Reaction against the Ideas of the Eighteenth Century; Theory of the Spontaneous in Poetry.-POETRY, 3-22: Sir Walter Scott; Sketch of his literary life; Keats, 9; Shelley, Byron, Crabbe, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Wordsworth; his Excursion, 18; Moore, Hood, Keble, Hogg, &c.-THE DRAMA, 22: Sheridan Knowles, Joanna Baillie, Lord Lytton, &c.-PROSE WRITERS: summary account of; Poets and Novelists: Lord Tennyson, Browning, M. Arnold, Landor, Clough, Swinburne. Names chronologically arranged, 7-33: Blake, Lady Morgan, Leyden, Jane and Anna M. Porter, Mrs. Tighe, Peacock, Mrs. Hofland, Miss Ferrier, Barry Cornwall, Hope, Beddoes, Galt, the Howitts, Cunningham, Wilson, De Quincey, Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Carleton, Griffin, Mrs. Norton, Warren, Elliott, Miss Mar- tineau, Domett, Lever, Basil Hall, Ainsworth, Mackay, Sir H. Taylor, Eliz. B. Browning, 17; Talfourd, Dickens, 18; Lover, Praed, Mrs. Trollope, Bailey, Faber, Grattan, Lord J. Manners, Cooper, Davis, De Vere, Horne, Patmore, Miss Sewell, Miss Yonge, Trench, Charlotte Bronté, 22; Aytoun, Mrs. Gaskell, C. Kingsley, Thackeray, 24; Dobell, McCarthy, A. Smith, Miss Kavanagh, Reade, Anthony Trollope, Lord Lytton, Locker, E. Arnold, Miss Craig, Mac- donald, Hughes, Miss Mulock, George Eliot, 28; W. Morris, W. W. Collins, Miss Procter, H. Kingsley, Dixon, Barnes, Miss C. Rossetti, Jean Ingelow, Dobson, L. Morris, D. Rossetti, Thomson. Four authors: Card. Wiseman, 34; Lord Macaulay, 35; Carlyle, 36; Card. Definition of Literature: Poetry and Prose Writings: Classification of Crabbe; 3. Allegories; Vision of Piers Plowman, Flower and the Leaf, the Thistle and the Rose, Spenser's Faerie Queene, 22; Castle of Indolence; Fables: Gay, Mrs. Thrale, Meyrick; 4. Romantic Poems: Scott's Lay and others; Byron's Oriental Tales; Lalla Rookh; 5. Historical Poems; Riming Chroniclers, Dryden's Annus Mirabilis. --DIDACTIC POETRY, 31-4: The Hind and Panther; Essay on Man; Essay on Criticism.-SATIRICAL POETRY, 35-41: of three kinds, moral, personal, political; Satires of Donne, Hall, and Swift; Pope's Satires; Moral Essays, 36; the Dunciad; English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; Hudibras; Absalom and Achitophel, 37; Churchill, Peter Pindar; Moore's Satires; the Vicar of Bray.-PASTORAL POETRY, 42: Spenser, Browne, Pope, Shenstone.-DESCRIPTIVE POETRY, 44: Poly- olbion, Cooper's Hill, the Seasons.-LYRICAL POETRY, 48-63: its kinds; devotional, loyal, patriotic, amatory, bacchanalian, martial; specimens of each kind.-ELEGIAC POETRY, 64: Fidele, the Cast- away, Lycidas, Adonais.-MISCELLANEOUS POETRY, 68: 1. Poems founded on the Passions and Affections; Michael'; 2. Poems of Sentiment and Reflection; Childe Harold, Wordsworth's 'Ode'; 3. Poems of Imagination and Fancy, Shelley's 'Skylark' and 'Cloud'; Prose Writings: 1. PROSE FICTION; Classification of Works of Fic- tion; Historical Novels, Scott; Novels of high life, Richardson; Novels of middle life, Fielding, Miss Austen; Novels of low life, Dickens, Smollett.-2. WORKS OF SATIRE, WIT, AND HUMOUR, 6- 11: Tale of a Tub; Battle of the Books; the Anti-Jacobin; Sterne; Sydney Smith.-3. ORATORY, 12: its kinds; Jeremy Taylor; Burke. Journalism, 15. Pamphleteering, 16; illustrated from Milton, Swift, and Byron.-4. HISTORY, 19-29: contemporary and retrospective; Clarendon, Raleigh, Gibbon, Bacon, Arnold, &c.—Biography, 30; its Divisions; Diaries, Letters.-5. THEOLOGY, 32-42: its Branches; leading Works in each.-6. PHILOSOPHY, 43-55: Logic: Bacon, Whately, Mill, Hamilton.-Psychology: 1. Moral Philosophy; Butler, &c.; 2. Intellectual Philosophy; Locke, Reid, Hamilton.- Meta- physics: Cudworth, More, Berkeley, 45; Hume, Coleridge.-Political Science Filmer, Hobbes, Milton, Burke, 49.-ESSAYS: Bacon, Fell- tham, Foster, &c.-CRITICISM: 1. Philosophical: Bacon's Advance- ment of Learning; 2. Literary: Sidney, Fielding, Hallam, &c.; 1. ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE forms of itself a special de partment of study. It is one of those exceptional products of the human mind, working with scanty materials, imperfect tools, and under adverse circumstances, which, like stars scattered over a dark portion of the sky, stud the dreary period that intervenes between the break-up of the ancient civilisation and literature, and the rise of those of modern times. It is a thing apart, like the Irish or the Icelandic literature, and re quires to be studied in connection with the fossil remains of other extinct cognate languages, such as the Old Saxon, the Masogothic, and the Frisian. It is a chapter in Paleontology. Yet, since the present English tongue is in its essential elements derived from the Anglo-Saxon, and since the existence of an Anglo-Saxon literature probably stimulated our earliest English writers to persist in the use of the vernacular, when interest, fashion, and the torrent of literary example would have led them to adopt the Norman French, it seems desirable to commence with a brief sketch of that literature. 