Matthew, suffers three days' martyrdom, and then, after a mighty flood and tempest of fire has destroyed his foes, converts the rest, founds a church, and sails away. There is no doubt of the authorship of the Elene, which Cynewulf wrote when he was 'old and ready for death in my frail tabernacle.' It is the last of the signed poems. He was now a careful artist. 'I've woven craft of words,' he says, 'culled them out, sifted night by night my thoughts.' He then recalls the story of his life while he signs his name in runes. It is the chief biographical passage in his work, and it ends with a fine description of the storm-wind hunting in the sky. The poem is in the Vercelli Book 1320 lines. The subject is the Finding of the True Cross by the Empress Helena. The battle of Constantine with the Huns and the voyage of Helena are the best parts of the poem. They are insertions by Cynewulf into the Latin life of Cyriacus, Bishop of Jerusalem, which (in the Acta Sanctorum, May 4) is the source of the poem. The battle is done with the full heroic spirit. The sea-voyage breathes of his delight in the doings of ships and of the ocean. The ancient saga-terms strengthen and animate his verse, and the poet seems to write like a young man. His metrical movement is steadier here than in the other poems. He uses almost invariably the short epic line into the usage of which English poetry had now drifted. Rhyme, also, and assonance are not infrequent. The poets, it is plain, had now formulated rules for their art. Had Northumbrian poetry lasted, it might have become as scientific as the Icelandic. The last poem belonging to Cynewulf or his school is the Dream of the Rood, which is found in the Vercelli Book. Its authorship is unknown, but many scholars give it to Cynewulf. I believe it to be his last poem, his farewell; and that he worked it up from that early 'Lay of the Rood' written, it is supposed, by Cædmon, and a portion of which is quoted on the Ruthwell Cross. Cynewulf wished to record before he died the vision of the Cross which converted him. He found this poem of Cadmon's, and wrought it up into a description of his vision, inserting the 'long epic lines' in which it was written. Then he wrote a beginning and end of his own in his 'short epic' line. This theory-it is no more--accounts for the difficulties of the poem. It begins by describing how he saw at the dead of night a wondrous Tree, adorned with gems, moist with blood; and how, as he looked on it, heavy-hearted with sin, it began to tell its story. I was hewed down in the holt, and wrought into shape, and set on a hill, and the Lord of all folk hastened to mount on me, the Hero who would save the world. Nails pierced me; I was drenched with the Hero's blood, and all Creation wept around me. Then His foes and mine took Almighty God from me, and men made His grave, and sang over Him a sorrowful lay. The old poem, thus worked up into Cynewulf's new matter, may be distinguished by its long epic lines from the newer matter, which is written in the short epic line. When the dream is finished, Cynewulf ends with a long passage so like the rest of his personal statements, so steeped in his individuality as we know it from his signed poems, so pathetic and so joyous, that it is hard to understand how the poem can be attributed to any one but Cynewulf. 'Few friends are left me now,' he says; they have fared away to their High Father. And I bide here, waiting till He on whose Rood I looked of old shall bring me to the happy place where the High God's folk are set at the evening meal.' And with that the "oetry and the life of Cynewulf close. The time is coming when his name will be more highly honoured among us, and his poetry better known. He had imagination; he anticipated, at a great distance, the Nature-poetry of the nineteenth century, especially the poetry of the sea; his personal poetry, full of religious passion both of penitence and joy, makes him a brother of the many poets who in England have written well of their own heart and of God in touch with it. His hymnic passages of exultant praise ought to be translated and loved by all who cherish the Divine praise which from generation to generation has been so nobly sung by English poets. The heroic passages in his poems link us to our bold heathen forefathers, and yet are written by a Christian. Their spirit is still the spirit of England. But his greatest hero was Jesus Christ. Cynewulf was, more than any other Old English poet, the man who celebrated Christ as the Healer of men, and, because He was the Healer the Hero of the New Testament. For The other remains of English poetry which we possess in the Exeter and Vercelli Books, and which were written before the revival of literature under Ælfred, belong more to the history of criticism than literature. They were written at various dates during the eighth and ninth centuries. our purpose it will almost suffice to name the best of them. One of them is a short Physiologus, a description of three animals-the Panther, the Whale, and the Partridge-followed by a religious allegory based on the description. The Panther symbolises Christ, the Whale the devil. There are two didactic poems, the Address of a Father to a Son, and of the Lost Soul to its Body. There are two other poems on the Gifts of Men and the Fates of Men, the latter of which treats its subject with so much originality that it has been given to Cynewulf. Both contain passages which tell us a good deal about the arts and crafts of the English, and about various aspects of English scenery. The Gnomic Verses-folk proverbs and maxims, short descriptions of human life and of natural events-are in four