precisely when Saxon can be said to have ceased and English to have begun, it must be supposed that the progress and improvement of the national speech was most considerable at those epochs which tended to restore the importance of the people. The hypothesis of a sudden transmutation of Saxon into English appears, on the whole, not to be distinctly made out. At the same time, some public events might be highly favourable to the progress and cultivation of the language. Of those events, the establishment of municipal governments, and of elective magistrates in the towns, must have been very important, as they furnished materials and incentives for daily discussion and popular eloquence. As property and security increased among the people, we may also suppose the native minstrelsy to have revived. The minstrels, or those who wrote for them, translated or imitated Norman romances; and in so doing, enriched the language with many new words, which they borrowed from the originals, either from

* Vide Tyrwhitt's Preface to the Canterbury Tales, where a distinct account is given of the grammatical changes exhibited in the rise and progress of English.

It is likely that the Normans would have taught us the use of rhyme and their own metres, whether these had been known or not to the Anglo-Saxons before the Conquest. But respecting Mr. Tyrwhitt's position, that we owe all our forms of verse, and the use of rhyme, entirely to the Normans, I trust the reader will pardon me for introducing a mere doubt on a subject which cannot be interesting to many. With respect to rhyme, I might lay some stress on the authority of Mr. Turner, who, in his History of the Anglo-Saxons, says that the AngloSaxon versification possessed occasional rhyme; but as he admits that rhyme formed no part of its constituent character, for fear of assuming too much, let it be admitted that we have no extant specimens of rhyme in our language before the Conquest. One stanza of a ballad shall indeed be mentioned, as an exception to this, which may be admitted or rejected, at the reader's pleasure. In the mean time let it be recollected, that if we have not rhyme in the vernacular verse, we have examples of it in the poetry of the Anglo-Saxon churchmenabundance of it in Bede's and Boniface's Latin verses. We meet also, in the same writers, with lines which resemble modern verse in their trochaic and iambic structure, considering that structure not as classical but accentual metre.-Take, for example, these verses: "Quando Christus Deus noster Natus est ex Virgine-"

which go precisely in the same cadence with such modern trochaics as

"Would you hear how once repining
Great Eliza captive lay."

And we have many such lines as these:

"Ut floreas cum domino

In sempiterno solio

Qua Martyres in cuneo," &c.

which flow exactly like the lines in L'Allegro:

want of corresponding terms in their own vocabulary, or from the words appearing to be more agreeable. Thus, in a general view, we may say that, amidst the early growth of her commerce, literature, and civilization, England acquired the new form of her language, which was destined to carry to the ends of the earth the blessings from which it sprung.

In the formation of English from its Saxon and Norman materials, the genius of the native tongue might be said to prevail, as it subdued to Saxon grammar and construction the numerous French words which found their way into the language.* But it was otherwise with respect to our poetry-in which, after the Conquest, the Norman Muse must be regarded as the earliest preceptress of our own. Mr. Tyrwhitt has even said, and his opinion seems to be generally adopted, that we are indebted for the use of rhyme, and for all the forms of our versification, entirely to the Normans.† Whatever might be the case with regard to our

And pomp, and feast, and revelry,

With masque, and antique pageantry."

Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own eight-syllable iambic. It is singular that rhyme and such metres as the above, which are generally supposed to have come into the other modern languages from the Latin rhymes of the church, should not have found their way from thence into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse. But they certainly did not, we shall be told; for there is no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon verse, before the Conquest. Of such specimens, however, it is not pretended that we have any thing like a full or regular series. On the contrary, many Saxon ballads, which have been alluded to by Anglo-Norman writers as of considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very names of their composers. And from a few articles saved in such a wreck, can we pronounce confidently on the whole contents of the cargo? The following solitary stanza, however, has been preserved, from a ballad attributed to Canute the Great.

"Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely,
The Cnut Ching reuther by,
Roweth Cnites noer the land,
And here we thes Muniches sang."

"Merry sang the Monks in Ely,
When Canute King was sailing by:
Row, ye knights, near the land,
And let us hear these Monks' song."

