HE first indwellers of the islands we call Great Britain and Ireland were a wild folk, coming we know not whence, who made rude stone weapons of flint, lived by hunting, could make fires and garments of skin, and dwelt in caves. These Palæolithic people were succeeded by, or developed into, a Neolithic race whose weapons, still of stone, were now highly polished and skilfully wrought. They began pastoral life in our island, and settled finally into communities; and the large-chamber tombs under earth, or their denuded remains, extending from Caithness to Dorset, showed that they occupied all the habitable parts of the country. They were a dark-haired, dark-eyed, short, brave, and constant people; and when they mingled afterwards with the Celtic race, they left some traces of their legends, religion, and law in the stories, the manners, and the language of the Celts. We may, with great probability, identify them with the earliest Picts of history, and the Silures of South Wales were their descendants.

It is only in folklore that we can hope to recover something of the way they thought and felt, but in the west of Ireland and Scotland, in Wales, and in the Midland Counties of England we still meet short, darkhaired, long-skulled people who retain the characteristics of this steady and valiant race. It is not impossible that some of the elements of their character and thought have entered into and still influence English poetry.

How long they lived undisturbed does not appear, but at last an Aryan folk, part of the first Celtic migration, invaded our island, drove back these Neolithic people to the west and north, but mingled with them; and the farther west and north they pushed the greater was the admixture. This first Celtic race are named the Goidels or the Gaels, and they colonised not only Great Britain, but also the Isle of Man, the Western Isles, and Ireland. They have lasted down to our own day, and the imaginative and enkindling spirit of their thought, literature, and art, infused into the English nature by intercourse and amalgamation, have had an intermittent and spiritual

influence on the poetry and prose of England. That influence was sometimes great, as at the beginning of our literature. Sometimes it was but little, but it always inspired when it came. After King Ælfred's days, and for a very long time, it ceased to do more than now and again to touch England; but it began to act on us again at the end of the eighteenth century, and at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth the Gaelic spirit is doing much the same kind of work it did in England during the seventh and eighth centuries.

It entered northern England from Iona, where Columba, bringing with him, and handing down to his successors, the poetry and learning of Ireland, had set up his church and dwelling. Oswald, King of Northumbria, who had been educated at Iona, summoned the Celtic monks to convert his country in 634; and Oswiu, also trained at Iona, extended the Irish influence until the whole of Northumbria received the faith from Irish missionaries, and set up a number of civilising monasteries on the Irish pattern. All the awakening and inspiring emotions of religion, out of which so much of literature is born, were kindled in the north of England at the Irish fire. This lasted untouched for thirty years; and then, alongside with the Celtic, the Latin forms of learning and religion began to make their way from Ripon, from Wearmouth, from Hexham and Jarrow. The Celtic and the Latin influences mingled. Meanwhile the Irish impulse penetrated into Mercia and East Anglia from the north; and the communication between Ireland itself and England was constant, each interchanging the results of their work and knowledge. Even the south was not exempt from the pressure of Irish wisdom. The school at Canterbury in Theodore's days was full of Irish scholars. 'Whole fleets' of students passed to and fro between Wessex and Ireland. Men like Ealdhelm were trained by Irish hermits who set up schools; and Glastonbury became a special centre of Irish learning, legend, and song; so that we may even say that Dunstan, long years afterwards, derived from the nest of Irish scholars who were settled there part of the spirit which made his character, and began that Renaissance of English learning which Ælfred had failed, but so nobly failed, to establish. This was the Goidelic invasion of England, and its imaginative and formative powers ran through all the poetry of Northumbria, and

stimulated the desires of Wessex and Mercia to know, and to feel after, the unknown.