collections, three in the Exeter Book and one in the Cotton MS. at Cambridge. Many of these are interesting. Some have come down from heathen times; some are quotations from the poets; others tell of war, of courts, of women, of games, of domestic life. They would have interested Ælfred; and it is probable that, collected at York, they were edited in Wessex in Elfred's time. The Rune Song is an alphabet of the Runes, with attached verses, such as we still make at the present day on the letters of the alphabet. There are two dialogues between Solomon and Saturnus, in which Christian wisdom in Solomon and the heathen wisdom of the East in Saturnus contend together in question and answer. Such dialogues became frequent in medieval literature, but changed their form. Marculf takes the place of Saturn, and represents the uneducated peasant or mechanic, whose rustic wit often gets the better of the king and the scholar. But there is no trace of this rebellion against Church and State in the English dialogues. With them we may close the poetry of the ninth century. A few years after the death of Cynewulf the Danish terror began. Literature decayed; men had not the heart to write poetry; and when, shortly after 867, the 'army' (which had already ravaged East Anglia and the greater part of Mercia) stormed York and destroyed every abbey and seat of learning from the Humber to the Forth, the poetry of Northumbria passed away. We may say that the farewell of Cynewulf in the Dream of the Rood was the dirge of Northumbrian song. At the Judgment-Day. Deep creation thunders, and before the Lord shall go The Bliss of Heaven. (From the Crist.) There, is angels' song; there, enjoyment of the blest ; Merry there man's multitude; there unmarred is youth by eld; Glory of the hosts of Heaven, health that knows not pain; Rest for righteous doers, rest withouten strife, For the good and blessed! Without gloom the day, Sleep nor heavy sickness, nor the scorching of the Sun; Neither cold nor care; but the happy company, St Guthlac dies and is received into Heaven. Seen beneath the sky's expanse, sheenier than the sun, So the blessed Burgstead was with blisses filled, Latin Writers before Ælfred. When Augustine landed in Thanet in 597 and made Canterbury the first Christian town, he brought with him, to add to the development of English literature, the power, the wisdom, the amalgamating force, and the long traditions of Rome. But at first, though the Roman missionaries influenced the English thought, they did not use the English language. All that they wrote they wrote in Latin. The Celtic Church encouraged the English to shape their thought and feeling in their own tongue; the Roman Church discouraged this; and the south of England, where Rome was supreme as a teacher, did not till the days of Ælfred produce any important literature in English. The Latin literature of the south began with Theodore of Tarsus, who was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 669. Benedict Biscop, a Northumbrian scholar, came with him from Rome; and Benedict, going to his home, was the proper founder of Latin literature in Northumbria. Hadrian, Theodore's deacon, joined in 671, and with his help Theodore set on foot the school of Canterbury, which soon became the centre of southern learning. Wessex and Kent now produced their own scholars, and their bishops were men who loved and nourished education. Daniel of Winchester was a wise assistant of Bæda; but the man who best represents the knowledge and literature of the south was Ealdhelm, who, educated by Mailduf, an Irishman, and also at Canterbury, became Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne. He may have helped to compile the Laws of Ine, 17 left us a correspondence which proves his influence over the growth of Christianity and learning in England and Europe, were all West Saxons. But King of Wessex, and he made some English songs; but his chief work was in Latin, and it was the Latin of a scholar who knew the Roman classics. He wrote Latin verse with ease, and translated into hexameters the stories of his prose treatise De laudibus Virginitatis. His Latin Riddles sent to Aldfrith of Northumbria were used by Cynewulf. His correspondence was extensive, and the letters to English and Welsh kings, to monasteries abroad, are as honourable to him as his letters to the abbesses and nuns, who in those days had learnt Latin, are charming, gay, and tender. His style is swollen, fantastic, and self-pleased, but the goodness and of the man shine grace through it. He was the last of the Wessex scholars who at this time did any literary work. Ability and intelligence in Wessex were more employed in organisation of the Church and in missionary enterprise than in writing. Theodore brought the whole Christianity of England into unity. Winifried or Boniface, who brought Central Germany into obedience to the Roman See; Willibald, one of our first pilgrims to Palestine; Lullus, Archbishop of Mainz, who has Reduced facsimile of MS. now in the British Museum (Cotton MSS.), formerly belonging to the monastery of St Augustine at Canterbury, and written about the year 700 A.D. It is part of the 17th Psalm (in the English version the 18th, vv. 1-7), from the Latin of St Jerome's earlier version. The interlinear English (or Anglo-Saxon) gloss has been added at the end of the tenth or beginning of the eleventh century. Transcriptions of both are given below.1 after the middle of the eighth century active literary life died in Wessex, and when Ælfred came to the throne in 871, there was not a single priest left who could understand their service books or put them into English. The history of