Chapter II: Part 2

[10] "Britannia after the Romans." The literary patriotism of Wales
has been more remarkable among humble individuals than among the
squirearchy, if we except the ardent Pennant. Mr. Owen Jones, an
honest furrier in Thames-street, kindled by the love of father-land,
offered the Welsh public a costly present of the "Archaeology of
Wales," containing the bardic poetry, genealogies, triads,
chronicles, &c. in their originals: the haughty descendant of the
Cymry disdained to translate for the Anglo-Saxon. To Mr. William Owen
the lore of Cambria stands deeply indebted for his persevering
efforts. Under the name of Meirion he long continued his literal
versions of the Welsh bards in the early volumes of the "Monthly
Magazine;" he has furnished a Cambrian biography and a dictionary.

Some years ago, a learned Welsh scholar, Dr. Owen Pughe, issued
proposals to publish the "Mabinogion," accompanied by translations,
on the completion of a subscription list sufficient to indemnify the
costs of printing.--See Mr. Crofton Croker's interesting work on
"Fairy Legends," vol. iii. He appealed in vain to the public, but the
whole loss remains with them. Recently a munificent lady [Lady
Charlotte Guest] has resumed the task, and has presented us in the
most elegant form with two tales such as ladies read. Since this note
was written several cheering announcements of some important works
have been put forth. [Many have since been published.]

[11] See Warton and Ellis. "Poesies de Marie de France" have been
published by M. de Roquefort, Paris, 1820.

[12] "The translators do the triadist an injustice in rendering _Tri_
by '_The Three_' when he has put no _The_ at all. The number was
accounted fortunate, and they took a pleasure in binding up all their
ideas into little sheaves or fasciculi of three; but in so doing they
did not mean to imply that there were no more such."--"Britannia
after the Romans."

[13] As these artificial associations, like the topics invented by
the Roman rhetoricians, have been ridiculed by those who have
probably formed their notions from unskilful versions, I select a few
which might enter into the philosophy of the human mind. They denote
a literature far advanced in critical refinement, and appear to have
been composed from the sixth to the twelfth century.

"The three foundations of genius; the gift of God, human exertion,
and the events of life."

"The three first requisites of genius; an eye to see nature, a heart
to feel it, and a resolution that dares follow it."

"The three things indispensable to genius; understanding, meditation,
and perseverance."

"The three things that improve genius; proper exertion, frequent
exertion, and successful exertion."

"The three qualifications of poetry; endowment of genius, judgment
from experience, and felicity of thought."

"The three pillars of judgment; bold design, frequent practice, and
frequent mistakes."

"The three pillars of learning; seeing much, suffering much, and
studying much." See Turner's "Vindication of the Ancient British
Bards."--Owen's "Dissertation on Bardism, prefixed to the Heroic
Elegies of Llywarc Hen."

THE NAME OF ENGLAND AND OF THE ENGLISH.

Two brothers and adventurers of an obscure Saxon tribe raised their ensign of the White Horse on British land: the visit was opportune, or it was expected--this remains a state secret. Welcomed by the British monarch and his perplexed council amid their intestine dissensions, as friendly allies, they were renowned for their short and crooked swords called _Seax_, which had given the generic name of Saxons to their tribe.

These descendants of Woden, for such even the petty chieftains deemed themselves, whose trade was battle and whose glory was pillage, showed the spiritless what men do who know to conquer, the few against the many. They baffled the strong and they annihilated the weak. The Britons were grateful. The Saxons lodged in the land till they took possession of it. The first Saxon founded the kingdom of Kent; twenty years after, a second in Sussex raised the kingdom of the South-Saxons; in another twenty years appeared the kingdom of the West-Saxons. It was a century after the earliest arrival that the great emigration took place. The tribe of the Angles depopulated their native province and flocked to the fertile island, under that foeman of the Britons whom the bards describe as "The Flame Bearer," and "The Destroyer." Every quality peculiar to the Saxons was hateful to the Britons; even their fairness of complexion. Taliessin terms Hengist "a white-bellied hackney," and his followers are described as of "hateful hue and hateful form." The British poet delights to paint "a Saxon shivering and quaking, his _white hair_ washed in blood;" and another sings how "close upon the backs of the _pale-faced_ ones were the spear-points."[1]

Already the name itself of _Britain_ had disappeared among the invaders. Our island was now called "Saxony beyond the Sea," or "West Saxon land;" and when the expatriated Saxons had alienated themselves from the land of their fathers, those who remained faithful to their native hearths perhaps proudly distinguished themselves as "the old Saxons," for by this name they were known by the Saxons in Britain.

Eight separate but uncertain kingdoms were raised on the soil of Britain, and present a moveable surface of fraternal wars and baffled rivals. There was one kingdom long left kingless, for "No man dared, though never so ambitious, to take up the sceptre which many had found so hot; the only effectual cure of ambition that I have read"--these are the Words of Milton. Finally, to use the quaint phrase of the Chancellor Whitelock, "the Octarchy was brought into one." At the end of five centuries the Saxons fell prostrate before a stronger race.