A second Wandering of the Celtic race followed on the first, and some of its warriors, settling in Gaul, were allured by the white cliffs of England, and by the tales of sailors, to cross the Channel. The first of these invaders landed on the south-eastern coasts, perhaps as early as 300 B.C., and drove back the Goidels, as these had driven back the Neolithic people, to the west and north. The last of these Gaulish tribes who came to our land were the Belgæ. To all these men of the second Celtic Wandering the name of 'Brythons' has been given. When they had banished the Goidels from about a third part of Britain, the Romans checked their development for a year or two in 55 B.C., but did not come again for ninety years. During these ninety years the Brythons pushed on till they mastered the most of Britain, and even those lands where the Goidels remained (Devon, Cornwall, portions of Wales, Cumberland and Westmoreland, and part of Lancashire) became Brythonic in language, manners, and poetry. North of the Solway and the Tweed the Brythons also drove their way, but with less force than in our England. They found themselves among a mixed people of Goidels and Neolithic folk in the Lowlands; and this country, sometimes Brythonic, sometimes Goidelic, ended by having in it an exceedingly mixed race, made up of these two Celtic strains dissolved in a Neolithic infusion; but the Brythonic element was master. Into the north of Scotland the Brythons scarcely penetrated. But wherever they were, their language prevailed. Later on they took the name of Cymry, and the English called them the Welsh. The fate they had given to the Goidels they met with at the hands of the English; until, after a hundred and fifty years of war, the Brythons only existed as a separate people in Devonshire, Cornwall, Wales, and in Strathclyde; that is, in the country which extended from the Ribble through Cumberland and Westmoreland to the Clyde.

The Cymry had a literature of their own, and they sang in verse the fortunes of their strife with the English, their own wars with one another, the war-deeds of their chieftains, and the tales of their families. Moreover, they made a host of stories in prose in which they embodied their myths and the legends of their ancestral heroes. Four great bards are said

to have flourished among them in the later half of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh century. These were Aneurin, Taliessin, Llywarch Hen, and Merddin; and we possess in manuscripts which date from the twelfth to the fourteenth century some of their poems, added to and modernised. They sing the wars of the northern Cymry with the Angles, and of the Cymry of Wales with the West Saxons, in poems by Taliessin and Llywarch Hen. These poems are of the sixth century. In the seventh the poets celebrated the great struggle between the Northumbrians and Cadwallon and his son. This is the first period of Cymric poetry. When the northern kingdom of the Cymry decayed, and they emigrated to South Wales, the old poetry was applied in the tenth century to the new dwelling-place and the new fortunes of the Cymry. This is the second period. Later on a third school of literature arose, poetic in North Wales, and of mythical and romantic tales in South Wales; and these tales are at the root of a great deal of English romance and song up to the present day. A fourth school of poetry, imitative of the old poetry of the north, continued under the Norman-Welsh rule till the days of Henry the Second, when the Black Book of Carmarthen was made up of some of the ancient poetry. the following centuries the Red Book of Aneurin, the Book of Taliessin, and the Book of Hergest contained some also of the old poetry and of its later imitations. These were mingled with original work of a still later period.

In

There existed then, close to the border-land between the English and the Cymry, a great body of living and growing poetry, and of imaginative story-telling, which could hardly help influencing the Border-English when, after the first fierce years of the Conquest, the Welsh of West Wales, of Wales, and of Cumbria were so often either in alliance with the English or amalgamated with them. The Celtic genius of the Brythons stole in, year by year, into the English of the Border, from Berwick to Carlisle, from Carlisle to Chester, from Chester to Bristol, and from Bristol to Glastonbury and Exeter. When, after the Norman Conquest, the Normans seized a good part of South Wales, the Welsh imagination was interwoven with the Norman passion; and in days still later, after the twelfth century, the fifth period of Welsh poetry, developing itself in lyrics of love and of nature, full of lonely and graceful sentiment, had, as I believe, a well-marked influence on

the birth and growth of the earliest English lyrics. As far as we can conjecture, the best of these lyrics were born on the lands of the Severn valley, and the first English poem of imaginative importance after the Conquest—the Brut of Layamon-arose in the heart of one who dwelt at Areley, on the banks of the Severn.

There was no such amalgamation in the first hundred and fifty years of the conquest of Britain by the English; the British were ruthlessly slain or driven away. Among those who fled over-sea was the only literary man among the Britons whose name has attained reputation. This was Gildas, whose Latin book, De Excidio, describes the horrors of the first years of the English invasion, and whose Epistola, addressed to the kings and priests of the Britons, is a fierce and probably an exaggerated indictment of their rule and their immoralities. Nevertheless, so far as his slight history goes, he is a sound authority. When, weary of trouble, he fled to Gaul, founded the Abbaye de Ruis, and died, British culture also died with him. He was not alone in his emigration. Hundreds of Britons took flight from the English sword, and out of this furious expulsion a Brythonic colony arose in France which played its own part in English literature. After the battles of Aylesford and Crayford in 455-57, and for fully a century and a half, the Britons of the southern counties and of South Wales emigrated to Armorica and made Brittany. In that little corner of France the Brythonic traditions, legends, and myths, the imaginative ballads and story-telling of this Celtic race, lived on, and developed in freedom. When the Arthurian legend, which probably began among the northern Cymry (and the first records of which are to be found embedded in the compilation which goes under the name of Nennius-the Historia Britonum), came to South Wales, it got from thence into Brittany, was taken up by Breton bards, freshly worked and added to, and then fell into the hands of the Normans. The Normans, having brought to bear upon it their formative genius, carried it back to South Wales, and then to England; and it was first thrown into clear shape by a dweller in Wales, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who composed into twelve Latin books his History of the Britons, which, begun in 1132, took its final form in 1147. From that day to this, for nearly eight hundred years, the Brythonic story of Arthur has been one of the master-subjects of imaginative literature in

