surprised at the exaggerated praise of all who mention them, from Bede to Wharton. His style has the worst vices of the period; it is turgid, laboured, complicated, obscure, affected, abounding with puerile images, sacrificing every thing to art, and wholly regardless of nature. It seems, indced, as if the sole object he considered worth his notice were words. The same bombastic amplification disfigures his prose no less than his poetry, his epistles no less than his more deliberate productions. The book which he addressed to Alfred of Northumbria on the dignity of the Number 7, on the rules of prosody, on poetical metres, and on the nature of metaphors; and that which he wrote on the Paschal controversy, little deserve our attention. Of his greatest prose work that in praise of virginity, the most notice has been taken, both by English and foreign scholars. It contains in a still higher degree his worst defects under his laboured, gorgeous, yet often puerile language, his thoughts are sometimes completely hidden. Still it is wonderfully imaginative, though in his hands fancy is a power which runs to waste: the very frequency of his figures destroys their effect; their profusion renders them nauseous to the organs of true taste. His epithets are beyond all conception extravagant: "The golden semblances of the virtues; the white jewels of merit; the purple flowers of modesty; the transparent eyeballs of virginal bashfulness; the sour grapes of iniquity; the swan-coloured hoariness of age; the shrubbery of pride; the torrid courtesy of the dogmas; the phlebotomy of the Divine word; the folding doors of dumb taciturnity; the helmet of grammar; the dragon of gluttony; the plenteous plantations of apple trees fecundating the mind with flourishing leaf; the shining lamps of chastity burning with the oil of modesty; the fetid sink of impurity, lamentably overwhelming the ships of the soul," are metaphors which Mr. Turner has collected in a very few pages of his prose works. A better idea, however, of his ordinary style may be formed from his letter to the monks of St. Wilfrid, who, after the disgrace of that celebrated man, were sufficiently disposed to follow the stream, even to enrol themselves among the enemies of their fallen benefactor : Con "Lately, as you have learned by experience, the furious agitation of the tempest, like a vast earthquake, has shaken the foundations of the church! Like the thunder clap, which vibrates far and wide, that tempest has been heard through different regions of the earth.” "What cause, I ask, however sad and atrocious, can separate you from your bishop; who has affectionately led you, by nourishing your minds, by instructing and chastising you, from the first opening of the rudiments, from the prime infancy of your tender age, to the full-blown flower of maturity; who, like a careful nurse clasping her beloved within the extended bounds of her arms, has embraced you in the cherishing fold of his love. template, I beseech you, the order of created things, and the nature divinely implanted in them, so that, from a comparison of the least, you may, with Christ's help, receive the flexible form of pity. Consider how the bees, by divine instinct swarming, when their leader forsakes the wintry mansions, eagerly issue from their nectar-breathing cells; how the hosts of the numerous caverns, a few excepted, which remain to defend and people their former seats, wing, in one dense mass, their rapid flight towards the sky: if, wonderful to relate, when they thus emerge from their winter camp, and seek the hollowed oak, their king, surrounded by dense legions of his subjects, should be impeded in his passage by the flying dust, or his tiny wings bedewed by the suddenly descending rains from the cataracts of high Olympus, and should return to the grateful hive, the seat just forsaken; quickly will all the host, passing through the wonted porch, eagerly regain the interior of their former cells.". -"If these creatures, of reason destitute, and without written laws which govern their lives, by nature's instinct obey, as the changing seasons roll, their leader's command; tell me, I ask, 'whether with horrid infamy they may not be branded, who, endowed with the'Spirit's sevenfold grace, madly bite the reins of devout submission." The reader may easily imagine that such a style of remonstrance was more likely to provoke the merriment than the pity of the monks, who not only suffered their abbot to depart alone, but evidently rejoiced at his departure. It proves, however, that, with all his puerile pedantry, Aldhelm had a portion of right feeling. The following is in the same taste; our author is evidently fond of bees: "Resembling the industry of the most sagacious bees, which, when the dewy dawn appears, and the beams of the most limpid sun arise, pour the thick armies of their dancing crowds from the temple over the open fields. Now lying in the honeybearing love-folds of the marigold, or in the purple flowers of the fenny herb, they suck in the juicy nectar, drop by drop, with their eager beaks; now sporting round the yellow willows, and the blushing broom, they bear their plunder on their numerous thighs and distended legs, and with it construct their waxen cells; now humming round the ivy berries, and