There is something very like rhyme in the Anglo-Saxon stanza. I have no doubt that Canute heard the monks singing Latin rhymes; and I have some suspicion that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas of Ely, who knew the whole song, translates his specimen of it in Latin lines, which, whether by accident or design, rhyme to each other. The genius of the ancient AngloSaxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, peri

forms of versification, the chief employment of our earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant the fictions of the Norman school, and to naturalize them in our language.

The most liberal patronage was afforded to Norman minstrelsy in England by the first kings of the new dynasty. This encouragement, and the consequent cultivation of the northern dialect of French, gave it so much the superiority over the southern or troubadour dialect, that the French language, according to the acknowledgment of its best informed antiquaries, received from England and Normandy the first of its works which deserve to be cited. The Norman trouveurs, it is allowed, were more eminent narrative poets than the Provençal troubadours. No people had a better right to be the founders of chivalrous poetry than the Normans. They were the most energetic generation of modern men. Their leader, by the conquest of England in the eleventh century, consolidated the feudal system upon a broader basis than it ever had before possessed. Before the end of the same century, Chivalry rose to its full growth as an institution, by the circumstance of martial zeal being enlisted under the banners of superstition. The crusades, though they certainly did not give birth to jousts and tournaments, must have imparted to them a new spirit and interest, as the preparatory images of a consecrated warfare. And those spectacles constituted a source of description to the romancers, to which no exact counterpart is to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. But the growth of what may properly be called romantic poetry was not instantaneous after the Conquest; and it was not till "English Richard ploughed the deep," that the crusaders seem to have found a place among the heroes of romance. Till the middle of the twelfth century, or possibly later, no work of professed fiction, or bearing any semblance to epic fable, can be traced in Norman verse-nothing but songs, satires, chronicles, or didactic works, to all of which, however, the name of Romance, derived from the Roman descent of the French tongue,

phrastical, and elliptical; but, according to that writer's conjecture, a new and humble, but perspicuous style of poetry was introduced at a later time, in the shape of the narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive the possibility of rhyme having found a place; because the verse would stand in need of that ornament to distinguish it from prose, more than in the elliptical and inverted manner. With regard to our anapæstic mea

was applied in the early and wide acceptation of the word. To these succeeded the genuine Metrical Romance, which, though often rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ingenuity, and design, sufficient to distinguish it from the dry and dreary chronicle. The reign of French metrical romance may be chiefly assigned to the latter part of the twelfth, and the whole of the thirteenth century; that of English metrical romance, to the latter part of the thirteenth, and the whole of the fourteenth century. Those ages of chivalrous song were, in the mean time, fraught with events which, while they undermined the feudal system, gradually prepared the way for the decline of chivalry itself. Literature and science were commencing, and even in the improvement of the mechanical skill employed to heighten chivalrous or superstitious magnificence, the seeds of arts, industry, and plebeian independence were unconsciously sown. One invention, that of gunpowder, is eminently marked out as the cause of the extinction of Chivalry; but even if that invention had not taken place, it may well be conjectured that the contrivance of other means of missile destruction in war, and the improvement of tactics, would have narrowed that scope for the prominence of individual prowess which was necessary for the chivalrous character, and that the progress of civilization must have ultimately levelled its romantic consequence. But to anticipate the remote effects of such causes, if scarcely within the ken of philosophy, was still less within the reach of poetry. Chivalry was still in all its glory; and to the eye of the poet appeared as likely as ever to be immortal. The progress of civilization even ministered to its external importance. The early arts made chivalrous life, with all its pomp and ceremonies, more august and imposing, and more picturesque as a subject for description.

Literature, for a time, contributed to the same effect, by her jejune and fabulous efforts at history, in which the athletic worthies of classical story and of modern romance were gravely connected by an ideal

sure, or triple-time verse, Dr. Percy has shown that its rudiments can be traced to Scaldic poetry. It is often found very distinct in Langlande; and that species of verse, at least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a Norman origin.

*The practice of translating French rhyming romances into English verse, however, continued down to the reign of Henry VII.

genealogy. Thus the dawn of human improvement smiled on the fabric which it was ultimately to destroy, as the morning sun gilds and beautifies those masses of frostwork, which are to melt before its noonday heat.

