Front matter (continued 2)

The infernal doors, that on their hinges grate Harsh thunder.

The emissary of Satan in Cædmon had “a strong mind, lion-like in air, in hostile mood he dashed the fire aside with a fiend’s power.”8 That demon flings aside the flames of hell with the bravery of his sovereign, as we see in Milton—

Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool His mighty stature; on each hand the flames Driv’n backward, slope their pointing spires, and roll’d In billows, leave in the midst a horrid vale.9

Cædmon thus represents Satan:—“Then spoke the haughty king, who of angels erst was brightest, fairest in heaven—beloved of his master—so beauteous was his form, he was like to the light stars.”

Milton’s conception of the form of Satan is the same.

His form had not yet lost All her original brightness, nor appear’d Less than archangel ruin’d.10

And,

His countenance as the morning star that guides The starry flock, allured them.11

Literary curiosity may be justly excited to account for these apparent resemblances, and to learn whether similarity and coincidence necessarily prove identity and imitation; and whether, finally, Cædmon was ever known to Milton.

The Cædmonian manuscript is as peculiar in its history as its subject. This poem, which we are told fixed the attention of our ancestors “from the sixth to the twelfth century,” and the genius of whose writer was “stamped deeply and lastingly upon the literature of our country,”12 had wholly disappeared from any visible existence. It was accidentally discovered only in a single manuscript, the gift of Archbishop Usher to the learned Francis Junius. During thirty years of this eminent scholar’s residence in England, including his occasional visits to Holland and Friesland, to recover, by the study of the Friesic living dialect, the extinct Anglo-Saxon, he devoted his protracted life to the investigation of the origin of the Gothic dialects. A Saxon poem, considerable for its size and for its theme, in a genuine manuscript, was for our northern student a most precious acquisition; and that this solitary manuscript should not he liable to accidents, Junius printed the original at Amsterdam in 1655, unaccompanied by any translation or by any notes.

We must now have recourse to a few dates.

Milton had fallen blind in 1654. The poet began “Paradise Lost” about 1658; the composition occupied three years, but the publication was delayed till 1667.

If Milton had any knowledge of Cædmon, it could only have been in the solitary and treasured manuscript of Junius. To have granted even the loan of the only original the world possessed, we may surmise that Junius would not have slept through all the nights of its absence. And if the Saxon manuscript was ever in the hands of Milton, could our poet have read it?

We have every reason to believe that Milton did not read Saxon. At that day who did? There were not “ten men to save the city.” In Milton’s “History of England,” a loose and solitary reference to the Saxon Chronicle, then untranslated, was probably found ready at hand; for all his Saxon annals are drawn from the Latin monkish authorities: and in that wonderful list of one hundred dramatic subjects which the poet had set down for the future themes of his muse, there are many on Saxon stories; but all the references are to Speed and Hollinshed. The nephew of the poet has enumerated all the languages in which Milton was conversant—“the Hebrew, (and I think the Syriac,) the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, the Spanish, and French.” We find no allusion to any of the northern tongues, which that votary of classical antiquity and of Ausonian melody and fancy would deem—can we doubt it?—dissonant and barbarous. The Northern Scalds were yet as little known as our own Saxons. A recent discovery that Milton once was desirous of reading Dutch may possibly be alleged by the Saxonists as an approach to the study of the Saxon; but at that time Milton was in office as “the Secretary for Foreign Tongues,” and in a busy intercourse with the Hollanders.13

“Secretary Milton” at that moment was probably anxious to con the phrases of a Dutch state-paper, to scrutinise into the temper of their style. Had Milton ever acquired the Dutch idiom for literary purposes, to study Vondel, the Batavian Shakspeare,14 from whom some foreigners imagine our poet might have drawn his “Lucifer,” it could not have escaped the nephew in the enumeration of his uncle’s philological acquirements. But even to read Dutch was not to read a Saxon manuscript, whose strange characters, uncouth abbreviations, and difficult constructions, are only mastered by long practice. To have known anything about the solitary Cædmon, the poet must have been wholly indebted to the friendly offices of its guardian; a personal intimacy which does not appear. The improbability that this scholar translated the manuscript phrase by phrase is nearly as great as the supposition that the poet could have retained ideas and expressions to be reproduced in that epic poem, which was not commenced till several years after.

The personal habits of Junius were somewhat peculiar; to his last days he was unrelentingly busied in pursuits of philology, of which, he has left to the Bodleian such monuments of his gigantic industry. Junius was such a rigid economist of time, that every hour was allotted to its separate work; each day was the repetition of the former, and on a system he avoided all visitors. Such a man could not have submitted to the reckless loss of many a golden day, in hammering at the obscure sense of the Saxon monk, which the critics find by his own printed text he could not always master; nor is it more likely that Milton himself could have sustained his poetic excitement through the tedious progress of a verbal or cursory paraphrase of Scripture history by this Gothic bard. At that day even Junius could not have discovered those “elastic rhythms,” which solicit the ear of a more modern Saxon scholar in his studies of Cædmon,15 but which we entirely owe to the skill, and punctuation, and accentuation of the recent editor, Mr. Thorpe.

Be it also observed, that Milton published his “Paradise Lost” in the lifetime of Junius, the only judge who could have convicted the bard who had daringly proposed

————to pursue Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme—

of concealing what he had silently appropriated.

There are so many probabilities against the single possibility of Milton having had any knowledge of Cædmon, that we must decide by the numerical force of our own suggestions.

The startling similarities which have led away critical judgments, if calmly scrutinised, may be found to be those apparent resemblances or coincidences which poets drawing from the same source would fall into. There is a French mystery of “The Conception,” where the scene is hell; Lucifer appeals to its inmates in a long address. This Satan of “The Conception” strikingly reminds us of the Prince of Darkness of Milton, and indeed has many creative touches; and had it been written after the work of Milton, it might have seemed a parody.16

Similarity and coincidence do not necessarily prove identity and imitation. Nor is the singular theme of “the Rebellion of the Angels” peculiar to either poet, since those who never heard of the Saxon monk have constructed whole poems and dramas on the celestial revolt.17

We may be little interested to learn, among all the dubious inquiries of “the origin of ‘Paradise Lost,’” whether a vast poem, the most elaborate in its parts, and the most perfect in its completion—a work, in the words of the great artist—

——who knows how long Before had been contriving?—P. L., ix. 138.

was or could be derived from any obscure source. The interval between excellence and mediocrity removes all connexion; it is that between incurable impotence and genial creation. A great poet can never be essentially indebted even to his prototype.

If we may still be interested in watching the primitive vigour of the self-taught, compared with the intellectual ideal of the poetical character, we must not allow ourselves, as might be shown in one of the critics of the Saxon school, to mistake nature in her first poverty, bare, meagre, squalid, for the moulded nudity of the Graces. The nature of Ennius was no more the nature of Virgil than the nature of Cædmon was that of Milton, for what is obvious and familiar is the reverse of the beautiful and the sublime. We have seen the ideal being,

Whose stature reach’d the sky, and on his crest Sat Horror plumed—

by the Saxon monk sunk down to a Saxon convict, “fastened by the neck, his hands manacled, and his feet bound.”

Cædmon represents Eve, after having plucked the fruit, hastening to Adam with the apples,—

Some in her hands she bare, Some in her bosom lay, Of the unblest fruit.

However natural or downright may be this specification, it is what could not have occurred with “the bosom” of our naked mother of mankind, and the artistical conception eluded the difficulty of carrying these apples—

————from the tree returning, in her hand A bough of fairest fruit.—ix. 850.

In Cædmon, it costs Eve a long day to persuade the sturdy Adam, an honest Saxon, to “the dark deed;” and her prudential argument that “it were best to obey the pretended messenger of the Lord than risk his aversion,” however natural, is very crafty for so young a sinner. In Milton we find the Ideal, and before Eve speaks one may be certain of Adam’s fall—for

————in her face excuse Came prologue, and apology too prompt, Which with bland words at will, she thus address’d.

A description too metaphysical for the meagre invention of the old Saxon monk!

We dare not place “the Milton of our forefathers” by the side of the only Milton whom the world will recognise. We would not compare our Saxon poetry to Saxon art, for that was too deplorable; but, to place Cædmon in a parallel with Milton, which Plutarch might have done, for he was not very nice in his resemblances, we might as well compare the formless forms and the puerile inventions of the rude Saxon artist, profusely exhibited in the drawings of the original manuscript of Cædmon,18 with the noble conceptions and the immortal designs of the Sistine Chapel.

1 Sir Francis Palgrave’s “Dissertation on Cædmon,” in the Archæologia.

In another work this erudite antiquary explains the marvellous part of Cædmon’s history by “natural causes;” and such a principle of investigation is truly philosophical; but we must not look over imposture in the search for “natural causes.” “Cædmon’s inability to perform his task,” observes our learned expositor, “appears to have arisen rather from the want of musical knowledge than from his dulness, and therefore it is quite possible that, allowing for some little exaggeration, his poetical talents may have been suddenly developed in the manner described.”—“Hist. of England,” i. 162. Thus the Saxon Milton rose in one memorable night after a whole life passed without the poet once surmising himself to be poetical; and thus, for we consent not to yield up a single point in the narrative of “the Dream,” appeared the patronising apparition and the exhilarating dialogue. A lingering lover of the Mediæval genius can perceive nothing more in a circumstantial legend than “a little exaggeration.” I seem to hear the shrill attenuated tones of Ritson, in his usual idiomatic diction, screaming, “It is a Lie and an Imposture of the stinking Monks!”