the light sprigs of the flourishing linden tree, they construct the multiform machine of their honey combs with angular and open cells, the artificial structure of which the excellent poet, with natural eloquence, has sung in catalectic verse; in like manner, unless I am deceived, your memorizing ingenuity of mind wanders through the luxuriant fields of letters, and runs with a bibulous curiosity." The earnestness with which St. Aldhelm inculcated what he considered the noblest of the virtues, chastity, is a favourite theme with his biographers. Nor did he inculcate it merely in his two treatises, the one prose the other verse, professedly written on that subject: in several other parts of his works he reverts to it. Thus in his letter to one of his disciples, who, according to a prevailing custom of the times, was about to visit Ireland for the sake of study — doubtless of more tranquil study, than, in the agitated state of the Saxon kingdoms, could be expected in this island — he gives that disciple some curious though not unnatural cautions against the danger of reading pagan books. We give the peculiarly characteristic letter in his own words; in fact, he is one of the authors whom it is almost impossible to translate without destroying his manner : "Domino venerabiliter diligendo et delectabiliter venerando Wilcfrido, Aldelmus vernaculus supplex in Christo perhennem salutem. Perlatum est mihi, rintugerulis referentibus, de vestræ caritatis industriâ; quod transmarinum iter gubernante Domino capere, sagacitate legendi succensâ, decreverit. Et iccirco vitâ comite optatum Hiberniæ portum tenens, sacrosancta potissimum præsagmina, refutatis philosophorum commentitiis, legito. Absurdum enim arbitror, spretâ rudis ac veteris instrumenti inextricabili normâ, per lubrica dumosi ruris diverticula, immo per dyscolos philosophorum anfractus, iter carpere. Seu certe opertis vitreorum fontium limpidis laticibus, palustres pontias lutulentasque limphas siticulose potare; in queis atra bufonum turma catervatim scatet, atque garrulitas ranarum crepitans coaxat. Quidnam, rogitans quæso, orthodoxæ fidei sacramento commodi affert circa temeratum spurcæ Proserpinæ incestum, quod abhorret fari, enucleate legendo scrutandoque sudescere; aut Hermionem petulantem Menelai et Helenæ sobolem, quæ ut prisca produnt opuscula, despondebatur pridem jure dotis Oresti, demunique sententiâ mutatâ Neoptolemo nupsit; lectionis præconio venerari: aut Lupercorum bacchantium antistites ritu lætantium Priapo parasitorum, heroico stilo historiæ carraxare; quæ altato quondam sceptri in vertice chelidro Hebrææ concionis obtutibus præsentato, hoc est, almâ mortis morte stipite patibuli affixâ, solo tenus diruta evanuere? Porro tuum dis cipulatum ceu cernuus arcuatis poplitibus flexisque suffraginibus, faculentâ famâ compulsus, posco; ut nequaquam prostibula lupanarium, nugas in queis pompulentæ prostitutæ delitescunt, lenocinante luxu adeas, quæ obrizo rutilante periscelidis armillaque lacertorum tereti utpote faleris falerati curules comuntur; sed magis edito aulæ fastigio spreto, quo patricii ac prætores potiuntur, gurgitii humili receptaculo contenta tua fraternitas feliciter fruatur; nec non contra gelida brumarum flabra e climate olim septentrionali emergentia neglecto, ut docet Christi disciplina, fucato ostro, potius lacernæ gracilis amictu ac mastrucæ tegmine incompto utatur." By this time the reader will have discovered that if the nuns, for whom St. Aldhelm chiefly wrote, and to whom he addressed his treatise in praise of virginity, really understood him, they must have made greater proficiency in the language than many scholars of the present day. "They are marked," says an admirable judge," by a pompous obscurity of language, an affectation of Grecian phraseology, and an unmeaning length of period which perplexes and disgusts." Of his prose works we will not attempt to give an analysis. The matter is worth nothing; the style and the manner soon displease; indeed, on this head we shall not add to the extracts we have already made; but proceed to his poetry, which has better claims on our attention.* The poems of St. Aldhelm are De Laude Virginum, De Octo Principalibus Vitiis, and Enigmata. The first, which is also the best, contains a preface to the abbess Maxima, which, for elaborate puerility, has no equal in the whole range of Latin composition, not even in the anonymous De Consolatione Rationis, to which, on a former occasion, we directed the reader's attention.+ It is an acrostic both in the initial and the final letters of each line; and what is still more singular, not only are the initials and the finals the same, though read inversely, but each line begins and ends with the successive letters of the first line. It is too extraordinary to be omitted. "Præfatio ad Maximam Abbatissam. "M ETRICA TIRONES NUNC PROMANT CARMINA CASTO * S. Aldelmus, De Laude Virginitatis (in Bibliotheca Magna Patrum, tom. viii.). Wilhelmus Malmesburiensis, Vita ejusdem Sancti (apud Wharton, Anglia Sacra, tom. ii.). Turner, Anglo-Saxons, iii. p. 404. Ceillier, Histoire des Auteurs Sacrés et Ecclésiastiques, tom. xvii, p. 753. Lingard, Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church, p. 343. + History of Spain and Portugal, vol. iv. p. 211-213. |