ENGLISH LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.

ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.

§ 1. The most ancient inhabitants of the British Isles. § 2. The Roman occu pation. § 3. Traces of the Celtic and Latin periods in the English language. § 4. Teutonic settlements in Britain. § 5. Anglo-Saxon language and literature. § 6. Effects of the Norman conquest upon the English popula tion and language. § 7. Romance Literature, Norman Trouvères and Provençal Troubadours. § 8. Change of Anglo-Saxon into English. § 9. Principal epochs of the English language.

§ 1. WITHIN the limited territory comprised by a portion of the British Isles has grown up a language which has become the speech of the most free, the most energetic, and the most powerful portion of the human race; and which seems destined to be, at no distant period, the universal medium of communication throughout the globe. It is a language, the literature of which, inferior to none in variety or extent, is superior to all others in manliness of spirit and in universality of scope; and it has exerted a great and a continually increasing influence upon the progress of human thought and the improvement of human happiness. To trace the rise and formation of such a language cannot be otherwise than interesting and instructive.

The most ancient inhabitants of the British Islands, concerning whom history has handed down to us any certain information, were a branch of that Celtic race which appears to have once occupied a large portion of Western Europe. Though the causes and period of their immigration into Europe are lost in the clouds of pre-historical tradition, this people, under the various appellations of Celts, Gael (Gaul) or Cymry (Cimbrians), seems to have covered a very large extent of territory, and to have retained strong traces, in its Druidical worship, its astronomical science, and many other features, of a remote Oriental descent. It is far from probable, however, that this race ever attained more than the lowest degree of civilization: the earliest records of it which we possess, at the time when it came in

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contact with the Roman arms, show it to have been then in a condition very little superior to barbarism-a fact sufficiently indicated by its nomad and predatory mode of existence, by the absence of agriculture, and above all by the universal practice of that infallible sign of a savage state, the habit of tattooing and staining the body. Whether the Phoenicians ever extended their navigation to the British Islands must remain doubtful; but their intercourse with the natives must in any case have been confined to the southern coast of the island; and there is no ground for supposing that the influence of the more polished strangers could have produced any change in the great body of the Celtic population.

§ 2. The first important intercourse between the primitive Britons and any foreign nation was the invasion of the country by the Romans in the year 55 B.C. Julius Cæsar, having subdued the territory occupied by the Gauls, a cognate tribe, speaking the same language and characterized by the same customs, religion, and political institutions, found himself on the shores of the Channel, within sight of the white cliffs of Albion; and naturally desired to push his conquests into the region inhabited by a people whom the Romans considered as dwelling at the very extremity of the earth: "penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos." The resistance of the Britons, though obstinate and ferocious, was gradually overpowered in the first century of the Christian era by the superior skill and military organization of the Roman armies: the country became a Roman province; and the Roman domination, though extending only to the central and southern portion of the country, that is, to England proper, exclusive of Wales, the mountainous portion of Scotland and the whole of Ireland, may be regarded as having subsisted about 480 years. A large body of Roman troops was permanently stationed in the new province; a great military road, defended by strongly fortified posts, extended from the southern coast at least as far as York; and the invaders, as was their custom, endeavoured to introduce among their barbarous subjects their laws, their habits, and their civilization. In the course of this long occupation by the Roman power, the native population became naturally divided into two distinct and hostile classes. Such of the Celts as submitted to the yoke of their invaders acquired a considerable degree of civilization, learnt the Latin language, and became a Latinized or provincial race, similar to the inhabitants on the other side of the Channel. The other portion of the Celts, namely, those who inhabited mountainous regions inaccessible to the Roman arms, and those who, refusing to submit to the invaders, fled from the southern districts to take refuge in their rugged fastnesses, retained, we may be sure, with their hostility to the invaders, their own language, dress, customs, and religion; and it was these who, periodically descending from the mountains of

Wales and Scotland, carried devastation over the more civilized province, and taxed the skill and vigilance of the Roman troops. It was to restrain the incursions of these savages that a strong wall was constructed in the reign of Severus across the narrowest portion of the island, from the river Tyne to the Solway Frith. When the Roman troops were at length withdrawn from Britain, in order to Jefend Italy itself against the innumerable hordes of barbarians which menaced it, we can easily comprehend the desperate position in which the Romanized portion of the population now found itself. Having in all probability lost, during their long subjection, the valour which originally distinguished them; having acquired the vices of servitude without the union which civilization can give, they found themselves exposed to the furious incursions of hungry barbarians, eager to reconquer what they considered as their birthright; and who, intense as was their hatred of the victorious Romans, must have looked with a still fiercer enmity on their degenerate countrymen, as traitors and cowards who had basely submitted to a foreign yoke. Down from their mountains rushed the avenging swarms of Scottish and Pictish savages, and commenced taking a terrible vengeance on their unhappy countrymen. Every trace of civilization was swept away; the furious devastation which they carried through the land is commemorated in the ancient songs and legends of the Cymry; and the objects of their vengeance, after vainly imploring the assistance of Rome in a most piteous appeal, had recourse to the only resource now left them, of hiring some warlike race of foreign adventurers to protect them. These adventurers were the Saxon pirates.