2. We know of no Anglo-Saxon composition, produced in England, that can be traced back with certainty to the times of Paganism. We must not look to the dwellers on the muddy Elbe, or the inhabitants of the plains of Holstein, for the teem B ing imagination which characterised the Northmen of Iceland and Scandinavia, and which-ages before the stirring stimulus of Christianity was applied to them-produced the wonderful mythology of the Edda. In 596, St. Augustine, sent by Gregory the Great, brought the faith to the Anglo-Saxon tribes; and the moral ferment which the introduction of this new spiritual element occasioned, acting upon a towardly and capable race, full of dormant power and energy of every kind, induced also such intellectual exertion as the times permitted, and as the partial communication by the missionaries of the literature of the ancient world tended to enkindle and to sustain. The Angles of Northumbria received Christianity, not from Rome, but from Iona, the island-monastery of the Culdees, or 'servants of God,' founded by Columba, an Irish saint, in 565. Aidan, a monk of Iona, having come into Northumbria about the year 635, at the invitation of the pious king Oswald, converted great numbers of the Angles, and fixed his episcopal see at Lindisfarne or Holy Isle. From this period until the Norman Conquest (and in one memorable instance beyond it), the AngloSaxon mind was ever labouring, so far as intestine war and Danish inroad would allow, and executed a very creditable amount of work. Its chief successes, it is true, were obtained through the medium of the Latin, which was then and long after the common language of Europe, and which a generous and expansive mind, sick of irrational or semi-rational local usages, and material isolation, would rejoice to employ. 3. The Venerable Beda (673-735), in whom the Saxon intellect culminated, wrote all his extant works in Latin. Incomparably the most valuable of these is his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, which gives us professedly a connected history of the Church and religion of England down to his own times, and incidentally throws a flood of light upon the secular history also. Among his other works may be named, De Ratione Temporum, a Martyrology, the Life of St. Cuthbert in prose and verse, a poem in leonine verse on St. Justin's martyrdom, Commentaries both on the Old and on the New Testament, and a sort of chronicle of universal history called De Sex Etatibus Sæculi. Alcuin, Eddi Stephanus, and Ethelwerd also wrote in Latin. But the rough vernacular was employed in popular poetry, and in all such prose writings as had a didactic purpose which included the laity within its scope. Such writings were naturally for the most part translations, since it was evidently safer and wiser to gain an insight into, and acquaintance with, 1 Beda, Eccl. Hist., book iii. ch. 5. the wisdom of antiquity, before essaying, under less favourable conditions, to make conquests in the realm of original thought. 3a. Alcuin, born at York in 732, three years before the death of Beda, was solidly educated in the great monastic school of that city. In time he became its scholasticus' or head-master, and the fame of his learning spread far and wide. Being in Lombardy in 781, he came under the notice of Charlemagne, at whose invitation he took charge of the palace school at Aix-la-Chapelle. Thence he removed to Tours some years later, and having established a school of great efficiency, died there in 802. His works were ably edited in the last century by Froben, abbot of St. Emmeran at Ratisbon. His letters, nearly three hundred in number, are interesting and historically important; among his corre spondents were two popes, Adrian I. and Leo III., Charlemagne and his son, many English kings, many bishops both of English and foreign sees, and several women; to these may be added Rabanus Maurus, his pupil, Colcu the lector, a celebrated Irish scholar, and St. Benedict of Aniane. His Biblical commentaries, educational works, and dogmatic treatises can hardly be said to live; the last-named, however, are of some importance as throwing a clear light on the controversy about Adoptionism. He also wrote Lives of St. Willibrord (infra, § 10) and two French saints, Vedast and Riquier. Among his numerous poems, the most interesting is one in 1650 hexameter lines, ' On the Bishops and Saints of the Church of York.' John Scotus Erigena, whose name sufficiently proves his Irish birth, but on the details of whose life scarcely anything is known, was one of the ornaments of the court of Charles the Bald, in the second half of the ninth century. Of the subtlety and strength of his intellect we can judge from two of his extant works, De Divisione Nature and De Predestinatione. At his patron's request, he translated from Greek into Latin the mystical work of the pseudo-Dionysius on the Celestial Hierarchies. He is believed to have died about 885. 4. I. Poetry. Of Anglo-Saxon poetry there remains to us on the whole a considerable mass. By far the larger portion of it dates, both in original conception and in extant form, from a period subsequent to the introduction of Christianity. One poem, of 143 lines, The Gleeman's Song, bears on the face of it that the writer lived in the time of Attila, in the early part of the fifth century; nor does there seem any sufficient reason to doubt that such was the fact. Another, Beowulf, the longest and most important of all, though in its present form manifestly the composition of a Christian writer, points to, and proves the existence of, earlier Sagas and songs, containing the substance of the narrative, which must have been produced in pre-Christian times. In others, again, as Andreas, Elene, and Judith, although the narrative itself deals with a Christian subject-matter, the zeal of Grimm in the investigation of the old Teutonic world has elicited numerous traces of heathen customs and modes of thought, which to us, and to all Teutonic races, possess the deepest historical interest. The last and |