The Viscount de Chateaubriand is infinitely more amusing than the plodders in the “weary ways of antiquity.” The mystical tale of the Saxon monk is dashed into a glittering foam of enigmatical brevity. “Cædmon rêvait en vers et composait des poèmes en dormant; Poésie est Songe.” And thus dreams may be expounded by dreams!—“Essai sur la Litérature Anglaise,” i. 55.

2 “The Six Days of the Creation” offered a subject for an heroic poem to Dracontius, a Spanish monk, in the fifth century, and who was censured for neglecting to honour the seventh by a description of the Sabbath of the Divine repose. It is preserved in “Bib. Patrum,” vol. viii., and has been published with notes. Genesis and Exodus—the fall of Adam—the Deluge—and the passage of the Red Sea, were themes which invited the sacred effusions of Avitus, the Archbishop of Vienne, who flourished in the sixth century. His writings were collected by Père Sirmond. This Archbishop attacked the Arians, but we have only fragments of these polemical pamphlets; as these were highly orthodox, what is wanting occasioned regrets in a former day. Other histories in Latin verse drawn from the Old Testament are recorded.

3 Among our ancestors all proper names were significant; and when they are not, we have the strongest presumptive reasons for suspecting that the name has been borrowed from some other tongue. The piety of many monks in their pilgrimages in the Holy Land would induce them to acquire some knowledge of the Hebrew or even the Chaldee—Bede read Hebrew. A scholar who has justly observed this, somewhat cabalistically has discovered that “the initial word of Genesis in Chaldee,” and printed in Hebraic characters בהדסין, exhibits the presumed name of the Saxon monk.

4 This sort of cento seems to have been a favourite fancy with this masterly versifier; for of another Anglo-Saxon bard who composed on warlike subjects, this critic says—“If the names of Patroclus and Menelaus were substituted for Byrthnoth and Godric, some of the scenes might be almost literally translated into a cento of lines from Homer.” Homer’s claim to originality, however, is secure from any critical collation with the old Saxon monk.

5 Notwithstanding the information with which I was favoured, I cannot divest myself of the notion that “the rebellion of the angels” must be more explicitly described among the Jewish traditions than yet appears; because we find allusions to it in two of the apostolical writings. In the epistle of Jude, ver. 6: “The angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, He hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day.” And in Peter, ii. 4: “God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to Hell, and delivered them unto chains of darkness to be reserved unto judgment.” These texts have admitted of some dispute; but it seems, however, probable that the apostles, just released from their Jewish bondage, had not emancipated themselves from the received Hebraical doctrines.

6 Paradise Lost, ii. 594.

7 Inferno, Canto iii. 5.

8 Cædmon, p. 29.

9 Paradise Lost, i. 221.

10 Paradise Lost, i. 592.

11 Paradise Lost, v. 798.

12 Guest’s “History of English Rhythms,” ii. 23.

13 This curious literary information has been disclosed by Roger Williams, the founder of the State of Rhode Island, who was despatched to England in 1651, to obtain the repeal of a charter granted to Mr. Coddington. I give this remarkable passage in the words of this Anglo-American:—“It pleased the Lord to call me for some time and with some persons to practise the Hebrew, the Greek, Latin, French and Dutch. The secretary of the council, Mr. Milton, for my Dutch I read him, read me many more languages. Grammar rules begin to be esteemed a tyranny. I taught two young gentlemen, a parliament-man’s sons, as we teach our children English—by words, phrases, and constant talk, &c.” This vague &c. stands so in the original, and leaves his “wondrous tale half-told.” “Memoirs of Roger Williams, the Founder of the State of Rhode Island, by James D. Knowles, Professor of Pastoral Duties in the Newton Theological Institution,” 1834, p. 264.

I am indebted for this curious notice to the prompt kindness of my most excellent friend Robert Southey; a name long dear to the public as it will be to posterity; an author, the accuracy of whose knowledge does not yield to its extent.

14 Mr. Southey observes, in a letter now before me, that “Vondel’s ‘Lucifer’ was published in 1654. His ‘Samson,’ the same subject as the ‘Agonistes,’ 1661. His ‘Adam,’ 1664. Cædmon, Andreini, and Vondel, each or all, may have led Milton to consider the subject of his ‘Paradise Lost.’ But Vondel is the one who is most likely to have impressed him. Neither the Dutch nor the language were regarded with disrespect in those days. Vondel was the greatest writer of that language, and the Lucifer is esteemed the best of his tragedies. Milton alone excepted, he was probably the greatest poet then living.”

This critical note furnishes curious dates. Milton was blind when the Lucifer was published; and there is so much of the personal feelings and condition of the poet himself in his “Samson Agonistes,” that it is probable little or no resemblance could be traced in the Hollander. The “Adam” of Milton, and the whole “Paradise” itself, was completed in 1661. As for Cædmon, I submit the present chapter to Mr. Southey’s decision.

No great genius appears to have made such free and wise use of his reading as Milton has done, and which has led in several instances to an accusation of what some might term plagiarism. We are not certain that Milton, when not yet blind, may not have read some of those obscure modern Latin poets whom Lauder scented out.

15 Guest’s “History of English Rhythms.”

16 This speech, in which Satan appeals to and characterises his Infernals, may be read in Parfait’s analysis of the Mystery.—Hist. du Théâtre François, i. 79.

17 L’Angeleida of Valvasone, the Adamo of Andreini, and others.—Hayley’s Conjectures on the Origin of “Paradise Lost.” See also Tiraboschi, and Ginguéné.

18 These singular attempts at art may be inspected in above fifty plates, in the Archæologia, vol. xx. We may rejoice at their preservation, for art, even in the attempts of its children, may excite ideas which might not else have occurred to us.

BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE.

The Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of “The Exploits of Beowulf” forms a striking contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Cædmon. Its genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity; but it derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive simplicity of a Homeric period—the infancy of customs and manners and emotions of that Hero-life, which the Homeric poems first painted for mankind:—that Hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the sentimental romance of another age and another race.

The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were those kinglings who could possess themselves of a territory in a single incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays, extended their dominion as “Sea-Kings” on the illimitable ocean.1 The war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society, when great men knew only to be heroes, flattered by their bards, whose songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons.

We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily prowess; vaunting, and talkative of their sires and of themselves; the son ever known by denoting the father, and the father by his marriage alliance—that primitive mode of recognition, at a period when, amid the perpetual conflicts of rival chieftains, scarcely any but relations could be friends; the family bond was a sure claim to protection. Like the Homeric heroes, they were as unrelenting in their hatreds as indissoluble in their partisanship; suspicious of the stranger, but welcoming the guest; we find them rapacious, for plunder was their treasure, and prodigal in their distributions of their golden armlets and weighed silver, for their egotism was as boundless as their violence. Yet pride and glory fermented the coarse leaven of these mighty marauders, who were even chivalric ere chivalry rose into an order. The religion of these ages was wild as their morality; few heroes but bore some relationship to Woden; and even in their rude paganised Christianity, some mythological name cast its lustre in their genealogies. In the uncritical chronicles of the middle ages it is not always evident whether the mortal was not a divinity. Their mythic legends have thrown confusion into their national annals, often accepted by historians as authentic records.2 But if antiquaries still wander among shadows, the poet cannot err. Beowulf may be a god or a nonentity, but the poem which records his exploits must at least be true, true in the manners it paints and the emotions which the poet reveals—the emotions of his contemporaries.

Beowulf,3 a chieftain of the Western Danes, was the Achilles of the North. We first view him with his followers landing on the shores of a Danish kingling. A single ship with an armed company, in those predatory days, could alarm a whole realm. The petty independent provinces of Greece afford a parallel; for Thucydides has marked this period in society, when plunder well fought for was honoured as an heroic enterprise. When a vessel touched on a strange shore, the adventurers were questioned “whether they were thieves?” a designation which the inquirers did not intend as a term of reproach, nor was it scorned by the valiant;4 for the spoliation of foreigners, at a time when the law of nations had no existence, seemed no disgrace, while it carried with it something of glory, when the chieftain’s sword maintained the swarm of his followers, or acquired for himself an extended dominion.

Beowulf was a mailed knight, and his gilded ensign hung like a meteor in the air, and none knew the fate it portended. The warder of the coast, for in those days many a warder kept “ocean-watch” on the sea-cliffs, takes horse, and hastens to the invader; fearlessly he asks, “Whence, and what are ye? Soonest were best to give me answer.”

The hero had come not to seek feud, nor to provoke insult, but with the free offering of his own life to relieve the sovereign of the Eastern Danes, whose thanes, for twelve years, had vainly perished, struggling with a mysterious being—one of the accursed progeny of Cain—a foul and solitary creature of the morass and the marsh. In the dead of the night this enemy of man, envious of glory and abhorrent of pleasure, glided into the great hall of state and revelry, raging athirst for the blood of the brave there reposing in slumber. The tale had spread in songs through all Gothland. This life-devourer, who comes veiled in a mist from the marshes, may be some mythic being; but though monstrous, it does little more than play the part of the Polyphemus of antiquity and the Ogre of modern fairyism.

In the timber-palace chambers were but small and few, and the guests of the petty sovereign slept in the one great hall, under whose echoing roof the Witenagemot assembled, and the royal banquet was held; there each man had his “bed and bolster” laid out, with his shield at his head, and his helmet, breastplate, and spear placed on a rack beside him—“at all times ready for combat both in house and field.”

