Cumberland. From the mixed race thus formed, a race which combined the genius of two dissimilar and gifted peoples, many of the greatest poets of England have sprung. Indeed it may be truly said, that English Literature is the expression and outcome, not of the English race and character alone, but of that character modified and enriched by the Celt. Not only has the Celtic blood thus mingled with the English: Celtic poetry and legend have furnished subject and inspiration to English writers down to our own day. It is, therefore, important for us to gain some notion of the Celtic as well as of the early English spirit, for in the literature of England we recognize the presence of both.

The Britons.

The Britons, like the English, were a huge, powerful race; they had fierce gray or bluish eyes, and light or reddish hair. Wild as they seemed before they lost their native vigor under the Roman rule, they had a natural vein of poetry and sentiment more pathetic and delicate than the somewhat prosaic and stolid English. They were quick-witted, unstable, lacking the English capacity for dogged and persistent effort, easily depressed and easily exalted, quickly sensitive to romance, to beauty, to sadness. Beside the stern and massive literature of the early English, with its dark background of storm and forest, with its resolution. and its fatalism, with the icy solitude of its northern ocean, stands that of the Celt, bright as fairy-land with gorgeous colors and the gleam of gold and precious stones, astir with the quick play of fancy, enlivened by an un-English vivacity and humor, and touched by an exquisite pathos. Here is the description from one of the Celtic Romances of a young knight going out to seek his fortune:

"And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed

hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and on him a saddle of costly gold. And in the youth's hand were two spears of silver, sharp, well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind and cause blood to flow, and swifter than the fall of the dew-drop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at the heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was upon his thigh, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven; his war horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled, white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one that was on the left side bounded across to the right side, and the one on the right to the left, and like two sea-swallows sported round him.

And the blade of grass bent not beneath him, so light was his step as he journeyed toward the gate of Arthur's palace."

The familiar figure of the young man going forth to conquer the world in the strength of his youth is here emblazoned with all the glowing colors, the delicate fancy of the Celtic genius.

Or take the following as an illustration of the Celtic sentiment and Celtic love of nature:

"The maiden was clothed in a robe of flame-colored silk, and about her neck was a collar of ruddy gold, on which were precious emeralds and rubies. More yellow was her head than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood anemone amidst the spray of the meadow-fountain. The eye of the trained hawk, the glance of the three mewed falcon, was not brighter than hers.

"Whoso beheld her was filled with her love; four white trefoils sprung up where'er she trod."

And finally, as an example of the Celtic humor, add the picture of another maiden as a study of the grotesque :

"And thereupon they saw a black curly-headed maiden enter, riding upon a yellow mule, with jagged thongs in her hand to urge it on; and having a rough and hideous aspect. Blacker were her face and her hands than the blackest iron covered with pitch; and her hue was not more frightful than her form. High cheeks had she and a face lengthened downward and a short nose with distended nostrils. And one eye was of a piercing mottled gray, and the other was black as jet deep sunk in her head. And her teeth were long and yellow, more yellow were they than the flower of the broom . . . and her figure was very thin and spare except her feet, which were of huge size."*

While the early English had certain great traits of character which were lacking in the Celt-the genius for governing, steadfastness, earnestness-the Celt was strong where the English were deficient. The mingling of these races, therefore, during the long period before the outburst of literature in the fourteenth century, was an important element in the unconscious preparation for the latter time. We can better understand this by remembering that William Shakespeare, the greatest genius of the modern world, stands as the highest example of this union of Celt and Teuton. "It is not without significance that the highest type of the race, the one Englishman who has combined in the largest measure the mobility and fancy of the Celt with the depth and energy of the Teutonic temper, was born on the old Welsh and English border-land in the forest of Arden."+

LITERATURE BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST. To this preparation by the making of the race must be added the education which came to the heathen English through contact with the religion and learning of Christian Europe. Christianity

Christianity.

Story of Pereder,” Mabinogion 114, Guest's ed.

†J. R. Green, quoted in Art. on Shakespeare," Encycl. Brit., 9th edition, which consult on this subject.

came as a new and mighty force to the serious-minded and naturally religious English; to it the beginning of English literature in England is directly due. Introduced in the north by St. Columba, and in the south by St. Augustine, it not only built churches, but founded great monastic schools, through which the culture of Italy was brought to Englishmen. It is within the walls of a monastery, the Abbey of Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, that we find the beginning of English poetry. There Cadmon, the herdsman, sings his song of the creation, a paraphrase of the book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible. In form, his rude verse resembles that chanted for centuries by the gleeman, or harper, in the old home of his race; but it is Christianity that inspires him, and puts a new song in his mouth. It is the monastery at Jarrow, in Northumbria, that gives England her first great prose writer, Bæda, or Bede, the teacher and monk-scholar (673-735). During Bede's lifetime the scholarship of Northumbria was superior to that of any nation of Western Europe. We gain an idea of about 800. the intellectual power of the English by remembering that, about a century before Bede and Cædmon, Northumbria was an illiterate and heathen kingdom.

Literary Greatness of Northumbria, 670 to

Revival of Learning in the fred, 880-901.

The literary greatness of Northumbria was interrupted by repeated invasions of the Danes, barbarous and heathen tribes, who at last gained possession of the North of England, under the treaty of Wedmore, 878. But learning, thus driven from south under Althe North, was fostered in the South by the energy and enthusiasm of Alfred the Great (880-901), who established schools, improved the education of the clergy, made his court a center of learning, and even himself translated from the monkish Latin into English for the benefit of his people, Bede's History of the English Church, and other works.

After the death of Alfred, the country was continually worried by the Danes; learning declined, and there were but few scholars of note in England from the beginning of the tenth century to the Norman Conquest.

In the five centuries between the first settlement of the English and this great event, we thus see the mind of the nation refined and developed by the influence of Christianity, and by the Latin learning and the older civilization of Southern Europe, which enter through the monastic schools.

THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

The conquest of England by the Normans, in 1066, brought a new and powerful influence into English life and literature. The Normans, or Northmen, were originally a mixed horde of piratical adventurers from Scandinavia and Denmark, who had won for themselves a country in the North of France. Enterprising, quickwitted, open to new ideas, this race of born rulers did more than seize upon some of the fairest lands of Southern Europe; wherever it went, it appropriated much that was best in the civilization of those it subdued. The fur-clad and half-savage Northmen, whose black, squaresailed ships crowded up the Seine after Rollo, were heathen freebooters. The Normans who conquered England a century and a half later, were the most courtly, cultured, art-loving, and capable race in Europe. In origin, they were Teutonic, like the English; yet so completely had they adopted and, in some respects, improved the civilization of the Gaul and the Roman, that scarcely an outward trace of their origin remained. After establishing themselves in Normandy, they had rapidly acquired the corrupt Latin of the region, and transformed it into a literary language. "They found it a barbarous jargon, they fixed it in writing, and they em