single poet to comfort the hearts of his contemporaries on the loss of their national liberty, is indeed astonishing; and can only be accounted for on the supposition that they had sunk more deeply than the Welsh they had once conquered, and more deeply than our national complacency is in general willing to admit. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is true, struggles on to the reign of Stephen, when the last remnant of Anglo-Saxon disappears; but it dies out from sheer exhaustion, without exhibiting a spark of that poetic fervour which sometimes breaks out in its earlier portions.

So the gift of song, which had once been the special attribute of the Saxon, passed over to his Norman conquerer; a change which might be attributed to the different effects of freedom and slavery. It was not to be expected that a brave and sensitive people, fond of adventure and ambitious of distinction, should pass over such an event in their history as the conquest of England without its due celebration. If a spark of poetic fire or imagination existed in their nature, it could not fail to be elicited by such a deed, even if it had never been developed before. The spirit which entered shortly after with such irrepressible ardour upon the Crusades could not long remain indifferent to the glory and renown which had accumulated round the name of the Normans by their English conquest. From a vassal duke his leader had become an independent sovereign; from a narrow strip of territory he had carved out for himself by his sword alone the broad acres and best domains of fertile England. What Rome had left, what the Briton had acquired, what the Anglo-Saxon had spared, had now fallen to his lot by the single exertion of his personal prowess, and seemingly by the exercise of those virtues which the Anglo-Saxon did not possess, and had not even the sense to admire and imitate. Even those qualities, purely poetical and literary, which the Norman showed until then in no great abundance, were abundantly developed by the Conquest. And we have the singular spectacle of a profoundly thoughtful, poetic, imaginative people, like the Anglo-Saxon, crushed and trampled down by their conquerors, yet exhibiting, so far as

literature is concerned, no keen sense of their degradation, no hope of freedom, no regrets for the past; whilst not only whatever poetry there is, but whatever literature there is, emanates exclusively from the conqueror, or from those who are more than half Norman in blood and wholly Norman in education and sympathy.

How very, different that literature is in its main features from the Anglo-Saxon, how much higher in its aims and more ambitious in its pretensions, may be seen by comparing any one of the Norman metrical chronicles with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; or the life and writings of a Norman archbishop and prelate, such as Lanfranc and Anselm, with the most eminent of their predecessors before the Conquest. The metrical history of England by Gaimar, of which the Anglo-Saxon portion alone comprised more than 5000 lines, swept, within its wide compass, the whole extent of history, ancient and modern, so far at least as it was known in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The adventures of Jason and his successful search for the Golden Fleece seemed to this Norman Homer to be the most apt commencement of a lay intended to glorify the deeds of compatriots more adventurous than Jason, whose flocks and fleeces, like his, were the reward of a similar spirit. That all books should be laid under contribution; that fact and fiction should be strangely blended; that Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon, the old world and the new, pagan and Christian, trouvere and historian, friends and foes, should be tesselated together in this poetical mosaic, is no more than might have been expected. But such writings show the vast difference in the mental requirements and intellectual condition of the two people; a difference attributable not merely to natural peculiarities, but to those social habits and refinements which distinguished the Norman from the Anglo-Saxon. For it must be remembered that, unlike the lays of the Anglo-Saxons, these Norman metrical chronicles were produced for the use of noble dames and ladies, and not unfrequently at their request. They were intended to be recited, and doubtless were recited, in castle and monastery, at festive gatherings, or at the solitary

hearth. They fostered the restless spirit of the Norman knight, which drove him out to seek new adventures abroad, and at home required to be fed with a recital of deeds which either were the counterpart of his own, or in which he or his father had been distinguished actors.

The love of learning in the Norman, conspicuous alike in the king, the noble, and the ecclesiastic, imposed upon the poet, and the chronicler, if he would please, the necessity of recommending himself to the favour of his patrons not less by the extent of his erudition than by the graces of his poetry. No Norman poet entered upon his task without due and laborious preparation. He sung or wrote, not because it was pleasant to sing, but because ne was commanded to do so, or desired to signalise his gratitude. And this, not in the way in which later poets have sought out patrons, in the hope of a pecuniary reward, but in the feeling that the noble whom he served, and with whose household he was intimately connected, deserved the song as the flower of nobility; and the master's glory was the poet's meed. Besides, the close personal relationship which so frequently existed between the author and his patron, and sometimes the position of the former as guardian or instructor of the family, when the lord was away, served as an additional stimulus to exertion. It was for the pleasure and praise of his lord that he undertook, partly in his character as poet, partly in his capacity of instructor, to trace back history through all its channels to its earliest sources. And to bring all men together into one common brotherhood of fame, who deserved fame, was indispensable before he considered himself duly qualified to do justice to the immediate subject of his song. For he was not less cosmopolitan in his poetical than in his national taste.