The elements of romantic fiction have been traced up to various sources; but neither the Scaldic, nor Saracenic, nor Armorican theory of its origin can sufficiently account for all its materials. Many of them are classical, and others derived from the Scriptures. The migrations of Science are difficult enough to be traced; but Fiction travels on still lighter wings, and scatters the seeds of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, till they surprise us by springing up with similarity in regions the most remotely divided. There was a vague and unselecting love of the marvellous in romance, which sought for adventures, like its knights errant, in every quarter where they could be found; so that it is easier to admit of all the sources which are imputed to that species of fiction, than to limit our belief to any one of them.‡

Norman verse dwelt for a considerable time in the tedious historic style, before it

Twelfth

reached the shape of amusing fable; Century. and we find the earliest efforts of the Native Muse confined to translating Norman

* Geoffrey of Monmouth's history, of which the modern opinion seems to be, that it was not a forgery, but derived from an Armorican original, and the pseudo-Turpin's Life of Charlemagne, were the grand historical magazines of the romancers. [Ellis's Met. Rom. vol. i. p. 75.] Popular songs about Arthur and Charlemagne (or, as some will have it, Charles Martel), were probably the main sources of Turpin's forgery and of Geoffrey's Armorican book. Even the proverbial mendacity of the pseudo-Turpin must have been indebted for the leading hints to songs that were extant respecting Charlemagne. The stream of fiction having thus spread itself in those grand prose reservoirs, afterwards flowed out from thence again in the shape of verse, with a force renewed by accumulation. Once more, as if destined to alternations, romance, after the fourteenth century, returned to the shape of prose, and in many instances made and carried pretensions to the sober credibility of history.

It is common fairness to Mr. Campbell, to say that the late Mr. Price has cited this passage as one distinguishable alike for its truth and its beauty,-that establishes the fact that popular fiction is in its nature traditive. Introd. to Warton's Hist. p. 92.-C.

Various theories have been proposed for the purpose of explaining the origin of romantic fiction. Percy contended for a Scandinavian, Warton for an Arabian, and Leyden for an Armorican birth, to which Ellis inclined; while some have supposed it to be of Provençal, and others of Norman invention. If every argument has not been exhausted, every hypothesis has. But all their systems, as Sir Walter Scott says, seem to be inaccurate,

verse, while it still retained its uninviting form of the chronicle. The first of the Norman poets, from whom any versifier in the language is known to have translated, was Wace, a native of Jersey, born in the reign of Henry II. In the year 1155, Wace finished his "Brut d'Angleterre," which is a French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Great Britain, deduced from Brutus to Cadwallader, in 689. Layamon, a priest of Ernleye upon Severn, translated Wace's Metrical Chronicle into the verse of the popular tongue; and notwithstanding Mr. Ellis's date of 1180, [1185?] may be supposed, with equal probability, to have produced his work within ten or fifteen years after the middle of the twelfth century.|| Layamon's translation may be considered as the earliest specimen of metre in the native language, posterior to the Conquest; except some lines in the Saxon Chronicle on the death of William I., and a few religious rhymes, which, according to Matthew Paris, the Blessed Virgin was pleased to dictate to St. Godric, the hermit, near Durham; unless we add to these the specimen of Saxor poetry published in the Archæologia by Mr. Conybeare, who supposes that composition to be posterior to the Conquest, and to be the last expiring voice of the Saxon Muse. Of the dialect of Layamon, Mr.

in so far as they have been adopted exclusively of each other, and of the general proposition,-that fables of a nature similar to the Romances of Chivalry, modified according to manners and the state of society, must necessarily be invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows upon the surface of the soil in every climate and in every country. (Misc. P. W, vol. vi. p. 174.) "In reality," says Southey, "mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full account; for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason, in other words, wherever there is man. And in similar stages of civilization, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the difference of time and scene. Pref. to Morte D'Arthur.-C.

Ellis (p. 44) says, Henry I., whom he professes to have Warton (p. 67) says he was educated at Caen, was canon of Bayeux, and chaplain to Henry II.-C.

seen.

