formed the foundation of the second part of a poem attributed to Cynewulf, which, if it be by him, supplies us with the sole date which belongs to the life of that mysterious poet. The story brings into vivid light not only the scenery of the fencountry, but the character of the young atheling of the time when the influence of Christianity was still fresh, and acted on a national type lately emerged from heathendom. The book represents Guthlac in contact with a great number of events important and unimportant, serious and ludicrous; and all of these, met in different ways by the saint, open out his pleasant character. Various persons are, moreover, brought into touch with him, and though the sketches of these persons are slight, they are clear-cut. Were it only for these sketches of our folk in the eighth century, the book ought to be more read than it is. It illustrates also the tender and colour-full

1 I give here the passage which describes the youth of Guthlac, his sudden conversion, and his resolve to go into hermitage, and the description of his voyage. I have translated it from the Anglo-Saxon version that the English colour may be felt. The historical value of the extract as a picture of the character of a young Englishman is great, but its worth as a piece of good literature is the main reason for which I quote it. The original Latin of the eighth century is often florid, pompous, and rhetorical, but the conception and arrangement of the life is good. It represents work done more in the manner of Ealdhelm than of Baeda. The Anglo-Saxon rendering is probably of the tenth or eleventh century. It is agreeably written, with a natural and happy turn of phrase, and represents very well the kind of work which a simplehearted monk of the new learning that started from Ælfred was capable of producing. The extracts then have the advantage of displaying something of the literary quality of two different centuries separated by perhaps two hundred years. But the events of the life described are of the eighth century.

"When his strength waxed and he grew to manhood, he minded him of the strong deeds of the heroes and men of yore. Then, as though he had woke from sleep, his mood was changed, and he got together a mickle troop and host of his comrades and himself took to weapons. Then he wreaked his grudges on his foes and burnt up their Burh, and ravaged their towns, and far and wide he made a manifold slaughter, and slew and took from men their goods. For nine winters he carried on these raids, but it happened one night, on coming back from an outfaring, as he rested his weary limbs, that he thought over many things in his mind, and he was suddenly moved with the awe of God and his heart was filled within with ghostly love; and when he awoke, he thought on the old kings that were of yore who, through mindfulness of wretched death and the sore outgoing of a sinful life, forsook the world, and he saw of a sudden vanish away all the great wealth they had, and his own life hasten and hurry to an end, and he vowed to God that he would be his servant, and aris ing when it was day signed himself with the sign of Christ's rood." So he joined the monastery of Hrypadun, but after two years longed for the wilderness and a hermitage, and departing, heard of a vast desolation and was minded to dwell therein. The description of it is a clear picture of the watery places where Crowland grew into its later splendour. "There is in Britain a fen of unmeasured mickleness that begins from the river Granta, not far from the city which is called Grantaceaster. There stretch out unmeasured marshes, now a swart waterpool, now foul running streams, and eke many islands and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings, wide and long, it spreads out up to the northern sea."

imagination with regard to the supernatural, of which Baeda is so full. "At Guthlac's birth" and I quote from the Anglo-Saxon version of the Latin men saw a hand of the fairest red hue coming out of the heavens, and it held a golden rood, and showed itself clear to many men, and bent forwards towards the door of the house wherein the child was born." Again, when the evil spirits have borne Guthlac to the very doors of hell and would fain push him in, the Apostle Bartholomew comes down to help him: "Then suddenly came down the indweller of heaven, the holy Apostle, with heavenly brightness and glory shining, amidst the dim darkness of swart hell; and the accursed ghosts could not abide there for the fairness of the holy Comer, and hid themselves in the darkness. But when Guthlac saw his faithful friend, he was very blithe with ghostly bliss and heavenly delight." Then at the command of the Apostle, the devils bear Guthlac back to his hermitage with gentleness. "So they brought him back with all mildness, and on their wings they bore him that he could not have been borne more pleasantly in a ship. Now, when they came in the midst of the highness of the lift, there came towards him a heap of holy spirits, and they all sang and said, 'Ibunt de virtute in virtutem,' et reliqua-that is, in English-Holy men shall go from strength to strength.' When it began to dawn they set him down, and as he was about to fulfil his morning-prayer-tide to God, he saw two of the cursed spirits weeping and wailing greatly, and when he asked why, they answered, 'We two weep because our power is all broken through thee' . . . and they went off as smoke before his face." Picture after picture; there is a savour of Dante in it!

The love of animals also appears, that frequent virtue of the mediæval saint, out of which has grown so much charming literature. The ravens of the fen are at his command, and the fishes and the wild beasts. When Wilfrith, his friend, was talking to him of the spiritual life, two swallows came suddenly flying in, and behold they upraised their song rejoicingly, and after that, perched without fear on the shoulders of the holy man, and again uplifted their song and often lit on his breast and arms and knees. Now when Wilfrith, long wondering, beheld the birds, he asked why the fowls of the wild waste sat on him and were so tame. And Guthlac said, "Hast thou never learnt, brother Wilfrith, in holy writ, that the wild deer and the wild birds were the nearer to him who hath led his life after the will of God?"

