Early Centuries.

In those dreary early centuries when England was in the throes of its beginnings, and when the Roman eagle which had always led a half-stifled life amongst British fogs, had gone back to its own eyrie in the South the old stock historians could and did find little to fasten our regard save the eternal welter of little wars. Indeed, those who studied fifty years ago will remember that all early British history was excessively meagre and stiff; some of it, I daresay, left yet in the accredited courses of school reading; dreadfully dull — with dates piled on dates, and battles by the page; and other pages of battle peppered with such names as Hengist, or Ethelred and Cerdic and Cuthwulf, or whoever could strike hardest or cut deepest.

But now, thanks to modern inquiry and to such men as Stubbs and Freeman and Wright, and the more entertaining Green we get new light on those old times. We watch the ribs of that ancient land piling in distincter shape out of the water: we see the downs and the bluffs, and the fordable

places in the rivers; we know now just where great wastes of wood stood in the way of our piratical forefathers—the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Angles; these latter either by greater moral weight in them, or by the accident of numbers (which is the more probable), coming to give a name to the new country and language which were a-making together.

We find that those old Romans did leave, besides their long, straight, high-roads, and Roman villas, and store of sepulchral vases, a germ of Roman laws, and a little nucleus of Roman words, traceable in the institutions and to some slight degree

in the language of to-day.

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We see in the later pages of Green through what forests the rivers ran, and can go round about the great Roman-British towns (Roman first and then adopted by Britons) of London and of York; and that other magnificent one of Cirencester (or Sisister as the English say, with a stout defiance of their alphabet). We can understand how and why the fat meadows of Somersetshire should be cov

*London was possibly a British settlement before the Romans built there; though latest investigators, I think, favor the contrary opinion.

eted by marauders and fought for by Celts; and we behold more clearly and distinctly than ever, under the precise topography of modern investigators, the walls of wood and hills which stayed Saxon pursuit of those Britons who sought shelter in Wales, Cumberland, or the Cornish peninsula.

Celtic Literature.

was

Naturally, this flight of a nation to its fastnesses was not without clamor and lament; some of which if we may trust current Cymric traditions put into such piercing sound as has come down to our own day in the shape of Welsh war-songs. Dates are uncertain; but without doubt somewhat of this Celtic shrill singing was of earlier utterance than anything of equal literary quality that came from our wrangling Saxon or West-Saxon forefathers in the fertile plains of England.

Some of these Celtic war strains have been turned into a music by the poet Gray* which our English

*To Cattraeth's vale, in glittering row,

Twice two hundred warriors go;

Every warrior's manly neck

Chains of regal honor deck,

ears love; Emerson used to find regalement in the strains of another Welsh bard; and the Mabinogion, a pleasant budget of old Cymric fable,* has come to a sort of literary resurrection in our day under the hands of the late Sidney Lanier. If you would know more of things Celtic, I would commend to your attention a few lectures read at Oxford in 1864-65 by Matthew Arnold in which he has brought a curious zeal, and his wonted acumen

Wreathed in many a golden link:

From the golden cup they drink
Nectar that the bees produce,

Or the grape's ecstatic juice,

Flush'd with mirth and hope they burn,

But none from Cattraeth's vale return

Save Aëron brave, and Conan strong
(Bursting through the bloody throng),
And I, the meanest of them all

That live to weep and sing their fall."

*Lady CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH SCHREIBER (née GUEST) made the first translations which brought these Welsh romances into vogue. Among them, is Geraint, the son of Erbin, which in our day has developed into the delightful Geraint and Enid. Mr. W. F. Skene has published the texts of various poems (from original MSS.) attributed to Taliesin, Aneurin, and others, with translations by D. Sylvan Evans and Robert Williams.

to an investigation of the influences upon English literature of that old Celtic current. It was a wild, turbulent current; it had fret and roar in it; it had passion and splendor in it; and there are those who think that whatever ardor of imagination, or love for brilliant color or music may belong to our English race is due to old interfusion of British blood. Certainly the lively plaids of the Highlander and his bagpipes show love for much color and exuberant gush of sound; and we all understand that the Celtic Irishman has an appetite for a shindy which demonstrates a rather lively emotional nature.

Beginning of English Learning.

But over that ancient England covered with its alternating fens and forests, and grimy Saxon hamlets, and Celtic companies of huts, there streams presently a new civilizing influence. It is in the shape of Christian monks * sent by Pope Gregory the

* There was a sort of Christianizing of Britain in later Romish times, but not much warmth or spending force in it; and Wright assures us that amid all the Roman remains thus far brought to light of mosaics and vases, only one Christian