ways, without writing or literary form, it helped to carry westward the themes of Eastern stories for the future profit of minstrels. It gave the Physiologus to all the modern tongues; it translated the Buddha into the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat.

Arabian literature affects the West in a somewhat similar way. Arabian learning, itself derived from Greek, passes into Western Christendom through the Schools, which bring it into conformity with the accepted educational usages. Arabian fancy makes its way by the contraband methods of popular storytelling. Aucassin and Nicolette, Flores and Blanchefloure, may well be Moorish stories. But their descent is not recorded, except in their character, their manner, some facts of custom that they imply (the serraglio in Flores), and the etymology of a name (Aucassin). They have no literary ancestry that can be traced in books. The Arabic literature that was produced in the Dark Ages is not related to the West in any literary manner. The Arabians give scientific matter, and they give the subjects of stories, but their own literature is something apart. It was "not destined to be ours," though the student of heroic poetry may turn for a moment from the themes of Attila or Sigfred to admire the temper of the Arabian Dark Ages-"the Ignorance"-before the chivalrous imagination of their earlier poets was transformed by the False Prophet and his polygamous methodism. As critics of life, the old Arabian poets may compare with the most heroic authors in the North, or even with Odin himself.

"But as for my people, though their number be not small, they are good for naught against evil, however light it be. They requite with forgiveness the wrong of those that do them

wrong,

and the evil deeds of the evil they meet with kindness and

love;

As though thy Lord had created among the tribes of men

themselves alone to fear him and never one man more. Would that I had in their stead a folk who, when they ride forth,

strike swiftly and hard, on horse or on camel borne !" 1

The case of the Celtic literatures, Welsh and Gaelic, might seem at first to be quite analogous to that of Greek or Arabic. Here again are masters and teachers who have a large share in making the system of education for the whole of the West; missionaries and scholars who give the spirit of their lives to animate the brutish mass and turn it into Christendom. Here again the work of the teachers is made by their pupils to conform to the general type, and the national and local character, when it gets away from home, is for the most part obliterated and merged in the common tradition. Though there may be "sentimental traces" of the Celtic ancestor at Jarrow, or at St Gall, never wholly lost either in the Teutonic or in the common Latin features, still the Celtic character is never other than subordinate in the schools of the Scot abroad; just as the Greek and the Arabian character have to be assimilated to the common Latin temper. The Celtic imagination

1 From the first poem in Sir Charles Lyall's Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, 1885.

again may be found in the romances of the Middle Ages in the same way as Greek or Arabian fictions there; unmistakable, but without an authentic history to explain its presence. The prose and poetry of

the Celtic tongues are as unfamiliar to most people as the poetry of Arabia in the Ignorance, and far less available for modern students than the later literature of Greece. They belong in date to the Dark Ages, but are they a proper part of the subject for an historical sketch which is bound to keep to the principal lines of progress, and to avoid the temptations of Bypath Meadow? Celtic literature is part of the subject by something other than the mere obligation of dates, and for another reason than the indebtedness of Western Europe to its Irish teachers, great as that is. Celtic is the counterpart of Teutonic, closely related in its origin, as is proved in a thousand ways, and exposed to the same influences. Early Irish and Welsh literature, like early English and Icelandic, is largely that of an heroic age, which has borrowed its pens and ink from Latin clerks, and is never wholly exempt from the touch of Latin learning. The literary problems of the Irish and the early English were nearly alike: both wanted to find the best way of story-telling; both were attached to the heroic traditions of their own people; both were obliged to trim between their natural affection for mythology and their duties in the schools. They followed different methods even in the schools, where the subjects were common to both; still more in the epic stories, where they were less restricted. But

though it may be possible to understand the one fairly well without the other, a history of Western Christendom in the Dark Ages requires both Teutonic and Celtic literature.

The Dark Ages are really and not merely conventionally separate from what came after, in literature. Poets of the twelfth or thirteenth century in French or German, Chrestien de Troyes, Walther von der Vogelweide, are really part of modern literature : their vocabulary may be difficult, but their poetical forms and devices, if they trouble the beginner at all, surprise him oftener by their familiar look than by their strangeness. To go back to the ninth or the tenth century is to find a different world. Not only are the languages of a more ancient type: the ways of imagination are different, the tunes of poetry are different; and there are still older things than those of the ninth century with which the traveller has to be acquainted. It is not wonderful that the times should have been judged severely by scholarly persons who found themselves astray there. The literary taste of Heorot, the Danish hall where Beowulf listened to poetry, or of the House of the Red Branch, where Conchobar, king of Ulster, was at home, is far more difficult to appreciate than that of the later Middle Ages, and almost as remote from the prevailing fashions of the twelfth, or the fourteenth, as from the eighteenth century. Dr Johnson is hardly farther from Beowulf than Chaucer is.

The earlier literature, it is true, had some share in the great romantic movement. Gray, though he ad

B

mired Froissart and Gawain Douglas, went farther back in his researches, and his contributions to the cause of the romantic schools came from old Icelandic and Welsh, not from the more familiar and generally more profitable times of chivalry. Some time before. him Dr Hickes had broken new ground: his translations from Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic were not left to their learned dignity in the great philological Thesaurus. By some happy fortune he had chosen for translation one of the Icelandic poems about the value of which there is least chance of disagreement: the story of Hervor was noticed, and read, and copied out of the folio volume of Hickes to be included in a popular anthology. Percy's "Runic Poetry," about the same time as Gray's Descent of Odin, helped in the same way to revive some interest in an order of poetry more ancient than his Reliques. The success. of Macpherson proved that the Dark Ages were not in themselves enough to alarm the reader. Balclutha really had some of the work of the Dark Ages in it, besides the eighteenth-century restorations and plasterings.

But it is not necessary to apologise for the things touched upon in this essay, however much the writer may find himself at fault in his treatment of them. They need interpretation, as all literature does when its own day is over. Many of them are difficult and strange. Literature is in some respects the most conventional of all the arts; Poetry, for all that it may boast of a universal dominion, changes its character with every province and dialect, one thing in