will not only have the personal satisfaction arising from a consciousness of superior knowledge, but will possess, in addition, a power of illustration and argument not attainable by the student whose attainments are confined to a knowledge of the principles of modern forensic practice only.

Moreover, our political institutions, which excite the admiration of all who have devoted attention to the subject, although they have been modified by Norman feudalism; although they have been rendered more secure by baronial or popular opposition to royal tyranny or absolutism; and although they have been improved and perfected by the wisdom of succeeding ages, still, even nowadays, are essentially Anglo-Saxon in all their main features. The originals of most of these institutions upon which the English race most prides itself at the present day, no less than the beginnings of many of the best principles of national constitutional government, and local self-government, to which both England and America owe so much of their greatness, are to be found in the charters and laws of the pre-Norman era. The statesman who has clearly before his mind the history of the grand constitutional principles of his country, and who can trace them back to a time when they existed only in germ, will have a broader view of the bearings of any attempt at

innovation or reform, and be better entitled to an opinion upon any important question of statesmanship, than those who are prevented by ignorance from casting their observation beyond the narrow circumference of their own age.

At the present day, too, when questions of Church discipline, Church doctrine, and Church practice are commanding the attention of intelligent men—the laity as well as the clergy-they who can turn to the religious writings of the Anglo-Saxons may gain from them an insight into the doctrine and polity of the early Anglican Church which those cannot possess who take the Tudor period as their starting point. And where is the clergyman who will not derive advantage from a perusal of the ecclesiastical laws, the ecclesiastical history, the homilies, and the various works of piety and devotion of Anglo-Saxon England, of which so many specimens are extant?

But, perhaps, the crowning advantage of a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon consists in the pleasure it affords the lover of English literature, by enabling him to enjoy the earlier, no less than the more modern, writings of England's greatest writers. Let the student, who has mastered the Anglo-Saxon stage of our language as it passes sluggishly through Saxon times, follow it through the so-called Semi-Saxon, as it begins in Layamon's Brut to break loose from

the trammels of grammatical forms; let him watch it, as it bounds through the Norman times, throwing off in its progress first one incumbrance and then another, till gaining power by the very oppression it has endured at the hands of its Norman tyrants, it bursts forth in the literature of the Early English period, giving promise of its future greatness; let him track it for a hundred years, as it changes its course, now tending to the Northern now to the Southern dialect, till, at length, in Middle English, it is powerful enough to express the highest flights of the genius of Chaucer; let him still follow it, as, impatient of restraint, it carries away in its progress the remaining imperfections which hide its true strength, until finally it shows its majestic power in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton; then the student will have gained a correct notion not only of the gradually increasing power of the language, in its passage from a synthetic to an analytic structure, he will, further, have gained a view of the gradual unfolding of the mind of the English nation as reflected in the ever increasing brilliancy of the national literature, that can never be attained by one whose reading is restricted by a knowledge of modern English only.

CHAPTER II.

The Life and Times of Cadmon and Sketch of the Junian Manuscript.

HE earliest specimen which has come down to

THE

us of the English metrical Romance or Epic, carries us back, like the earliest specimen of the English prose Romance or Novel, to the very dawn of English life and history.

In tracing to its source the story of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, (and it is with this tale that English prose Romance begins), we have to retrace our steps and explore the dim past of bardic times when the Cambrian poets sang of the warlike deeds of kings and heroes in the death struggle then being waged between the Kelt and the Saxon.

And this, cæteris paribus, is equally true of the metrical Romance, whether secular or sacred; whether it be the Christianised-pagan romance of the Beowulf or the Scriptural romance of Cadmon's "Fall of Man." Both of these, take us back in thought to early Anglo-Saxon times, when England was dense

with forests, when the woods were filled with the wolf, the elk, and the bear, and when only here and there a solitary dwelling in the field or feld, i. e. the clearing, marked the habitation of human beings.

The little that we know of the life of Cadmon, and the strange story of the sudden revelation of high poetic powers possessed by this hitherto unknown ceorl, would be unintelligible should we fail to understand the social and ecclesiastical conditions of the times in which he lived.

It is difficult, no doubt, to reproduce in imagination, even approximately, the everyday life of an age long gone by and enter into the spirit of its daily thought; and yet this must be attempted if we would study intelligently the literature of any past epoch. The history, the religion, the language, and the social customs of any given age are mutually explanatory, and one and all, must be made subsidiary if the literature of the past is to stand out before the mind as a living picture.

In the short account of the life of Cadmon which has been handed down to us by the Venerable Beda in his Historia Ecclesiastica, and which unfortunately is the only one that we possess, there are references to certain phases of Anglo-Saxon life that we must glance at before going farther, in order to render intelligible Beda's narrative of this remarkable man.