England. This--the full tale of which belongs to the next section of this book-is the last thing to be said of the influence on English literature of the Brythons, the children of the second Celtic migration.

These two Celtic invasions, the Goidelic and the Brythonic, were followed by another invasion. When the Brythons had been. about four hundred years in Britain, the Romans, under Claudius, came to stay, ninety years after the invasion of Julius Cæsar in 55 B.C. Their occupation, which lasted till A.D. 410, has had no power over English literature. To some extent it had Christianised and Romanised the Brythons; but the Roman influence did not really touch English literature till it came back with Christianity in the seventh century to England, and linked a converted people to the long traditions, literature, law, and glory of pagan and Christian Rome. But almost all the traces of this early occupation of Britain by the Romans were swept away by the hurricane of fire and sword which the English, coming in the middle of the fifth century to conquer and to settle the land, let loose on the provincial civilisation of Britain.

English Literature

Before the English Invasion of Britain.

The first Engle-land extended from South Sweden through Denmark and its islands to the lands about the mouth of the Elbe. Its indwellers were men of three tribes-the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons—and their common name and tongue was English. They lived along the coast, and in their marshy settlements fought on their western shores a fierce battle with the encroaching sea; but nature was not so rough with them on the eastern coasts of Denmark. They had the expansive spirit which the sea encourages, and in their rude but seaworthy ships sailed in all weathers to ravage the neighbouring coasts, terrible for courage and activity, for cruelty and greed, fearless of death and rejoicing in danger. From the Humber to Southampton they kept the British coast in terror during the later years of the Roman occupation.

Like other nations, they sang their battles at the feast and celebrated their gods. They built up sagas of their ancestral heroes, and most of their chiefs were also bards. The older men who did not go on piracy farmed the lands of their settlements, and agriculture

as well as war had its own songs. In these lays of religion, of war and agriculture, English poetry began in the ancient Engle-land while Britain was still a Roman province.

Of this heathen poetry on the Continent we have still some fragments left. Portions of the mythical sagas, founded on the doings of nature and of the ancestral heroes, lie embedded in Beowulf. The Battle of Finnsburg is the sole remnant of a series of sagas which were made before the time when the FolkWanderings began in 375. Waldhere, the fragment of a saga on the story of Walther of Acquitaine, carries us back to the days. of the Theodoric cycle of tales. A poem entitled Widsith retains verses which date from the time when the English were still fighting in their lands about the Eyder and the Elbe. The Complaint of Deor belongs to another world than that of our island, and we possess in the scattered verses of the Charms which the farmer sang as he ploughed and swarmed his bees, and went on a journey and exorcised the demons of cramp and fever, perhaps the oldest remains of heathen song.

The Charm for Bewitched Land contains pure heathen lines such as:

Hail be thou, Earth, mother of men.
Fruitful be thou in the arms of the God.

Be filled with thy fruit for the fare-need of men.

And the rites of the ploughing which are there described are the old heathen rites of the farmer when he first drove his plough through the acre. As we have them, they are Christianised, but their pagan origin appears through the Christian recension. In the Charm for the Swarming of Bees, gravel is thrown over the bees, and the spell-master sings, 'Let this earth be strong against all wights whatever;' and to the bees, 'Sit ye, Victory-women, sink ye to the earth.' But the Charm against a Sudden Stitch is even closer to heathendom. The Charm-doctor stands over the sick man with his shield, guarding him from the darts of the Witch Maidens, and describes their ride over the hill and their flinging of spears, while he charms out the javelin which has caused the cramp. These are remnants as old as the hills, fragments from the ancient Teutonic lands before the English left them for Britain.