But of all the accidents and the fortunes of the Saxon dynasty, not the least surprising is that an obscure town in the duchy of Sleswick, _Anglen_, is commemorated by the transference of its name to one of the great European nations. The _Angles_, or _Engles_, have given their denomination to the land of Britain--_Engle-land_ is _England_, and the _Engles_ are the _English_.[2]

How it happened that the very name of _Britain_ was abolished, and why the Anglian was selected in preference to the more eminent race, may offer a philosophical illustration of the accidental nature of LOCAL NAMES.

There is a tale familiar to us from youth, that Egbert, the more powerful king of the West Saxons, was crowned the first monarch of England, and issued a decree that this kingdom of Britain should be called England; yet an event so strange as to have occasioned the change of the name of the whole country remains unauthenticated by any of the original writers of our annals.[3] No record attests that Egbert in a solemn coronation assumed the title of "King of England." His son and successor never claimed such a legitimate title; and even our illustrious Alfred, subsequently, only styled himself "King of the West Saxons."

The story, however, is of ancient standing; for Matthew of Westminster alludes to a similar if not the same incident, namely, that by "a common decree of all the Saxon kings, it was ordained that the title of the island should no longer be Britain, from Brute, but henceforward be called from the English, England." Stowe furnishes a positive circumstance in this obscure transaction--"Egbert caused the brazen image of Cadwaline, King of the Britons, to be thrown down." The decree noticed by Matthew of Westminster, combined with the fact of pulling down the statue of a popular British monarch, betrays the real motive of this singular national change: whether it were the suggestion of Egbert, or the unanimous agreement of the assembled monarchs who were his tributary kings, it was a stroke of deep political wisdom; it knitted the members into one common body, under one name, abolishing, by legislative measures, the very memory of Britain from the land. Although, therefore, no positive evidence has been produced, the state policy carries an internal evidence which yields some sanction to the obscure tradition.

It is a nicer difficulty to account for the choice of the Anglian name. It might have been preferred to distinguish the Saxons of Britain from the Saxons of the Continent; or the name was adopted, being that of the far more numerous race among these people. Four kingdoms of the octarchy were possessed by the Angles. Thus doubtful and obscure remains the real origin of our national name, which hitherto has hinged on a suspicious fact.

The casual occurrence of the ENGLES leaving their name to this land has bestowed on our country a foreign designation; and--for the contingency was nearly occurring--had the kingdom of Northumbria preserved its ascendancy in the octarchy, the seat of dominion had been altered. In that case, the Lowlands of Scotland would have formed a portion of England; York would have stood forth as the metropolis of Britain, and London had been but a remote mart for her port and her commerce. Another idiom, perhaps, too, other manners, had changed the whole face of the country. We had been Northmen, not Southerns; our neighbourhood had not proved so troublesome to France. But the kingdom of Wessex prevailed, and became the sole monarchy of England, Such local contingencies have decided the character of a whole people.[4]

The history of LOCAL NAMES is one of the most capricious and fortuitous in the history of man; the etymologist must not be implicitly trusted, for it is necessary to be acquainted with the history of a people as much as the history of languages, to be certain of local derivations. We have recently been cautioned by a sojourner in the most ancient of kingdoms,[5] not too confidently to rely on etymology, or to assign too positively any reason for the origin of LOCAL NAMES. No etymologist could have accounted for the name of our nation had he not had recourse to our annals. Sir WALTER RALEIGH, from his observations in the New World, has confirmed this observation by circumstances which probably remain unknown to the present inhabitants. The actual names given to those places in America which they still retain, are nothing more than the blunders of the first Europeans, demanding by signs and catching at words by which neither party were intelligible to one another.[6]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Britannia after the Romans," 62, 4to.

[2] It is a singular circumstance that our neighbours have preserved
the name of our country more perfectly than we have done by our
mutilated term of _England_, for they write it with antiquarian
precision, _Angle-terre_--the land of the Angles. Our counties bear
the vestiges of these Saxons expelling or exterminating the native
Britons, as our pious Camden ejaculates, "by God's wonderful
providence."

[3] The diligent investigator of the history of our Anglo-Saxons
concludes that this unauthorised tale of the coronation and the
decree of Egbert is unworthy of credence.

Camden, in his first edition, had fixed the date of the change of the
name as occurring in the year 810; in his second edition he corrected
it to 800. Holinshed says _about_ 800. Speed gives a much later date,
819. It is evident that these disagreeing dates are all hazarded
conjectures.

[4] Mitford's "Harmony of Language," 429. I might have placed this
possible circumstance in the article "A History of Events which have
not happened," in "Curiosities of Literature."

[5] Sir GARDNER WILKINSON, in the curious volume of his recondite
discoveries in the land of the Pyramids.

[6] "History of the World," 167, fol. 1666. We have also a curious
account of the ancient manner of naming persons and places among our
own nation in venerable Lambarde's "Perambulations of Kent," 349,
453.

THE ANGLO-SAXONS.

The history and literature of England are involved in the transactions of a people who, living in such remote times at the highest of their fortunes, never advanced beyond a semi-civilization. But political freedom was the hardy and jealous offspring nursed in the forests of Germany; there was first heard the proclamation of equal laws, and there a people first assumed the name of Franks or Freemen. Our language, and our laws, and our customs, originate with our Teutonic ancestors; among them we are to look for the trunk, if not the branches, of our national establishments. In the rude antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon church, our theoretical inquirers in ecclesiastical history trace purer doctrines and a more primitive discipline; and in the shadowy Witenagemot, the moveable elements of the British constitution: the language and literature of England still lie under their influence, for this people everywhere left the impression of a strong hand.