This scene is truly Homeric; and thus we find in the early state of Greece, for the historian records this continual wearing of armour, like the barbarians, because “their houses were unfenced, and travelling was unsafe.”5

The watchman of the seas leaves not the coast, duteous in his lonely cares; while Beowulf, with his companions, marches onwards. They came to where the streets were paved; an indication in that age of a regal residence. The iron rings in their mailed coats rang as they trod in their “terrible armour.” They reach the king’s house; they hang up their shields against the lofty wall. They seat themselves on a bench, placing in a circle their mailed coats, their bucklers, and their javelins. This warlike array called forth an Ulysses, “famed for war and wisdom;” they parley; the thane hastens to announce the warlike but the friendly visitor; and the hero, so famed for valour, yet would not obtrude his person, standing behind the thane, “for he knew the rule of ceremony.” The prince of the East Danes joyfully exclaims, that “he had known Beowulf when a child; he remembered the name of his father, who married the only daughter of Hrethel the Goth. It is said that he has the strength of thirty men in the grip of his hand. God only could have sent him.”

Beowulf, he whose beautiful ship had come over “the swan-path,” may now peacefully show himself in his warlike array. Beowulf stood upon the dais; his “sark of netted mail” glittered where the armourer’s skill had wrought around the war-net. Here we discover the ornamental artist as in the Homeric period. He found the prince of the East Danes, “old and bald” like Priam, seated among his earls. Our hero, whom we have observed so decorous in “his rule of ceremony,” now launches forth in the commendation of his own prowess.

He who had come to vanquish a fiend exulted not less in a swimming-match in the seas, “when the waves were boiling with the fury of winter,” during seven whole days and nights, combating with the walruses.

The exploits of Beowulf are of a supernatural cast; and this circumstance has bewildered his translator amid mythic allusions, and thus the hero sinks into the incarnation of a Saxon idol,—a protector of the human race. It is difficult to decide whether the marvellous incidents be mythical, or merely exaggerations of the northern poetic faculty. We, however, learn by these, that corporeal energies and an indomitable spirit were the glories of the hero-life; and the outbreaks of their self-complacency resulted from their own convictions, after many a fierce trial.

Such an heroic race we deem barbarous; but what are the nobler spirits of all times but the creatures of their age? who, however favoured by circumstances, can only do that which is practicable in the condition of society.

Henforth, the son of Eglaff, sate at the feet of the king; jealousy stirred in his breast at the prowess of “the proud seafarer.” This cynical minister of the king ridicules his youthful exploits, and sarcastically assured the hero, that “he has come to a worse matter now, should he dare to pass the space of one night with the fiend.” This personage is the Thersites of our northern Homer—

With witty malice studious to defame, Scorn all his joy, and laughter all his aim.

And like Thersites, the son of Eglaff receives a blasting reproach:—“I tell thee, son of Eglaff, drunken with mead, that I have greater strength upon the sea than any other man. We two (he alludes to his competitor), when we were but boys, with our naked swords in our hands, where the waves were fiercest, warred with the walruses. The whale-fish dragged me to the bottom of the sea, grim in his gripe; the mighty sea-beast received the war-rush through my hand. The sea became calm, so that I beheld the ocean promontories, as the light broke from the east. Never since have the sea-sailors been hindered of their way; never have I heard of a harder battle by night under the concave of heaven, nor of a man more wretched on the ocean-streams. Of such ambushes and fervour of swords I have not heard aught of thee, else had the fiend I come to vanquish never accomplished such horrors against thy prince. I boast not, therefore, son of Eglaff! but never have I slaughtered those of my kin, for which hast thou incurred damnation, though thy wit be good.”

In this state of imperfect civilization, we discover already a right conception of the female character. At the banquet the queen appears; she greeted the young Goth, bearing in her own hand the bright sweet liquor in the twisted mead-cup. She went among the young and the old mindful of their races; the free-born queen then sate beside the monarch. There was laughter of heroes. A bard sung serene on “the origin of things,” as Iopas sang at the court of Dido, and Demodocus at that of Alcinous. The same bard again excites joy in the hall by some warlike tale. Never was banquet without poet in the Homeric times.

Here our task ends, which was not to analyse the tale of Beowulf, but solely to exhibit the manners of a primeval epoch in society. The whole romance, though but short, bears another striking feature of the mighty minstrel of antiquity; it is far more dramatic than narrative, for the characters discover themselves more by dialogue than by action.

The literary history of this Anglo-Saxon metrical romance is too remarkable to be omitted. It not only cast a new light on a disputed object in our own literary history, but awoke the patriotism of a foreign nation. Beowulf had shared the fate of Cædmon, being preserved only in a single manuscript in the Cottonian Library, where it escaped from the destructive fire of 1731, not, however, without injury. In 1705, Wanley had attempted to describe it, but he did not surmount the difficulty. Our literary antiquaries, with Ritson for their leader, stubbornly asserted that the Anglo-Saxons had no metrical romance, as they opined by their scanty remains. The learned historian of our Anglo-Saxons, in the progress of his ceaseless pursuit, unburied this hidden treasure—which at once refuted the prevalent notions; but this literary curiosity was fated to excite deeper emotions among the honest Danes.

The existing manuscript of “The Exploits of Beowulf” is of the tenth century; but the poem was evidently composed at a far remoter period; though, as all the personages of the romance are Danes, and all the circumstances are Danish, it may be conjectured, if it be an original Anglo-Saxon poem, that it was written when the Danes had a settlement in some parts of Britain. At Copenhagen the patriotism of literature is ardent. The learned there claimed Beowulf as their own, and alleged that the Anglo-Saxon was the version of a Danish poem; it became one of the most ancient monuments of the early history of their country, and not the least precious to them for its connexion with English affairs. The Danish antiquaries still amuse their imagination with the once Danish kingdom of Northumbria, and still call us “brothers;” as at Caen, where the whole academy still persist in disputations on the tapestry of Bayeux, and style themselves our “masters.”

It was, therefore, a national mortification to the Danes that it was an Englishman who had first made known this relic; and further, that it existed only in the library of England. The learned Thorkelin was despatched on a literary expedition, and a careful transcript of the manuscript of Beowulf was brought to the learned and patriotic Danes. It was finished for the press, accompanied by a translation and a commentary, in 1807. At the siege of Copenhagen a British bomb fell on the study of the hapless scholar, annihilating “Beowulf,” transcript, translation, and commentary, the toil of twenty years. It seemed to be felt, by the few whose losses by sieges never appear in royal Gazettes, as not one of the least in that sad day of warfare with “our brothers.” Thorkelin was urged to restore the loss. But it was under great disadvantages that his edition was published in 1815. Mr. Kemble has redeemed our honour by publishing a collated edition, afterwards corrected in a second with a literal version. Such versions may supply the wants of the philologist, but for the general reader they are doomed to be read like vocabularies. Yet even thus humbled and obscured, Beowulf aspires to a poetic existence. He appeals to nature and excites our imagination—while the monk, Cædmon, restricted by his faithful creed, and his pertinacious chronology—seems to have afforded more delight by his piety than the other by his genius—and remains renowned as “the Milton of our forefathers!”

1 See the curious delineation of the Vikings of the North, in Turner’s “Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons,” i. 456, third edition.

2 Mr. Kemble, the translator of Beowulf, has extricated himself out of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero. Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the translation, it is preceded by “A Postscript to the Preface,” far more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of “the postscript to cut away the preface root and branch,” for all that he had published was delusion! particularly “all that part of my preface which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null and void!” The result of all this scholar’s painful researches is, that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies, and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.

The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these, our old masters, who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at their head, have “treated mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa, furbished up for us in the North.” What a delightful phantasmagoria comes out while we remain in darkness! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.

3 These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero exulting in bone and nerve was known as “the Bear;” the more insatiable, as “the Wolf;” and “the Wild Deer” is the common appellative of a warrior. The term “Deer” was the generic name for animal, and not then restricted to its present particular designation.

“Rats and Mice, and such small Deer,”

baffled our Shakspearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great source of the English language—the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their own—and read geer or cheer. Percy discovered in the old metrical romance of “Sir Bevis of Southampton,” the very distich which Edgar had parodied.—Warton, iii. 83.

4 Thucydides, Lib. i.

5 Thucydides.

THE ANGLO-NORMANS.

The Anglo-Saxon dominion in England endured for more than five centuries.

A territorial people had ceased to be roving invaders, but stood themselves in dread of the invasions of their own ancient brotherhood. They trembled on their own shores at those predatory hordes who might have reminded them of the lost valour of their own ancestors. But their warlike independence had passed away. And, as a martial abbot declared of his countrymen, “they had taken their swords from their sides and had laid them on the altar, where they had rusted, and their edges were now too dull for the field.”1 They could not even protect the soil which they had conquered, and often wanted the courage to choose a king of their own race. Sometimes they stood ready to pay tribute to the Dane, and sometimes suffered the throne to be occupied by a Danish monarch. In a state of semi-civilization their rude luxury hardly veiled their unintellectual character. Feeble sovereigns and a submissive people could not advance into national greatness.

When the Duke of Normandy visited his friend and kinsman, Edward the Confessor, he beheld in England a mimetic Normandy; Norman favourites were courtiers, and Norman soldiers were seen in Saxon castles. Edward, long estranged from his native realm, had received his education in Normandy; and the English court affected to imitate the domestic habits of these French neighbours—the great speaking the foreign idiom in their houses, and writing in French their bills and accompts.2 Already there was a faction of Frenchified Saxons in the court of the unnational English sovereign.

