Page:King Alfred's Version of the Consolations of Boethius.djvu/29

Rh deeply impressed Alfred, who had himself known adversity, and was far from sure that his present heyday would last.

But the task of translation, though congenial, was difficult. In the first place, Alfred's knowledge of Latin can hardly have sufficed to give him an exact idea of the contents of a book whose style was modelled on the old classical writers of Rome, and differed widely from the crude Latin written by the learned monks in the ninth century. This difficulty the King surmounted, as we have already noticed, by having Asser read out the Latin text and explain it to him; and this is confirmed by an examination of Alfred's version, which in many parts bears the marks of having been written from a recent recollection of the Latin rather than directly from it. The King's version makes no attempt to imitate the artificial and involved periods of Boethius; he was content to write so as to be 'understanded of the people,' and in this he succeeded, for his English, though devoid of art and often inelegant and rambling, is clear enough as to the sense. It is probable that Alfred wrote as he spoke, for he could have found but little prose literature in English fit to form his style upon. Certain parts of the Vulgate and the Book of Psalms and a number of prayers had been Englished, as the Life informs us; but beyond these it is likely that no prose of a literary character existed in West-Saxon. All previous literary effort in English had taken the form of verse, which chiefly flourished north of the Humber; and we have the curious, but not isolated, spectacle of a noble and expressive poetry co-existing with a rude, faltering, barely articulate