seems desirable to commence with a brief sketch of that literature.

We know of no Anglo-Saxon composition, produced in England, that can be traced back with certainty to the times of Paganism. We must not look to the dwellers on the muddy Elbe, or the inhabitants of the plains of Holstein, for the teeming imagination which characterized the Northmen of Iceland and Scandinavia, and which— ages before the stirring stimulus of Christianity was applied to them-produced the wonderful mythology of the Edda. In 596, St. Augustine, sent by Gregory the Great, brought the faith to the Anglo-Saxon tribes; and the moral ferment which the introduction of this new spiritual element occasioned, acting upon a towardly and capable race, full of dormant power and energy of every kind, induced also such intellectual exertion as the times permitted, and as the partial communication by the missionaries of the literature of the ancient world tended to enkindle and to sustain. The Angles of Northumbria received Christianity, not from Rome, but from Iona, the island-monastery of the Culdees, or servants of God,' founded by Columba, an Irish saint, in 565. Aidan, a monk of Iona, having come into Northumbria about the year 635, at the invitation of the pious king Oswald, converted great numbers of the Angles, and fixed his episcopal see at Lindisfarne or Holy Isle.' From this period until the Norman Conquest (and in one memorable instance beyond it), the Anglo-Saxon mind was ever labouring, so far as intestine war and Danish inroad would allow, and executed a very creditable amount of work. Its chief successes, it is true, were obtained through the medium of the Latin, then and long after the common language of Europe, and which a generous and expansive mind, sick of irrational or semi-rational local usages, and material isolation, would rejoice to employ.

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Bede, Eccl. Hist. book iii. ch. 5.

The Venerable Bede (673-735), in whom the Saxon intellect culminated, wrote all his extant works in Latin. Incomparably the most valuable of these is his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which gives us professedly a connected history of the Church and religion of England down to his own times, and incidentally throws a flood of light upon the secular history also. Among his other works may be named, De Ratione Temporum, a Martyrology, the Life of St. Cuthbert, a poem in leonine verse on St. Justin's martyrdom, Commentaries both on the Old and on the New Testament, and a sort of chronicle of universal history called De Sex Etatibus Sæculi. Alcuin, Eddi Stephanus, and Ethelwerd also wrote in Latin. But the rough vernacular was employed in popular poetry, and in all such prose writings as had a didactic purpose which included the laity within its scope. Such writings were naturally for the most part translations, since it was evidently safer and wiser to gain an insight into, and acquaintance with, the wisdom of antiquity, before essaying, under less favourable conditions, to make conquests in the realm of original thought.

I. Poetry. Of Anglo-Saxon poetry there remains to us on the whole a considerable mass. By far the larger portion of it dates, both in original conception and in extant form, from a period subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. One poem, of 143 lines, The Gleeman's Song, bears on the face of it that the writer lived in the time of Attila, in the early part of the fifth century; nor does there seem any sufficient reason to doubt that such was the fact. Another, Beowulf, the longest and most important of all, though in its present form manifestly the composition of a Christian writer, points to, and proves the existence of, an earlier poem or poems, containing the substance of the narrative, which must have been produced in pre-Christian times. In others, again, as Andreas and Elene, or Judith, although the narrative.

itself deals with a Christian subject-matter, the zeal of Grimm in the investigation of the old Teutonic world has elicited numerous traces of heathen customs and modes of thought, which to us, and to all Teutonic races, possess the deepest historical interest. The last and least interesting class consists of metrical translations from the Psalms, and other parts of the Bible, the only value of which lies in any additional illustration which they may bring to the study of the language.

