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author of the first English poem after the Conquest. We may roughly say that its date is 1205, ten years or so before the Ormulum was written, ten years before the Great Charter. It is plain that its composition, though it told a Welsh story, was looked on as a patriotic work by the writer. There was a priest in the land,' he writes of himself, whose name was Layamon; he was son of Leovenath: may the Lord be gracious unto him! He dwelt at Earnley, a noble church on the bank of Severn, near Radstone, where he read books. It came in mind to him and in his chiefest thought that he would tell the noble deeds of England, what the men were named, and whence they came who first had English land.' And it was truly of great importance. The poem opened to the imagination of the English people an immense past for the history of the island they dwelt in, and made a common bond of interest between Norman and Englishman. Though chiefly rendered from the French, there are not fifty Norman words in its more than 30,000 lines. The old English alliterative metre is kept up with a few rare rhymes. As we read the short, quick lines in which the battles are described, as we listen to the simple metaphors, and feel the strong, rude character of the poem, it is as if we were reading Cadmon; and what Cædmon was to early English poetry, Layamon is to English poetry after the Conquest. He is the first of the new singers.

STORY-TELLING GROWS FRENCH IN FORM.-After an interval, the desire for story-telling increased in England. The story of Genesis and Exodus was versified about 1250, and in it and some others about the same date, rhymes are used. Many tales of Arthur's knights, and other tales which had an English origin, such as the lays of Havelok the Dane and of King Horn (about 1280), were translated from the French; ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER wrote his Riming Chronicle, 1298; and the Romance of King Alexander, about 1280, originally a Gree work, was adapted from the French into English. As the

dates grow nearer to 1300, seven years before the death of Edward I., the amount of French words increases, and the French romantic manner of telling stories is more and more marked. In the Lay of Havelok, the spirit and descriptions of the poem still resemble old English work; in the Romance of Alexander, on the other hand, the natural landscape, the convention 1 introductions to the parts, the gorgeous descriptions of pomps and armor and cities, the magic wonders, the manners, and feasts, and battles of chivalry, the love passages are all steeped in the colors of French romantic poetry. Now this romance was adapted by a Frenchman in the year 1200.(?) It took, therefore, nearly a century before the French romantic manner of poetry could be naturalized in English; and it was naturalized, curious to say, at the very time when England as a nation had lost its French elements and become entirely English. Finally, the influence of this French school in England is seen in the earlier poems of Chaticer, and in poems, such as the Court of Love, attributed to him. It came to its height and died in the translation of the Romaunt of the Rose, the last and crowning effort also of French romance. After that time the story-telling of England sought its subjects in another country than France. It turned to Italy.

JOHN GOWER belongs to a school older than Chaucer, inasmuch as he is never touched by the Italian, only by the French, influence. He belongs to a different school even as an artist; for his tales are not pure story-telling like Chaucer's, but tales with a special moral. Partly the religious and social reformer and partly the story-teller, he represents a transition, and fills up the intellectual space between Langland and Chaucer. In the church of St. Saviour, at Southwark, his head is still seen resting on his three great works, the Speculum Meditantis, the Vox Clamantis, and the Confessio Amantis, 1393. It marks the unsettled state of the literary language that each of these was written in a different tongue, the first in French and the second in Latin.

The third is his English work. In 30,000 lines or more, he mingles up allegory, morality, the sciences, the philosophy of Aristotle, all the studies of the day with comic or tragic tales as illustrations. We have seen that Robert de Brunne was the first to do this; Gower was the second. The tales are wearisome and long, and the smoothness of the verse makes them more wearisome. Gower was a careful writer of English; and in his satire of evils and in his grave reproof of the follies of Richard II., he rises into his best strain. The king himself, even though reproved, was a patron of the poet. It was as Gower was rowing on the Thames that the royal barge drew near, and he was called to the king's side. 'Book some new thing,' said the king, 'in the way you are used, into which book I myself may often look;' and the request was the origin of the Confessio Amantis, the Confession of a Lover."

"Of original imaginative power the poem shows not the slightest trace, and its principal merit lies in the sententious passages which are here and there interspersed, and which, whether borrowed or original, are often pithy and striking."-G. P. Marsh.