The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen; the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs and manners, their polity, their laws, their institutions, their literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in their own contemporary manuscripts, and in another source which we long neglected--in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems often to have been to them "the land of promise." The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation, were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by strange characters, and obscured by perplexing forms of diction. The language as well as the writing had passed away; all had fallen into desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written.

But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned Archbishop MATTHEW PARKER, who was the first to attempt their restitution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas Walsingham's History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this king's secretary, Asser, _printed in the Saxon character_; we are told, as "an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an acquaintance with the _handwriting of their ancestors_."[1] "The invitation" was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! SPELMAN, the great legal archaeologist, was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to the study; and his "Glossary" is too humble a title for that treasure of law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the learned world at home and abroad--while the unsold copies during the life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned SOMNER; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the restituted lore. HICKES, in his elaborate "Thesaurus," displayed a literature which had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read. These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary Rowe Mores expresses it, "unsightly to politer eyes." A lady--and she is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient language of our country--Mrs. ELSTOB, the niece of Hickes, patronised by a celebrated Duchess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly to disappear from our literature.

None of our historians from MILTON to HUME ever referred to an original Saxon authority. They took their representations from the writings of the monks; but the true history of the Anglo-Saxons was not written in Latin. It was not from monkish scribes, who recorded public events in which the Saxons had no influence, that the domestic history of a race dispossessed of all power could be drawn, and far less would they record the polity which had once constituted their lost independence. The annalist of the monastery, flourishing under another dynasty, placed in other times and amid other manners, was estranged from any community of feeling with a people who were then sunk into the helots of England. MILTON, in his history of Britain, imagined that the transactions of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy, or Octarchy, would be as worthless "to chronicle as the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air." Thus a poet-historian can veil by a brilliant metaphor the want of that knowledge which he contemns before he has acquired--this was less pardonable in a philosopher; and when HUME observed, perhaps with the eyes of Milton, that "he would hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon Annals," however cheering to his reader was the calmness of his indolence, the philosopher, in truth, was wholly unconscious that these "obscure and uninteresting annals of the Anglo-Saxons" formed of themselves a complete history, offering new results for his profound and luminous speculations on the political state of man. Genius is often obsequious to its predecessors, and we track BURKE in the path of Hume; and so late as in 1794, we find our elegant antiquary, Bishop PERCY, lamenting the scanty and defective annals of the Anglo-Saxons; naked epitomes, bare of the slightest indications of the people themselves. The history of the dwellers in our land had hitherto yielded no traces of the customs and domestic economy of the nation; all beyond some public events was left in darkness and conjecture.

We find ELLIS and RITSON still erring in the trackless paths. All this national antiquity was wholly unsuspected by these zealous investigators. In this uncertain condition stood the history of the Anglo-Saxons, when a new light rose in the hemisphere, and revealed to the English public a whole antiquity of so many centuries. In 1805, for the first time, the story and the literature of the Anglo-Saxons was given to the country. It was our studious explorer, SHARON TURNER, who first opened these untried ways in our national antiquities.[2]

Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be too literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambiguous. Different anglicisers offer more than one construction.[3]

It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are found in a most corrupt state.[4] This fatality was occasioned by the inattention or the unskilfulness of the caligrapher, whose task must have required a learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a puerile system of alliteration,[5] and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the strokes, or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. "Nouns have been mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns."

These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The tortuous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense: their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous metaphorical nomenclature where a single object must be recognised by twenty denominations, not always appropriate, and too often clouded by the most remote and dark analogies[6]--all these have perplexed the most skilful judges, who have not only misinterpreted passages, but have even failed to comprehend the very subject of their original. This last circumstance has been remarkably shown in the fate of the heroic tale of BEOWULF. When it first fell to the hard lot of WANLEY, the librarian of the Earl of Oxford, to describe "The Exploits of Beowulf," he imagined, or conjectured, that it contained "the wars which this Dane waged against the reguli, or petty kings of Sweden." He probably decided on the subject by confining his view to the opening page, where a hero descends from his ship--but for a very different purpose from a military expedition. Fortunately Wanley lauded the manuscript as a "tractatus nobilissimus," and an "egregium exemplum" of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. Probably this manuscript remained unopened during a century, when SHARON TURNER detected the error of Wanley, but he himself misconceived the design of these romantic "Exploits." Yet this diligent historian carefully read and analysed this heroic tale. CONYBEARE, who had fallen into the same erroneous conception, at length caught up a clue in this labyrinth; and finally even a safer issue has been found, though possibly not without some desperate efforts, by the version of Mr. KEMBLE.

Even the learned in Saxon have not always been able to distinguish this verse from prose; the verse unmarked by rhyme being written continuously as prose.[7] A diction turgid and obscure was apparent; but in what consisted the art of the poet, or the metrical system, long baffled the most ingenious conjectures. RITSON, in his perplexity, described this poetry or metre as a "rhymeless sort of poetry, a kind of bombast or insane prose, from which it is very difficult to be distinguished." TYRWHIT and ELLIS remained wholly at a loss to comprehend the fabric of Anglo-Saxon poesy. HICKES, in the fascination of scholarship, had decided that it proceeded on a metrical system of syllabic quantities, and surmounted all difficulties by submitting the rhythmical cadences of Gothic poesy to the prosody of classical antiquity. This was a literary hallucination, and a remarkable evidence of a favourite position maintained merely by the force of prepossession.

