carried on the traditions of classical education; they taught the liberal arts; they collected material for natural and civil history, and expounded it; they preserved the classical forms of verse and prose, with modifications according to their taste; they served the Church in the teaching of Divinity. In one kind of composition only are they innovators; the rhyming hymns are the original Latin poetry of the Dark Ages; apart from these the universal language is employed for purposes of education-to convey knowledge, or to illustrate in rhetoric the precepts of the schools. So it had been before the Dark Ages began, and so it continued afterwards. The Latin literature of the Dark Ages has not a definite character of its own, in the same way as the old Teutonic poetry. That body of poetry belongs properly to the centuries from the sixth to the eleventh. The Latin literature of the Dark Ages is not their exclusive property; it begins before them and is continued after them; its period is a much longer one, a period which at the lowest reckoning includes the whole of the Middle Age in the old wide sense of the term, down to the Revival of Learning. Even this is too narrow, for the Latin literature of the Middle Ages is in many things conservative, and it is difficult to stop in tracing it back to its sources: many of its favourite ideas and principles are those of Cicero, and many of them were in his time far from new; and at the other end of the history there may be found a similar difficulty when things supposed to be peculiarly medieval show themselves proof against the Renaissance, surviving quite

happily in the minds and writings of humanist reformers. The German literature of the Dark Ages makes one group of writings with a life and character of its own; the Latin literature is merely a section, with an arbitrary date to mark the dividing-line.

In the vernacular literatures there is, of course, a great deal which, as far as ideas and matters are concerned, really belongs to Latin. Not all the vernacular literature is fresh, barbarous, and original; much of it is translation, much is adaptation and exposition of Latin knowledge. The significant distinction for the Dark Ages is not between Latin and vernacular utterance, but between Latin and barbarian ideas. For instance, the works of Elfric or of Notker Labeo belong to the Latin world, the common educational tradition. They are Teutonic in speech, and they come into the history of English and German culture. But they are not English and German literature in the same way as the heroic poems about Sigemund or Hildebrand.

In all sorts of ways the two influences cross and mingle, to pass into the blended stream of the later mediæval literature. One of the great attractions of the Dark Ages is that they exhibit, sometimes, more clearly than was possible later, a different kind of literary tradition from the classical; the pure elements contributed by the barbarians to the literary art of Europe. The value of this may have been exaggerated or wrongly judged by enthusiasts. But no exaggeration, and no reaction against it, can destroy the importance for literary history of the remains of that

Teutonic poetry which was least affected by Rome. Whatever its intrinsic value, it gives the starting ground, the background, the relief, in relation to which the new schools of the twelfth century are to be estimated.

The Latin literature and the Teutonic literature of the Dark Ages make up a considerable body of writings, but there are others besides, other languages and authors belonging to the history of the world and entering more or less into the common traffic of ideas. Greek, Celtic, and Arabian authors have a claim to be noticed in any full account of the literary productions of those centuries.

Greek in the Dark Ages has influence upon the West for the most part indirectly: either through its old-established partnership in Latin culture, or in ways not literary at all, by means of travellers, pilots, and traders; so that what comes through is generally either ancient, if there is any scholarship in it, or unscholarly, if it is new. The part of Greece, however, as an intermediary between the East and the West, and a channel of information, is of very great importance for the history of literary intercourse and the distribution of popular stories and popular science of all kinds. After Greek had ceased to exercise any distinctly literary influence on the West other than that which had long been known, if not exhausted, in the rhetorical schools, it continued to provide new matters for amusement and edification; saints' lives and fables, romances like that of Alexander, like Apollonius of Tyre: while doubtless in many easy

ways, without writing or literary form, it helped to carry westward the themes of Eastern stories for the future profit of minstrels. It gave the Physiologus to all the modern tongues; it translated the Buddha into the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat.

Arabian literature affects the West in a somewhat similar way. Arabian learning, itself derived from Greek, passes into Western Christendom through the Schools, which bring it into conformity with the accepted educational usages. Arabian fancy makes its way by the contraband methods of popular storytelling. Aucassin and Nicolette, Flores and Blanchefloure, may well be Moorish stories. But their descent is not recorded, except in their character, their manner, some facts of custom that they imply (the serraglio in Flores), and the etymology of a name (Aucassin). They have no literary ancestry that can be traced in books. The Arabic literature that was produced in the Dark Ages is not related to the West in any literary manner. The Arabians give scientific matter, and they give the subjects of stories, but their own literature is something apart. It was "not destined to be ours," though the student of heroic poetry may turn for a moment from the themes of Attila or Sigfred to admire the temper of the Arabian Dark Ages-"the Ignorance"-before the chivalrous imagination of their earlier poets was transformed by the False Prophet and his polygamous. methodism. As critics of life, the old Arabian poets may compare with the most heroic authors in the North, or even with Odin himself.

"But as for my people, though their number be not small, they are good for naught against evil, however light it be. They requite with forgiveness the wrong of those that do them

wrong,

and the evil deeds of the evil they meet with kindness and

love;

As though thy Lord had created among the tribes of men

themselves alone to fear him and never one man more. Would that I had in their stead a folk who, when they ride forth,

strike swiftly and hard, on horse or on camel borne ! " 1

The case of the Celtic literatures, Welsh and Gaelic, might seem at first to be quite analogous to that of Greek or Arabic. Here again are masters and teachers who have a large share in making the system of education for the whole of the West; missionaries and scholars who give the spirit of their lives to animate the brutish mass and turn it into Christendom. Here again the work of the teachers is made by their pupils to conform to the general type, and the national and local character, when it gets away from home, is for the most part obliterated and merged in the common tradition. Though there may be "sentimental traces" of the Celtic ancestor at Jarrow, or at St Gall, never wholly lost either in the Teutonic or in the common Latin features, still the Celtic character is never other than subordinate in the schools of the Scot abroad; just as the Greek and the Arabian character have to be assimilated to the common Latin temper. The Celtic imagination

1 From the first poem in Sir Charles Lyall's Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, 1885.