The earliest of the longer poems is Widsith, the Far-voyager. Its personal part, in which the bard tells of himself and his wanderings, may belong in its original form to the fifth century,

but many additions were afterwards made to these ancient verses. Names of men much earlier and later than the fifth century were foisted in by later editors of the poem. The real interest of the verses is not in these questionable matters, but in the proud and pleasant account Widsith gives of himself as a wandering minstrel, and of the honour and gifts lavished on poets. We see him at the court of Eormanric, singing his mistress Ealdhild's praises over all lands. We hear him and his mate Scilling singing in the hall while all the lords are listening. He tells of the fighting with the Huns in the Wistla woods, and he ends by an outburst of pleasure in his art and in the honour it receives from all who care for a noble fame.

The Scôp (that is, the Shaper, the Poet), in the Complaint of Deor, is not so happy as Widsith. He is no rover, but lives with his lord, and has from him lands and wealth. But | his rival, Heorrenda, supplants him, and this song is written to console his heart. Others, Weland, Hild, Geat, Theodoric, suffered dreadful pain. "This he overwent, so also will I,' is the refrain of each verse. The allusions to the sagas of Theodoric and Gudrun and Eormanric prove that the English knew, as Waldhere also proves, the Germanic cycle of stories. None of the examples are Christian, but the poem suffers from a Christian interpolation. It is a true lyric, with a 'refrain' at the end of each verse, and this is unique in Old English poetry.

The two fragments of the poem of Waldhere, found by Werlauff at Copenhagen, are made from the original German seventh-century form of the poem. The Christian and chivalric elements of the later forms are entirely absent in the verses we possess. Waldhere flies with his love Hildeguthe from the Huns, and is pursued by Guthere and Hagena. She encourages him to fight against twelve warriors in our first fragment; the second is part of the dialogue between Guthere and Waldhere.

The few lines we have of the Fight at Finnsburg belong to an older cycle of saga than that of Theodoric. There is another portion of this Finn-saga in Beowulf, and the story there told either precedes or continues our fragment. It is sung by the Scôp at the feast in Heorot, Hrothgar's hall. Finn, king of the North Frisians, has married Hildeburh, sister of Hnæf. He invites Hnæf and his comrade Hengest, with sixty men, meaning to slay them.

The verses describe the attack and defence of the hall. It is a fierce, impassioned piece of war-poetry. The related passage in Beowulf describes the burning of Hildeburh's sons on the pyre, and her bitter mourning for them, and the vengeance taken on Finn.

These are our heathen fragments, all of them so infiltrated with Teutonic saga that we believe that the English, when they came to our land, possessed and sang the great stories of their Continental brethren. Of other stories, both mythical and heroic, we have remains scattered through Beowulf-the myth of Scyld; the story of Heremod; the story of Thrytho, which belongs to the ancient saga of Offa; the story of Ingeld and Froda and Freaware, which was the origin of a whole circle of tales; and, oldest of all, the story of Sigmund, which afterwards was developed into the great VolsungaSaga in the north, and in Germany into the Nibelungen Lied.

Beowulf.

We have one great saga of our own-the Saga of Beowulf. The poem of Beowulf, as we possess it, was probably composed into its present form in the eighth century in England, we do not know by whom; and received, either then or afterwards when it was put into the West Saxon dialect, the addition, but in moderation, of certain Christian elements. The story is, however, honestly heathen, and its original lays arose on the Continent among the English. They came to our England with the Angles, were developed in Northumbria and Mercia, and may have reached full saga proportions in the seventh century. In the eighth (though some make it later) one poet took up all the scattered forms of it, wrought them into a whole, gave them an ethical unity in the character of Beowulf, the ideal hero and king, and filled the complete poem with his own personality.

Beowulf seems to have been an historical personage of the sixth century, a Geät, and nephew of Hygelac, who is the Chochilaicus whom Gregory of Tours mentions as raiding the Frisian shore, and slain by its defenders. Beowulf was present at the battle, and avenged his lord's death. Hygelac died in 520. Beowulf placed Hygelac's son on the throne, and after his death reigned fifty years. This brings the historic Beowulf up to about 570. But this historic personage has not much to do with the poem. Its main story (with folk-lore admixtures from earlier and savage times) is the transference to the hero of the mythical deeds of Beowa, who is one of the presentations of the Sun and the Summer, and whose fight with the Winter and the Darkness, with the frost-giants, the destroying sea and the poisonous mist of the moorland, imaged in the poem by the monster