spoken seemed to him so slight, so much a matter of course, that it was forgotten as soon as uttered; it was merely his way of looking at a world unknown to his listener. She did not know of what woman it was that he had dared to speak with such contempt; probably of some one she had never seen. It was not at the stranger alone; it was through her at all women that the mire of suspicion had been thrown.

She could not go forward now, and while she stood trying to grow calm through her indignation and seeing that she must go home by the other road, which would take her quite a distance out of her way, scraps of the conversation that fell upon her ears found lodgment in her mind. The two seemed to be talking of some man now. Then all at once she heard Bulchester say: "It's the oddity that takes you; she had lost what went before "that will soon wear off. But I'm glad enough you're not as wise as I, to prefer the other. What makes you so sure, though, that he has secured your ?" In some movement she lost the last word and the answer, unless it were

merely a significant exclamation of belief. "You wouldn't stand upon the chances of change though," resumed Bulchester, "I know you well enough. But, according to you, there's the insuperable obstacle."

Edmonson laughed contemptuously. "Insuperable?" he answered. "Stray shots have taken off more superfluous kings and men than the world knows of. And just now, with this prospect of war before the country, something is sure to happen,- to happen, Bulchester; luck has a passion for me, and after all her caprices, she is coming to-."

Elizabeth lost the rest of the sentence. She was already on her way home by the other road, treading softly while on the beach, lest the pebbles should betray her footsteps. When she was well out of hearing she stopped a moment to take breath. She stood looking out upon the expanse of ocean before her as if her sight could reach to the unknown world beyond it. "Last night," she said, "I thought the worst had come to me. I was wrong."

[TO BE CONTINUED.]

It is a pleasure to throw back the door,
And view the relics of departed hours;
To brush the cobwebs from the ancient lore,
And turn again the book of withered flowers.
Within the dusty chambers of the past,

Old pictures hang upon the crumbling walls; Dim shadowy forms are in the twilight cast, And many a dance is whirling through the halls.

There are bright fires blazing on the hearth,

The merry shout falls on the ear again; And little footsteps patter down the path, Just like the coming of the summer rain. I hear the music of the rippling rill,

The dews of morn are sprinkled on my cheek; While down the valley and upon the hill

The laughing echoes play their hide-andseek.

I roam the meadow where the violets grow, I watch the shadows o'er the mountain creep;

I bathe my feet where sparkling fountains flow, Or bow my head on moss-grown rocks to

sleep.

I hear the bell ring out the passing hour,
I hear its music o'er the valleys flung;
O, what a preacher is that time-worn tower,

Reading great sermons with its iron tongue! The old church clock, forever swinging slow,

With moving hands at morning and at even, Points to the sleepers in the yard below,

Then lifts them upward to the distant heaven. How will such memories o'er the spirit stray,

Of hopes and joys, of sorrows and of tears; They are the tomb-stones time will ne'er decay, Although the moss will gather with the years.

OUR Saxon ancestors when they conquered England, were rude, barbarous, and cruel. The gods of their worship were bloodthirsty and revengeful. Odin, their chief divinity, in his celestial hall drank ale from the skulls of his enemies. In the year 596, the Monk Augustine, or Austin, was sent by Pope Gregory to attempt their conversion to christianity. He and his associates were so successful that on one occasion ten thousand converts were baptized in one day. Of course their conversion was external and nominal. They still clung to their old superstitions and customs. But with the new religion came new ideas.

Manuscripts were circulated; monasteries and schools were founded, and learning was somewhat diffused. The Saxon language is marked by three several epochs:

1st. From the irruption of the Saxons into Britain, A. D. 449, to the invasion of the Danes, including a period of 330 years.

2d. The Danish-Saxon period, continuing to the Norman conquest, A. D. 1066.

3d. The Norman-Saxon era, running down to the close of Henry II's reign. Of the first period, but a single specimen remains, and that a quotation by King Alfred; of the 2d period, numerous specimens both in verse and prose are extant; with the last period, the annals of English poetry commence.

The three dialects of these three literary epochs illustrate fully the changes which the old Saxon tongue underwent during the five centuries of its growth into the modern English.

Learning was chiefly confined to the

church, during the dark ages; of course, the great lights of Saxon England were prelates, except Alfred, and most of them wrote in Latin.