To what cause are we to ascribe the complex construction of the diction, and the multiplied intricacies of the metres of the poetry of the Northmen? Bishop Percy noticed, that the historian of the Runic poetry has counted up among the ancient Icelandic poets one hundred and thirty-six different metres. The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon are cognate languages, being both dialects of the ancient Gothic or Teutonic. The genius of the Danish Scalds often displays in their Eddas[8] a sublime creative power far out of the reach of the creeping and narrow faculty of the Saxon, yet the same mechanism regulated both; the fixed recurrence of certain letters or syllables which constitutes that perpetual alliteration, which oftener than rhyme gratified the ear of barbaric poesy, and a metaphorical phraseology or poetical vocabulary appropriated by the bards, furnishing the adept with phrases when he had not always ready any novel conceptions. Shall we deem such arbitrary forms and such artificial contrivances, the mere childishness of tastes, to have been invented in the wintry years of these climates, to amuse themselves in their stern solitudes; or rather, may we not consider them as a mystery of the Craft, the initiation of the Order? for by this scholarlike discipline in multiplying difficulties the later bards separated themselves from those humbler minstrels who were left to their own inartificial emotions.

Such prescribed formulae, and such a mechanism of verse, must have tethered the imagination in a perpetual circle; it was art which violated the free course of nature. In this condition we often find even the poetry of the Scandinavians. The famous death-song of Regner Lodbrog seems little more than an iteration of the same ideas. An Anglo-Saxon poem has the appearance of a collection of short hints rather than poetical conceptions, curt and ejaculative: a paucity of objects yields but a paucity of emotions, too vague for detail, too abrupt for deep passion, too poor in fancy to scatter the imagery of poesy. The Anglo-Saxon betrays its confined and monotonous genius: we are in the first age of art, when pictures are but monochromes of a single colour. Hence, in the whole map of Anglo-Saxon poetry, it is difficult to discriminate one writer from another.[9]

Their prose has taken a more natural character than their verse. The writings of Alfred are a model of the Anglo-Saxon style in its purest state; they have never been collected, but it is said they would form three octavo volumes; they consist chiefly of translations.

The recent versions in literal prose by two erudite Saxonists of two of the most remarkable Anglo-Saxon poems, will enable an English reader to form a tolerable notion of the genius of this literature. CONYBEARE'S poetical versions remained unrivalled. But if a literal version of a primitive poetry soon ceases to be poetry, so likewise, if the rude outlines are to be retouched, and a brilliant colouring is to be borrowed, we are receiving Anglo-Saxon poetry in the cadences of Milton and "the orient hues" of Gray.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bp. Nicholson's Eng. Lib.

[2] It is pleasing to record a noble instance of the enthusiasm of
learned research. "The leisure hours of sixteen years" furnished a
comprehensive history of which "two-thirds had not yet
appeared."--_Mr. Turner's Preface._

[3] A sufferer, moreover, fully assures us that some remain, which
"must baffle all conjecture;" and another critic has judicially
decreed that, in every translation from the Anglo-Saxon that has
fallen under his notice, "there are blunders enough to satisfy the
most unfriendly critic." "The Song of the Traveller," in "The Exeter
Book," was translated by CONYBEARE; a more accurate transcript was
given by Mr. KEMBLE in his edition of Beowulf; and now Mr. GUEST has
furnished a third, varying from both. We cannot be certain that a
fourth may not correct the three.

[4] "Without exception!" is the energetic cry of the translator of
Beowulf.

[5] The first line contains two words commencing with the same
letter, and the second line has its first word also beginning with
that letter. This difficulty seems insurmountable to a modern reader,
for our authority confesses that, "In the Saxon poetry; as it is
preserved in manuscripts, the first line often contains but one
alliterating word, and, from the negligence of the scribes, the
alliteration is in many instances entirely lost."--_Dissertation on
Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Fraser's Magazine_, xii. 81.

[6] A striking instance how long a universal error can last, arising
from one of these obscure conceits, is noticed by Mr. GRENVILLE
PIGOTT in his "Manual of Scandinavian Mythology."

These warlike barbarians were long reproached that even their
religion fomented an implacable hatred of their enemies; for in the
future state of their paradisiacal Valhalla, their deceased heroes
rejoiced at their celestial compotations, _to drink out of the skulls
of their enemies_.

A passage in the death-song of Regner Lodbrog, literally translated,
is, "Soon shall we _drink_ out of the _curved trees of the head_;"
which Bishop Percy translates, "Soon, in the splendid hall of Odin,
we shall drink beer out of the skulls of our enemies." And thus also
have the Danes themselves, the Germans, and the French.

