was the case, also, with ecclesiastical constitutions, and with the code of laws which was di

gested by Alfred, and again promulgated with alterations by several of his successors.

Among prose works claiming a literary character, the original compositions are far less numerous than the translations from the Latin, in many of which, however, the writers freely insert matter of their own. None of these invite our attention so forcibly as the versions of parts of the Scriptures. There is still preserved, in several manuscripts, a Latin Psalter, with an interlined Anglo-Saxon translation, partly metrical; there are translations and paraphrases of the Gospels, with which comments are intermixed; and there are versions of some historical books of the Old Testament.

Several distinguished men are named as having laboured in this sacred task: the Psalms are said to have been translated by Bishop Aldhelm; the Gospel of St John by Bede; and the Psalms or other books by Alfred, or rather by the ecclesiastics who were about him. But we cannot say positively who were the authors of any of the existing versions; unless it has been rightly inferred that the Heptateuch, which has been pubd. 1006. } lished, was a work of Elfric, who was archbishop of Canterbury in the close of the tenth century. This, however, we do know; that, although the Moso-Gothic version of the Gospels was older than any of ours, the Anglo-Saxon translations came next in date; and that they preceded, by several generations, all other attempts of the sort made in any of the new languages of Europe.

7. Among the original compositions in prose, is a large stock of Homilies or Sermons. Eighty of these were written by the venerable Ælfric, already named, and he, in the times of the Protestant Reformation, was appealed to as having in some of them combated the doctrines of the Church of Rome. He has bequeathed to us also more than one theological treatise, a Latin Grammar, a Glossary, and probably a curious Manual of Astronomy. He is, however, the only man named, as having, after the time of Alfred, been eminent in the cultivation of the vernacular tongue. A good many anonymous works interest us chiefly as illustrative of the state of thinking and knowledge. Such are treatises on geography, medicine, and medical botany (in which magical spells play a leading part), a series of arithmetical problems, whimsical collections of riddles, and a singular dialogue between Solomon and Saturn, seemingly designed for use as a catechism, and extant in more shapes than one.

If the relics now briefly described have their chief importance, merely as showing what our ancestors knew, or wished to

know, there is one monument of their prose literature from which, rude and meagre as it is, modern scholars have derived specific and valuable instruction. It is a series of historical records, usually arranged together, under the name of The Saxon Chronicle. Registers of public occurrences were kept in several of the religious houses, much in the same way as the Irish Annals; the practice beginning perhaps as early as the time of Alfred, when such a record is said to have been carried on under the direction of the Primate Plegmund. For the earlier periods, the chroniclers appear to have borrowed freely from each other, or from common sources; but in the later times each of them set down, from his own knowledge, the great events of his own time. Our extant Saxon Chronicle is made up from the manuscripts of several such conventual records, all of them in some places identical, but each containing much that is not found in the rest. They close at different dates, the most recent being brought down to year 1154.

the

b. 849,

8. Our survey of Anglo-Saxon literature may fitly be d. 901. closed with the illustrious name of Alfred;

The pious Alfred, king to Justice dear,
Lord of the harp and liberating spear!

The ninth century in England must be held in abiding reverence, if it had given birth to no distinguished man but him alone. From him went forth, over an ignorant and half-barbarous people, a spirit of moral strength, and a thirst for rational enlightenment, which worked marvels in the midst of the most formidable difficulties, and whose effects were checked only by that flood of national calamity which, rising ominously during his life, soon swept utterly away the ripening harvest of Saxon civilization.

His original compositions were very inconsiderable. His favourite literary employment was that of rendering, into his native tongue, the Latin works from which mainly his own knowledge was derived; works understood by very few among his countrymen, and confessedly understood so imperfectly by himself, that his translations are to be regarded as the joint work of himself and his instructors. The books selected, as the objects of his chief efforts, indicate strongly his union of practical judgment, of serious and elevated sentiment, and of eager desire for the improvement of society. Thus, besides the labours on the Scriptures which he performed or encouraged, he translated selections from the Soliloquies of Saint Augustine of Hippo, the Treatise of Gregory the Great on the Duties of the Clergy, the Ecclesiastical History of Bede, the Ancient History of Orosius,

and the work of Boethius on the Consolation of Philosophy. Often, in dealing with these works, he was not a mere translator. If a passage of his author suggested a fact known to himself, or an apt train of reflection, the fact or the thought was added to the original, or substituted for it. Thus he incorporates devout reflection and prayer of his own with his extracts from St. Austin; to the geographical portion of Orosius he adds an outline of the State of Germany, wonderfully accurate for his opportunities, and gives also accounts, taken from the mouths of the adventurers, of a voyage to the Baltic, and another towards the North Pole; and the finely thoughtful eloquence of the last of the philosophic Romans prompts to the Teutonic king long passages of meditation, not unworthy either of the model or of the theme.

It is probably impossible for us moderns to estimate justly the resolute patience of Alfred; because we can hardly, by any stretch of conception, represent to ourselves strongly enough the obstacles which, in his time and country, impeded for all men both the acquisition of knowledge and the communication of it. We find it easier to perceive the extraordinary merit of studies pursued, with a success which, though imperfect, was beyond the standard of his age, by a man whose frame was racked by almost ceaseless pain; a man, also, whom neither studious industry nor bodily torment disabled from toiling with unsurpassed energy as the governor, and legislator, and reformer of a nation; and a man who, while he so worked and so suffered, was never allowed to unbuckle the armour which he had put on in youth, to defend his father-land against hordes of savage enemies. This," declared he, " is now especially to be said; that I have wished to live worthily while I lived, and after my life to leave, to the men that should be after me, my remembrance in good works." He, too, who thus acknowledged duty as the great law of being, had learned humbly whence it is, that all strength for the performance of duty must be received. He has set down the momentous lesson with a labouring quaintness of phrase: "When the good things of life are good, then are they good through the goodness of the good man that worketh good with them: and he is good through God!"

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