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Rh this unscientific expression means the Celtic and Teutonic families of speech; our period has nothing to shew for the Romance languages. Most of what it seemed needful to say about Celtic literature in connexion with learning has found a place in the chapter preceding this. It must be borne in mind that the evolution of fresh native literatures independent of learning transmitted by books is foreign to our subject; the fact that the really native product is in itself the best worth reading is irrelevant here. Famous poems such as the Tain Bo Cuailnge and Beowulf, and the Dream of the Rood, therefore have to be passed over, and such parts of the old Northern corpus of poetry as critics allow to be anterior to the year 1000.

Infinitely the largest place in these two centuries is occupied by the Anglo-Saxon writings. A certain number of poems assigned to the latter part of the eighth century are on themes derived from books. The Andreas of the Vercelli manuscript is from a text which is only forthcoming in scanty fragments of Latin, though we have it in Greek: there was also once a poem on the adventures of St Thomas in India, but it has disappeared; it was too fabulous for Aelfric to use as the basis of his Homily on the Apostle. Other Acts of Saints are drawn upon in the poems called Elene and Juliana. We have not the original that lies behind the Dialogue of Salomon and Saturn, but there was one, presumably in Latin, and a strange book it must have been. The Phoenix is in part at least a rendering of a poem attributed to Lactantius. One of the Genesis-poems – that which is called Genesis B, and has been said to be anglicised from Old Saxon – is held to be under obligations to the poems of Alcimus Avitus. The ninth century Homilies of the Vercelli and Blickling manuscripts, as has been said, present versions of and allusions to the Apocalypse of Thomas. The source oftenest employed for sermons is not unnaturally the homily-book of Gregory the Great, to whom Christian England owed so much.

The end of the same century sees King Alfred's work: he puts into the hands of his clergy and people Gregory, Orosius, Bede, and Boethius, and infuses into Orosius and Boethius something of his own great spirit. He did not seek to make his people or his priests erudite, but to fit them for the common duties of their lives: we find little curious learning in what he wrote or ordered to be written. And in the work of Aelfric, nearly a hundred years later, I seem to see an equally sober and practical, yet not prosaic, mind. His sermons, whether he is paraphrasing Gregory on the Sunday Gospels, or is telling the story of a saint from his Acts, appear to be exactly fitted to their purpose of leading simple men in the right way: skill in narrative, beauty of thought, goodness of soul, are there.

Whatever Aelfric it was who composed the Colloquy for schoolboys, he, too, was gifted with sympathy and freshness. It gives some pictures of ordinary life and manners which have long been popular, and with good reason.