Alcuin's writings, which include 232 letters, and some inscriptions, epigrams, and poems, there is a hard sense of duty for the love of God, but there is little liveliness of fancy. He was a thoroughly practical man, who carried into the empire of Charlemagne the same administrative ability which he had shown as schoolmaster and librarian in the monastery of York, labouring always with all his powers to bring men to knowledge, that they might come near to God. He worked on difficult material, a fact which may account for some of his severity; and when he died, in 804, he was in some trouble with his imperial master for misconduct of the monks in his own abbey of St. Martin's, at Tours. 66 12. Meanwhile, the spirit of the people was expressed also in song. Apart from "Beowulf," and Cædmon's Paraphrase," each existing in a single manuscript, the main body of the First English poetry that has come down to us has been preserved in two collections, known as the EXETER BOOK and the VERCELL: Book. Each is named from the place where it was found. The Exeter Book is a collection of poems given, with other volumes, to the library of his cathedral by Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, between the years 1046 and 1073. The other volume was discovered in 1823, in a monastery at Vercelli, in the Milanese, where it had been mistaken for a relic of Eusebius, who was once Bishop of Vercelli, and died in 371. Among the pieces in these volumes are three of considerable length, by a poet named Cynewulf. His name comes down to us, because he had a peculiar way of distributing the letters of it among the verses in some part of each of his poems. In the Vercelli Book is Cynewulf's Elene, a poem of 2,648 lines, on the legend of St. Helen, or the Finding of the True Cross by the mother of Constantine. In the Exeter Book we have Cynewulf's legend of Juliana, martyr in the days of Emperor Maximian, and a series of poems which have unity among themselves, and have been read as a single work, Cynewulf's Christ. Cynewulf deals with Scripture history and legend in a devout spirit, and his poems are interesting, although their earnestness is not quickened by any touch of genius. He was probably, as Jacob Grimm suggests, a Cynewulf, Bishop of Lindisfarne, who died in the year 780; certainly of that century, and not Cynewulf, Abbot of Peterborough, who died Bishop of Winchester in 1008. Among other poems in the two collections we have in the Exeter Book the Traveller's Song, which is sometimes thought TO A.D. 850] THE EXETER AND VERCELLI BOOKS 27 to be the oldest of First English poems. In it Widsith names the places through which he has wandered. He has witnessed the wars of an Ætla. Some say that this means Attila, the Hun. Another interpretation places the scene of the wandering in our own country, between the years 511 and 534. The Exeter Book contains also the legend of St. Guthlac, and a poem on the myth of The Phonix, as an allegory of the life of the Christian; another of its poems is a fable of The Panther, applied to the resurrection of our Lord, and another is of The Whale, who attracts fishes by sweet odour from his mouth, "then suddenly around the prey the grim gums crash together. So is it to every man who often and negligently in this stormy world lets himself be deceived by sweet odour. . . Hell's barred doors have not return or escape, or any outlet for those who enter, any more than the fishes, sporting in ocean, can turn back from the whale's grip." The jaws of the whale were the accepted symbol of the mouth of hell. They stand for that in tenth century pictures which adorn the manuscript of Cadmon. In later years we still find them so accepted in the scenery of the miracle plays. This method of reading natural history into religious parable occurred in scattered passages of many early fathers of the Church. By degrees a fixed association was established between the asserted properties of certain animals and the religious meaning given to them, and the collection of such parables into a religious manual of natural history was made at an early date in the Eastern Church, under the name of Physiologus. There was a Physiologus denounced as heretical by a council held in the year 496. Fisolog, or Physiolog, came to be quoted as man or book, and we have it as a book in Latin manuscripts of the eighth century. Out of this form of literature sprang the Bestiaries of the Middle Ages. An Address of the Soul to the Body, a poem on The Various Fortunes of Men, Proverbs, and (Cynewulf's) Riddles, were also among the inventions copied into the Exeter Book. The collection includes a few pieces not exclusively devotional, and it represents in fair proportion the whole character of First English poetry. Since it was produced by an educated class, trained in the monasteries, the religious tone might be expected to predominate even if this were not also the literature of a religious people. The domestic feeling of the Teuton is tenderly expressed among these poems in a little strain from shipboard on the happiness of him whose wife awaits on shore the dear bread-winner, ready to wash his travel-stained clothes and to clothe him anew by her own spinning and weaving. In the Vercelli Book, beside Cynewulf's Helen, there is a still longer legend of St. Andrew, with a Vision of the Holy Rood, the beginning of a poem on The Falsehood of Men, a poem on The Fates of the Apostles, and two Addresses of the Soul to the Body, one corresponding to that in the Exeter Book. Such poems, in which the Soul debates with the Body as chief cause of sin, remained popular for centuries. 13. Among the remains of First English poetry, outside the Exeter and the Vercelli Book, the most interesting of those which seem to have been produced before the end of the eighth century is a fragment of old battle-song, known as The Fight at Finnesburg, discovered in the seventeenth century by Dr. George Hickes, on the cover of a manuscript of Homilies in Lambeth Palace; also a fine fragment of a poem on Judith in the same manuscript which contains Beowulf. Along the margin of a volume of Homilies in the Bodleian Library there is written also a fragment of a gloomy poem on The Grave. 