§ 3. Before approaching the second act in the great drama of English history, it will be well to clear the ground by making a few remarks upon the traces left by the Celtic period in the language of the country. It must first of all be distinctly remembered that the Celtic dialect, whether in the form still spoken in Wales, which is supposed to be the most similar to the language of the ancient Britons, or in that employed in the Highlands of Scotland and among the Celtic population of Ireland, has only a very remote affinity to modern English. It is in all respects a completely different tongue; and so completely insignificant has been its influence on the present language that, in a vocabulary consisting of about 40,000 words, it would be difficult to point out a hundred derived directly from the Celtic.*

It is true that the English language contains a considerable number of words ultimately traceable to Celtic roots, but these have been introduced into it through the medium of the French, which, together with an enormous majority of Latin words, contains some of

On the Celtic element in the English language, see 'The Student's Manual of the English Language,' p. 28, seq., and p. 45.

Gaulish origin. The same remark may be made respecting the prominent Latin element in the English language. The Latin words, which constitute three-fifths of our language, cannot in any instance be proved to have derived their origin from any corrupt Latin dialect spoken in Britain; but to have been filtered, so to speak, through some of the various forms of the great Romance speech from which French, Italian, and Spanish are derived. One class of words, however, is traceable to the Brito-Roman period of our history; and this is ineffaceably stamped upon the geography of the British Isles. In Wales, in the Highlands of Scotland, and in Ireland, where the population is pure and unmixed, the names of places have probably remained unaltered from a very remote period, perhaps long anterior to the invasion of Julius Cæsar; and even in those parts of the country which have been successively occupied by very different races, many appellations of pure Celtic antiquity have survived the inundations of new peoples, and may still be marked, like some venerable Druidical cromlech, standing in hoar mysterious age in the midst of a more recent civilization. Thus the termination "don " is in some instances the Celtic word "dun," a rock or natural fortress. Again, the termination "caster " or "chester" is unquestionably a monument of the Roman occupation of the island, indicating the spot of a Roman "castrum" or fortified post.*

*

§ 4. The true foundations of the English laws, language, and national character were laid, between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the sixth centuries, deep in the solid granite of Teutonic antiquity. The piratical adventurers whom the old German passion for plunder and glory, and also, perhaps, the entreaties of the "miserable Britons," allured across the North Sea from the bleak shores of their native Jutland, Schleswig, Holstein, and the coasts of the Baltic, were the most fearless navigators and the most redoubted sea-kings of those ages. On their arrival in Britain, concerning which the early chronicles are filled with vague and picturesque legends, like that of Hengist and Horsa, these rovers were in every respect savages, though their rugged energetic Teuton nature, so admirably sketched by Tacitus at a preceding period, offered a rich and fertile soil capable of being developed by Christianity and civilization into a noble type of national character. Successive bands of the same race, attracted by the reports of their predecessors respecting the superiority of the new settlement over their own barren and perhaps over-peopled fatherland, gradually established themselves in those parts of Britain which the Romans had occupied before them. But the same causes which prevented the Romans from penetrating into the mountainous

* In the same way some other Latin words appear in other names of places: as strata," paved roads,” in Strat-ford, Stret-ton; colonia, in Lin-coln; port-us, in Portsmouth, &c.

districts of Wales and Scotland, continued to exclude the Saxons also from those inaccessible fastnesses. Gradually, and after sanguinary conflicts, they succeeded, as the armies of Rome had done before, in driving back into these regions the wild Celtic populations which had descended thence with the hope of reconquering their inheritance; and this historical fact receives confirmation from the circumstance that the present inhabitants of these mountain regions are in the present day of pure Celtic blood, retaining the language of their British ancestors; and forming a race as completely distinct from the English people properly so called, as the Finn or the Lett, for example, from the Slavonic occupier of the land of his forefathers. The level, and consequently more easily accessible, portion of Scotland was gradually peopled by the Anglo-Saxon race; and their language and institutions were established there as completely as in South Britain itself. This fact alone ought to be sufficient to destroy the prejudice, so common not only among foreigners but even among Englishmen, of regarding all the inhabitants of Scotland as Celts alike; of representing William Wallace, for instance, in a Highland kilt, a mistake as ludicrous as would be that of painting Washington armed with a tomahawk, or adorned, like a Cherokee chief, with a belt of scalps or a girdle of wampum. It is probable that even the half-Romanized Britons who first invited the Saxon tribes to come to their assistance were speedily involved by their dangerous allies in the same persecution as their savage mountain countrymen: at all events one fact is certain, that the Celt in general, whether friendly or hostile, possessing a less powerful organization and a less vigorous moral constitution than the Teuton, was in the course of time either quietly absorbed into the more energetic race, or gradually disappeared, with that fatal certainty which seems to be an inevitable law regulating the contact of two unequal nationalities, just as the aboriginal Indian has disappeared before the descendants of the very same Anglo-Saxons in the New World. It is only a peculiar combination of geographical conditions that has enabled the primeval Celt to retain a separate existence on the territory of Great Britain, while the predominance-a numerical predominance onlyof the Celtic race in the population of Ireland may be traced to other, but no less exceptional causes.

§ 5. The true parentage, therefore, of the English nation, is to be traced to the Teutonic race. The language spoken by the Northern invaders was a Low-Germanic dialect, akin to the modern Dutch, but with many Scandinavian forms and words. Like the people who spoke it, it was possessed of a character at once practical and imaginative; at once real and ideal; and required but the influence of civilization to become a noble vehicle for reasoning, for eloquence, and for the expression of the social and domestic feelings. In the