judgments, if calmly scrutinized, 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.*

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.t

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,

Before had been contriving ?"—P. L., ix. 138.

The

was or could be derived from any obscure source. 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 vigor 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,

*This speech, in which Satan appeals to and characterizes his Infernals, may be read in Parfait's Analysis of the Mystery. Hist. du Théâtre François, i., 79.

L'Angeleida of VALVASONE, the Adamo of ANDREINI, and oth- Hayley's Conjectures on the Origin of Paradise Lost. See also Tiraboschi and Ginguáná.

ers.

to mistake nature in her first poverty, bare,

meager, squalid, The nature of En

for the moulded nudity of the graces. nius was no more the nature of Virgil, than the nature of Cadmon 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 reached 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." Cædmon 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

cr

from the tree returning, in her hand

A bough of fairest fruit."—ix. 850.

In Cadmon 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 addressed."

A description too metaphysical for the meager 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 Cadmon 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 Cadmon,* with the noble conceptions and the immortal designs of the Cistine Chapel.

* These singular attempts at art may be inspected in above fifty plates, in the Archæologia, vol. xx. We may rejoice at their preservation, for art, even in the attempts of its children, may excite ideas which might not else have occurred to us.

57

BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE.

THE Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of "The Exploits of Beowulf" forms a striking contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Cædmon. Its genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity; but it derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive simplicity of a Homeric period- the infancy of customs and manners and emotions of that hero-life, which the Homeric poems first painted for mankind that hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the senti mental romance of another age and another race.

The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were those kinglings

66

who could possess themselves of a territory in a single incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays, extended their dominion as sea-kings" on the illimitable ocean. * The war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society, when great men knew only to be heroes flattered by their bards, whose songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons.

We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily prowess; vaunting and talkative of their sires and of themselves; the son ever known by denoting the father, and the father by his marriage alliancethat primitive mode of recognition, at a period when, amid

* See the curious delineation of the Vikingr of the North, in Turner's Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons, i., 456, third edition.

the perpetual conflicts of rival chieftains, scarcely any but relations could be friends; the family-bond was a sure claim to protection. Like the Homeric heroes, they were as unrelenting in their hatreds as indissoluble in their partisanship; suspicious of the stranger, but welcoming the guest; we find them rapacious, for plunder was their treasure, and prodigal in their distributions of their golden armlets and weighed silver, for their egotism was as boundless as their violence. Yet pride and glory fermented the coarse leaven of these mighty marauders, who were even chivalric, ere chivalry rose into an order. The religion of these ages was wild as their morality; few heroes but bore some relationship to Woden; and even in their rude paganized Christianity, some mythological name cast its lustre in their genealogies. In the uncritical chronicles of the middle ages it is not always evident whether the mortal was not a divinity. Their mythic legends have thrown confusion into their national annals, often accepted by historians as authentic records.* But if antiquaries still wander among

* Mr. KEMBLE, the translator of BEOWULF, has extricated himself out of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero. Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the translation, it is preceded by "A Postscript to the Preface," far more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of "the postscript to cut away the preface root and branch," for all that he had published was delusion! particularly "all that part of my preface which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null and void!" The result of all this scholar's painful researches is, that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand; an ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies, and history labors to reduce to mortal dimensions.

The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these our old masters who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at their head, have "treated mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Nu