with the fury of winter," during seven whole days and nights, combating with the walruses. The exploits of Beowulf are of a supernatural cast; and this circumstance has bewildered his translator amid mythic allusions, and thus the hero sinks into the incarnation of a Saxon idol, a protector of the human race. It is difficult to decide whether the marvellous incidents be mythical, or merely the exaggerations of the northern poetic faculty. We, however, learn by these, that corporeal energies and an indomitable spirit were the glories of the hero-life; and the outbreaks of their selfcomplacency resulted from their own convictions, after many a fierce trial. Such an heroic race we deem barbarous; but what are the nobler spirits of all times but the creatures of their age? who, however favoured by circumstances, can only do that which is practicable in the condition of society. Henforth, the son of Eglaff, sate at the feet of the king; jealousy stirred in his breast at the prowess of "the proud sea-farer." This cynical minister of the king ridicules his youthful exploits, and sarcastically assured the hero, that "he has come to a worse matter now, should he dare to pass the space of one night with the fiend." This personage is the Thersites of our northern Homer - "With witty malice studious to defame, And like Thersites, the son of Eglaff receives a blasting reproach "I tell thec, son of Eglaff, drunken with mead, that I have greater strength upon the sea than any other man. We two (he alludes to his competitor) when we were but boys, with our naked swords in our hands, where the waves were fiercest, warred with the walruses. The whale-fish dragged me to the bottom of the sea, grim in his gripe; the mighty sea-beast received the war-rush through my hand. The sea became calm so that I beheld the ocean-promontories, as the light broke from the east. Never since have the seasailors been hindered of their way; never have I heard of a harder battle by night under the concave of heaven, nor of a man more wretched on the ocean-streams. Of such ambushes and fervour of swords I have not heard ought of thee, else had the fiend I come to vanquish never accomplished such horrors against the prince. I boast not, therefore, son of Eglaff! but never have I slaughtered those of my kin, for which hast thou incurred damnation, though thy wit be good." In this state of imperfect civilisation, we discover already a right conception of the female character. At the banquet the queen appears; she greeted the young Goth, bearing in her own hand the bright sweet liquor in the twisted mead-cup. She went among the and the old mindful of their races; young the free-born queen then sate beside the monarch. There was laughter of heroes. A bard sung serene on "the origin of things," as Iopas sang at the court of Dido, and Demodocus at that of Alcinous. The same bard again excites joy in the hall by some warlike tale. Never was banquet without poet in the Homeric times. Here our task ends, which was not to analyse the tale of Beowulf, but solely to exhibit the manners of a primeval epoch in society. The whole romance, though but short, bears another striking feature of the mighty minstrel of antiquity; it is far more dramatic than narrative, for the characters discover themselves more by dialogue than by action. The literary history of this Anglo-Saxon metrical romance is too remarkable to be omitted. It not only cast a new light on a disputed object in our own literary history, but awoke the patriotism of a foreign nation. Beowulf had shared the fate of Cadmon, being preserved only in a single manuscript in the Cottonian Library, where it escaped from the destructive fire of 1731, not however without injury. In 1705, Wanley had attempted to describe it, but he did not surmount the difficulty. Our literary antiquaries, with Ritson for their leader, stubbornly asserted that the Anglo-Saxons had no metrical romance, as they opined by their scanty remains. The learned historian of our Anglo-Saxons, in the progress of his ceaseless pursuit, unburied this hidden treasure-which at once refuted the prevalent notions; but this literary curiosity was fated to excite deeper emotions among the honest Danes. The existing manuscript of "The Exploits of Beowulf” is of the tenth century; but the poem was evidently composed at a far remoter period; though, as all the personages of the romance are Danes, and all the circumstances are Danish, it may be conjectured, if it be an original Anglo-Saxon poem, that it was written when the Danes had a settlement in some parts of Britain. At Copenhagen the patriotism of literature is ardent. The learned there claimed Beowulf as their own, and alleged that the Anglo-Saxon was the version of a Danish poem; it became one of the most ancient monuments of the early history of their country, and not the least precious to them for its connexion with English affairs. The Danish antiquaries still amuse their imagination with the once Danish kingdom of Northumbria, and still call us "brothers;" as at Caen, where the whole academy still persist in disputations on the tapestry of Bayeux, and style themselves our "masters." It was, therefore, a national mortification to the Danes that it was an Englishman who had first made known this relic; and further, that it existed only in the library of England. The learned THORKELIN was despatched on a literary expedition, and a careful transcript of the manuscript of Beowulf was brought to the learned and patriotic Danes. It was finished for the press, accompanied by a translation and a commentary, in 1807. At the siege of Copenhagen a British bomb fell on the study of the hapless scholar, annihilating "Beowulf," transcript, translation, and commentary, the toil of twenty years. It seemed to be felt, by the few whose losses by sieges never appear in royal Gazettes, as not one of the least in that sad day of warfare with " our brothers." THORKELIN was urged to restore the loss. But it was under great disadvantages that his edition was published in 1815. Mr. Kemble has redeemed our honour by publishing a collated edition, afterwards corrected in a second with a literal version. Such versions may supply the wants of the philologist, but for the general reader they are doomed to be read like vocabularies. Yet even thus humbled and obscured, BEOWULF aspires to a poetic existence. He appeals to nature and excites our imagination while the monk, CEDMON, restricted by his faithful creed, and his pertinacious chronology - seems to have afforded more delight by his piety than the other by his genius-and remains renowned as "the Milton of our forefathers!" 