14. When Alcuin died, in the year 804, the blending of the elements which were to build up a strong nation had advanced almost to the fusion of states into a single kingdom, with the name of England. The spirit of liberty had from oldest times been common to the Celt and Teuton. When Lucan, who lived in the first century, sang of the liberty, and with that the great ness, of Rome lost at Pharsalia, he said— "That liberty, ne'er to return again And flying civil war, her flight has ta'en O'er Tigris and the Rhine: and can be brought (Book. VII. May's Translation.) But the steady spirit of association which knits men together for the creation and maintenance of a free state against all adverse influences from without or from within, that was especially the contribution of the Germans to our strength. Their name of Germans meant "brothers-in-arms." Tacitus, when he described their customs at the end of the first century, told how among them the young member of a household was advanced, when able to bear arms, into the rank of member of the Commonwealth: how chiefs deliberated about minor matters, TO A.D. 877) DICUIL. ERIGENA 29 but about the more important the whole tribe; though when the final decision rested with the people, the affair was always thoroughly discussed before them by their chiefs. There is the germ here of Parliamentary government; and the true home life, from which national life draws its strength, was indicated in the respect of the Germans for their women. "Almost alone among the barbarians,” said Tacitus, "they are content with one wife. No one in Germany,” he added, with a bitter thought of Rome, "no one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and be corrupted." The first suggestion even of the spirit which led the Church Reformation of an after age is to be found when Tacitus says of the old German tribes that they "do not consider it consistent with the grandeur of celestial beings to confine the gods within walls, or to liken them to the form of any human countenance. They consecrate woods and groves, and they apply the names of deities to the abstraction which they see only in spiritual worship." Of a mind so characterised in its days of heathendom we have traced the later forms through "Beowulf," Cadmon's "Paraphrase," and other verses, and through the work of Bede and Alcuin, to the time when distinct communities are about to join in regarding England as their common country. 15. But they owed much to the fervour of the Celt. Dicuil, an Irish monk, who, in the year 825, at the age of seventy, wrote a Latin description of the earth, says he had spoken with Culdees, or Celtic missionary priests, whose zeal penetrated beyond the Faroes to distant Iceland. The livelier genius, also, of the Celt, with its audacity of thought, is shown by the writer who best represented English intellect in the generation after Alcuin. This was John Scotus Erigena, whose names of Scot and of Erigena-whether that mean born in Erin or in Ayrshire-indicate with the form of his genius that Celtic blood flowed in his veins. He lived at the court of Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald, King of France, who looked upon him as a miracle of wit and wisdom. He was a little man, and once, when he sat at dinner between two very fat monks, the king sent a dish from his own table of three fishes, one large and two small, which he was to share equally with his two neighbours. He gave to each of the fat monks a little fish, and took the big fish for himself. "That is not equal division," said the king. "It is," said Erigena. "There is a little one for a big one, there is a little ore for a big one, and I'm [A.D. 845 a little one for a big one." Such stories indicate lively familiarity of intercourse between the king and the philosopher. Erigena was distinguished for his knowledge of Greek, and he translated for Charles into Latin certain works ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, a traditional convert of St. Paul's, and first Bishop of Athens. These were mystical, half Platonic writings, first produced at an Eastern Church conference in the year 532, and there used to support opinions which the theologians of the Western Church denounced as heretical as soon as Erigena's translation made the nature of the teaching known. Erigena produced also a great work of his own in Latin On the Division of Nature, in the form of dialogue between pupil and master, which, placing reason higher than authority, set out with the doctrine that there is a perfect harmony between reason and revelation; and that all philosophy tends to a knowledge of the unity of the Creator, in whom all things begin and end. Evil, Erigena taught, being the opposite to the eternal God, could not be eternal. "A vice," he said, "is a spoilt virtue that can have no separate existence." In eternal fire he saw a material adaptation of spiritual thought to the unstrengthed faith, and he idealised some parts of Old Testament story into spiritual symbols. The pure study of Plato, the quick fancy, the bold speculation, brought John Scotus Erigena within the censure of the Pope and of two councils; but as long as Charles the Bald lived, there was shelter in his court. When Charles the Bald died, in 877, Erigena returned to England; and it is said that, about the year 884, when he was teaching in the monastery at Malmesbury, his pupils attacked his theology by stabbing him to death with the pointed iron styles used for school writing. 16. About this time, perhaps, there was produced by a Celtic writer a Latin History of the Britons. In a prologue which began to appear before the twelfth century copies of the history, its author's name is said to be Nennius. Nothing is known of Nennius, and the date of his writing is variously inferred from internal evidence to have been 796, or 800, or 879, or 980. This history tells of the contests of the Britons with the Romans and the Saxons. It derives their name from Brutus, a Roman Consul, and it thus names King Arthur to recite his twelve great battles against the Saxons :-"There it was that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, |