William the Norman surveyed an empire already half Norman; and in the prospect, with his accustomed foresight, he mused on a doubtful succession. A people who had often suffered themselves to fall the prey of their hardier neighbour, lie open for conquest to a more intelligent and polished race.

The victory of Hastings did not necessarily include the conquest of the people, and William still condescended to march to the throne under the shadow of a title. After a short residence of only three months in his newly-acquired realm, “the Conqueror” withdrew into his duchy, and there passed a long interval of nine months. William left many an unyielding Saxon; a spirit of resistance, however suppressed, bound men together, and partial insurrections seemed to be pushing on a crisis which might have reversed the conquest of England.3

During this mysterious and protracted visit, and apparent abandonment of his new kingdom to the care of others, was a vast scheme of dominion nursed in the councils of Norman nobles, and strengthened by the boundless devotion of hardy adventurers, who were all to share in the present spoliation and the future royalty? In his prescient view did William there anticipate a conquest of long labour and of distant days; the state, the nobles, the ecclesiastics, the people, the land, and the language, all to be changed? Hume has ventured to surmise that the mind of the Norman laboured with this gigantic fabric of dominion. It is probable, however, that this child of a novel policy was submitted to a more natural gestation, and expanded as circumstances favoured its awful growth. One night in December the King suddenly appeared in England, and soon unlimited confiscations and royal grants apportioned the land of the Saxons among the lords of Normandy, and even their lance-bearers. It seemed as if every new-comer brought his castles with him, so rapidly did castles cover the soil.4 These were strongholds for the tyrant foreigner, or open retreats for his predatory bands; stern overlookers were they of the land!

The Norman lords had courts of their own; sworn vassals to their suzerain, but kinglings to the people. Sometimes they beheld a Saxon lord, whose heart could not tear itself from the lands of his race, a serf on his own soil; but they witnessed without remorse the rights of the sword. Norman prelates were silently substituted for Saxon ecclesiastics, and whole companies of claimants arrived to steal into benefices or rush into abbeys. It was sufficient to be a foreigner and land in England, to become a bishop or an abbot. Church and State were now indissolubly joined, for in the general plunder each took their orderly rank. It was the triumph of an enlightened, perhaps a cunning race, as the Norman has been proverbially commemorated, over “a rustic and almost an illiterate generation,” as the simplicity of our Saxon prelates, who could not always speak French, is described by Ordericus Vitalis, a monk who, long absent from England, wrote in Normandy. Ingulphus, the monk of Croyland, though partial to “the Conqueror,” however, honestly confesses that when the English were driven from their dignities, their successors were not always their superiors.

All who were eager to court their new lords were brought to dissemble their native rusticity. They polled their crowns, they cut short their flowing hair, and throwing aside the loose Saxon gown, they assumed the close vest of the more agile Norman. “Mail of iron and coats of steel would have better become them,” cried an indignant Saxon. We have seen what a martial Saxon abbot declared to the Conqueror, while he mourned over his pacific countrymen. This was the time when it was held a shame among Englishmen to appear English. It became proverbial to describe a Saxon who ambitioned some distinguished rank, that “he would be a gentleman if he could but talk French.”

Fertile in novelties as was this amazing revolution, the most peculiar was the change of the language. The style of power and authority was Norman; it interpreted the laws, and it was even to torment the rising generation of England; children learned the strange idiom by construing their Latin into French, and thus, by learning two foreign languages together, wholly unlearned their own. Not only were they taught to speak French, but the French character was adopted in place of their own alphabet. It was a flagrant instance of the Conqueror’s design to annihilate the national language, that finding a College at Oxford with an establishment founded by Alfred to maintain divines who were “to instruct the people in their own vulgar tongue,” William decreed that “the annual expense should never after be allowed out of the King’s exchequer.”5

The Norman prince on his first arrival could have entertained no scheme of changing the language, for he attempted to acquire it. The secretary of the Conqueror has recorded that when the monarch seemed inclined to adopt the customs of his new subjects, which his moderate measures at first indicated, the Norman prince had tried his patience and his ear to babble the obdurate idiom, till he abhorred the sound of the Saxon tongue. If because the Conqueror could not learn the Saxon language he decided wholly to abolish it, this would seem nothing more than a fantastic tyranny; but in truth, the language of the conquered is usually held in contempt by the conquerors for other reasons besides offending the delicacy of the ear. The Normans could not endure the Saxon’s untunable consonants, as it had occurred even to the unlettered Saxons themselves; for barbarians as their hordes were when they first became the masters of Britain, they had declared that the British tongue was utterly barbarous.6

But not at his bidding could the military chief for ever silence the mother-tongue. Enough for “this stern man” to guard the land in peace, while every single hyde of land in England was known to him, and “put at its worth in HIS BOOK,” as records the Saxon chronicler. The language of a people is not to be conquered as the people themselves. The “birth-tongue” may be imprisoned or banished, but it cannot die—the people think in it; the images of their thoughts, their traditional phrases, the carol over the mead-cup, and their customs far diffused, survived even the iron tongue of the curfew.

The Saxons themselves, who had chased the native Britons from their land, still found that they could not suppress the language of the fugitive people. The conquerors gave their Anglo-Saxon denominations to the towns and villages they built; but the hills, the forests, and the rivers retain their old Celtic names.7 Nature and nationality will outlast the transient policy of a new dynasty.

The novel idiom became the language of those only with whom the court-language, whatever it be, will ever prevail—the men who by their contiguity to the great affect to participate in their influence. In that magic circle of hopes and fears where royalty is the sole magician of the fortunes of men, the Conqueror perpetuated his power by perpetuating his language. Ignorance of the French tongue was deemed a sufficient pretext for banishing an English bishop pertinacious in his nationality, who had for a while been admitted to the royal councils, but whose presence was no longer necessary to the dominant party.

To the successors of the Norman William it might appear that the English idiom was wholly obliterated from the memories of men; not one of our monarchs and statesmen could understand the most ordinary words in the national tongue. When Henry the Second was in Pembrokeshire, and was addressed in English—“Goode olde Kynge,” the King of England inquired in French of his esquire what was meant? Of the title of “Kynge,” we are told that his majesty was wholly ignorant! A ludicrous anecdote of the chancellor of Richard the First is a strange evidence that the English language was wholly a foreign one for the English court. This chancellor in his flight from Canterbury, disguised as a female hawker, carrying under his arm a bundle of cloth, and an ell-measure in his hand, sate by the sea-side waiting for a vessel. The fishermen’s wives inquired the price of the cloth; he could only answer by a burst of laughter; for this man, born in England, and chancellor of England, did not know a single word of English! One more evidence will confirm how utterly the Saxon language was cast away. When the famous Grosteste, bishop of Lincoln (who would no doubt have contemned his Saxon surname of “Great-head”), a voluminous writer, once condescended to instruct “the ignorant,” he wrote pious books for their use in French; the bishop making no account of the old national language, nor of the souls of those who spoke it.

When the fate of conquest had overthrown the national language, and thus seemed to have bereaved us of all our literature, it was in reality only diverging into a new course. For three centuries the popular writers of England composed in the French language. Gaimar, who wrote on our Saxon history; Wace, whose chronicle is a rhymed version of that of Geoffry of Monmouth; Benoit de Saint Maur (or Seymour); Pierre Langtoft, who composed a history of England; Hugh de Rotelande (Rutland), and so many others, were all English; some were descendants from Norman progenitors, but in every other respect they were English. Some were of a third generation.

Our Henry the Third was a prodigal patron of these Anglo-Norman poets. This monarch awarded to a romancer, Rusticien de Pise, who has proclaimed the regal munificence to the world, a couple of fine “chateaux,” which I would not, however, translate as has been done by the English term “castles.” Well might a romancer so richly remunerated promise his royal patron to finish “The Book of Brut,” the never-ending theme to the ear of a British monarch who, indeed, was anxious to possess such an authentic state-paper. Who this Rusticien de Pise was, one cannot be certain; but he was one of a numerous brood who, stimulated by “largesses” and fair chateaux, delighted to celebrate the chivalry of the British court, to them a perpetual fountain of honour and preferment. We may now smile at the Count de Tressan’s querulous nationality, who is indignant that the writers of the French romances of the Round Table show a marked affectation of dwelling on everything that can contribute to the glory of the throne and court of England, preferring a fabulous Arthur to a true Charlemagne, and English knights to French paladins.8 When Tressan wrote, this striking circumstance had not received its true elucidation; the hand of these writers had only flowed with their gratitude; these writers composed to gratify their sovereign, or some noble patron at the English court, for they were English natives or English subjects, long concealed from posterity as Englishmen by writing in French. It had then escaped the notice of our literary antiquaries at home and abroad, that these Englishmen could have composed in no other language. How imperfect is the catalogue of early English poets by Ritson! for it is since his day that this important fact in our own literary history has been acknowledged by the French themselves, who at length have distinguished between Norman and Anglo-Norman poets. M. Guizot was enabled by the French government to indulge his literary patriotism by sending a skilful collector to England to search in our libraries for Norman writings; and we are told that none but Anglo-Norman writers have been found—that is, Englishmen writing on English affairs, and so English that they have not always avoided an unguarded expression of their dislike of foreigners, and even of Normans!

