the fifty-ninth year of my age I have made it my business, for the use of me and mine, to compile out of the works of the venerable fathers, and to interpret and explain, according to their meaning, these following pieces."

The enumeration itself is startlingly voluminous. "His writings form almost an encyclopædia of the knowledge of his day." But it is by one work that he has made the English nation a lasting debtor to his fame; for his Ecclesiastical History of the English was a history of England, and was for centuries the only source of knowledge in matters relating to the nation's early career. Written for the purpose of preserving among the Angles and Saxons the memory of their conversion to the Christian faith, it told them, also, the story of their political life. In careful and successful research, in arrangement of materials, and in felicity of style, he rises far above all Gothic historians of that age.

Asser, a devout bishop, was the friend and counsellor D. 910.] of Alfred. He is supposed to have been the author of an extant biography of the king. This work is of great interest, but its authenticity has been fiercely disputed. Although strong arguments are brought forward against its reliableness, still the probability is that the book contains substantial truth, and that it was written in 893. It tells the simple and romantic story of the king's life; pictures his youth, his manhood, his character; narrates the incidents which show his love and care for his subjects; shows us the organization of the government, and incidentally displays the state of civilization in that day. The present popular opinions of the reign of Alfred, and all the deeds ascribed to him—save a few distortions of tradition-are derived from the records of Asser.

NOTE.-For extended reading upon the topics discussed in this chapter, the stu. dent is referred to Wright's Biographia Britannica Literaria, Morley's English Writers, Guest's History of English Rhythms, Conybeare's Illustrations of Anglo Saxon Poetry, Thorpe's edition of Caedmon, Craik's English Literature and Lan guage, and Taine's English Literature.

CHAPTER III.

FOR

FROM THE CONQUEST TO GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

OR more than a century after the Norman Conquest, English Literature was utterly inert. That event, so fatal to the native aristocracy, seemed at first to have swept away in common ruin the laws, language, and arts of the English people, and to have blotted out England from the muster-roll of the nations. A foreign king and aristocracy, an alien language and literature, ruled in the land; the old speech was no longer heard in the halls of the great native genius no longer strove to utter itself in the native tongue; and the voice of the English nation seemed stilled forever. But it was not the stillness of death; in a few generations signs of returning life began to show themselves; and the English nation emerged from the fiery trial, with its equipment of language, laws and literature, materially altered indeed, and perhaps improved, but still bearing the ineffaceable Teutonic stamp. The national life was not annihilated at Senlac; it was but suspended for a time.

In the old English, as in other Teutonic languages, there was a tendency to shake off the complicated inflections that fettered free utterance. This tendency existed before the Norman Conquest. That great political revolution but gave it an additional impulse. The vernacular speech was driven from literature for a time, and found its refuge in the cottages of ignorant people. No longer fixed by use in literature, and exposed to many disturbing influences, it fell into disorder. The processes of change were thereby accelerated, and when, at the middle of the twelfth century, this speech rose to the surface once more, it had traveled much farther on its prescribed course, than it would have done had it been left

to itself. Still it was the old tongue. In the words of Max Müller, "not a single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system of the English language. The Grammar, the blood and the soul of the language, is as pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the British Isles, as it was when spoken on the shores of the German Ocean by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes of the continent." *

This, the Middle English Stage, may be called the revolutionary period of the language, during which it was in a state of apparently hopeless disorganization. There was a general breaking up of the old grammatical system; uncertainty, confusion, and fluctuation prevailed everywhere. The Northern, the Midland, and the Southern dialects, each with certain peculiar inflectional forms, and each represented by literary works of some note, struggled for the mastery. The influx of French words too, though trifling at first, had already begun; and for the next three centuries the process went on with increasing rapidity. Still there was a general movement towards simplification and stability; each century brought the lan guage nearer to modern English.

The interest of the writings which will form the subject of this chapter is almost exclusively philological and historical. Their literary merits are small; but they supply the means of tracing the course of the language through its many varying forms, and, occasionally, they throw a powerful light on the feelings and aspirations, the political and social condition of the people. We shall give them but a passing glance.

