up to immortalize King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. We desire to trace upward, till the dim distance hides it, the memory of those Welsh bards, who, in the decay of their country, were the champions, and at last the martyrs, of national freedom.

Ancient Welsh writings, still extant, are described as dealing intelligently, both in prose and verse, with a wonderful variety of topics. It is not universally admitted that any of these were composed earlier than the twelfth century: but it is probable, from evidence both external and internal, that some are much older.

There is a marked character of primitive antiquity in the singular pieces called the Triads. They are collections of historical facts, maxims ethical and legal, mythological doctrines and traditions, and rules for the structure of verse: all of them are expressed with extreme brevity, and regularly disposed in groups of three. Among the Welsh Metrical pieces, those of the times succeeding the Norman Conquest are very numerous; but a few are to be found which have plausibly been assigned to celebrated bards of the sixth century. It is pleasant to believe that the great Taliessin still speaks to us from his grave; that we read the poems of Aneurin, the heroic and unfortunate prince of Cumbria and Strathclyde; and that, in the verses of Merdhin the Caledonian, we possess relics of the sage and poet, whom the reverence of later ages transformed into the enchanter Merlin. The romantic impression is strengthened by the earnest simplicity, and the spirit of pathetic lamentation, with which some of these irregular lyrics chant the calamities of the Cymrians. There exists likewise a considerable stock of old Welsh Romances, the most remarkable of which are contained in the series called the Mabinogi or Tales of Youth. Most of those that have been translated into English, such as Peredur and the Lady of the Fountain, are merely versions from some of the finest of the Norman-French romances. But several others, as the stories of Prince Pwyll and Math the Enchanter, are very similar to the older Norse sagas; and these, if not very ancient in their present shape, must have sprung from the traditions of an exceedingly rude and early generation.

Frequently, both in the triads and in the bardic songs, allusions are made to the heroic Arthur. A Cymric prince of Wales or Cumbria, surrounded by patriotic warriors like himself, and valiantly resisting the alien enemies of his country, had, in many a battle, triumphantly carried the Dragon-flag of his race into the heart of the hosts amidst whom floated the Pale Horse of the Saxon standard. At length, we are told, he died by domestic treason; and the flower of the British nobles perished with him. His name was cherished with melancholy pride, and his heroism magnified

with increasingly fond exaggeration, alike among those Welsh Britons who still guarded the valleys of Snowdon, and among those who, having sought a foreign seat of liberty, wandered in exile on the banks of the Loire. Poetic chroniclers among the Cymrians of Brittany gradually wove the scattered and embellished traditions into a legendary British history: this Armoric compilation was used, perhaps with traditions also that had lingered in Wales, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the twelfth century, as the groundwork of a Latin historical work; and then the poets of chivalry, allured by the beauty and pathos of the tale, made it for ages the centre of the most animated pictures of romance.

LATIN LITERATURE.

4. The Latin learning of the Dark Ages, though seldom extensive or exact, and always confined to a very small circle of students, formed a point of contact between the instructed men of the several races. Its cultivation arose out of the introduction of Christianity; and its most valued uses were those which related to the faith and the church.

It is doubtful at what time the seeds of spiritual life were first scattered on our island shores. Miracles were said to have attested the preaching of Joseph of Arimathea in England; and a cave which still looks, from the cliffs of Fifeshire, over the eastern sea, was celebrated as the oratory whence, towards the close of the fourth century, the Greek Saint Regulus went forth to christianize the Picts. It is better proved that there were British converts among the martyrs in the persecution of Diocletian; and that, not much later, Irishmen, such as the heretical Pelagius, were to be found in the continental churches. But any progress which the true faith may have made among our forefathers, in the Roman times, seems to have been arrested by the anarchy and bloodshed which everywhere attended the Germanic invasions.

Ireland, in which Saint Patrick's teaching is said to have begun a few years before the middle of the fifth century, certainly led the way to the general acceptance of Christianity; and the conversion of Britain was first attempted by Irish missionaries. Among these, Saint Columba is especially named, as having, in the latter half of the sixth century, founded his celebrated monastery in the sacred isle of Iona, from which he and his disciples and successors extended their preaching in the west and north of Scotland. About the end of the same century, Saint Augustine arrived in England, sent by Pope Gregory, who, according to the beautiful story told

by the old historians, had been deeply moved by seeing AngloSaxon youths exposed in the slave-market of Rome. For several generations before the Norman conquest, Great Britain and Ireland were, in name at least, universally Christian.

5. Almost all who then cultivated Latin learning were ecclesiastics; and by far the larger number of those who became eminent in it were unquestionably Irishmen. Most of them are described by old writers as Scots: but this name was first applied to the Irish Celts, and was not transferred to the inhabitants of North Britain till after the Dark Ages. Indeed, amidst the bloodshed and wanderings which accompanied and followed the fall of the Roman Empire, Ireland was a place of rest and safety, both to fugitives from the continent, and to others from England. Among the latter is named Gildas the Wise, a brother of the British bard Aneurin, and the supposed writer of a treatise "on the Destruction of Britain," which, if it were undoubtedly genuine, would be the oldest of our Latin histories. Thus adding the acquisitions of other countries to its own, the Green Isle contained, for more centuries than one, a larger amount of learning than all that could have been collected from the rest of Europe; and its scholars often found other sanctuaries among the storm-defended rocks of the Hebrides.