It is worthy of observation, that even those Norman writers who came young into England soon took the colour of the soil; and what rather surprises us, considering the fashion of the court at that period, studied the original national language, translated our Saxon writings, and often mingled in their French verse phrases and terms which to this day we recognise as English. Of this we have an interesting evidence in an Anglo-Norman poetess, but recently known by the name of “Marie de France;” yet had she not written this single verse accidentally—

Me nummerai par remembrance, Marie ai num, si sui de France—

we should from her subjects, and her perfect knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English, have placed this Sappho of the thirteenth century among the women of England. This poetess tells us that she had turned into her French rhymed verse the Æsopian Fables, which one of our kings had translated into English from the Latin. This royal author could have been no other than Alfred, to whom such a collection has been ascribed. We learn from herself the occasion of her version. Her task was performed for a great personage who read neither Latin nor English; it was done for “the love of the renowned Earl William Longsword”—

——Cunte Willaume, Le plus vaillant de cest Royaume.

Who would calculate the “largesse” “Count William,” this puissant Longsword, cast into the lap of this living muse when she offered all this melodious wisdom; whose beautiful simplicity a child might comprehend, but whose moral and politic truths would throw even the Norman Longsword into a state of rational musing? Her “Lais,” short but wild “Breton Tales,” which our poetess dedicated to her sovereign, our Henry the Third, are evidence that Marie could also skilfully touch the heart and amuse the fancy.

In her poems, Marie has translated many French terms into pure English, and abounds with allusions to English places and towns whose names have not changed since the thirteenth century. Her local allusions, and her familiar knowledge of the vernacular idiom of the English people, prove that “Marie,” though by the accident of birth she may be claimed by France, yet by her early and permanent residence, and by the constant subjects of her writings, her “Breton Tales,” and her “Fables” from the English, by her habits and her sympathies, was an Englishwoman.

At this extraordinary period when England was a foreign kingdom, the English people found some solitary friends—and these were the rustic monk and the itinerant minstrel, for they were Saxons, but subjects too mean and remote for the gripe of the Norman, occupied in rooting out their lords to plant his own for ever in the Saxon soil.

The monks, who lived rusticated in their scattered monasteries, sojourners in the midst of their conquered land, often felt their Saxon blood tingle in their veins. Not only did the filial love of their country deepen their sympathies, but a more personal indignation rankled in their secret bosoms at the foreign intruders, French or Italian—the tyrannical bishop and the voluptuous abbot. There were indeed monks, and some have been our chroniclers, base-born, humiliated, and living in fear, who in their leiger-books, when they alluded to their new masters, called them “the conquerors,” noticed the year when some “conqueror” came in, and recorded what “the conquerors” had enacted. All these “conquerors” designated the foreigners, who were the heads of their houses. But there were other truer Saxons. Inspired equally by their public and their private feeling, these were the first who, throwing aside both Latin and French, addressed the people in the only language intelligible to them. The patriotic monks decided that the people should be reminded that they were Saxons, and they continued their history in their own language.

This precious relic has come down to us—the “Saxon Chronicle”9—but which in fact is a collection of chronicles made by different persons. These Saxon annalists had been eye-witnesses of the transactions they recorded, and this singular detail of incidents as they occurred without comment is a phenomenon in the history of mankind, like that of the history of the Jews contained in the Old Testament, and, like that, as its learned editor has ably observed, “a regular and chronological panorama of a people described in rapid succession by different writers through many ages in their own VERNACULAR LANGUAGE.” The mutations in the language of this ancient chronicle are as remarkable as the fortunes of the nation in its progress from rudeness to refinement; nor less observable are the entries in this great political register from the year One of Christ till 1154, when it abruptly terminates. The meagreness of the earlier recorders contrasts with the more impressive detail of later enlarged and thoughtful minds. When we come to William of Normandy, we have a character of that monarch by one who knew him personally, having lived at his court. It is not only a masterly delineation, but a skilful and steady dissection. The earlier Saxon chronicler has recorded a defeat and retreat which Cæsar suffered in his first invasion, which would be difficult to discover in the Commentaries of Cæsar.

The true language of the people lingered on their lips, and it seemed to bestow a shadowy independence to a population in bondage. The remoter the locality, the more obdurate was the Saxon; and these indwellers were latterly distinguished as “Uplandish” by the inhabitants of cities. For about two centuries “the Uplandish” held no social connexion; separated not only by distance, but by their isolated dialects and peculiar customs, these natives of the soil shrunk into themselves, intermarrying and dying on the same spot; they were hardly aware that they were without a country.

It was a great result of the Norman government in England that it associated our insular and retired dominion with that nobler theatre of human affairs, the Continent of Europe. In Normandy we trace the first footings of our national power; the English Sovereign, now a prince of France, ere long on the French soil vied in magnitude of territory with his paramount Lord, the Monarch of France. Such a permanent connexion could not fail to produce a conformity in manners; what was passing among our closest neighbours, rivals or associates, was reflected in the old Saxon land which had lost its nationality.

1 Speed, 441. This was said to “the Conqueror,” and this Abbot of St. Alban’s paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become treason.

2 A circumstance which Milton has recorded.

3 Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the Norman; Spelman, the great antiquary, and Blackstone, the historian and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the assumed title of “the Conqueror” to a mere technical feudal term of “Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of inheritance.” The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled “the Conqueror,” and such is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland. Ritson is indignant at what he calls “a pitiful forensic quibble.”

But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedate Whitelocke, positively asserts that “William only conquered Harold and his army; for he never was, nor pretended to be, the conqueror of England, although the sycophant monks of the time gave him that title.”—Whitelocke’s “Hist. of England,” 33.

In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul’s, which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William denominates himself, “by the grace of God, King of Englishmen” (Rex Anglorum), and addresses it “to all his well-beloved French and English people, greeting.”—Stowe’s “Survey of London,” 326, Edit. 1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was “the Conqueror” as well as the sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sang of his hero,—

—————————qui regna sur la France, Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance.

4 The final history of these citadels may illustrate that verse of Goldsmith which reminds us—

“To fly from PETTY TYRANTS—to the Throne!”

In the short space of seventy years the owners of those castles bearded even majesty itself; these lords, by their undue share of power, were in perpetual revolt; till two royal persons, though opposed to each other, Stephen and Maude, decreed for their mutual interest the demolition of fifteen hundred and fifteen castles. They were razed by commission, or by writs to the sheriffs; and a law was further enacted that “none hereafter, without license, should embattle his house.” And thus was broken this aristocracy of castles. See two dissertations on “Castles,” by Sir Robert Sutton, and by Agard; “Curious Discourses by Eminent Antiquaries,” i. 104 and 188.

This number of castles seems incredible; possibly many were “embattled houses.” My learned friend, the Rev. Joseph Hunter, an antiquary most versant in manuscripts, inclines to think there may be some scriptural error of the ancient scribe, who was likely to add or to leave out a cipher, without much comprehension of the numerals he was transcribing without a thought, like what happened to the eleven thousand virgins of St. Ursula.

5 Speed, 440.

6 A curious fact discovered by Mr. Turner in a Cottonian manuscript has brought this circumstance to our knowledge. In a grant of land in Cornwall, an Anglo-Saxon king, after mentioning the Saxon name of the place, adds, “which the inhabitants there called, barbarico nomine, by the barbarous name of Pendyfig;” which was the British or Welsh name.—“Vindication of the Ancient British Poems,” 8.

7 Camden has noticed this striking circumstance in his “Britannia.” See also Percy’s Preface to Mallett’s “Northern Antiquities,” xxxix.

8 See his Preface to the prose romance of “La Fleur des Batailles.”

9 Miss Gurney, who has honourably been hailed as “the Elstob of her age,” privately printed her own close version of the “Saxon Chronicle” from the printed text, 1810. Happy lady! who, when sickness had made her its prisoner, opened the “Saxon Chronicle;” and she learned that she might teach the learned.

The Rev. Dr. Ingram, principal of Trinity College, Oxon, has since published his translation, accompanied by the original, a collation of the manuscripts, and notes critical and explanatory. 1823. 4to. A volume not less valuable than curious.

THE PAGE, THE BARON, AND THE MINSTREL.

When learning was solely ecclesiastical and scholastical, there were no preceptors for mankind. The monastery and the university were far removed from the sympathies of daily life; all knowledge was out of the reach of the layman. It was then that the energies of men formed a course of practical pursuits, a system of education of their own. The singular institution of chivalry rose out of a combination of circumstances where, rudeness and luxury mingling together, the utmost refinement was found compatible with barbaric grandeur, and holy justice with generous power. In lawless times they invented a single law which included a whole code—the law of knightly honour. L’Ordenne de Chevalerie is the morality of knighthood, and invests the aspirant with every moral and political virtue as every military qualification.1

Destitute of a national education, the higher orders thus found a substitute in a conventional system of manners. Circumstances, perhaps originally accidental, became customs sealed with the sign of honour. In this moral chaos order marshalled confusion, as refinement adorned barbarism. A mighty spirit lay as it were in disguise, and it broke out in the forms of imagination, passion, and magnificence, seeking their objects or their semblance, and if sometimes mistaken, yet still laying the foundations of social order and national glory in Europe.

A regular course of practical pursuits was assigned to the future noble “childe” from the day that he left the parental roof for the baronial hall of his patron. In these “nurseries of nobility,” as Jonson has well described such an institution, in his first charge as varlet or page, the boy of seven years was an attendant at the baron’s table, and it was no humiliating office when the youth grew to be the carver and the cupbearer. He played on the viol or danced in the brawls till he was more gravely trained in “the mysteries of woods and rivers,” the arts of the chase, and the sciences of the swanery, and the heronry, and the fishery; the springal cheerily sounded a blast of venery, or the falconer with his voice caressed his attentive hawk, which had not obeyed him had he neglected that daily flattery.