Latin literature in the MidEngland kingdom of Mercia is even of less importance than it is in Wessex. Under Æthelbald the country seems to have won a reputation for learning; and Ecgwin, Bishop of Worcester, is said to be our first autobiographer. The Life of St Guthlac, written by Felix of Crowland for an East Anglian king, in outpuffing Latin, is the only work we know of. But Æthelbald and his successor Offa were munificent to monasteries; and the school at Worcester was the last refuge of learning, when its cause was lost all over England in the ninth century. The career of Latin literature in Northumbria was more continuous and more important than it was in Wessex or Mercia. The names of many of its scholars were known over the world, and are famous to this day. Northumbrian scholarship founded a great school, almost a university, at York, from which flowed the learning which, received and cherished by Charles the Great, produced an early Renaissance in Europe. The story of its rise and its fall belongs to York. The story of its growth and development belongs to Wearmouth and Jarrow. Christianity reached York in the year 627, when Paullinus baptised Eadwine. But after Eadwine's death Northumbria relapsed into heathenism, Paullinus fled, and Latin literature was stifled in its birth. Literature and religion again took fresh life under Oswald in 634, but they were now in Celtic, not in Roman hands. The monasteries set up were ruled by Celtic monks from Iona; the bishops came from the same place; the kings and princes of the Northumbrian house were, for the most part, educated at Iona, spoke Irish, and knew the poetry and learning of Ireland. And the Irish, accustomed to praise God and their heroes and saints in their own tongue, encouraged the Northumbrians to write in their own tongue. The first literature of Northumbria was in English. Rome was naturally unsatisfied with this predominance of the Celtic Church; Northumbria must be drawn into the Latin fold; and Theodore, Wilfrid, and others, with Prince Alchfrith, fought their battle so well that in 664, at the Synod of Whitby, Northumbria joined the Latin Church. And now, though the Celtic influence lasted for many years, Latin learning, which had begun in Ripon and Hexham, took deep root in the north. Benedict Biscop, who had been at Rome with Theodore, built in 674 the monastery of St Peter at Wearmouth, and in 682 the sister house at Jarrow. He and the large libraries he collected for these abbeys were the real foundation of the Latin literature and learning of the north. Scholars and writers soon began to multiply. Wilfrid's biography-the first written in England -was done by his friend Eddius Stephanus about 709. The Life of St Cuthbert was written at Lindisfarne. Wilfrid's closest friend, Acca, Bishop of Hexham, increased the library which John of Beverley had ministered to. These are the chief names of the early Latin writers of the north. But the learning was scattered. It was gathered together and generalised by Bæda of Jarrow. He is the master of the time, and his books became not only the sources of English, but of European learning. To this day his name is revered; he is still called the Venerable Bede; all the science, rhetoric, grammar, theology, and historical knowledge of the past which he could attain he absorbed, edited, and published. He increased in his Homilies and Commentaries the religious literature of the world; he made delightful biographies, and he wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation with skill and charm. It is our best authority. His first books, on the scientific studies of the time, were written between 700 and 703. They were followed by a primer of the history of the world-De sex ætatibus Sæculi, 707; by the Commentaries on almost all the books of the Old and New Testaments, and these range over many years after 709; by the Lives of Cuthbert and the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, 716-20; and by the De Temporum ratione in 726. The Ecclesiastical History was finished in 731, and his last work, the Letter to Egbert, was done in the year of his death, 735. These thirty-five years were thus filled with that learning and teaching and writing in which he had always great delight; and the little cell at Jarrow, whence he rarely stirred, was continually visited by men of many businesses and of all ranks in life. He kept in touch with all the monasteries of England, and with many in Europe. Even so far away as Rome he had scholars who worked for him among the archives. His greatest book is the Ecclesiastical History. He took so much pains to make it accurate, and to write nothing without consulting original and contemporary authorities, that the modern historical school claim him as their own. He shows in the book that power of choice and rejection of material so necessary for a historian; and, what chiefly concerns us here, he filled it with a literary charm and beauty of statement when the subject permitted this self-indulgence. It is here that his personality most appears; that we feel his happy, gentle, loving, and simple nature. His character adorns his style. The stories which embellish the book have a unique clearness and grace, a vivid grasp of character, a human tenderness, which makes us feel at times as if we were present with him in his room at Jarrow and listening to his charitable voice. Cuthbert, one of his pupils, gives an account of his fair death in his cell among his books; and it is pleasant to think that the last work on which he was engaged on the day of his departure was a translation into English of the Gospel of St John, and that almost his last speech was the