Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/453

Rh indigenous deity, but one of foreign origin—came to be bis priests; and in that capacity praised him, sometimes in poetical, sometimes in oratorical, form. Throughout Christendom from early times down to ours, religious services have emphasized in various proportions the different attributes of the deity—now chiefly his anger and revenge, now chiefly his goodness, love, and mercy; but they have united in ceaseless exaltation of his power; and the varieties of oral admiration, of invocation, of devotion, have been partly in prose and partly in verse. All along the Church-service has had for its subject-matter this or that part of the divine story, and all along it has embodied its ideas and feelings in a semi-rhythmical liturgy, in hymns, in the orations which we call sermons: each of them having in one way or other the laudatory character. So that the Christian priest has throughout stood in substantially the same relation to the being worshiped, as did the pagan priest, and has perpetually used kindred vehicles of expression.

While the Christian priest has been officially one who repeated the laudations already elaborated and established, he has also been to a considerable extent an originator, alike of orations and poems. Limiting ourselves to our own country, and passing over the ancient bards, such as Taliesin and Merlin, whose verses were in praise of living and dead pagan heroes, and coming to the poets of the new religion, we see that the first of them Cædmon, a convert who became inmate of a monastery, rendered in metrical form the story of creation and sundry other sacred stories—a variously elaborated eulogy of the deity. The next poet named is Aldhelm, a monk. The clerical Bede again, known mainly by other achievements, was a poet, too; as was likewise bishop Cynewulf. For a long time after, the men mentioned as writers of verse were ecclesiastics; as was Henry of Huntingdon, a prior; Geraldus Cambrensis, archdeacon; Layamon, priest; and Nicholas of Guildford. Not until Edward Ill's reign do we find mention of a secular song-writer—Minot; and then we come to our first great poet, Chaucer, who, whether or not "of Cambridge, clerk," as is suspected, became court-poet and occupied himself mainly with secular poetry. After this the differentiation of the secular verse-writer from the sacred verse-writer became more marked, as we see in the case of Gower; but still, while the subject-matter of the poems became more secularized, as with Langland and with Barbour, the ecclesiastical connection remained dominant. Lydgate was priest, orator and poet; Occleve, poet and civil servant; William of Massington, proctor and poet; Juliana Berners, prioress and secular poetess; Henryson, schoolmaster and poet; Skelton, priest and poet laureate; Dunbar, prior and secular poet; Douglas, rector and court-poet; Barclay, priest and poet; Hawes,