It is a fact well deserving the attention of the student, that the communication between distant countries, thus arising out of the miseries incident to troublous times, received a new impulse as each country adopted the Christian faith. All were thenceforth members of one ecclesiastical community; and each maintained connexion, both with the rest, and with Rome the common centre. It does indeed appear, that the Anglo-Saxon church was much less dependent on the papal see than many others, in respect both of government and of doctrine: yet, from an early date, its intercourse with Italy was close and constant. Pilgrimages to Rome were exceedingly common. Two, if not more, of the Saxon princes assumed the cowl, and were buried in the precincts of the church of Saint Peter: among the hospices for the reception of pilgrims, which were built around the venerated spot, that of our countrymen was one of the earliest and the Anglo-Saxon fraternity, (technically described in the old books as a school,) received corporate privileges from the popes, and is honourably commemorated as having repeatedly given valiant aid in the defence of the city. Alfred is said to have sent alms every year to Rome, receiving, in return, not only relics, but other and more valuable gifts: and he invited foreign ecclesiastics to settle in his kingdom, and assist in his attempts to revive learning anong the native clergy. Religious zeal thus produced an

interchange of knowledge, which, in times almost without commerce, and in a state of society making travelling difficult and dangerous, could not otherwise have taken place.

6. Thus, though our nation lost some of her best and ablest sons, through the frequent disturbances which chequered her history, she gained other instructors, whose services counterbalanced the loss.

Many of our native churchmen, it is true, lived chiefly abroad; but our churches and schools received very many foreigners. So, in the seventh century, the most active promoters of erudition among the Anglo-Saxons were the Abbot Adrian, an African sent from Naples, and the Archbishop Theodore, a native of Tarsus who had been a monk at Rome. So, likewise, on the other hand, two of the four men, whose names hold decisively the highest places in the literary roll of our ancient ancestry, gave the benefit of their talents to foreign lands. England retained Bede and Alfred; but she lost Alcuin and Erigena. Alcuin, perhaps an Irishman, though educated at York, taught and wrote in the dominions of Charlemagne. Joannes Scotus Erigena, again, remarkable alike as almost the only learned layman of the Dark Ages, and as the only thinker who then attained original views in speculative philosophy, was almost certainly native of Ireland. But France was the principal scene of his labours; and neither his invitation to England by Alfred, nor his tragical death in that country, can be held as any thing more than doubtful traditions.

Among those native ecclesiastics who remained in England, three men only can here be named as eminent for success in Latin studies. The oldest of these was Bishop Aldhelm, a southern Saxon, whose zeal for the enlightenment of the people gives him a better title to fame, than the specimens which have been produced from his Latin prose and verse; another was Asser, a Welsh monk of St David's, the friend, and teacher, and affectionate biographer of the illustrious Alfred; and greater than any of these was the Northumbrian Beda, whose name receives by immemorial custom an epithet expressing

b. 672. d. 735.

well-merited reverence. The Venerable Bede, entering in boyhood the monastery of Wearmouth, in his native district, spent his whole manhood in the neighbouring cells of Jarrow, zealously occupied in ecclesiastical and historical research. His extant writings are allowed to exhibit an extent of classical scholarship, and a correctness of taste, surprising for his time: and his investigations into the antiquities of the country gave birth to his Ecclesiastical History of England, which is to this day a leading authority, not for the annals of the church only, but for all the public events that occurred in the earlier part of the Anglo-Saxon period.

C

The Anglo-Saxon names which have thus been set down are very few and the nation really did not possess, in any period, many men who at all deserved to be described as learned. From the age of Bede to that of Alfred, we encounter hardly any evidence of so much as moderate erudition; and this great man had to undertake a task, which really amounted to something very like the instruction of a people altogether ignorant. We shall learn immediately that the method which he and his assistants adopted, for enlightening their countrymen, led them to promote Latin learning to no further extent, than that which was absolutely required for enabling them to master some of the most important items of the knowledge recorded in the dead language. Their leading aim was the cultivation of their mother-tongue, and the diffusion of practical information through its means.

It is also a fact to be remembered, that the classical learning of Alfred's age, such as it was, did not long survive its founder. In this respect, not less than in others, the last few generations of the Anglo-Saxon period exhibit unequivocal symptoms of decay.

Some of the causes which brought about this decline, should be kept in our view while we proceed to survey the vernacular literature of the nation. Hardly more than barbarians when they landed in our island, the Anglo-Saxons were checked in their progress to wards civilisation by their continual wars against the Britons, and still more by their own divisions and contests. At length, when the chiefs of one of their petty states had been recognised as kings of Saxon England, the polity thus established was shaken to its foundations, by the long struggle they had to maintain against their Gothic kinsmen from Scandinavia. The conquest of the country by the Danish prince Canute presaged the ease with which the race was to be subdued by William of Normandy