Now none of these feelings can be traced in Anglo-Saxon literature; at least if we may judge from its remains. The AngloSaxon poet and historian sought no patron; he had apparently no personal attachments to gratify by the exercise of his genius or the exhibition of his learning; and he certainly lived in no such intimate personal relationship with his native nobles as fell to the

lot of the Norman poet. The unfavourable evidence of Malmesbury, that the Anglo-Saxon thane had become gross in his tastes and indifferent to learning is verified by the whole tenor of AngloSaxon literature, at least with few exceptions. It may be thought that these conclusions are too general, considering the paucity of materials now remaining for an exact survey and determination of the question; it may be said also that the Norman conquest swept away much of the Anglo-Saxon literature; and many authors were suffered to perish by the neglect and ignorance of the AngloSaxon tongue, who, under other circumstances, would have left by their writings a, more favourable impression of the genius, the literature, and social condition of the Anglo-Saxon than we are now able to form. There may perhaps be some force in these objections; but, for myself, I am inclined to think that there is no good reason for supposing that much Anglo-Saxon literature of importance has been buried under the ruins of the Conquest; or that what has been irretrievably lost was of a nature very different from that which has been preserved, or attained any such degree of excellence as would materially affect the judgment we are enabled to form from those portions which remain. A comparison between the state of literature, and specially of historical literature and biography, for one hundred and fifty years before and one hundred and fifty years after the Norman Conquest, must result in establishing the immeasurable superiority of the Norman over the Anglo-Saxon in all the great qualities of profound thought, extensive learning, wide sympathy, and even personal interest and observation. As there is no ecclesiastic in the earlier period whose writings can be compared with those of Anselm, so are there no biographies or local histories, before the Conquest, which can bear the least comparison with the very vivid and realistic details of Eadmer of Malmesbury, or of the biographers of Thomas Becket. With all the admiration professed by the Anglo. Saxon for Alfred or Edward the Confessor, for Alphage or other national saints, he has failed to record the acts, the personal appearance, the sayings, of the great founders and kings of his country with the same minute and lively detail as his Norman successor

has preserved for us the portraiture of Henry I., or even of William Rufus. And, what is still more strange, we are indebted for our knowledge of whatever was most remarkable in the Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastics, before the Norman invasion, to that spirit of learning and inquiry which inspired the Norman, and not to the Anglo-Saxons. But for the industry of Norman ecclesiastics and the large and liberal spirit of Norman archbishops, the name of more than one great Anglo-Saxon would have remained as a name and nothing more.

Nor was it in these respects alone that the period on which we are now engaged differed so much from that which preceded it. The Norman excelled his Anglo-Saxon contemporary not in learning merely, and in that spirit of cosmopolitanism which was the distinguishing characteristic of his race. He was more practical and more systematic; he was better qualified for government and for consolidating kingdoms and empires than the Anglo-Saxon, whose history previous to the Conquest is full of the degeneracy of a great people, of their intestine divisions, their incapacity, or their indolence. Seldom and slowly roused even to the necessary efforts of self-preservation, they rose only to fall again more rapidly under the yoke of the invader, and to succumb more shamefully at last to a handful of foreigners, far inferior numerically to themselves. There was no growth of national unity or sentiment, no consciousness of a great people, no wars abroad, no peace at home; and their literature, like themselves, though full of noble and rude thoughts, degenerated from poetry to history, from history to compilations, until the ever-diminishing and dwindling stream was lost in the swamps of the grammarian and the homilist, unenlivened by any pretension to philosophy, and bare of all claim to originality. If union gives strength, disunion produces feebleness, let the original and individual atoms be as strong and as excellent as they may be; and it is to this continual tendency to disintegration that we must attribute in a great degree the retrograde course of the Anglo-Saxon and of Anglo-Saxon literature— a literature of more than five centuries, but which has with one or two exceptions, little to show worthy the attention of the historian