Two copies of Layamon's or Lazamon's Brut are in the British Museum, Cott. MSS. Calig. A ix. and Otho C 13. Warton and Price have only touched incidentally on Layamon, from Mr. Ellis and Mr. Campbell's showing, one of the most important authors in the English language.-C.

Two specimens of the ancient state of the language, viz. the stanzas on old age, beginning "He may him sore adreden," and the quotation from the Ormulum, which Dr. Johnson placed, on the authority of Hickes, nearly

Mr.

Mitford, in his Harmony of Languages, observes, that it has "all the appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of those who spoke it. It is truly neither Saxon nor English."* Ellis's opinion of its being simple Saxon has been already noticed. So little agreed are the most ingenious speculative men on the characteristics of style, which they shall entitle Saxon or English. We may, however, on the whole, consider the style of Layamon to be as nearly the intermediate state of the old and new languages as can be found in any ancient specimen:-s thing like the new insect stirring its wings, before it has shaken off the aurelia state. But of this work, or of any specimen supposed to be written in the early part of the thirteenth century, displaying a sudden transition from Saxon to English, I am disposed to repeat my doubts.

Thirteenth

-some

Without being over credulous about the antiquity of the Lives of the Saints, and the other fragments of the thirteenth Century. century, which Mr. Ellis places in chronological succession next to Layamon, we may allow that before the date of Robert of Gloucester, not only the legendary and devout style, but the amatory and satirical, had begun to be rudely cultivated in the language. It was customary, in that age, to make the minstrels sing devotional strains to the harp, on Sundays, for the edification of the people, instead of the verses on gayer subjects which were sung at public entertainments; a circumstance which, while it indicates the usual care of the Catholic church to make use of every hold over the popular mind, discovers also the fondness of the people for their poetry, and the attractions which it had already begun to assume. Of the satirical style I have already alluded to one example in the "Land of Cokayne," an allegorical satire on the luxury of the church, couched under the description of an imaginary paradise, in which the nuns are

after the Conquest, are considered by Mr. Tyrwhitt to be of a later date than Layamon's translation. Their language is certainly more modern.

*Mitford, p. 170. In the specimen of Layamon published by Mr. Ellis, not a Gallicism is to be found, nor even a Norman term: and so far from exhibiting any "appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of those who spoke it," nearly every important form of Anglo-Saxon grammar is rigidly adhered to; and so little was the language altered at this advanced period of Norman influence, that a few slight

represented as houris, and the black and gray monks as their paramours. This piece has humour, though not of the most delicate kind; and the language is easy and fluent, but it possesses nothing of style, sentiment, or imagery, approaching to poetry. Another specimen of the pleasantry of the times is more valuable; because it exhibits the state of party feeling on real events, as well as the state of the language at a precise time. It is a ballad, entitled "Richard of Alemaigne," composed by one of the adherents of Simon de Montfort, earl of Leicester, after the defeat of the royal party at the battle of Lewes in 1264. In the year after that battle the royal cause was restored, and the earl of Warren and Sir Hugh Bigod returned from exile, and assisted in the king's victory. In this satirical ballad, those two personages are threatened with death, if they should ever fall into the hands of their enemies. Such a song and such threats must have been composed by Leicester's party in the moment of their triumph, and not after their defeat and dispersion; so that the date of the piece is ascertained by its contents. This political satire leads me to mention another, which the industrious Ritson published, and which, without violent anachronism, may be spoken of among the specimens of the thirteenth century; as it must have been composed within a few years after its close, and relates to events within its verge. It is a ballad on the execution of the Scottish patriots, Sir William Wallace and Sir Simon Fraser. The diction is as barbarous as we should expect from a song of triumph on such a subject. It relates the death and treatment of Wallace very minutely. The circumstance of his being covered with a mock crown of laurel in Westminster Hall, which Stowe repeats, is there mentioned; and that of his legs being fastened with iron fetters "under his horses wombe," is told with savage exultation. The piece was probably

variations might convert it into genuine Anglo-Saxon. PRICE, Warton, vol. i. p. 109.-C.