"Gower has positively raised tediousness to the precision of science; he has made dulness an heirloom for the students of our literary history. It matters not where you try him, whether his story be Christian or pagan, borrowed from history or fable, you cannot escape him. Dip in at the middle or at the end, dodge back to the beginning, the patient old man is there to take you by the button and go on with his imperturbable narrative. His tediousness is omnipresent, and, like Dogberry, he could find it in his heart to bestow it all on your worship. The word lengthy has been charged to our American account, but it must have been invented by the first reader of Gower's works—the only inspiration of which they were ever capable. Our literature had to lie by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uniformity of commonplace in the Recreations of a Country Parson.”—J. R. Lowell.

ENGLISH LYRICS." In the midst of all this story-telling, like prophecies of what should afterwards be so lovely in English poetry, rose, no one can tell how, some lyric poems, country

idylls, love songs, and, later on, some war songs. The English ballad, sung from town to town by wandering gleemen,* had never altogether died. A number of rude ballads collected round the legendary Robin Hood, and the kind of poetic literature which sung of the outlaw and the forest, and afterwards so fully of the wild border life, gradually took form. About 1280 a beautiful little idyll, called The Owl and the Nightingale, was written in Dorsetshire, in which the author, NICHOLAS OF GUILDFORD, judges between the rival birds. In 1300 we meet with a few lyric poems, full of charm. They sing of springtime with its blossoms, of the woods ringing with the thrush and nightingale, of the flowers and the seemly sun, of country work, of the woes and joy of love, and many other delightful things. They are tinged with the color of French romance, but they have an English background. We read nothing like them, except in Scotland, till we come to the Elizabethan time. After this, in 1352, the war lyrics of LAURENCE MINOT sing the great deeds and battles of Edward III."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. LAYAMON AND GOWER.-Marsh's Or. and Hist. Eng. Lang., Lects. IV. and IX.; R. Pauli's Ed. of Confessio Amantis; F. J. Child's Lang. of Ch. and Gow. in A. J. Ellis' Early Eng. Pronunciation; Littell, v. 2, 1858; Fraser's Mag., v. 59. Also some of the works referred to in Less. 3.

"The minstrel, or gleeman, was held in high esteem among the Saxons. His genius obtained for him everywhere the respect and protection of the great and powerful. His place was in the hall of princes, where he never failed to earn admiration and applause, attended generally with advantages of a more substantial nature. He was sometimes a household retainer of the chief whom he served, sometimes he wandered through different countries, visiting the courts of various princes. It was the minstrel's duty not only to tell the mythic history of the earlier ages but to relate contemporary events, and to clothe in poetry the deeds which fell under his eye, to turn into derision the coward or the vanquished enemy, and to laud and exalt the conduct of his patrons. At times the bard raised his song to higher themes, and laid open the sacred story of the cosmogony and the beginning of all things.

These minstrel-poets had by degrees composed a large mass of national poetry, which formed collectively one grand mythic cycle. Their education consisted chiefly in committing this poetry to memory, and it was thus preserved from age to age. They rehearsed such portions of it as might be asked for by the hearers, or as the circumstances of the moment might require. In their passage from one minstrel to another, these poems underwent successive changes."-Wright.

HISTORY.

LESSON 9.

"The Normans carried a historical taste with them to England, and created a most valuable historical literature. It was written in Latin, and we have nothing to do with it till story-telling grew out of it in the time of the Great Charter. But it was in itself of such importance that a few things must be said about it.

1. The men who wrote it were called CHRONICLERS. At first they were mere annalists-that is, they jotted down the events of year after year without any attempt to bind them together into a connected whole. But afterwards, from the time of Henry I., another class of men arose, who wrote, not in scattered monasteries, but in the Court. Living at the centre of political life, their histories were written in a philosophic spirit, and wove into a whole the growth of law and national life and the story of affairs abroad. They are our great authorities for the history of these times. They begin with WILLIAM OF MALMESBURY, whose book ends in 1142, and die out after MATTHEW PARIS, 1235-73. Historical literature in England is represented after the death of Henry III. only by a few dry Latin annalists till it rose again in modern English prose in 1513, when Sir Thomas More's Life of Edward V. and Richard III. is said to have been written.

2. A distinct English feeling soon sprang up among these Norman historians. English patriotism was far from having died among the English themselves. The Sayings of Elfred, about 1200, were written in English by the English. These and some ballads, as well as the early English war songs, interested the Norman historians and were collected by them. William of Malmesbury, who was born of English and Norman parents, has sympathies with both peoples, and his history marks how both were becoming one nation. The same welding together of the conquered and the conquerors

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