The original and extraordinary blunder lies with Olaus Wormius, the
great Danish antiquary, to whose authority poets and historians bowed
without looking further. Our grave Olaus was bewildered by this
monstrous style of the Scalds, and translated this drinking bout at
Valhalla according to his own fancy,--"Ex concavis crateribus
craniorum;"--thus turning the "trees of the head" into a "skull," and
the skull into a hollow cup. The Scald, however, was innocent of this
barbarous invention; and, in his violent figures and disordered
fancy, merely alluded to the branching horns, growing as trees, from
the heads of animals--that is, the curved horns which formed their
drinking cups. If Olaus here, like Homer, nodded, something might be
urged for his defence; for who is bound to understand such remote, if
not absurd conceits? but I do not know that we could plead as fairly
for his own interpolating fancy of "drinking out of the skulls of
their enemies."

This grave blunder became universal, and a century passed away
without its being detected. It was so familiar, that Peter Pindar
once said that the booksellers, like the heroes of Valhalla, drank
their wine out of the skulls of authors.

[7] HICKES and WANLEY mistook the "Ormulum," a paraphrase of Gospel
history, as mere prose; when in fact it is composed in long lines of
fifteen syllables without rhyme.

[8] See "A Manual of Scandinavian Mythology," by Mr. Grenville
Pigott. 1839. "The Northern Mythology" will be found here not only
skilfully arranged, but its wondrous myths and fables elucidated by
modern antiquaries. It is further illustrated by the translation of
the poem of Oehlenschlaeger, on "The Gods of the North;" whose genius
has been transfused in the nervous simplicity of the present version.

[9] Such is the critical decision of CONYBEARE, a glorious
enthusiast. "Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry," by John Josiah
Conybeare. 1826.

The late Mr. Price, the editor of Warton's History, announced an
elaborate work on the Anglo-Saxon poetry. The verse of CONYBEARE and
the disquisitions of PRICE would have completed this cycle of our
ancient poetry. But a fatal coincidence marked the destiny of these
eminent votaries of our poetic antiquity--both prematurely ceasing to
exist while occupied on their works. CONYBEARE has survived in his
brother, whose congenial tastes collected his remains; PRICE, who had
long resided abroad, and there had silently stored up the whole
wealth of Northern literature, on his return home remained little
known till his valued edition of Warton announced to the literary
world the acquisitions they were about to receive. He has left a name
behind him, but not a work, for Price had no fraternal friend.

Since this chapter was written, Mr. Thos. Wright has published "An
Essay on the State of Literature and Learning under the
Anglo-Saxons." It displays a comprehensive view taken by one to whose
zealous labours the lovers of our ancient literature are so deeply
indebted.

CAEDMON AND MILTON.

Caedmon, the Saxonists hail as "the Father of English Song!"

The personal history of this bard is given in the taste of the age. Caedmon was a herdsman who had never read a single poem. Sitting in his "beership," whenever the circling harp, that "Wood of Joy!" as the Saxon gleemen have called it, was offered to his hand, all unskilled, the peasant, stung with shame, would hurry homewards. Already past the middle of life, never had the peasant dreamt that he was a sublime poet, or at least a poet composing on sublime themes, incapable as he was even of reading his own Saxon.

As once he lay slumbering in a stall, the apparition of a strange man thus familiarly greeted him:--"Caedmon, sing some song to me!" The cowherd modestly urged that he was mute and unmusical:--"Nevertheless thou shalt sing!" retorted the benignant apparition. "What shall I sing?" rejoined the minstrel, who had never sung. "Sing the origin of things!" The peasant, amazed, found his tongue loosened, and listened to his own voice; a voice which was to reach posterity!

He flew in the morning to the town-reeve to announce a wonder, that he had become a poet in the course of a single night. He recited the poem, which, however--for we possess it--only proves that between sleeping and waking eighteen lines of dreamy periphrasis may express a single idea. Venerable Bede held this effusion as a pure inspiration: the modern historian of the Anglo-Saxons indulgently discovers three ideas: Conybeare, more critical, acknowledges that "the eighteen lines expand the mere proposition of 'Let us praise God, the maker of heaven and earth.'" But this was only the first attempt of a great enterprise--it was a thing to be magnified for the neighbouring monastery of Whitby, who gladly received such a new brother.

For a poet who had never written a verse, it was only necessary to open his vein: a poet who could not read only required to be read to. The whole monkery came down with the canonical books; they informed him of all things, from "Genesis" down to "the doctrine of the apostles." "The good man listened," as saith Venerable Bede, "like a clean animal ruminating; and his song and his verse were so winsome to hear, that his teachers wrote them down, and learned from his mouth." These teachers could not have learned more than they themselves had taught. We can only draw out of a cistern the waters which we have poured into it. Every succeeding day, however, swelled the Caedmonian Poem; assuredly they wanted neither zeal nor hands--for the glory of the monastery of Whitby!

Such is a literary anecdote of the seventh century conveyed to us by ancient Bede. The dream of the apparition's inspiration of this unlettered monk was one more miracle among many in honour of the monastery; and it was to be told in the customary way, for never yet in a holy brotherhood was found a recusant.