At fourteen the varlet became an esquire, vaulting on his fiery steed, and perfecting himself in all noble exercises, nicely adroit in the science of “courtesie,” or the etiquette of the court; and already this “servant of love” was taught to elect La dame de ses pensées, and wore her favour and her livery for “the love of honour, or the honour of love,” as Sir Philip Sydney in the style of chivalry expressed it.

At the maturity of twenty and one years the late varlet, and now the esquire, stood forth a candidate to blazon his shield by knighthood—the accomplished gentleman of these Gothic days, and right learned too, if he can con his Bible and read his romance. Enchanting mirror of all chivalry! if he invent songs and set them to his own melodies. Yet will the gentle “batchelor” he dreaming on some gallant feat of arms, or some martial achievement, whereby “to win his spurs.” On his solemn entrance into the church, laying his sword upon the altar, he resumed it by the oath which for ever bound him to defend the church and the churchmen. Thus all human affairs then were rounded by the ecclesiastical orbit, out of which no foot dared to stray. All began and all ended as the romances which formed his whole course of instruction—with the devotion which seemed to have been addressed to man as much as to Heaven.

After the termination of the Crusades, the grand incident in the life of the Baron was a pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem; what the penitent of the Cross had failed to conquer, it seemed a consolation to kneel at and to weep over: a custom not obsolete so late as the reigns of our last Henries; and still, though less publicly avowed, the melancholy Jerusalem witnesses the Hebrew and the Christian performing some secret vow, to grieve with a contrition which it seems they do not feel at home.

In these peregrinations a lordly Briton might chance to find some French or Italian knight as rash and as haughty; it was a law in chivalry that a knight should not give way to any man who demanded it as a right, nor decline the single combat with any knight under the sun; a challenge could not therefore be avoided. But a pas d’armes was not always a friendly invitation, for often under the guise of chivalry was concealed the national hostility of the parties.

But when no crusade nor pilgrimage in the East, nor predatory excursion in the West, nor even the blazonry of a tournament, which fed his eyes with a picture of battle, summoned to put on his mail-coat, how was the vacant Lord to wear out his monotonous days in his castle of indolence? The domestic fool stood beside him, archly sad, or gravely mirthful, as his master willed, with a proverb or a quip; and, with his licensed bauble, was the most bitterly wisest man in the castle. Patron of the costly manuscript which he could not himself read, the romancer of his household awaited his call; the great then had fabulators or tale-tellers, as royalty has now, by title of their office—its readers. But this Lord was too vigorous for repose, and the tranquillity of chess was too trying for his brain; the chess-board was often broken about the head of some mute dependent, or perchance on one who returned the dagger for the board. There was little peace for his restlessness, when, weary in his seat, his priceless Norway hawk perched above his head,2 and his idle hounds spread over the floor, ceaselessly reminded him of those wide and frowning forests which were continually encroaching on the tillage of the contemned agriculturist, offering a mimetic war, not only against the bird and the beast, but man himself; for the lairs of the forest concealed the deer he chased, and often the bandit who chased the Lord—the terrible Lord of this realm of wood and water, where, whoever would fowl a bird or strike a buck, might have his eyes torn from their sockets, or on the spot of his offence mount the instant gallows.3

There was a disorderly grandeur about the castellated mansion which should have required the ukase of this Sovereign of many leagues, surrounded by many hundreds of his retainers; but rarely the cry of the oppressed was allowed to disturb the Lord, while all within were exact in their appointments, as clock-work movements which were wound up in the government of these immense domestic establishments. Great families had their “household books,” and in some the illegible hand of the lordly master himself, when the day arrived that even barons were incited to scriptural attempts, may yet be seen.4 These nobles, it appears, were more select in their falconer and their chef de cuisine than in their domestic tutor, for such there was among the retainers of the household. This humiliated sage, indeed, in his own person was a model for the young varlets, on whom it was his office to inculcate that patient suppleness and profound reverence for their Lord and their superiors, which seemed to form the single principle of their education. At this period we find a domestic proverb which evidently came from the buttery. As then eight or ten tables were to be daily covered, it is probable the chivalric epicures sometimes found their tastes disappointed by the culinary artists; it would seem that this put them into sudden outbreakings of ill-humour, for the proverb records that “the minstrels are often beaten for the faults of the cooks.”

Too much leisure, too many loungers, and the tedium of prolonged banquets, a want of the pleasures of the luxurious sedentary would be as urgent as in ages more intellectual and refined; those pleasures in which we participate though we are passive, receiving the impressions without any exertion of our own—pleasures which make us delighted auditors or spectators. The theatre was not yet raised, but the listlessness of vacuity gave birth to all the variegated artists of revelry. If they had not comedy itself, they abounded with the comic, and without tragedy the tragic often moved their emotions. Nor were they even then without their scenical illusions, marvels which came and vanished, as the Tregetour clapped his hands—enchantments! which though Chaucer opined to be only “natural magic,” all the world tremblingly enjoyed as the work of devils; a sensation which we have totally lost in the necromancy of our pantomimes. And thus it was that in the illumed hall of the feudal Lord we discover a whole dramatic company; which, however dissimilar in their professional arts, were all enlisted under the indefinite class of Minstrels; for in the domestic state of society we are now recalling, the poetic minstrel must be separated from those other minstrels of very different acquirements, with whom, however, he was associated.

There were minstrels who held honourable offices in the great households, sometimes chosen for their skill and elocution to perform the dignified service of heralds, and were in the secret confidence of their Lord; these were those favourites of the castle, whose guerdon was sometimes as romantic as any incident in their own romance.

No festival, public or private, but there the minstrel poet was its crowning ornament. They awakened national themes in the presence of assembled thousands at the installation of an abbot, or the reception of a bishop.5 Often, in the Gothic hall, they resounded some lofty “Geste,” or some old “Breton” lay, or with some gayer Fabliau, indulging the vein of an improvvisatore, altering the old story when wanting a new one. Delightful rhapsodists, or amusing tale-tellers, combining the poetic with the musical character, they displayed the influence of the imagination over a rude and unlettered race—

——They tellen Tales Both of WEEPYING and of Game.

Chaucer has portrayed the rapture of a minstrel excited by his harp, a portrait evidently after the life.

Somewhat he lisped for his wantonness To make the English swete upon his tonge; And in his Harping when that he had songe, His Eyen twinkled in his Hed aright, As don the Sterrés in a frosty night.

The minstrel more particularly delighted “the Lewed,” or the people, when, sitting in their fellowship, the harper stilled their attention by some fragment of a chronicle of their fathers and their father-land. The family harper touched more personal sympathies; the ancestral honours of the baron made even the vassal proud—domestic traditions and local incidents deepened their emotions—the moralising ditty softened their mind with thought, and every county had its legend at which the heart of the native beat. Of this minstrelsy little was written down, but tradition lives through a hundred echoes, and the “reliques of ancient English poetry,” and the minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and some other remains, for the greater part have been formed by so many metrical narratives and fugitive effusions.

There were periods in which the minstrels were so highly favoured that they were more amply rewarded than the clergy—a circumstance which induced Warton to observe with more truth than acuteness, that “in this age, as in more enlightened times, the people loved better to be pleased than to be instructed.”6 Such was their fascination and their passion for “Largesse!” that they were reproached with draining the treasury of a prince. It is certain that this thoughtless race have suffered from the evil eye of the monkish chroniclers, who looked on the minstrels as their rivals in sharing the prodigality of the great; yet even their monkish censors relented whenever these revellers appeared. It was a festive day among so many joyless ones when the minstrel band approached the lone monastery. Then the sweet-toned Vielle, or the merry Rebeck, echoed in the hermit-hearts of the slumbering inmates; vaulters came tumbling about, jugglers bewitched their eyes, and the grotesque Mime, who would not be outdone by his tutored ape. Then came the stately minstrel, with his harp borne before him by his smiling page, usually called “The Minstrel’s Boy.” One of the brotherhood has described the strolling troop, who

Walken fer and wyde, Her, and ther, in every syde, In many a diverse londe.

The easy life of these ambulatory musicians, their ample gratuities, and certain privileges which the minstrels enjoyed both here and among our neighbours, corrupted their manners, and induced the dissipated and the reckless to claim those privileges by assuming their title. A disorderly rabble of minstrels crowded every public assembly, and haunted the private abode. At different periods the minstrels were banished the kingdom, in England and in France; but their return was rarely delayed. The people could not be made to abandon these versatile dispensers of solace, amid their own monotonous cares.

