Warwickshire, another in Glamorgan: it is not wonderful that the poetry of a thousand years ago in a number of old languages should be unfamiliar and repellent at the first sight of it. The essential thing is to find out whether and in what sense it has any present value. As a preliminary, with regard to the common learned prejudice against the barbarians, there is nothing better nor more auspicious than Daniel's memorable protest and noble defence: "Me thinks we should not so soon yield our consents captive to the authority of Antiquity, unless we saw more reason; all our understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italy. We are the children of nature as well as they; we are not so placed out of the way of judgement, but that the same sun of discretion shineth upon us. Time and the turn of things bring about these faculties according to the present estimation; and Res temporibus non tempora rebus servire oportet. . It is not books but only that great book of the world and the all-overspreading grace of heaven that makes men truly judicial. Nor can it but touch of arrogant ignorance to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains the order of society, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in some one thing or other, that fits his humour and the times. . . . The Goths, Vandals, and Longobards, whose coming down like an inundation overwhelmed, as they say, all the glory of learn ing in Europe, have yet left us still their laws and customs, as the originals of most of the provincial constitutions of Christendom, which being well considered with their other courses of government, may seem to clear them from this imputation of ignorance. And though the vanquished never speak well of the conqueror, yet even through the unsound coverings of maledictions appear those monuments of truth as argue well their worth, and proves them not without judgment, though without Greek and Latin." 1 To subdivide the literature of the Dark Ages, historically, is not easy, for in the vernacular tongues the dates of authorship are seldom certain, often not to be fixed within a century or two: while in Latin, where some of the ordinary classification is possible, it is not remarkably useful. The great fact in Latin of these days is the decline and revival between the time of Gregory the Great and Charlemagne, after which there is a fairly continuous succession of learned men and, with many eccentricities, no such general decay as happened in the sixth and seventh centuries. The history of Latin is the history of education, and follows the great schools. There is a line from Ireland and Iona to Jarrow and York, and from there to the Court of Charles. Alcuin's school at Tours is the parent of the school at Fulda where Hraban carried on the same work. Different lines of descent are united at Reichenau and St Gall, which are in relation with the newer school at Fulda on the one hand, and with the Irish on the other. Bede 1 Daniel, A Defence of Ryme, 1607. (Jarrow) taught Egbert (York), who taught Alcuin (Tours), who taught Hraban (Fulda), who taught Walafrid Strabo (Reichenau): that pedigree roughly indicates one of the chief lines along which literary studies were carried. But the stages do not mean the same thing as the literary generations in later history, where definite fashions change through all sorts of ambitious experiments and new inventions, Ben Jonson giving place to Dryden, Ronsard to Malherbe, and so on. Here the life is of a different sort. In Latin there was no opportunity for such triumphs and glories as came later in the new languages. Here success meant obedience to the old models; or if rebellion took its chance and tried to make something new, it was always something exceptional, and often turned out to be exceptional in a hackneyed way after all. Even in the Latin hymns, the greatest achievement of the language in those times, there is an uncertainty and intermittent character about their production, unlike the energy with which new types of poetry are taken up, and exhausted, where the conditions are more favourable. There was no "town," in the pleasant literary sense of the word, to make an audience for literary adventurers, to give them the illusion of fame which counts for so much towards the reality of literary success. Even where there was something like a court and an Augustan patronage, under Charles the Great, it brought out nothing new-only repetitions of the sort of thing that had been done better two hundred years before by Venantius Fortunatus. Latin, it is true, is capable of life; but its life comes from the individual temperament of the man using it, and not from any such tide of inspiration as carried the Elizabethans even beyond their natural powers. The Latin author, if he is a strong man like Bede, or a lover of adventure like Paul Warnefrid, or a lively person like Liutprand of Cremona, will make the language do what he pleases, and will not fail to express his own character in so doing. But he cannot have, in the Dark Ages at any rate, the lift and impetus of contemporary ambitions all moving the same way, with a vague certainty that something new will come of it somehow. The Latin author has no contemporaries. He is a fellow-worker along with Cicero or St Augustine, and ought to be satisfied with that. There are some general subjects, in which the literature of these ages can be grouped, better perhaps than under distinctions of time. The characteristic teaching of the Middle Ages is much the same in Cassiodorus, in Isidore, in Alcuin and Hrabanus Maurus. The Liberal Arts, or perhaps even better, the whole of didactic literature, may be taken as one department of the history. Among the barbarous nations and their poetry and stories, apart from those vernacular books where the common educational work was carried on, there are certain chief interests easily discernible—that of Mythology and that of the Heroic Poem-according as the nations are affected by the marvels of their old traditions, or by the dramatic attraction of more recent great exploits. In con |