The venerable Bede (born 673, died 735), as he is styled, who wrote in the eighth century, was a profoundly learned man for those times. His writings embrace all topics then included in the knowledge of the schools or the Church. His works were published at Cologne, in 1612, in eight folio volumes. Another of the ornaments of this century was Alcuin, librarian and pupil of Egbert, Archbishop of York. He enjoyed a European reputation; was invited to France, by Charlemangne, to superintend his own studies; and was thought by some to have been the founder of the University of Paris. He was contemporary with Bede, was acquainted with the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, languages.and composed treatises on music, logic, rhetoric, astronomy and grammar; besides lives of saints, commentaries on the Bible, homiles, epistles and verses.

From the age of these authors learning declined till Alfred appeared. "At my accession to the throne," he remarks, "all knowledge and learning were extinguished in the Englsh nation, insomuch, that there were very few to the south of the Humber who understood the common prayers of the Church, or were capable of translating a single sentence of Latin into English; but to the north of the Thames, I cannot recollect so much as one who could do this." King Alfred was an eminent lover and promotor of learning. His works in the Saxon tongue, both original and translated, were numerous and valuable. His glory

as a scholar is not eclipsed by his fame as a legislator. In both respects he has no peer in England's line of Kings. He is reputed to have been the founder of the University of Oxford, as well as the originator of the "Trial by Jury." He died A. D. 900 or 901.

John Scot, or Johannes Scotus Engena, flourished during Alfred's reign, was a lecturer at Oxford, and the founder or chief prompter of scholastic divinity. The earliest specimen of the AngloSaxon language extant is the Lord's prayer, translated from the Greek by Ealdfride, Bishop of Sindisfarne, or Holy Island, about the year 700:

The new Danish irruptions again arrested the progress of learning, and ignorance and misery, as is usual, followed in the train of war. Alfred had restored learning and promoted the arts of peace. But his successors failed to sustain the institutions he planted. He is said to have shone with the lustre of the brightest day of summer amidst the gloom of a long, dark, and stormy, winter. Before the Norman conquest the Anglo-Saxon tongue fell into disrepute ; and French teachers and French manners were affected by the high-born.

During the reign of Edward, the Confessor, it ceased to be cultivated; and after the Conqueror, it became more barbarous and vulgar, as it was then the sign of servility, and the badge of an enslaved race.

As early as the year 652, the AngloSaxons were accustomed to send their youth to French monasteries to be educated. In succeeding centuries the court and nobility were intimately allied to the magnates of France; and the adoption of French manners was deemed an accomplishment. The conquerors commanded the laws to be administered in French. Children at school were forbidden to read their native language, and the English name became a term of reproach. An old writer in the eleventh century says: "Children in scole, agenst the usage and manir of all other nations, beeth compelled for to leve hire own langage, and for to construe his lessons and thynges in Frenche, and so they haveth sethe Normans came first into England." The Saxon was spoken by the peasants, in the country, yet not without an intermixture of French; the courtly language was French with some vestiges of the vernacular Saxon.

The Conqueror's army was composed of the flower of the Norman nobility. They brought with them the taste, the arts, and the refinements, they had acquired in France. European schools and scholars had been greatly benefitted by studying Latin versions of Greek philosophers from the Arabic. Many learned men of the laity also became teachers, and the Church no longer enjoyed a monopoly of letters. They travelled into Spain to attend the Arabic schools.

It is a remarkable fact that Greek learning should have travelled through Bagdad to reach Europe.

The Arabs were as fond of letters as of war. In the eighth century, when they overran the Asiatic provinces, they found many Greek books which they read with eagerness. They translated such as best pleased them into Arabic. Greek poetry they rejected because it was polytheistic. Of Greek history they made no use, because it recorded events prior to the advent of their prophet. The politics of Greece and its eloquence were not congenial to their despotic notions, and so they passed them by. Grecian ethics were suspended by the Koran, hence Plato was overlooked. Mathematics, metaphysics, logic, and medicine, accorded with their tastes. Hence they translated and studied Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates, and illustrated them with voluminous commentaries. These works stimulated native authors to write new treatises. The Arabs, therefore, became distinguished for their skill in logic, medicine, mathematics, and kindred studies. They founded universities during the eighth century in the cities of Spain and Africa. Charlemagne commanded their books to be translated into Latin; thus Aristotle entered Europe through Asia by the double door of the Arabic and Latin tongues, and, by long prescription, still holds his place in European schools.