If we except a few fragments of verse—the Hymn of St. Godric, the Ely Song of King Canute, The Here Prophecy, none of them exceeding eight lines in length-the first to break the long silence was Layamon, author of the Brut. According to his own account he was a priest. He must have been a gentle, pious, patriotic man, and a lover of tradition. His work, written early in the thirteenth century, is a chronicle of Britain, and is mainly a translation from the French of the Brut d'Angleterre; but Layamon has introduced so much new matter into his work, and has made it so conversational in style, that it is more than double the length of the original. It is a free narration in verse of Celtic traditions which had been

*"Lectures on the Science of Language," 1st series, p. 81, Amer. Edition.

preserved in France and in parts of England. The story makes Brutus, a son of the Trojan Aeneas, the founder of the line of British Monarchs. The style of the work bears witness to Norman influence, but not to so great an extent as might have been expected from the translator of a French original. The fact that it was written for the common people of a rural district was favorable to the use of simple English, and makes it a valuable illustration of the state of our language at that time. Written at least one hundred and fifty years after the Norman Conquest, it is, nevertheless, a specimen of almost pure Saxon. The old text has not fifty words taken from the French. The foreign influence, however, appears in the occasional use of Norman rhymes amid the Saxon alliterative versification.

The Ormulum is another monument of our old literature, and is supposed to have been written in the thirteenth century. One of its editors describes it as "a series of homilies in an imperfect state, composed in metre, without alliteration, and, except in very few cases, without rhyme: the subject of the homilies being supplied by those portions of the New Testament which were read in the daily services of the church." The author himself says, "If any one wants to know why I have done this deed, why I have turned into English the Gospel's holy teaching; I have done it in order that all young Christian folks may depend upon that only, that they with their whole might follow aright the Gospel's holy teaching in thought, in word, in deed." The text reads more easily than Layamon's Brut, and that fact, together with many peculiarities of structure, indicates that the work is more recent. At the time of its writing, the conflict of languages and dialects in England was going on, and the people made sad work in their attempts to pronounce each other's speech. In order to save his verses from abuses of mispronunciation, ORM, or Ormin, adopted an ingenious use of consonants as a key to the sounds of vowels. After every short vowel the consonant was doubled, and the reader, of whatever speech he might be, was left with no excuse for marring the sound of the verse. A single couplet will illustrate:

"Thiss boc iss nemmned Orrmulum,

Forrthi that Orrm itt wrohhte."

This book is called Ormulum, because Orm wrote it.

In this age the average literary taste craved the narration of romance in song. It was native to the French; but English writers, in considerable numbers, sought their laurels in this kind of composition. The stories, originally written in the French, full of love and adventure, were vital with the spirit of chivalry. Profes sional minstrels, knights, and even kings had vied in their composition. They had a tendency to group themselves about great names, some having Alexander, some Charlemagne as their central figure; but one cluster, the Arthurian, is of genuine native growth, and this one happens to possess the highest interest of them all. Translations and imitations of these French romances slowly came into popular favor with the English people, and aided in the fusion of the languages.

common people was not fully Many spirited political songs

But the patriotic spirit of the satisfied in imitating foreign poesy. of English origin, and ballads full of characteristic English satire were written. One of these ballads, the Owl and the Nightingale, in giving an amusing account of a competition in song between the two birds, furnishes perhaps the finest specimen of the popular literature of the thirteenth century, and is specially interesting as the earliest narrative and imaginative English poem not copied from some foreign model.

Writings in English do not represent the entire intellectual wealth of the nation during this Anglo-Norman period; indeed they form but a small portion. For almost three centuries after the Conquest, French continued to be the language of polite literature, and Latin the language of theology, philosophy, science and history. In these departments many Englishmen were writing; but they were contributors to a foreign, not to their national literaCure.

That national literature has now reached the eve of its first great expansion. It has been in existence for a thousand years, but has as yet produced no work of pre-eminent merit, no name that is entitled to rank among intellects of the highest order. Energy of thought and expression, natural sweetness and simple pathos, are not wanting; but there is still a complete absence of artistic form, literary skill, and the higher qualities of workmanship. Nothing appears to portend the magnificent outburst that is at