And it

N the first section, the influence of the Celtic temperament and culture has been recognised as stimulating and modifying the trend of early English intellectual life; but in this work it is not possible directly to take cognisance of the literatures of the races other than Anglic who have contributed essential elements to the mixed people now inhabiting the British Islands. Besides English in its various dialects and successive stages, at least five languages have been spoken by those at home within this area even if we arrange the Celtic tongues in two groups only-Irish, Manx, and Scotch Gaelic; Welsh and Cornish. The lingua Latina rustica was spoken in the Roman colonies for four centuries at least; and in the Middle Ages Church and Law Latin was the literary vehicle of some of the greatest Englishmen, and practically the vernacular of synods and of monasteries. From the Norman Conquest to the days of Edward III., as we have seen, Norman French was the language of literature. should be remembered that for generations the old Norse in some shape was spoken and written not merely in Shetland and Orkney and at the court of the Jarls of Caithness, but in the Western Islands of Scotland, in the Danelagh of England, and in the Danish kingdoms of Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford good authorities hold that considerable portions of the collection called the Corpus Poeticum Boreale were written by the Scandinavians of Ireland. Other languages were doubtless spoken in Britain before the arrival of the first Celtic invaders, those of the Ivernian or other prehistoric inhabitants; and some Celtic philologists now trace the peculiarities of Irish, Welsh, and the neo-Celtic tongues to the old pre-Aryan language, characteristics they share with other languages of the old Mediterranean stock, ancient Egyptian and modern Berber. In Wales, as in France, the best authorities hold that the vast majority of the present inhabitants are sprung-not from the Celts or any of the successive invaders-but from the race or races who held the land before the coming of the Aryans. A fortiori, this is even truer of Ireland and the Highlands. The first Celts to invade Britain were the Goidels, who became incorporated with their non-Aryan subjects; a like process took place when the later Brythonic conquerors established themselves in Britain. Nowhere in the Celtic fringe' are the people of pure Celtic descent; and it may well be that what is especially characteristic of Irish literature and is interpreted as the true 'Celtic note' is not of Celtic origin at all, but reflects the moods of the earlier non-Aryan inhabitants of Erin, from

whom the conquering Gael, invaders from Britain, learnt the manner of the gods of the land, the really autochthonous legends and folklore.

The Cymric literature of Wales has a history of nine or ten centuries and still flourishes; and for three or four hundred years men of Welsh blood have been contributors to English literature. Such Welshmen have not been very numerous nor of the first importance. They have not been regarded as wholly aliens in England; and as they wrote in the literary English of their time, it has not been thought necessary to treat them in a separate division of this work. Vaughan the Silurist and his brother are amongst the most unmistakable; James Howell, cosmopolitan though he was in temper, was Welsh by birth as he was in name and blood. John Davies of Hereford was a Welshman born just outside the principality; Sir John Davies may have been of Welsh blood. The Pembroke Herberts were a great Welsh house, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury and George Herbert were apparently both born at their father's home of Montgomery Castle. John Donne, a power in English literature, was said to be of Welsh descent; and the great Puritan, John Owen, is known, apart from his Welsh name, to have been of an old Welsh family. Roger Williams-in Milton's words, that noble confessor of religious liberty,', and founder of Rhode Island-was a fiery Welshman. And earlier, Asser, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map, and the rationalist Bishop Pecock by their writings left their mark deep enough on mediæval Latin, Anglo-French, and English thought. These are all notable figures in the history of our literature before the end of the seventeenth century, and are treated in their proper chronological places. Guillim, in virtue of his great folio Display of Heraldrie (1610), the eponym of the science, was born at Hereford of Welsh family. And dozens of others might be named, from the voluminous Giraldus Cambrensis to John Owen the Latin epigrammatist, whose interest as authors, however great, is inconsiderable in connection with the story of English letters.