In the place where Guthlac had lived, Crowland drew the

patronage of Æthelbald and after him of Offa, who, beginning his reign (757) over Mercia in some obscurity, had become, before his death in 796, the greatest king that England had as yet seen; but whose power went out, after his death, like a dying candle. We might imagine that this great prince whose charters are "more numerous than those of any other king of his age," who was the friend of learned persons like Alcuin, who had relations of close correspondence with the court of Charles at a time when Charles was patronising and advancing learning, would have created around him some kind of literature. This is so natural a conjecture that some persons have either asserted or suggested it. Professor Earle conjectures that Hygberht, the sole Archbishop of Lichfield, whom Offa set up as a rival of Canterbury, was the writer of the existing poem of Beowulf. Others seem to suggest that Cynewulf was a Mercian or of a Mercian school. But there is no evidence of any literary school, capable of producing poems like Beowulf and the Elene, in the court or kingdom of Offa. The fabulous tales, however, which had collected round the ancient hero of the continental England, round Offa the son of Wermund-tales which were part of a legend common to England and Scandinavia - were mixed up with Offa of Mercia. They make him thus one of the subjects of literature, but they obscure all his early history. His life was a life of wars and eager policy. His patronage of the Church was for his own ends, and St. Albans was founded by him as a make-weight against an immoral life which had, by the evil example it gave, a bad effect on the monasteries and therefore upon their learning. At his death Mercia lost all power, and in 828 it was swallowed up by Ecgberht. Not many years after Ecgberht's death, the whole of Mercia was fought over by the heathen. All the monasteries perished; learning and the materials of learning were for the most part destroyed. Middle as well as Southern England was drowned in ignorance. Yet we must not forget that the popular lays, the ballads, and the war-songs still continued. The wandering minstrel still went from hamlet to hamlet; the Scôp still made his verses in the camp, and the legend which tells how Ælfred sang to the harp in the tents of his foes, tells us that when the Muse has been driven from the seats of learning, she finds a shelter among the people.

1 The western part of Mercia was not, however, harried so mercilessly as the rest of it. There seems to have lingered there some of the means for building up, when peace came, a new home for learning. In 873 Werfrith was made Bishop of Worcester, and he seems to have been able to establish a school in that city, and to develop it after the peace of Wedmore. But this, and the help he gave to Ælfred, does not belong to the present history.

CHAPTER XIV

LITERATURE IN NORTHUMBRIA

It was in Northumbria that English literature, as distinguished from Latin literature in England, arose, and it reached in that northern land a remarkable and varied development. It was also in the same region that Latin learning and literature, written by English folk, attained its highest excellence. The English literature began with Caedmon of Whitby, and he created, as we hear from Baeda, a school of poetry, and this is one of the earliest vernacular literatures of which we know in modern Europe. The Latin literature is fully represented by the work of Baeda, and his work was the greatest done in Europe at the time, and may be said to be the foundation or impulse of all mediæval learning. Thus in the seventh century, in our own land, the dance of the modern Muses began. Those of them who recited their thoughts in the Latin tongue -the Muse of History and of divine Philosophy-ceased in England after a brief period their noble speech, but found their voice afresh, when many centuries had passed, in our native tongue. Those who sang in English, the Muses of Poetry of epic, tragic and lyric strains, sang for too short a time in the ears of all, then also ceased or seemed to cease in England. Their song was still heard, but only on the lips of warriors and wandering bards, in camp and village. Lowlier and lowlier was its sound, but its hour came at last. Again the Muses took up the English lyre for all the world to hear, and their first strains were coincident with the time of the Great Charter. As the people grew in freedom and in power so swelled the Muses' voice, ever louder and sweeter and in more varied music, from century to century, until the present hour.

It is the beginning of this poetic life in our own England which we have now to consider. Its early life in Northumbria lasted not much more than a century, from about 670 to

about the year 800. The poetry is remarkable for two things which do not generally characterise the earlier efforts of song -for a comparative excellence and for variety of range. The excellence is only comparative: we get more art in the poetry than we expect, more originality, more happy surprises, more personal feeling well expressed than we should imagine possible in the childhood of a literature; but when we look at the poetry by itself alone, it is not, with a few exceptions, of a high class. When we consider its variety of range, we can speak with a less uncertain tone. From this point of view it deserves high attention. During the short time it lasted, it tried and touched, as if driven to extend its swelling life in all directions, a great number of different modes of poetry. All we have of it is contained in the MS. of Beowulf; in two books, one kept at Exeter and another found at Vercelli; in the Chronicle and in a few other MSS. They are all of no great length: a man might read them through in a few days, but in their narrow space there is an astonishing variety,and variety of methods and subjects prove a keen individuality and an eager life in the poets of a people. Beowulf took its shape, at least so I believe, in Northumbria, and Beowulf has some relation to an epic. The three books of Judith that remain to us out of twelve are, like an epic poem, freely invented and imaginatively developed from existing legends. Out of the paraphrasing of the Bible which Caedmon began, arose a narrative poetry which treated episodes of the Bible as if they were lays in a Saga. Hymns, songs of praise and prayer were certainly written by Caedmon, as well as poetic narrative. The religious lyric was born. If we should dare to impute to Caedmon or his school the long epsiode of the Fall in the Genesis, or the Exodus, or the series of cantatas on the life and triumph of Jesus over Satan, we should be able to refer to Northumbria three other types of poetry; and for my part, I hold that these, however later than Caedmon the critics may put them, were written under the influence, the close influence, of the Northumbrian Master. This poetry is also full of a dramatic manner, and this manner grew in Northumbria. The story in the more ancient Caedmonic poems and in the Judith is often told in dramatic conversations. The Christ of Cynewulf possesses long passages which might be sung at a miracle play.

Nor does this exhaust the range of Northumbrian song. The Riddles, of which there are a gathering of eighty-nine, are full, as we have seen, of the poetry of natural description, of