"Though some make slight of Libels," says Selden, "yet you may see by them how the wind sits; as, take a straw, and throw it up into the air, you shall see by that which way the wind is, which you shall not do by casting up a stone. More solid things do not show the complex. ion of the times, so well as ballads and libels."-Table Talk. See it in Percy's Reliques, and in Wright's Political Songs of England, p. 69.-C.

Ritson's Ancient Songs.

A few love-songs of that early period have been preserved, which are not wholly destitute of beauty and feeling. Their expression, indeed, is often quaint, and loaded with alliteration; yet it is impossible to look without a pleasing interest upon strains of tenderness which carry us back to so remote an age, and which disclose to us the softest emotions of the human mind, in times abounding with such opposite traits of historical recollection. Such a stanza as the following would not disgrace the lyric poetry of a refined age.

For her love I cark and care,
For her love I droop and dare;
For her love my bliss is bare,

And all I wax wan.

For her love in sleep I slake,
For her love all night I wake;
For her love mourning I make
More than any man.

In another pastoral strain, the lover says:-
When the nightingale singés the woods waxen green;
Leaf, and grass, and blosme, springs in Averyl, I ween:
And love is to my heart gone with one spear so keen,
Night and day my blood it drinks-my heart doth me teen.

Robert, a monk of Gloucester, whose surname is unknown, is supposed to have finished his Rhyming Chronicle about the year 1280. He translated the Legends of Geoffrey of Monmouth, and continued the History of England down to the time of Edward I., in the beginning of whose reign he died. The topographical, as well as narrative, minuteness of his Chronicle, has made it a valuable authority to antiquaries; and as such it was consulted by Selden, when he wrote his Notes to Drayton's "Polyolbion." After observing some traits of humour and sentiment, moderate as they may be, in compositions as old as the middle of the thirteenth century, we might naturally expect to find in Robert of Gloucester not indeed a decidedly poetical manner, but some approach to the animation of poetry.

* Wright assigns it to 1306. Political Songs, p. 212. -0.

† It is here stripped of its antiquated spelling. I am deprived of sleep.

Ellis, vol. i. p. 97. It was evidently written after the year 1278, as the poet mentions King Arthur's sumptuous tomb, erected in that year before the high altar of

as he has been called,|| whatever progress in the state of the language it may display, comes in reality nothing nearer the character of a work of imagination than Layamon's version of Wace, which preceded it by a hundred years. One would not imagine, from Robert of Gloucester's style, that he belonged to a period when a single effusion of sentiment, or a trait of humour and vivacity, had appeared in the language. On the contrary, he seems to take us back to the nonage of poetry, when verse is employed not to harmonize and beautify expression, but merely to assist the memory. Were we to judge of Robert of Gloucester not as a chronicler, but as a candidate for the honours of fancy, we might be tempted to wonder at the frigidity with which he dwells, as the first possessor of such poetical ground, on the history of Lear, of Arthur, and Merlin; and with which he describes a scene so susceptible of poetical effect as the irruption of the first crusaders into Asia, preceded by the sword of fire which hung in the firmament, and guided them eastward in their path. But, in justice to the ancient versifier, we should remember, that he had still only a rude language to employ-the speech of boors and burghers, which, though it might possess a few songs and satires, could afford him no models of heroic narration. In such an age, the first occupant passes uninspired over subjects which might kindle the highest enthusiasm in the poet of a riper period; as the savage treads unconsciously, in his deserts, over mines of incalculable value, without sagacity to discover, or implements to explore them. In reality, his object was but to be historical. The higher orders of society still made use of French; and scholars wrote in that language or in Latin. His Chronicle was therefore recited to a class of his contemporaries to whom it must have been highly acceptable, as a history of their native country believed to be authentic, and composed in their native tongue. To the fabulous legends of antiquity he added a record of more re

Glastonbury church: and he declares himself a living witness of the remarkably dismal weather which distinguished the day upon which the battle of Evesham was fought, in 1265. From these and other circumstances, this piece appears to have been composed about the year 1280. WARTON, vol. i. p. 52.-C.

By Tom Hearne, his very accurate editor.-C.