From the Anglo-Norman Conquest of Ireland— which was both the continuation and the completion of the Norman Conquest of England-there had been much writing from Ireland and about Ireland by Englishmen for a longer or shorter time resident in Ireland, but not much that ranks as literature. Spenser wrote his book on Ireland and most of the Faerie Queene at Kilcolman, his home from 1589 on, but his connection with Ireland is wholly external. Sir John Davies, Sir William Temple, and Sir William Petty were Englishmen who lived for a time in Ireland and wrote about Ireland. Richard Stanyhurst, on the other hand, was born

at Dublin (1547; see page 332) of a family settled in Ireland for three centuries; he was but a feeble forerunner of the glorious company which was in the eighteenth century to include Steele and Swift, Burke and Goldsmith. Stanyhurst's nephew, Archbishop Ussher, is a noble representative of AngloIrish Churchmanship, and was also born in Dublin (1581). Sir John Denham was born (1615) at Dublin, the son of an Irish judge, but was in no other sense an Irishman. But the Hon. Robert Boyle (born at Lismore Castle in 1627) bears the name of a great Anglo-Irish house. Roger Boyle (page 787), Earl of Cork and dramatist, was also born at Lismore. The Earl of Roscommon was Irish born, but lived most of his life out of Ireland. Tate and Brady both, as well as the dramatists Southerne and Farquhar, were Irishmen born and bred; but their work, like that of other notable Anglo-Irishmen-Swift, Toland, Steele, Parnell, and Berkeley---born before the Revolution, belongs mainly to the next period, and will be dealt with in the next volume. Of the Irish contributors to English literature before the Revolution it may be said generally that though some of them, like Ussher, thoroughly identified themselves with the land of their birth, the Irish tone and temper is rather conspicuous by its absence. The growth of that temper and the beginning of the Irish question are associated with the name of William Molyneux (died 1698), whose Case of Ireland being bound by Acts of Parliament passed in England, published in the same year, and burned by the order of the English House of Commons, marks him as the forerunner of Swift and Grattan.

In the English colonies in North America there was hardly any literature of consequence till about the middle of the eighteenth century. The books of travel, poems, sermons, and the like in the seventeenth century were largely the work of men and women English born, and, except for their change of residence, to all intents and purposes Britons of the native type. Captain John Smith, who told— if he did not also invent the tale of Pocahontas, was a grown man when in 1605 he joined the Virginia expedition, spent only a small part of his life on American soil, and died in London. But his True Relation of Occurrences in Virginia (1608) ranks as the first book in American literature, though judged from the point of literature it has no great value. In Virginia, George Sandys

(see page 450) completed that translation of Ovid which he dedicated to King Charles I. Richard Ligon in his History of the Barbadoes (1657) furnished the materials out of which Richard Steele spun his famous novelette of Inkle and Yarico; but Ligon was a broken London merchant of sixty when in 1647 he sailed to begin life anew in the West Indies. Roger Williams, though he became heart and soul a colonial, was a Welshman, and was also thirty years of age ere he arrived (1631) on the shores where he was to found the state of Rhode Island, and to be remembered for his vehement discourse against The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution. John Eliot, 'the apostle of the Indians,’ who went to America in the same year, was four years younger when he left his native Hertfordshire. Anne Bradstreet (1612-72), 'the first professional poetess of New England,' was a woman grown ere she left her home in Old England. The works of all these authors were sent to England to be published. The Bay Psalm Book, printed at Cambridge in Massachusetts in 1640, was the first book in English that issued from the press in America; it was largely the production of John Eliot and of Richard Mather, a Lancashire Puritan, who emigrated to the colony in 1635, and was father of Increase Mather and grandfather of Cotton Mather.

Such were the slender beginnings of the vast and varied American literature, now one of the two great branches of literature in the English tongue. For well-nigh a century it has uttered the thoughts and feelings of a nation of marked characteristics, of strong originality, in which the English element has been the dominant constituent; and its history must be traced in another volume of this work. Written in English-though English with a difference-the daughter literature in some respects rivals the parent, and has in many ways influenced, both in substance and in form, what is said and sung on the other side of the Atlantic. The people of the United States are now by far the largest section under one government of those who speak English. In America some English books find their widest circle of readers. The older English literature is by Americans justly regarded as an inheritance common to them with us; and much helpful work towards the better understanding of the English language and of the triumphs of English letters has been done by American writers and in the United States.

D. P.