At different periods minstrels appear to have been persons of great wealth—a circumstance which we discover by their votive religious acts in the spirit and custom of those days. The Priory of St. Bartholomew in Smithfield, in 1102, was founded by “Rahere,” the king’s minstrel, who is described as “a pleasant-witted gentleman,” such as we may imagine a wealthy minstrel, and moreover “the king’s,” ever to have been.7 In St. Mary’s Church at Beverley, in Yorkshire, stands a noble column covered with figures of minstrels, inscribed, “This Pillar made the Minstrels;” and at Paris, a chapel dedicated to St. Julian of the Minstrels, was erected by them, covered with figures of minstrels bearing all the instruments of music used in the middle ages, where the violin or fiddle is minutely sculptured.8

If in these ages of romance and romancers the fair sex were rarely approached without the devotion of idolatry, whenever “the course of true love” altered—when the frail spirit loved too late and should not have loved, the punishment became more criminal than the crime; for there was more of selfish revenge and terrific malignity than of justice, when autocratical man became the executioner of his own decree. The domestic chronicles of these times exhibit such harrowing incidents as those of La Châtelaine de Vergy, where suddenly a scene of immolation struck through the devoted household; or that of “La Dame du Fayel,”9 who was made to eat her lover’s heart. And those who had not to punish, but to put to trial, the affections of women who were in their power, had their terrible caprices, a ferocity in their barbarous loves. Year after year the Gothic lord failed to subdue the immortalised patience of Griselda, and such was our “Childe Waters,” who put to such trials of passion, physical and mental, the maiden almost a mother. In the fourteenth century, one century later than the histories of the “Châtelaine” and the “Dame,” either the female character was sometimes utterly dissolute, or the tyranny of husbands utterly reckless, when we find that it was no uncommon circumstance that women were strangled by masked assassins, or walking by the riverside were plunged into it. This drowning of women gave rise to a popular proverb—“It is nothing! only a woman being drowned.” La Fontaine, probably without being aware of this allusion to a practice of the fourteenth century, has preserved the proverbial phrase in his “La Femme noyée,” beginning,

Je ne suis pas de ceux qui disent ce n’est rien, C’est une Femme qui se noye!10

The personages and the manners here imperfectly sketched, constituted the domestic life of our chivalric society from the twelfth century to the first civil wars of England. In this long interval few could read; even bishops could not always write; and the Gothic baron pleaded the privilege of a layman for not doing the one nor the other.

The intellectual character of the nation can only be traced in the wandering minstrel and the haughty ecclesiastic. The minstrel mingling with all the classes of society reflected all their sympathies, and in reality was one of the people themselves; but the ecclesiastic stood apart, too sacred to be touched, while his very language was not that either of the noble or of the people.

A dense superstition overshadowed the land from the time of the first crusade to the last. It may be doubtful whether there was a single Christian in all Christendom, for a new sort of idolatry was introduced in shrines, and relics, and masses; holy wells, awful exorcisms, saintly vigils, month’s minds, pilgrimages afar and penances at home; lamp-lighting before shrines decked with golden images, and hung with votive arms and legs of cripples who recovered from their rheumatic ails. The enthusiasm for the figure of the cross conferred a less pure sanctity on that memorial of pious tribulation. Everywhere it was placed before them. The crusader wore that sign on his right shoulder, and when his image lay extended on his tomb, the crossed legs were reverently contemplated. They made the sign of the cross by the motion of their hand, in peril or in pleasure, in sorrow and in sin, and expected no happy issue in an adventure without frequently signing themselves with the cross. The cross was placed at the beginning and at the end of their writings and inscriptions, and it opened and closed the alphabet. The mystical virtues of the cross were the incessant theme of the Monachal Orders, and it was kissed in rapture on the venal indulgence expedited by the papal Hierophant. As even in sacred things novelty and fashion will perversely put in their claim, we find the writers and sculptors varying the appearance of the cross; its simple form became inclosed in a circle , and again varied by dots .11 The guardian cross protected a locality; and in England, at the origin of parishes, the cross stood as the hallowed witness which marked the boundaries, and which it had been sacrilege to disturb. It was no unusual practice to place the sign at the head of private letters, however trivial the contents, as we find it in charters and other public documents. In one of the Paston letters, the piety of the writer at a much later period could not detail the ordinary occurrences of the week without inserting the sacred letters I.H.S.; and similar invocations are found in others.12

The material symbol of Christianity had thus been indiscriminately adopted without conveying with it the virtues of the Gospel. The cross was a myth—the cross was the Fetish13 of an idolatrous Christianity—they bowed before it, they knelt to it, they kissed it, they kissed a palpable and visible deity; never was the Divinity rendered more familiar to the gross understandings of the vulgar; and in these ages of unchristian Christianity, the cross was degraded even to a vulgar mark, which conveniently served for the signature of some unlettered baron.

1 St. Palaye, to whom we owe the ideal of chivalry, has truly observed, “Toutes les vertus recommandées par la Chevalerie tournoient au bien public, au profit de l’Etat.” It was when the causes of its institution ceased, and nothing remained but its forms without its motive, that altered manners could safely ridicule some noble qualities which, though now displaced, have not always found equal substitutes. In the advancement of society we may count some losses.

2 I recollect this trait in Chaucer. The Norway hawk was among the most valuable articles of property, valued at a sum equal to £300 of the present day.—Nicholls, “History of Leicestershire,” xxxix.

3 The Norman William punished men with loss of eyes for taking his venery.—Selden’s notes to “Drayton’s Polyolbion,” Song ii.

An instant execution of two youths by the gamekeepers, at the command of their Lord, appears in an ancient romance recently published in France.—Journal des Savans, 1838.

4 A curious specimen of these “Household Books,” though of a later period, is that of the Northumberland family, printed by Bishop Percy. Many exist in manuscript, and contain particulars more valuable than the prices of commodities, for which they are usually valued; they offer striking pictures of the manners of their age. [The Wardrobe accounts of Edward the Fourth, the Privy Purse expenses of Edward IV. and Henry VIII., have been since published by Sir Harris Nicolas; and those of the Princess Mary, afterwards Queen, by Sir Frederick Madden. The judicious notes and dissertations of these editors render them of much use in illustration of the history of each era.—Ed.]

5 “Warton,” i. 94.

6 “Warton,” ii. 412.

7 Stowe’s “Survey by Strype,” book iii. 235. We might wish to learn the authority of Stowe for ascribing this “pleasant wit” to Rahere of the eleventh century! As the pen of venerable Stowe never moved idly, our antiquary must have had some information which is now lost. “The king’s minstrel” is also a doubtful designation: was the founder of this priory “a king of the minstrels?” an office which the French also had, Roy des Ménéstraulx, a governor instituted to keep order among all minstrels. Our Rahere, however “pleasant-witted,” seems to have fallen into penance for his “wit,” for he became the first prior.

8 Antiquités Nationales, par Millin, xli. Two plates exhibit this Gothic chapel and the various musical instruments.

9 Both these romantic tales may be considered as authentic narratives, though they have often been used by the writers of fiction. La Châtelaine de Vergy has been sometimes confounded with Le Châtelaine de Coucy, the lover of La Dame du Fayel. The story of the Countess of Tergy (on which a romance of the thirteenth century is founded, Hist. Litt. de France, xviii. 779) has been a favourite with the tale-tellers—the Queen of Navarre, Bandello, and Belle Forest, and is elegantly versified in the “Fabliaux, or Tales,” of Way. That of the Dame du Fayel, one of the fathers of French literary history, old Fauchet, extracted it from a good old chronicle dated two centuries before he wrote. The story is also found in an ancient romance of the thirteenth century, in the Royal Library of France.—Hist. Litt. de la France, xiv. 589; xvii. 644. The story of Childe Waters in Percy’s Collection has all the pathetic simplicity of ancient minstrelsy, which is more forcibly felt when we compare it with the rifaccimento by a Mrs. Pye, in Evans’s Old Ballads.

10 Montaigne was so well acquainted with this practice, that he has used it as a familiar illustration of the obstinacy of some women—which I suppose the good man imagined could not be paralleled by instances from the masculine sex; however, his language must not be disguised by a modern version. “Celui qui forgea le conte de la femme qui, pour aucune correction de ménaces et bastonnades, ne cessait d’appeler son mari, Pouilleux, et qui, précipité dans l’eau, haussoit encore, en s’étouffant, les mains et faisoit au-dessus de sa tête signe de tuer des poux, forgea un conte duquel en vérité tous les jours on voit l’image expresse de l’opiniâtreté des femmes.”

The punishment of our “Ducking-stool” for female brawlers possibly originated in this medieval practice of throwing women into the river: but this is but an innocuous baptism, while we find the obstinate wife here, who probably spoke true enough, s’étouffant,—merely for correcting the filthy lubbard, her lord and master.

11 Leland’s “Itinerary,” ii. 126.

12 Paston’s “Letters,” v. 17.

13 See the very curious chapter on the “Fetish Worship,” in that very original and learned work “The Doctor,” v. 133.

GOTHIC ROMANCES.

A new species of literature arose in the progress of that practical education which society had assumed; a literature addressed to the passions which rose out of the circumstances of the times; dedicated to war, to love, and to religion, when the business of life seemed restricted to the extreme indulgence of those ennobling pursuits. In too much love, too much war, too much devotion, it was not imagined that knights and ladies could ever err. If sometimes the loves were utterly licentious, wondrous tales are told of their immaculate purity; if their religion were then darkened by the grossest superstition, their faith was genuine, and would have endured martyrdom; and if the chivalric valour often exulted in its ferocity and its rapacity, its generous honour amid a lawless state of society maintained justice in the land, by the lance which struck the oppressor, and by the shield which covered the helpless.

Everything had assumed a more extended form: the pageantry of society had varied and multiplied; the banquet was prolonged; the festival day was frequent; the ballad narrative, or the spontaneous lyric, which had sufficed their ruder ancestors to allure attention, now demanded more volume and more variety; the romance with a deeper interest was to revolve in the entangling narrative of many thousand lines. There was a traditional store, a stock of fabling in hand, heroical panegyrics, satirical songs, and legendary ballads; all served as the stuff for the looms of mightier weavers of rhyme, whose predecessors had left them this inheritance. The marvellous of Romance burst forth, and this stupendous fabric of invention bewitched Europe during three centuries.

