PERIOD OF PREPARATION. 670 to 1400. Chapter 1. RACE, LITERATURE, AND LANGUAGE BEFORE CHAUCER. IT is not until the fourteenth century that the language of English literature becomes so like the English of today that we can understand it without special study. Before that time, while England had no national speech, we find many books written in Latin, some in NormanFrench, and others in different varieties of an English which seems to us almost as strange as a foreign tongue. But while the literature of our modern English language may be said to begin in the comparatively modern English of some of the great writers of the fourteenth century, the literature of England stretches back for six hundred years before that time. Geoffrey Chaucer, who lived in the latter half of the fourteenth century, may be thought of as beginning this more modern period. The five centuries since his birth are bright with clusters of great writers, and at first may seem to us to contain all that is worth study in the literature of England. But if we look more closely, we see that England's great literary production during the latter period is directly connected with her slow centurie of preparation in the earlier; that her mental life, and the literature which is its most direct expression, have a continuous growth and history for more than twelve hund red years. We I cannot now do more than indicate some main features of this preparatory period. Looking at it in outline, we see that the way was prepared for the later literature, 1. By the making of the Race. The modern English people, whose national character English Literature interprets and expresses, was formed during this time by the mixture of different race ele ments. 2. By the Literature before the Norman Conquest. 3. By the Norman Conquest, with its far-reaching effects on race, literature, and language. 4. By the making of the Language out of the combination of different tongues. The English. THE MAKING OF THE RACE. The English settlers of Britain were Low-German tribes, resembling in language, and to some extent in character, their neighbors the Frisians, the modern Dutch, to whom they were closely related by blood. Two of the three English tribes came from what are now the Schleswig-Holstein provinces of Northern Germany, the country about the mouth of the river Elbe which lies to the north of Holland. The third tribe, the Jutes, held that peninsula yet farther northward which is now part of Denmark. This early home of the English, with its harshness, gloom, and privations, was a land to breed men. Fierce storms beat down upon it, and often in the spring and autumn the sea swept over its sunken, muddy coasts, flooding it far inland. Dismal curtains of fog settled over it; its miles of tangled forests were soaked and dripping with frequent rains. The other home of the English was the sea. The eldest son succeeded to his father's land; as soon as the younger sons grew old enough they took to the war-ships to win fame and plunder by slaughter and pillage. Their high-prowed galleys were a menace and a terror to the richer coast settlements far southward, and prayers were regularly offered in some churches for a deliverance from their fury. Swift in pursuit, they were swift also in flight. One of their poets contrasts life on their wintry waters with the joy of home: "Knows not he who finds happiest Home upon earth, How I lived through long Winter In labor and care, On the icy-cold ocean An exile from joy. Cut off from dear kindred, Encompassed with ice; Hail flew in hard showers, And nothing I heard But the wrath of the waters, The icy-cold way; At times the swan's song; In the moan of the sea-whelp For laughter of men ; These early English were fair-haired, blue-eyed men, big-boned and muscular, with the fearlessness and audacity of the hero, and the rapacity and cruelty of the savage. A young race with stores of unwasted vigor; with an immense, if brutal, energy; with an enormous and unspent capacity for life, for feeling, for thought, for action. Nor were they mere barbarians. They had that instinct for law and freedom which in the coming generations was to build Parliaments and create Republics; they had no less that splendid seriousness, that reverence for life and death, that profoundly religious * "The Sea-farer." Morley's trans. "Eng. Writers," vol. ii. p. 21. The entire poem may be read with advantage. spirit which animates and inspires the greatest productions of English literature. In spite of all their delight in the joy of battle, in spite of their feasting and drunken revelry, there runs through their poetry the persistent undertone of a settled melancholy. They look death steadily in the face as "the necessary end"; * they are continually impressed by the sense of the power of Fate, against which the weapons of the warrior are idle. "One shall sharp hunger slay; One shall the storms beat down; One shall live losing The light of his eyes, And one, lame of foot, With sinew-wound wearily Wasteth away, Musing and mourning, With death in his mind." † In another poem we are forced to descend into the very grave and watch the dust return to dust.‡ Yet this haunting sense of the shortness of life did not produce in the early English the determination to enjoy to-day. Living in the rush of battle and tempest, it rather stimulated them to quit themselves as heroes. The English conscience speaks in such lines as these: "This is best laud for the living In last words spoken about him :— When on earth, against wiles of the foe, With brave deeds overcoming the devil." § * " "Julius Cæsar," act ii. sc. 2. "The Fortunes of Man." Morley's trans." Eng. Writers," vol. ii. p. 33. "The Grave," a characteristic poem. See Longfellow's trans. in "Poets and Poetry of Europe." §"The Sea-farer," supra. In these early English we recognize those great traits of mind and character which have continued to animate the race; traits which in the centuries to come were to take shape in the deeds of heroes and in the songs of poets. In these half-savage pirate tribes, with their deep northern melancholy, is the germ of that masterful and aggressive nation which was to put a girdle of English round the world; of their blood are the seamen who chased the towering galleons of the Spanish Armada, the six hundred who charged to death at Balaclava, or those other English, our own forefathers, who declared and maintained their inheritance of freedom. The spirit of this older England, enriched by time, is alive, too, in the words of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of Browning, as it is in the deeds of Raleigh, of Chatham, and of Gordon. The Celts. When the English began to settle in Britain, about the middle of the fifth century, the island was occupied by tribes of a people called Celts. In early times this race held a great part of Western Europe as well as the British Isles, until conquered or pushed aside by the Teutonic races, the group to which the English belong. Scotland and Ireland were occupied by one great division of the Celts, the Gaels, and what is now England by an other, the Cymri, or, as we commonly call them, the Britons. The Celts were a very different race from the Teutons, and the Britons were as thoroughly Celtic in their disposition, as the English were Teutonic. For more than fourteen hundred years Celt and Teuton have dwelt together in England; for while the Britons were driven westward by the English, they were far from being exterminated, and in certain sections these two races have blended into one. This mixture of the races has been greatest in the North and West, for instance, in such counties as Devon, Somerset, Warwick, and |