Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/425

Rh ENGLISH L I T E K A T U 11 E 405 Duor Such a man was St Dunstan, who fought with a giant s in - strength against corruption, sloth, and ignorance, and was ever faithful to the interests of learning. There is in the Bodleian Library a little volume, probably written in his own hand ; it is a sort of common-place book ; the frontispiece is a drawing of the saint prostrated at the feet of the throned Christ, executed by Dunstau himself ; among the contents of the volume are a grammatical treatise by Eutychius, with extremely curious Welsh glosses, part of Ovid De Arte Amandi with similar glosses, and lessons, in Latin and Greek, taken from the Pentateuch and the prophets. But his work was undone during the disastrous reign of Ethelred II., at the end of which the Danish power established itself in England. Under Edward the Confessor, French influences began to be greatly felt. The two races of the Teutonic north had torn each other to pieces, and the culture which Saxon had been able to impart to Northman was not sufficient to discipline him into a truly civilized man. England, though at a terrible cost, had to be knit on to the state-system of Southern Europe; her anarchy must give place to centralization; her schools, and her art, and her architecture be remodelled by Italians and Frenchmen ; her poets turn their eyes, not towards Iceland, but towards Normandy or Provence. Turning now to the other literary centre, the Northum brian kingdom, we find that impulse and initiation were due to more than one source. In the main, the conversion of the Angles north of the Tees, and the implantation among them of the germs of culture, are traceable to lona, and, indirectly, to the Irish Church and St Patrick. From Ireland, in the persons of St Columba and his followers, was wafted to the long low island surrounded by the mountains of the Hebrides, a ministry of light and civiliza tion, which from the 6th to the llth century diffused its blessings over northern Europe. Oswald, son of the Bernician king Ethelfrid, was driven out of Northumbria after his father s death by Edwin of Deira, and took refuge among the northern Picts. He embraced Christianity through the teaching of the monks of lona or some monastery dependent on it ; and when he became king of Bernicia in 634, one of his first thoughts was to send to his old teachers, and ask that missionaries might be sent to instruct his people. Aidan accordingly came from Tona and founded a bishop s see at Lindisfarne, or Holy Isle. Hence issued the founders of the monasteries of Hexham, Coldingham, Whitby, and many other places. The actual representatives of the monks of lona returned after some years to their own country, because they would not give way in the dispute concerning Easter ; but the civilizing effects of their mission did not pass away. The school of piety and learning which produced an Aidan, an lam- Adamnan, and a Cuthbert deserved well not of England only but of humanity. Adamnan, abbot of lona about the year 690, has a peculiar interest for us, because a long extract from his work on the holy places is incorporated by Beda in his Ecclesiastical History. He also wrote a life of his founder, St Columba, printed by Canisius and in the Florilegium Insulce Sanctorum. To the encouragement of Bishop Aidan we owe it that Hilda, a lady of the royal house of Deira, established monasteries at Hartlepool and Streoneshalch (afterwards Whitby) ; and it was by the monks of Streoneshalch that the seed was sown, which, falling upon a good heart and a capacious brain, bore fruit minion. in tlle poetry of Caidmon, the earliest English poet. We need not repeat the well-known story of the vision, in which the destined bard, then a humble menial employed about the stables and boat-service of the monastery, believed that an injunction of more than mortal authority was laid upon him, to sing of the beginning of creation.&quot; The impulse having been once communicated, Ciedmon, as Bcda informs us, continued for a long time to clothe in his native measures the principal religious facts recorded in the Pentateuch and in the New Testament. Is the work commonly known as Cajdmon s Paraphrase identical with the work described by Beda 1 ? Have we in this paraphrase a genuine utterance of the 7th century 1 The answers to these questions are still involved in doubt, and to enter upon the discussion which they presuppose would be foreign to our present purpose. We will merely say that the unique MS. of the Paraphrase, which is of the 10th century, contains no indication whatever of authorship, and that it opens in a manner different from the prologue made by the real Cu?dmon, of which we have a Latin version in Beda and an Anglo-Saxon % 7 ersion in Alfred s translation of Beda. On the other hand, the portion of the MS. which is written in the first hand agrees tolerably well in its contents with the real work of Casdmon, as Beda describes it. The portion of the MS. which is written in. the second hand is probably of much later date ; some critics have not hesitated to designate its author as the &quot; pseudo-Caidmon.&quot; The opening cantos of the Para phrase, which treat of the rebellion of the angels and the fall of man, are allowed by general consent to be those most vividly expressed, and most characterized by poetical power. It is here that bright strong phrases occur, which, as is believed, Milton himself did not disdain to utilize, and his known acquaintance with Francis Junius, the then possessor of the Caedmon MS., seems to lend some countenance to the belief. Hitherto the influences in Northumbria tending to culture have been found to be only indirectly Roman ; the immediate source of them was lona. But when we come to the Venerable Beda, the great light of the Northumbrian Beda. church, the glory of letters in a rude and turbulent age, nay, even the teacher and the beacon light of all Europe for the period from the 7th to the 10th century, we find that the fountain whence he drew the streams of thought and knowledge came from no derivative source, but was supplied directly from the well-head of Christian culture. Benedict Biscop, a young Northumbrian thane, much employed and favoured in the court of Oswy, abandoned the world for the church, and travelling to Home resided there several years, diligently studying the details of ecclesiastical life and training, and the institutes of litur gical order. Returning to England in 668, with Theodore, the new primate, and the abbot Hadrian, he brought into Northumbria a large number of books, relics, and other ecclesiastical objects, and, being warmly welcomed by King Egfrid, founded a monastery in honour of St Peter oil land granted by the king at the mouth of the Wear. That the other great apostolic name venerated at Rome might not go without due honour, he built a second monastery soon afterwards in honour of St Paul at Jarrow on the Tyne, seven miles from Wearmouth. After the founder s time the two monasteries were usually governed by one abbot. When only seven years old, Beda, like Orderic in a later age, was brought by his father to Jarrow, and given up to the abbot to be trained to monastic life. The rest of his life, down to the year 731, was passed in the monastery, as we know from his own statement ;. in 735 he died. His works, which have several times been edited in a complete form abroad, but never yet in his own country, may be grouped under five heads- 1, Educational ; 2, Theological ; 3, Historical ; 4, Poetical ; 5, Letters. To the first class belong the treatises De Orthographia and De Arte Metrica, the first being a short dictionary, giving the correct spelling and the idiomatic use of a considerable number of Latin words, with (in many cases) their Greek equivalents, the second a prosody, describing the principal classical metres, with examples. De Xatura Rcrum is a