Romance, from the light fabliau to the voluminous fiction, has admitted, in the luxury of our knowledge and curiosity, not only of critical investigation, but of its invention, by tracing it to a single source. The origin of Romance has been made to hinge on a theoretical history; and by maintaining exclusive systems, mostly fanciful and partly true, it has been made complicate. Whether invention in the form of Romance came from the oriental tale-teller or the Scandinavian Scald, or whether the fictions of Europe be the growth of the Provençal or the Armorican soil, our learned inquirers have each told; nor have they failed in considerably diminishing the claims of each particular system opposed to their own; but the greatest error will be found in their mutual refutations.1 While each stood entrenched in an exclusive system, they were only furnishing an integral portion of a boundless and complicate inquiry. They scrutinised with microscopic eyes into that vast fabric of invention, which the Gothic genius may proudly oppose to the fictions of antiquity, and they seemed at times forgetful of the vicissitudes which, at distant intervals, and by novel circumstances, enlarged and modified the changeful state of romantic fiction among every people.

In the attempt to retrace the Nile of Romance to a solitary source, in the eagerness of their discoveries they had not yet ascertained that this Nile bears many far-divided heads, and some from which Time shall never remove its clouds; for who dares assign an origin to the ancient Milesian tales, the tales and their origin being alike lost?2

Warton, encumbered by his theory of an Eastern origin, opened the map to track the voyage of an Arabian tale: he landed it at Marseilles, that port by which ancient Greece first held its intercourse with our Europe, and thence the tale was sent forwards through genial Italy, but forced to harbour in this voyage of Romance at the distant shores of Brittany, that land of Romance and of the ancient Briton. The result of his system startled the literary world by his assumption, that “the British history” of Geoffry of Monmouth entirely consists of Arabian inventions! the real source of the airy existence of our British Arthur! Bishop Percy had been nearly as adventurous in his Gothic origin, by landing a number of the northern bards with the army of Rollo in Normandy; an event which contributed to infuse the Scaldic genius into the romances of chivalry, whose national hero is Charlemagne—the tutelary genius of France and Germany.

They had looked to the east, and to the north—and wherever they looked for the origin of Romance it was found. They had sought in a corner of the universe for that which is universal.

Romance sprang to birth in every clime, native wherever she is found, notwithstanding that she has been a wanderer among all lands, and as prodigal a dispenser as she has been free in her borrowings and artful in her concealments.

The art of fabling may be classed among the mimetic arts—it is an aptitude of the universal and plastic faculties of our nature; and man might not be ill defined and charactered as “a mimetic and fabling animal.”

The earliest Romances appear in a metrical form about the middle of the twelfth century. The first were “Estoires,” or pretended chronicles, like that of the Brut of Wace; the Romances of martial achievement then predominated, those of the Knights of Arthur, and the Paladins of Charlemagne; the adventures of love and gallantry were of a later epoch. In the mutability of taste an extraordinary transition occurred; after nearly two centuries passed in rhyming, all the verse was to be turned into prose. Whether voluminous rhymes satiate the public ear, or novelty in the form was sought even when they had but little choice, the writers of Romance, a very flexible gentry, who of all other writers servilely accommodate themselves to the public taste, with more fluent pens loitered into a more ample page; or, as they expressed themselves, “translatés de rime en prose,” or “mis en beau langage.” Many of the old French metrical Romances, in the fourteenth century, were disguised in this humbled form; but their “mensogne magnanime,” to use Tasso’s style, who loved them, lost nothing in number or in hardihood. On the discovery of the typographic art, in the fifteenth century, many of these prose Romances in manuscript received a new life by passing through the press; and these, in their venerable “lettres Gothiques,” are still hoarded for the solace of the curious in fictions of genuine antiquity, and of invention in its prime, both at home and abroad; and in a reduced form we find them surviving among the people on the Continent. It is singular that the metrical Romances seem never to have received the honours conferred on the prose.3

These Romances, in their manuscript state, were cherished objects;4 the mighty tomes, sometimes consisting of forty or fifty thousand lines, described as those “great books of parchment,” or “the great book of Romances,” were usually embellished by the pen and the pencil with every ornament that fancy could suggest; bound in crimson velvet, guarded by clasps of silver, and studded with golden roses; profuse of gorgeous illuminations, and decorated with the most delicate miniatures, “lymned with gold of graver’s work” on an azure ground; or the purple page setting off the silvery letters;—objects then of perpetual attraction to the story-believing reader, and which now charm the eye which could not as patiently con the endless page. The fashions of the times are exactly shown in the dresses and the domestic furniture; as well as their instruments, military and musical.

Studies for the artist, as for the curious antiquary,5 we may view the plumage in a casque curved and falling with peculiar grace, and a lady’s robe floating in its amplitude; and ornaments of dress arranged, which our taste might emulate. A French amateur who possessed le Roman de la Violette, a romance of a fabulous Count of Nevers, was so deeply struck by its exquisite and faithful miniatures, that he employed the best artists to copy the most interesting, and placed them in his collection of the costume and fashions of the French nation; a collection preserved in the Royal Library of France.6 If their hard outline does not always flow into grace, their imagination worked under the mysterious influence of the Romance through all their devoted labour. In a group of figures we may observe that the heads are not mechanically cast by one mould, but the distinct character looks as if the thoughtful artist had worked out his recollections on which he had meditated. In some of the heads, portraits of distinguished persons have been recognised. Not less observable are the arabesques often found on the margins, where the playful pencil has prodigally flung flowers and fruit, imitating the bloom, or insects which look as if they had lighted on the leaf. These margins, however, occasionally exhibit arabesques of a very different character; figures or subjects which often amused the pencil of the monastic limners, satirical strokes aimed at their brothers and sisters—the monks and the nuns! I have observed a wolf, in a monk’s frock and cowl, stretching its paw to bless a cock bending its submissive head; a cat, in the habit of an abbess, holding a platter in its paws to a mouse approaching to lick it, alluding to the allurements of abbesses to draw young women into the convents; and a sow, in a nun’s veil, mounted on stilts. A pope appears to be thrown by devils into a cauldron, and cardinals are roasting on spits. All these expressions of suppressed opinion must have been executed by the monks themselves. These reformers before the Reformation sympathised with the popular feeling against the haughty prelate and the luxurious abbot.

The great Romance of Alexander, preserved in the Bodleian Library, reveals a secret of the cost of time freely bestowed on that single and mighty tome. The illuminator, by preserving the date when he had completed his own work compared with that of the transcriber when he had finished his part, appears to have employed nearly six years on the paintings which embellish this precious volume.7

Such a metrical Romance was a gift presented to royalty, when engrossed by the rapturous hand of the Romancer himself; the autograph, in a presentation copy, might count on the meed of “massy goblets” when the munificent patron found the new volume delectable to his taste, which indeed had been anticipated by the writer. This incident occurred to Froissart in presenting his Romance to Richard the Second, when, in reply to his majesty’s inquiry after the contents, the author exultingly told that “the book treated of Amour!”

To the writers of these ancient Romances we cannot deny a copious invention, a variegated imagination, and, among their rambling exuberances and their grotesque marvels, those enchanting enchantments which the Greeks and Romans only partially and coldly raised. We may often, too, discover that truth of human nature which is not always supposed to lie hid in these desultory compositions. Amid their peculiar extravagances, which at least may serve to raise an occasional smile, the strokes of nature are abundant, and may still form the studies of the writers of fiction, however they may hang on the impatience of the writers and the readers of our duodecimos. Ancient writers are pictorial: their very fault contributes to produce a remarkable effect—a fulness often overflowing, but which at least is not a scantiness leaving the vagueness of imperfect description. Their details are more circumstantial, their impressions are more vivid, and they often tell their story with the earnestness of persons who had conversed with the actors, or had been spectators of the scene. We may be wearied, as one might be at a protracted trial by the witnesses, but we are often struck by an energetic reality which we sometimes miss in their polished successors. Their copiousness, indeed, is without selection; they wrote before they were critics, but their truth is not the less truth because it is given with little art.

The dilations of the metrical Romances into tomes of prose, Warton considered as a proof of the decay of invention. Was not this censure rather the feeling of a poet for his art, than the decision of a critic? for the more extended scenes of the Romances in prose required a wider stage, admitted of a fuller dramatic effect in the incidents, and a more perfect delineation of the personages through a more sustained action. If the prose Romances are not epics by the conventional code of the Stagyrite, at least they are epical; and some rude Homers sleep among these old Romancers, metrical or prosaic. A living poetic critic, one best skilled to arbitrate, for he is without any prepossessions in favour of our ancient writers, has honestly acknowledged their faithfulness to nature in their touching simplicity; “nor,” he adds, “do they less afford, by their bolder imagination, adequate subjects for the historical pencil.” And he has more particularly noticed “Le bone Florence de Rome,”—thus written by our ungrammatical minstrels. “Classical poetry has scarcely ever conveyed in shorter boundaries so many interesting and complicated events as may be found in this good old Romance.”8 This indeed is so true, that we find these romantic tales were not only recited or read, but their subjects were worked into the tapestries which covered the walls of their apartments. The Bible and the Romance equally offered subjects to eyes learned in the “Estoires” never to be forgotten.

Our master poets have drawn their waters from these ancient fountains. Sidney might have been himself one of their heroes, and was no unworthy rival of his masters: Spenser borrowed largely, and repaid with munificence: Milton in his loftiest theme looked down with admiration on this terrestrial race,

————and what resounds In fable or romance of Uther’s son, Begirt with British or Armoric knights.