making of a few English verses, for, indeed, he was learned in English songs. (There is a translation from Bæda's History at page 169.) The seat of learning at Bæda's death was transferred from Jarrow to York, where Ecgberht, Bæda's pupil, became an archbishop. The school he established at York may almost be termed a university. The education given was in all the branches of learning then known, in Ethica, Physica, and Logica. The library was the largest and the best outside of Rome, and was more useful than that at Rome. The arts were not neglected. The Latin Fathers; the Roman poets, grammarians, orators; the Natural History of Pliny, some of the Greek Fathers, and the Scriptures, were studied by a host of scholars from Ireland, Italy, Gaul, Germany, and England. When Ecgberht died Elberht succeeded him, and with Alcuin's help increased the library and developed the education given in the schools. In 770 York and its library and schools was the centre of European learning. Ælberht's greatest friend was Alcuin (Eng. Ealhwine), the finest scholar York produced, and the last. His classical was as good as his patristic learning. His style has earned him the name of the Erasmus of his century. He loved Virgil so well that pious persons reproached him for it. His reputation came to the ears of Charles the Great, who was then starting the education of his kingdoms; and Alcuin, who had met Charles at Pavia about 780, and again at Parma in 781, left England-though he revisited it in 790-92-to remain on the Continent till his death in the abbey of St Martin of Tours in 804. He left many books behind him-learned, theological, and virtuous. Of his Latin poems, that dedicated to the history of the great men of the school of York is the best. The Letters-more than three hundred-which he wrote to Charles and to most of the important personages in England and Europe, have the best right to the name of literature, and prove how wide was his influence, and how useful his work to the centuries that followed. He brought all the scholarship of England to the empire of the greatest man in Europe, whose power sent it far and wide. And he did this at the very time when its doom had begun to fall upon it in England. Alcuin himself heard of the ravaging of Lindisfarne by the Vikings in 793, and of the attack in the following year on Wearmouth, and cried out with pity and sorrow. The years that followed were years of decay. Northumbria was the prey of anarchy from 780 to 798. The six years of quiet that followed were years in which the school of York, weakened by Alcuin's absence, sickened and failed. In 827 Ecgberht of Wessex put an end to the separate kingdom of Northumbria. In 867 the Danish army invaded the north, conquered York, settled there, and destroyed every abbey, both in Deira and Bernicia. Bishoprics, libraries, schools Only were all swept away. A little learning may have crept on in York, for the town was not destroyed, and it again flourished under Danish rule. one poor school of learning remained in that part of Mercia which was finally saved by Ælfred from the Danes. Worcester was the last refuge of the faded learning of Northumbria; and when Ælfred began the revival of education in England, collected the old poetry, attempted to restore monastic leisure and scholarship, and himself, having learnt Latin, originated English prose by the translation of Latin books, it was from Worcester that he fetched the only Englishmen who could help him in his work. Ælfred. Ælfred, whose character was even greater than his renown as warrior, ruler, and lawgiver, was also a king in English literature. With him, at Winchester, began the prose-writing of England. His books were chiefly translations, but they were interspersed with original work which reveals to us his way of thinking, the temper of his soul, the interests of his searching intelligence, and his passion for teaching his people all that could then be known of England, of the history of the world, of religion, and of the Divine Nature. They appealed to the clergy, to the people, to scholars, to the warriors and sailors of England. Their aim was the education of his countrymen. Born at Wantage in 849, he was the youngest son of Ethelwulf, and the grandson of the great Ecgberht. Rome, whither he went at the age of four years, and then again when he was six years old, made its deep impression on him. He stayed on his return at the court of Charles the Bald, and heard, no doubt, of the education which Charles the Great had given to the empire, for when he undertook a similar task in England he followed the methods and the practice of the emperor. When he arrived in England he sought for teachers, but found none. When he was twenty years old he heard with indignant sorrow of the destruction of all learning in England by the Danes; and the lover of learning as well as the patriot was whetted into wrath when, on the height of Ashdown, he and his brother Ethelred drove the Danes down the hill with a pitiless slaughter. Not long after this battle he became King of Wessex in 871. The work by which he made his kingdom belongs to history. It was only in 887 that he began his literary labour in a parenthesis of quiet. But he had made preparations for it beforehand. He had collected round him whatever scholars were left in England. They were few,-Werfrith, Bishop of Worcester; Denewulf, of the same town ; Plegmund, Æthelstan, and Werwulf, all three from Mercia. With these he exhausted England. Then he sent to Flanders for Grimbald, whom he made Abbot of Winchester; and to Corvei in Westphalia for John the Old Saxon, whom he placed over his monastic house at Athelney. But his |