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The earliest in date of all the Anglo-Saxon poems appears to be The Gleeman's Song. It forms a part of the well-known Exeter MS., given to the cathedral of that city by Bishop Leofric in the time of Edward the Confessor. In this poem (printed by Mr. Kemble, together with Beowulf, in 1833, and again by Mr. Guest in his History of English Rhythms) we undoubtedly possess, to pass over the mere mention of the name of the Angli by Tacitus, the earliest existing notices of the country, government, and political relations of our Angle progenitors. When the Gleeman (a name corresponding to 'bard' for the Celtic, and scald' for the Scandinavian tribes) has to speak of Ongle,' the land of the 'Engle,' he tells us that it was ruled over by a king named Offa ; that this king, with the help of the Myrgings (apparently a tribe bearing kindred to the Angles; the poet himself was a Myrging, see 1. 87), enlarged his borders after the battle of Fifel-dór (a name for the Eider-literally 'gate of terror') and that the Engle and Swæfe (Suevi) held their respective lands thenceforward, as Offa appointed to them. The Angles, at the date of the poem, still lived in Germany; the abode of the great Eormanric or Hermanric, King of the East Goths, was to be sought for 'eastan of Ongle;' it lay in and around Wistlá-wudu,'

The Codex Exoniensis was printed for the Society of Antiquaries in 1842, under the editorship of Mr. Thorpe.

2 Germania, 40.

the forest of the Vistula, where the Gothic warriors, with their hard swords, turned to bay in defence of their ancient seats against the hordes of Attila: '

heardum sweordum

Ymb Wistlá-wudu wergen sceoldon

Ealdne edel-stol Etlan leodum.

Again, the nations under the sway of the empire are designated by the singular name of Rum-walas-strangers of Rome, and part of the dominions of the 'Caser,' or emperor, is called Wala-ríce. Evidently we have here the Wälsch, Wälsch-land, Walloon, Welsh, of the Teutonic tribes; names by which they described the races, strange to themselves in blood and language, by which they were surrounded, and especially the inhabitants of Italy. But the Anglo-Saxon, after his conversion at the end of the seventh century, never again applied this name to the subjects of the Roman empire; Rome was then too near and dear a name to him to allow of his using any term importing estrangement with reference to her people. Here again, then, we have an evidence of the early date of the present poem. But it may be objected that the author speaks of heathens' (1. 73), and therefore may be presumed to have been a Christian; and if there were Angle Christians early in the fifth century, how came it that at the time of their transmigration to Britain, and for more than a century after, they are represented to us as purely Pagan? Many lines of thought and inquiry suggest themselves in reply, which cannot here be fol

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1 It seems a difficulty at first sight to understand how Hermanric (see Gibbon, Decline and Fall, eh. xxv. and xxvi.) and Attila could be brought in conjunction as contemporaries of the same poet. But this was perfectly possible; Hermanric was assassinated in the year 375, and Attila, though not known in the Roman world till many years later, succeeded his uncle as ruler, jointly with his brother Blæda, of the Hunnish tribes, in 403. Now the whole tenor of the poem points to a long course of wanderings continued through many years, so that the Gleeman, at different parts of his career, may easily have known both Hermanrie and Attila.

lowed up. But it may be observed that Christianity admits of many degrees; that of the Peruvians, after the Spanish conquest, bore but a faint resemblance to that of the Jesuit converts in Paraguay; and the thin varnish of Arian Christianity thrown over the barbarism of Alaric and his Visigoths, shares the name, but not the influence or the durability, of the religious system which softened the manners and the hearts of Ethelbert and Edwin. Besides the East and West Goths, the Burgundians, and many other Teutonic races, professed Christianity in the fifth century; and there is nothing improbable in the conjecture that the Angles may have derived from their neighbourhood to the Goths of East Prussia the same kind of nominal Christianity which the latter possessed. This loose profession they may easily have lost, after their colonizing enterprise had established them firmly in Britain; nor would the circumstance that the Britons were Christians have tended at all to attach them to Christianity, but rather the contrary. For, besides the proverbial 'odisse quem læseris,' no fact is more certain than that the Angles thoroughly despised the Celts whom they dislodged; and as the latter studiously refrained from imparting to their conquerors the faith which alone, in the belief of the fifth century, could preserve them from eternal damnation, so the former must have been disposed to involve the religion of the Britons in the same sweeping contempt which they entertained for themselves.

The essential charm of the Anglo-Saxon, as of the Icelandic poetry-though it appertains to the former in a lower degree is in the glimpses which it gives us into the old Teutonic world, when Odin was still worshipped in the sacred wood, when the wolf, the eagle, and the raven were held in reverence as noble and fearless creatures, bringers of good luck, and specially dear to the gods; and when the battle and the banquet were the only forms of life in which the hero could or cared to shine.