52 THE ANGLO-NORMANS. THE Anglo-Saxon dominion in England endured for more than five centuries. A territorial people had ceased to be roving invaders, but stood themselves in dread of the invasions of their own ancient brotherhood. They trembled on their own shores at those predatory hordes who might have reminded them of the lost valour of their own ancestors. But their warlike independence had passed away. And, as a martial abbot declared of his countrymen, 66 they had taken their swords from their sides and had laid them on the altar, where they had rusted, and their edges were now too dull for the field."* They could not even protect the soil which they had conquered, and often wanted the courage to choose a king of their own race. Sometimes they stood ready to pay tribute to the Dane, and sometimes suffered the throne to be occupied by a Danish monarch. In a state of semi-civilisation their rude luxury hardly veiled their unintellectual character. Feeble sovereigns and a submissive people could not advance into national greatness. When the Duke of Normandy visited his friend and kinsman, Edward the Confessor, he beheld in England a mimetic Normandy; Norman favourites were courtiers, and Norman soldiers were seen in Saxon castles. Edward, long estranged from his native realm, had received his education in Normandy; and the English court affected to imitate the domestic habits of these French neighbours-the great speaking the foreign idiom in their houses, and writing in French their bills and accompts.† Already there was a faction of frenchified Saxons in the court of the unnational English Sovereign. William the Norman surveyed an empire already halfNorman; and in the prospect, with his accustomed foresight, he mused on a doubtful succession. A people who had often suffered themselves to fall the prey of their hardier neigh Speed, 441. This was said to "the Conqueror," and this abbot of St. Alban's paid dearly for the patriotism which had then become treason. † A circumstance which Milton has recorded. bour, lie open for conquest to a more intelligent and polished race. The victory of Hastings did not necessarily include the conquest of the people, and William still condescended to march to the throne under the shadow of a title. After a short residence of only three months in his newly-acquired realm, "the Conqueror" withdrew into his duchy, and there passed a long interval of nine months. William left many an unyielding Saxon; a spirit of resistance, however suppressed, bound men together, and partial insurrections seemed to be pushing on a crisis which might have reversed the conquest of England.* During this mysterious and protracted visit, and apparent abandonment of his new kingdom to the care of others, was a vast scheme of dominion nursed in the councils of Norman nobles, and strengthened by the boundless devotion of hardy adventurers, who were all to share in the present spoliation and the future royalty? In his prescient view did William there anticipate a conquest of long labour and of distant days; the state, the nobles, the ecclesiastics, the people, the land, and the language, all to be changed? Hume has ventured to surmise that the mind of the Norman laboured with this gigantic fabric of dominion. It is probable, however, that this child of a novel policy was submitted to a more natural * Our great lawyers probably imagined that the honour of the country is implicated in the title usually accorded to William the Norman; SPELMAN, the great antiquary, and BLACKSTONE, the historian and the expounder of our laws, have absolutely explained away the assumed title of "the Conqueror" to a mere technical feudal term of "Conquestor, or acquirer of any estate out of the common course of inheritance." The first purchaser (that is, he who brought the estate into the family which at present owns it) was styled "the Conqueror," and such is still the proper phrase in the law of Scotland. RITSON is indignant at what he calls "a pitiful forensic quibble." But another great lawyer and lord chancellor, the sedate WHITELOCKE, positively asserts that "William only conquered Harold and his army; for he never was, nor pretended to be, the conqueror of England, although the sycophant monks of the time gave him that title."-Whitelocke's Hist. of England, 33. In a charter, granting certain lands for the church of St. Paul's, which Stowe has translated from the record in the Tower, William denominates himself, "by the grace of God, King of Englishmen" (Rex Anglorum), and addresses it "to all his well-beloved French and English People, greeting.”—Stowe's Survey of London, 326, Edit. 1603. Did William on any occasion declare that he was "the Conqueror" as well as the Sovereign of England? When William attempted to learn the Saxon language, it is obvious that he did not desire to remind his new subjects that he ruled as Voltaire sung of his hero, qui régna sur la France, Par droit de Conquête et par droit de Naissance. |