The blooming meadows wave their healthful herbs,
Which hands experienc'd cull to serve mankind;
By thee, mid flowery banks, the waters glide
Where the glad fishermen their nets extend;
Thy gardens shine with apple-bending boughs,
Where the white lilies mingle with the rose;
Their morning hymns the feather'd tribes resound,
And warble sweet their great Creator's praise.
Dear cell! in thee my tutor's gentle voice
The lore of sacred wisdom often urg'd;
In thee at stated times the Thunderer's praise
My heart and voice with eager tribute paid.
Lov'd cell! with tearful songs I shall lament thee,
With groaning breast I shall regret thy charms;
No more thy poet's lay thy shades will cheer,
No more will Homer or thy Flaccus hail thee;
No more my boys beneath thy roof will sing,
But unknown hands thy solitudes possess.
Thus sudden fades the glory of the age,
Thus all things vanish in perpetual change.
Naught rests eternal or immutable:

The gloomy night obscures the sacred day;
The chilling winter plucks fair autumn's flowers;
The mournful storm the placid sea confounds;
Youth chases wild the palpitating stag,

While age incumbent totters on its staff.

Ah! wretched we! who love thee, fickle world!
Thou fliest our grasp and hurriest us to ruin.

One of Alcuin's fancies in versification was to close his second line with half of the first :

Præsul amate precor, hac tú diverte viator

Sis memor Albini ut, præsul amate precor.P

There are several poems, some short, others longer, in this kind of composition.

Many of Alcuin's poems are worthy of a perusal. Some exhibit the flowers of poetry, and some attempt tenderness and sensibility with effect. They are all distinguished by an easy and flowing versification. Several poems are addressed to his pupil Charlemagne, and mention him under the name of David, with a degree of affection which seldom approaches the throne. The adulation of a courtly poet, however, sometimes appears very gross, as in these lines, in which, alluding to Charlemagne's love

1740.

Nil manet æternum, nil immutabile vere est,
Obscurat sacrum nox tenebrosa diem.
Decutit et flores subito hyems frigida pulcros
Perturbat placidum et tristior aura mare.
Quae campis cervos agitabat sacra juventus
Incumbit fessos nunc baculo senior.
Nos miseri cur te fugitivum mundus amamus?
Tu fugis a nobis semper ubique ruens.

Alb. Opera. ed. Du Ch. p. 1731.

of poetry, he ventures to address him by the venerable name of the Chian bard:

Dulcis Homere vale, valeat tua vita per ævum,
Semper in æternum dulcis Homere vale.

This appears in the same poem with two other childish lines:

Semper ubique vale, dic, dic, dulcissime David,

David amor Flacci, semper ubique vale.

One of his poems consists of six stanzas, each of six lines. The two first are quoted, because this poem is very like one of the most common modes of versifying in the Anglo-Saxon poetry:

Te homo laudet,
Alme Creator,

Pectore mente,

Pacis amore,
Non modo parva,
Pars quia mundi est.

Sed tibi sancte
Solus imago,
Magna Creator,
Mentis in arce
Pectore puro
Dum pie vivit.

Of the other Latin poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, little need be said. We have a few fragments of some authors, but they deserve a small degree of consideration. Malmsbury has preserved to us part of a poem made on Athelstan, probably by a contem porary, of which the only curiosity is, that it is a mixture of final rhymes and middle rhymes. Where the poet ceases to rhyme at the end of his lines, he proceeds to rhyme in the middle; and where he desists from middle rhymes, he inserts his final ones.' There is some poetry on Edgar preserved by Ethelwerd; and the Vedastne MS. of the life of Dunstan contains some rhyming lines."

a Alb. Opera. ed. Du Ch. p. 1742, 1743.

• Ibid. p. 780.

The twelve first lines may be quoted as a specimen :
Regia progenies produxit nobile stemma
Cum tenebris nostris illuxit splendida gemma,
Magnus Ethelstanus patriæ decus, orbita recti,
Illustris probitas de vero nescia flecti.

Ad patris edictum datus in documenta scholarum,
Extimuit rigidos ferula crepitante magistros:
Et potans avidis doctrinæ mella medullis
Decurrit teneros, sed non pueriliter annos
Mox adolescentis vestitus fiore juventæ
Armorum studium tractabat, patre jubente.
Sed nec in hoc segnem senserunt bellica jura
Idquoque posterius juravit publica cura.

t Ethelw. lib. iv. c. 9.

Malms. lib. ii. p. 49.

a Acta Sanct. May.

CHAPTER VI.

Of the general Literature of the Anglo-Saxons.

THAT every nation improves as fast as the means and causes of the improvement within it, and the external agencies that are operating upon it can effect or allow, all anterior history proves; but the modes and paths of the progress of each country will be as different as its circumstances are dissimilar: in one age or state some directions will be taken peculiar to itself, and distinct from those of its predecessors or contemporaries. In their paths of excellence, it may be pausing, but it will be found to be forcing other channels of its own. The movement is always either preparation for advance, or a diffusion of attained improvements, or clear and steady progression. If its career seems on some points to be questionable, or retrograde, it will, on a more scrutinizing examination, be found to be decided and prosperous in others.

The Anglo-Saxon nation is an instance that may be adduced in verification of these principles. It did not attain a general or striking eminence in literature. But society wants other blessings besides these. The agencies that affected our ancestry took a different course: they impelled them towards that of political melioration, the great fountain of human improvement; and during the period of the Anglo-Saxon dynasty, laid firmly the foundations of that political constitution, and began the erection of that great social fabric, which Danes and Normans afterwards did not overthrow but contributed to consolidate and complete.