Charlemagne founded the universities of Bononia, Pavia, Paris, and Osnaburg, in Hanover. These became centres for propagating the new sciences. The Normans, too, shared in the general progress of learning, and carried with them their attainments into England.. The wild imagination of the Saracens kindled a love of romantic fiction, wherever their influence was felt. The crusades made the Europeans intimately acquainted with the literature of the Arabs. Says Marton, who maintains

that romantic fiction originated in Arabia, in his "History of English Poetry," "Amid the gloom of superstition, in an age of the grossest ignorance and credulity, a taste for the wonders of oriental fiction was introduced by the Arabians into Europe, many countries of which were already seasoned to a reception of its extravagancies by means of the poetry of the Gothic scalds, who, perhaps, originally derived their ideas from the same fruitful region of invention.

"These fictions coinciding with the reigning manners, and perpetually kept up and improved in the tales of troubadours and minstrels, seem to have centred about the eleventh century in the ideal histories of Turpin and Geoffrey of Monmouth, which record the suppositious achievements of Charlemagne and King Arthur, where they formed the groundwork of that species of narrative called romance. And from these beginnings or causes, afterwards enlarged and enriched by kindred fancies fetched from the crusades, that singular and capricious mode of imagination arose, which at length composed the marvellous machineries of the more sublime Italian poets, and of their disciple Spenser." The theory which traces romantic fiction to the Arabs is but partially true. The entire literature of that age was monstrous, full of the most absurd and extravagant fancies. History was fabulous; poetry mendacious and philosophy erroneous. Theology abounded in pious frauds. Monks and minstrels vied with each other in the invention of lying legends to adorn the lives of heroes and saints. All classes of the community shared in the general delusion, and the supernatural seemed more credible than the natural. In tracing the progress of learning, in England, I propose, during the remainder of the present paper to

The lyre is one of the oldest of musical instruments. Its invention is ascribed to a god. Its Saxon name is harp. It was the favorite instrument of the ancient Hebrews, as well as of the Greeks. The Saxons, Britons and Danes regarded it with veneration, and protected by legal enactments those who played upon it. Their persons were esteemed inviolable and secured from injuries by heavy penalities. By the laws of Wales, slaves were forbidden to practice upon it; and no creditor could seize the harp of his debtor. That minstrels were a privileged class is manifested from king Alfred's penetrating the Danish camp (878) disguised as a harper. Sixty years after a Danish king visited King Athelstan's camp in the same disguise. It was also said of Aldhelm, one of the leading scholars of the eighth century: "He was an excellent harper, a most eloquent Saxon and Latin poet, a most expert chanter, or a singer, a doctor egregius, and admirably versed in scriptures and liberal sciences." The minstrel was a regular and stated officer of the Anglo-Saxon kings. Poetry is always the earliest form of literature; song the earliest form of poetry. The Muse adapts her lessons to the nation's infancy and adds the charm of melody to verse. No nation is destitute of lyric poetry. Even the North American Indians have their war songs, though their individual worship of their gods has prevented the creation of any national poetry for associated worship. The Scandinavians have but one term for the poet and the singer. The Northern scald invented and recited his own songs and epics. In other countries the poet and minstrel performed separ

Bishop Percy, "were an order of men in the Middle Ages who subsisted by the arts of poetry and music, and sang to to the harp verses composed by themselves and others. They appear to have accompanied their songs with mimicry and action. They are called in Latin of the day histriones, Mimi and Scurrae. Such arts rendered them exceedingly popular in this and in neighboring countries, where no high scene of festivity was esteemed complete that was not set off with the exercise of their talents; and where so long as the spirit of chivalry existed, they were protected and caressed, because their songs tended to do honor to the ruling passion of the times, and to encourage and foment a martial spirit."

They were the legitimate successors of the bards and scalds of early times whose art was considered divine and their songs worthy of regal patronage. They were the historians, genealogists, poets, and musicians, of the land. The word minstrel is derived from the Latin minister, a servant, because they were classed among the King's attendants. An earlier Saxon name for this class of performers was "Gleeman," in rude English, a Jogeler or Jocular; Latin, "Joculator." The word "glee" is from the Saxon "gligg," meaning music; and the meaning now attached to that word shows how intimately associated were pleasure and music in the national mind. The harp was the most ancient of Saxon musical instruments. It continued in use for a thousand years. It was well known in the time of Chaucer. His Frere could play upon it and sing to it; the merry "wife of Bath" had frequently danced to it in her youth. It was an ordinary accompaniment of revels and tavern festivals. It continued in use till the reign of Elizabeth. In