Even to this day we ourselves dream grotesque adventures; but in the days of monachism visions were not merely a mere vivid and lengthened dream, a slight delirium, for they usually announced something important. A dream was a prognostic or a prelude. The garrulous chroniclers, and saintly Bede himself, that primeval gossiper, afford abundant evidence of such secret revelations. Whenever some great act was designed, or some awful secret was to be divulged, a dream announced it to the world. Was a king to be converted to Christianity, the people were enlightened by the vision which the sovereign revealed to them; was a maiden to take the vow of virginity, or a monastery to be built, an angelical vision hovered, and sometimes specified the very spot. Was a crime of blood to be divulged by some penitent accessory, somebody had a dream, and the criminal has stood convicted by the grave-side, which gave up the fatal witness in his victim. In those ages of simplicity and pious frauds, a dream was an admirable expedient by which important events were carried on, and mystification satisfactorily explained the incomprehensible.

The marvellous incident on which the history of Caedmon revolves may only veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a _peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed in a_ DREAM.[1]

Scriptural themes were common with the poets of the monastery.[2] The present enterprise, judging from the variety of its fragments from both Testaments and from the Apocrypha, in its complete state would have formed a chronological poem of the main incidents of the Scriptures in the vernacular Saxon. This was a burden of magnitude which no single shoulder could have steadily carried, and probably was supported by several besides "the Dreamer." Critical Saxonists, indeed, have detected a variation in the style, and great inequalities in the work; such discordances indicate that the paraphrase was occasionally resumed by some successor, as idling monks at a later period were often the continuators of voluminous romances. I would class the Caedmonian poem among the many attempts of the monachal genius to familiarize the people with the miraculous and the religious narratives in the Scriptures, by a paraphrase in the vernacular idiom. The poem may be deemed as equivocal as the poet; the text has been impeached; interpolations and omissions are acknowledged by the learned in Saxon lore. The poem is said to have been written in the seventh century, and the earliest manuscript we possess is of the tenth, suffering in that course of time all the corruptions or variations of the scribes, while the ruder northern dialect has been changed into the more polished southern. If we may confide in a learned conjecture, it may happen that Caedmon is no name at all, but merely a word or a phrase; and thus the entity of the Dreamer of the Monastery of Whitby may vanish in the wind of two Chaldaic syllables![3] Be this as it may, for us the poem is an entity, whatever becomes of the pretended Dreamer.

It has become an arduous inquiry whether MILTON has not drawn largely from the obscurity of this monkish Ennius? "In reading Caedmon," says SHARON TURNER, "we are reminded of Milton--of a 'Paradise Lost' in rude miniature." Conybeare advances, "the pride, rebellion, and punishments of Satan and his princes have a resemblance to Milton so remarkable that _much of this portion might be almost literally translated by a cento of lines from the great poet_."[4] A recent Saxonist, in noticing "the creation of Caedmon as beautiful," adds, "it is still more interesting from _its singular correspondence even in expression with 'Paradise Lost_.'"

The ancient, as well as the modern, of these scriptural poets has adopted a narrative which is not found in the Scriptures. The rebellion of Satan before the creation of man, and his precipitation with the apostate angels into a dungeon-gulf of flame, and ice, and darkness, though an incident familiar to us as a gospel text, remains nothing more than a legend unhallowed by sacred writ.

Where are we, then, to seek for the origin of a notion universal throughout Christendom? I long imagined that this revolt in heaven had been one of the traditions hammered in the old rabbinical forge; and in the Talmudical lore there are tales of the fallen angels; but I am assured by a learned professor in these studies, that the Talmud contains no narrative of "the Rebellion of Satan." The Hebrews, in their sojourn in Babylon, had imbibed many Chaldean fables, and some fanciful inventions. At this obscure period did this singular episode in sacred history steal into their popular creed? Did it issue from that awful cradle of monstrous imaginings, of demons, of spirits, and of terrifying deities, Persia and India? In the Brahminical Shasters we find a rebellion of the angels before the creation, and their precipitation from light into darkness; their restoration by the clemency of the Creator, however, occurs after their probationary state, during millions of years in their metamorphoses on earth. But this seems only the veil of an allegory designed to explain their dark doctrine of the metempsychosis. The rebellion of the angels, as we have been taught it, is associated with their everlasting chains and eternal fire; how the legend became universally received may baffle inquiry.[5]

But the coincidence of the Caedmonian with the Miltonian poem in having adopted the same peculiar subject of the revolt of Satan and the expulsion of the angels, is not the most remarkable one in the two works. The same awful narrative is pursued, and we are startled at the opening of the Pandemonium by discovering the same scene and the same actors. When we scrutinise into minuter parts, we are occasionally struck by some extraordinary similarities.

Caedmon, to convey a notion of the ejection from heaven to hell, tells that "the Fiend, with all his comrades, fell from heaven above, through as long as _three nights and days_." Milton awfully describes Satan "confounded, though immortal," rolling in the fiery gulf--

_Nine times the space that measures day and night_
To mortal men.

Caedmon describes the Deity having cast the evil angel into that "House of perdition, down on that new bed; after, gave him a _name_ that the highest (of the devils which they had now become) should be called _Satan_ thenceforwards." Milton has preserved the same notice of the origin of _the name_, thus--

To whom the _Arch-Enemy_,
And thence in heaven called _Satan_--

Satan in Hebrew signifying "the Enemy," or "the Adversary."

The harangue of Satan to his legions by the Saxon monk cannot fail to remind us of the first grand scene in the "Paradise Lost," however these creations of the two poets be distinct. "The swart hell--a land void of light, and full of flame," is like Milton's--

----yet from these flames
No light, but rather darkness visible.