There were no causes in action of sufficient energy at that time to make the Anglo-Saxons a literary people. They had not, like the Gauls or Britons, the benefit of Roman instruction, to educate them; for both the Roman legions and settlers had quitted the island before they came. From the Britons they could gain nothing, because assailing them as invaders, and enslaving or exterminating them, there was no chance of any sympathy of mental cultivation. Nor were the Britons much qualified to have been their intellectual teachers. Luxury, civil factions, merciless wars with each other, and the Scotch and Irish depredations, were fast barbarizing the island, while the Saxons were fighting for its occupation. The songs of the British bards were engrossed by encomiums on martial slaughter, drunken carousals, or the mystical traditions of expiring Druidism, in which but a few

gleams of intelligent thought were at any time intermixed. Their historical events were twisted into the strange form of unnatural triads; and though they possessed many adages of moral wisdom and acute and satirical observation of life and manners, yet aphorisms without reasoning are but the sentences of a dictator, which impress the memory without cultivating the understanding; and even these could rarely benefit the Saxons, from the extreme dissimilarity to their own, of the language in which they were preserved. Hence, till Gregory planted Christianity in England, there was no means or causes of intellectual improvement to our fierce and active ancestors.

But Christianity was necessarily taught at first as a system of belief of certain doctrines, and of practice of certain rites and duties. The length of time requisite to inculcate and imbibe these left no opportunity for the diffusion of literature. The monks from Rome introduced some; but they had not only to bring it into the island, but to raise among the Anglo-Saxons the state of mind and capacity requisite to understand it, as well as the desire to attain it. No effects can take place without adequate causes. It was only among the monasteries that the new taste could be at first introduced, and among that part of the nation which devoted itself to religion. The rest neither felt the want of it, nor the value, nor had the leisure or the means of attending to it. The great majority of the population was in the working or servile state; and husbandry being imperfectly understood or practised, too much labour was required to raise the produce they needed, and too little was obtained, with all their efforts, to give that leisure and comfort without which no nation or individual will study. The higher classes being all independent, and either assailing or depredating on others, or watching and defending themselves, or pursuing their vindictive feuds, or attending their kings and chiefs in expeditions, witena-gemots, and festivities, or employing their time in learning the use of arms, or in pilgrimages, penances, and superstitions, or attending county or baronial courts, performing suit of service, and transacting that frequent civil business of life which their free institutions were always creating, had as little surplus leisure for the cultivation of literature as the vassal, peasant, or the interior domestic. Their dependent jurisdiction and franchises furnished also their thegns, or barons with continual employment. The clergy only were accessible to it; and these were, as a body, too poor to have books from which to learn it, and in their parochial villages had neither inducement nor opportunities to gain it. It was into the monasteries only that, under the circumstances of the day, the liberal studies could make any entrance. Nor at first even here. The monks were long occupied in building their churches and cloisters, and putting their ground in a state of cultivation, and of

raising from it the means of subsistence. Most of them for some time could scarcely do this. It was only as some became gradually affluent that they could afford to purchase manuscripts, or were at leisure to study them. Literature was not then generally wanted for preferment, business, distinction, occupation, or amusement in the world. There was too much for all classes to do and suffer. But as the more favoured monasteries acquired wealth, libraries, and leisure, some few individuals began to derive enjoyment from literature; and as fast as the means of obtaining it accrued, the taste and pursuit of it arose and was diffused. The neglect of it did not proceed from the barbarism or incapacity of the Anglo-Saxon mind, but from its energies being necessarily absorbed by more indispensable occupations. Our ancestors were clever and active men in all the transactions and habits of their day, and were exerting in all their concerns as much awakened intellect as their gross system of feeding and habits of drinking permitted to be developed. We have estimated them too low, because we have too highly appreciated the general condition of Roman society, and too much compared our forefathers with ourselves. Absence of literature has been too often mistaken for absence of intellect. It is usually forgotten that illiteracy has been the general character of the mass of all people, whether Egyptian, Phoenician, Greek, or Roman, as much as of the Goths or Anglo-Saxons. In the most celebrated countries of antiquity it was a portion only, and that but a small one, of their population which possessed either books or literature. It is only in our own times that these are becoming the property of nations at large. When our Anglo-Saxons applied to literature they showed the strength of their intellectual powers, and a rapidity of progress that has never been surpassed. Bede, Alcuin, and Erigena may be compared with any of the Roman or Greek authors who appeared after the third century. But that within a hundred years after knowledge, for the first time, dawned upon the Anglo-Saxons, such a man as Bede should have arisen, writing so soundly on every branch of study that had been pursued by the Romans, and forming in his works a kind of cyclopedia of almost all that was then known, is a phenomenon which it is easier to praise than to parallel.

The natural direction of the Anglo-Saxon mind, when first led

a I observe a passage in Bede which shows that even the Anglo-Saxon clergy made their literature subservient to their business. He says, "I have known many clerici placed in school, for this chiefly, that they might acquire a knowledge of secular letters, which teach their auditors most studiously to seek carnal things; to contend for obtaining the glory of the world; and to learn the subtleties of syllogisms and arguments, that they may triumph over the unlearned, who are circumvented with a verbosity of this sort." Again, "As many scholars exercise themselves in secular letters for the love of secular life, so I shall exercise myself in sacred letters." Bed. Op. vol. viii. p. 1063, 1064.