CHAPTER I. THE FORMING OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 1. The Earliest Europeans.-2. The Celts.-3. The Teutons.-4. Their Blending into the English People.-5. Traits contributed by the Celts.-6. Traits contributed by the Teutons. 1. ONCE Europe was peopled only here and there by men who beat at the doors of nature, and upon the heads of one another, with sharp flints. What knowledge they struck out in many years was bettered by instruction from incoming tribes, who, beginning earlier or learning faster, brought higher results of experience out of some part of the region that we now call Asia. Generation after generation came and went, and then Europe was peopled by tribes different in temper, some scattered among pastures with their flocks and herds, or gathering for fight and plunder around chiefs upon whom they depended; others drawing together on the fields they ploughed, able to win, and strong to hold, the good land of the plain in battle under chiefs whose strength depended upon them. But none can distinguish surely the forefathers of these most remote forefathers of the Celt and Teuton, in whose unlike tempers lay some of the elements from which, when generations after generations more had passed away, a Shakespeare was to come. 2. The first of these great tribes who came into the British Isles were the Celts; and of these there were two distinct families, the Gaelic Celts and the Cymric Celts. The former, migrating by sea from Spain, struck on the eastern coast of Ireland and on the south-western shores of England, and thence spread thinly over both islands. Afterwards the Cymric Celts, who had been seated in Belgium and the north of France, being crowded and hustled by an advancing Teutonic tribe, fled across the Channel, landed on the south coast of England, and gradually forced the main body of their predecessors in Southern Britain (the Gaelic Celts) to join their countrymen across the Irish Sea. Soon, however, the Teutons, who had formed a Belgic Gaul, crossed the English Channel, and were strong enough to form a Belgic England; and from all lands opposite the eastern coast of Britain, the Teutons kept coming over as colonists. 3. This process of change was continuous, and may have been so for some centuries before the hundred years between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth century after Christ, during which there were six Teutonic settlements thought worthy of especial record. The six settlements were thus distinguished because they established sovereignties, and began the strong uprearing of the nation which took from a great immigrant Teutonic tribe its name of English. The First English, who are commonly known by the schoolname of Anglo-Saxons, but who even then called themselves the English people (Englisc folc), were formed by a gradual blending of Teutonic tribes. They came, at different times and in different generations, from different parts of the opposite coast. On the eastern shores, from the Moray Firth to below Whitby, the land lay readiest of access to men from the opposite side of the North Sea, among whom Scandinavians were numerous; accordingly the Scandinavian element is chiefly represented in the character, form, face, and provincial dialects of the north country. The part of the east coast belonging now to Lincolnshire was readiest of access to the Danes; and in Lincolnshire the Danish element is strongly represented. Farther south, the coast was opposite the Frisian settlements; therefore, among the immigrants over the North Sea to Southern England, the Frisians, forefathers of the modern Dutchmen, would predominate. Adventurers of many tribes might join in any single expedition. When they had formed their settlements, the Teutonic spirit of co-operation, and the social progress that came of it, produced changes of home, intermarriages, community of interests, community of speech in a language proper to the cultivated men of the whole country. This manner of speech, First English (or Anglo-Saxon), was not brought complete from any place upon the Continent, but it was formed here by a fusion of the closely-related languages or dialects of the Teutonic immigrants. 4. Thus we see that by the year 670, at about which time the first writing in English literature was produced, there was in the British Isles a population consisting in part of Celts, and in part of Teutons; and it is from a blending of these tribes during the twelve centuries that have elapsed since then, that the present English-speaking race have derived their physical and spiritual qualities. English literature from the seventh century to the nineteenth is a continuous expression of those qualities, both spiritual and physical. 5. First we desire to know what qualities have been contributed to the common stock by the Celt; for his influence on English literature proceeds not from example set by one people, and followed by another, but, in the way of nature, by establishment of blood-relationship and the transmission of modified and blended character to a succeeding generation. The Gaelic Celt now represented by the Irish and the Highland Scotchwas at his best an artist. He had a sense of literature; he had active and bold imagination, joy in bright color, skill in music, touches of a keen sense of honor in most savage times, and in religion fervent and self-sacrificing zeal. In the Cymric Celt-now represented by the Welsh- there was the same artist nature. By natural difference, and partly, no doubt, because their first known poets learned in suffering what they taught in song, the oldest Cymric music comes to us, not like the music of the Irish harp, in throbbings of a pleasant tunefulness, but as a wail that beats again, again, and again some iterated burden on the ear. In the fusion of the two races, the Celtic and Teutonic, which slowly began among the hills and valleys of the north and west of England, where the populations came most freely into contact, the gift of genius was the contribution of the Celt. "The true glory of the Celt in Europe," says James Fergusson, "is his artistic eminence. It is not, perhaps, too much to assert, that, without his intervention, we should not have possessed in modern times a church worthy of ad |