The locality is not unlike, "There they have at even, immeasurably long, each of all the fiends a renewal of fire, with sulphur charged; but cometh ere dawn the eastern wind frost, bitter-cold, ever fire or dart." This torment we find in the hell of Milton--

The bitter change
Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce,
From beds of raging _fire_ to starve in _ice_.

The parching air
_Burns frore_, and _cold performs the effect of fire_.[6]

The "Inferno" of Dante has also "its eternal darkness for the dwellers in fierce _heat_ and in _ice_."[7] It is evident that the Saxon, the Italian, and the Briton had drawn from the same source. The Satan of Caedmon in "the torture-house" is represented as in "the dungeon of perdition." He lies in chains, his feet bound, his hands manacled, his neck fastened by iron bonds; Satan and his crew the monk has degraded into Saxon convicts. Milton indeed has his

Adamantine chains and penal fire,

and

A dungeon horrible on all sides round.

But as Satan was to be the great actor, Milton was soon compelled to find some excuse for freeing the evil spirit from the chains which Heaven had forged, and this he does--

Chain'd on the burning lake, _nor ever thence
Had ris'n or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs_,
That with reiterated crimes he might
Heap on himself damnation, while he sought
Evil to others.

The Saxon monk had not the dexterity to elude the difficult position in which the arch-fiend was for ever fixed; he was indissolubly chained, and yet much was required to be done. It is not, therefore, Satan himself who goes on the subdolous design of wreaking his revenge on the innocent pair in Paradise; for this he despatches one of his associates, who is thus described: "Prompt in arms, he had a crafty soul; this chief set his helmet on his head; he many speeches knew of guileful words: wheeled up from thence, he _departed through the doors of hell_." We are reminded of

The infernal doors, that on their hinges grate
Harsh thunder.

The emissary of Satan in Caedmon had "a strong mind, lion-like in air, _in hostile mood he dashed the fire aside with a fiend's power_."[8] That demon flings aside the flames of hell with the bravery of his sovereign, as we see in Milton--

Forthwith upright he rears from off the pool
His mighty stature; _on each hand the flames
Driv'n backward, slope their pointing spires, and roll'd
In billows_, leave in the midst a horrid vale.[9]

Caedmon thus represents Satan:--"Then spoke the haughty king, who of angels erst was _brightest, fairest in heaven_--beloved of his master--_so beauteous was his form_, he was like to the light stars."

Milton's conception of the form of Satan is the same.

His form had not yet lost
All her _original brightness_, nor appear'd
Less than archangel ruin'd.[10]

And,

His countenance as the _morning star_ that guides
The starry flock, allured them.[11]

Literary curiosity may be justly excited to account for these apparent resemblances, and to learn whether similarity and coincidence necessarily prove identity and imitation; and whether, finally, Caedmon was ever known to Milton.

The Caedmonian manuscript is as peculiar in its history as its subject. This poem, which we are told fixed the attention of our ancestors "from the sixth to the twelfth century," and the genius of whose writer was "stamped deeply and lastingly upon the literature of our country,"[12] had wholly disappeared from any visible existence. It was accidentally discovered only in a single manuscript, the gift of Archbishop Usher to the learned Francis JUNIUS. During thirty years of this eminent scholar's residence in England, including his occasional visits to Holland and Friesland, to recover, by the study of the Friesic living dialect, the extinct Anglo-Saxon, he devoted his protracted life to the investigation of the origin of the Gothic dialects. A Saxon poem, considerable for its size and for its theme, in a genuine manuscript, was for our northern student a most precious acquisition; and that this solitary manuscript should not he liable to accidents, Junius printed the original at Amsterdam in 1655, unaccompanied by any translation or by any notes.

We must now have recourse to a few dates.

Milton had fallen blind in 1654. The poet began "Paradise Lost" about 1658; the composition occupied three years, but the publication was delayed till 1667.

If Milton had any knowledge of Caedmon, it could only have been in the solitary and treasured manuscript of Junius. To have granted even the loan of the only original the world possessed, we may surmise that Junius would not have slept through all the nights of its absence. And if the Saxon manuscript was ever in the hands of Milton, could our poet have read it?

We have every reason to believe that Milton did not read Saxon. At that day who did? There were not "ten men to save the city." In Milton's "History of England," a loose and solitary reference to the Saxon Chronicle, then untranslated, was probably found ready at hand; for all his Saxon annals are drawn from the Latin monkish authorities: and in that wonderful list of one hundred dramatic subjects which the poet had set down for the future themes of his muse, there are many on Saxon stories; but all the references are to Speed and Hollinshed. The nephew of the poet has enumerated all the languages in which Milton was conversant--"the Hebrew, (and I think the Syriac,) the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, the Spanish, and French." We find no allusion to any of the northern tongues, which that votary of classical antiquity and of Ausonian melody and fancy would deem--can we doubt it?--dissonant and barbarous. The Northern Scalds were yet as little known as our own Saxons. A recent discovery that Milton once was desirous of reading Dutch may possibly be alleged by the Saxonists as an approach to the study of the Saxon; but at that time Milton was in office as "the Secretary for Foreign Tongues," and in a busy intercourse with the Hollanders.[13]

"Secretary Milton" at that moment was probably anxious to con the phrases of a Dutch state-paper, to scrutinise into the temper of their style. Had Milton ever acquired the Dutch idiom for literary purposes, to study Vondel, the Batavian Shakspeare,[14] from whom some foreigners imagine our poet might have drawn his "Lucifer," it could not have escaped the nephew in the enumeration of his uncle's philological acquirements. But even to read Dutch was not to read a Saxon manuscript, whose strange characters, uncouth abbreviations, and difficult constructions, are only mastered by long practice. To have known anything about the solitary Caedmon, the poet must have been wholly indebted to the friendly offices of its guardian; a personal intimacy which does not appear. The improbability that this scholar translated the manuscript phrase by phrase is nearly as great as the supposition that the poet could have retained ideas and expressions to be reproduced in that epic poem, which was not commenced till several years after.

The personal habits of Junius were somewhat peculiar; to his last days he was unrelentingly busied in pursuits of philology, of which, he has left to the Bodleian such monuments of his gigantic industry. Junius was such a rigid economist of time, that every hour was allotted to its separate work; each day was the repetition of the former, and on a system he avoided all visitors. Such a man could not have submitted to the reckless loss of many a golden day, in hammering at the obscure sense of the Saxon monk, which the critics find by his own printed text he could not always master; nor is it more likely that Milton himself could have sustained his poetic excitement through the tedious progress of a verbal or cursory paraphrase of Scripture history by this Gothic bard. At that day even Junius could not have discovered those "elastic rhythms," which solicit the ear of a more modern Saxon scholar in his studies of Caedmon,[15] but which we entirely owe to the skill, and punctuation, and accentuation of the recent editor, Mr. Thorpe.

Be it also observed, that Milton published his "Paradise Lost" in the lifetime of Junius, the only judge who could have convicted the bard who had daringly proposed

-----------to pursue
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme--

of concealing what he had silently appropriated.

There are so many probabilities against the single possibility of Milton having had any knowledge of Caedmon, that we must decide by the numerical force of our own suggestions.

The startling similarities which have led away critical judgments, if calmly scrutinised, may be found to be those apparent resemblances or coincidences which poets drawing from the same source would fall into. There is a French mystery of "The Conception," where the scene is hell; Lucifer appeals to its inmates in a long address. This Satan of "The Conception" strikingly reminds us of the Prince of Darkness of Milton, and indeed has many creative touches; and had it been written after the work of Milton, it might have seemed a parody.[16]

Similarity and coincidence do not necessarily prove identity and imitation. Nor is the singular theme of "the Rebellion of the Angels" peculiar to either poet, since those who never heard of the Saxon monk have constructed whole poems and dramas on the celestial revolt.[17]

We may be little interested to learn, among all the dubious inquiries of "the origin of 'Paradise Lost,'" whether a vast poem, the most elaborate in its parts, and the most perfect in its completion--a work, in the words of the great artist--

------who knows how long
Before had been contriving?--P. L., ix. 138.

was or could be derived from any obscure source. The interval between excellence and mediocrity removes all connexion; it is that between incurable impotence and genial creation. A great poet can never be essentially indebted even to his prototype.

If we may still be interested in watching the primitive vigour of the self-taught, compared with the intellectual ideal of the poetical character, we must not allow ourselves, as might be shown in one of the critics of the Saxon school, to mistake nature in her first poverty, bare, meagre, squalid, for the moulded nudity of the Graces. The nature of Ennius was no more the nature of Virgil than the nature of Caedmon was that of Milton, for what is obvious and familiar is the reverse of the beautiful and the sublime. We have seen the ideal being,

Whose stature reach'd the sky, and on his crest
Sat Horror plumed--

by the Saxon monk sunk down to a Saxon convict, "fastened by the neck, his hands manacled, and his feet bound."

Caedmon represents Eve, after having plucked the fruit, hastening to Adam with the apples,--

Some in her hands she bare,
Some in her bosom lay,
Of the unblest fruit.

However natural or downright may be this specification, it is what could not have occurred with "the bosom" of our naked mother of mankind, and the artistical conception eluded the difficulty of carrying these apples--

------------from the tree returning, in her hand
_A bough of fairest fruit_.--ix. 850.

In Caedmon, it costs Eve a long day to persuade the sturdy Adam, an honest Saxon, to "the dark deed;" and her prudential argument that "it were best to obey the pretended messenger of the Lord than risk his aversion," however natural, is very crafty for so young a sinner. In Milton we find the Ideal, and before Eve speaks one may be certain of Adam's fall--for

----------in her face excuse
Came prologue, and apology too prompt,
Which with bland words at will, she thus address'd.

A description too metaphysical for the meagre invention of the old Saxon monk!

We dare not place "the Milton of our forefathers" by the side of the only Milton whom the world will recognise. We would not compare our Saxon poetry to Saxon art, for that was too deplorable; but, to place Caedmon in a parallel with Milton, which Plutarch might have done, for he was not very nice in his resemblances, we might as well compare the formless forms and the puerile inventions of the rude Saxon artist, profusely exhibited in the drawings of the original manuscript of Caedmon,[18] with the noble conceptions and the immortal designs of the Sistine Chapel.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Sir Francis Palgrave's "Dissertation on Caedmon," in the
Archaeologia.