TO THE FOUR COURTS, PLEASE1
The driver rubbed at his nettly chin
With a huge, loose forefinger, crooked and
black,

And his wobbly, violet lips sucked in,
And puffed out again and hung down slack:
One fang shone through his lop-sided smile, 5
In his little pouched eye flickered years of guile.

And the horse, poor beast, it was ribbed and forked,

And its ears hung down, and its eyes were old, And its knees were knuckly, and as we talked It swung the stiff neck that could scarcely hold Its big, skinny head up - then I stepped in, And the driver climbed to his seat with a grin.

God help the horse and the driver too,

And the people and beasts who have never a friend,

For the driver easily might have been you, 15
And the horse be me by a different end.
And nobody knows how their days will cease,
And the poor, when they're old, have little of
peace.

WHAT TOMAS AN BUILE SAID
IN A PUB1

I saw God. Do you doubt it?

Do you dare to doubt it?

I saw the Almighty Man. His hand
Was resting on a mountain, and

1 From Insurrections, by James Stephens. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan & Co., Ltd., London, and by special arrangement with The Macmillan Company, New York, publishers

TRANSLATIONS FROM OLD

ENGLISH

BÆDA'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE

Pages xiii ff. Our principal source of information about affairs in England for nearly one hundred and fifty years after the arrival of the missionary bishop St. Augustine and his companions, A.D. 597, is the history written in the later years of his life by the great scholar Bæda, who lived and taught at the monastery of Jarrow and died there in 735. Jarrow and its sister monastery Wearmouth had been founded in 682 and 674 respectively by Benedict, the abbot of St. Peter's, Canterbury, and soon became important centers of religious and intellectual culture. Abbot Benedict made several visits to Rome and brought back with him architects, skilled workmen, scholars, and books. At Jarrow he founded an excellent library and school. Jarrow's chief title to fame is Bæda, the greatest scholar of his day in all Europe. His writings were numerous and covered the whole field of learning as it was then conceived. His pupils became the leaders of thought in their day, and one of them, Egbert, founded the famous school of York, which was attended by continental as well as English scholars. Among the latter was Alcuin, the great organizer of education under Charlemagne.

During his last illness he was eagerly translating into English the Gospel of St. John and extracts from St. Isidore, and his pupil Cuthbert says he was "learned in our songs," but no English writing has come down from him except the five-line poem called Bada's Death Song.

His Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum) was, like all works intended for scholars, written in Latin. About a hundred and fifty years later King Alfred caused it to be trans

1 For convenience of reference. page and line numbers are given throughout. In referring to prose selections, c. is used as an abbreviation for column.

lated into the English of his time, because, as he tells us, there was then scarcely anyone in England who could read Latin (see his Preface to his translation of the Pastoral Care, p. xxix of this book). Our two extracts are translated from King Alfred's Old English version. The first gives a picturesque episode in the adoption of Christianity by the English. The capacity of the English for poetic thought and feeling is further illustrated by the second selection, the famous account of the poet Cadmon, who was still living at Whitby when Bæda was a pupil at Jarrow.

BEOWULF

Pp. xv ff. Scholars formerly called Beowulf a national epic, or folk-epic, and held that it was not composed by an individual but just grew. They taught that at certain stages in the development of a tribe or people the tribe as a whole participates in making poems, or lays, embodying the traditions of the tribe-mythological tales and heroic sagas and that later through confusion of names and persons some of these lays crystallize together into great epic poems, like Beowulf in England, the Iliad in Greece, and the Chanson de Roland in France. This theory, with all that it involves for the origins of epic poetry, is now rejected.

The episodes forming the Beowulf are not mythological in origin nor are they concerned with significant events in the history of the English people. They belong to the class of tales which grew up in primitive times about fights between men and the terrible monsters with which fear and imagination peopled the caves and forests and dark waters.

The only copy of Beowulf that has come down to us is preserved in a single manuscript written, according to the latest view, in the tenth century, but the poem itself was composed some three hundred years earlier. One should not, however, suppose that it was the work of unlettered savages. Whether we admit that the author imitated Vergil's Eneid or not, we may be sure that he wrote at a time when northern England was a

seat of learning and culture and after much religious poetry had been composed by Cadmon and others. There can be little doubt that the author was a scholar, familiar with Latin literature, and perhaps resident at the King's court. His purpose in writing would seem to have been, not to furnish idle amusement, but to present to the young members of a vain and apparently degenerate aristocracy (similar to that implied by the letters of St. Boniface) a picture of the finer ideals of conduct and manners held by the princes and ladies of the old, heroic age.

Our ancestors devoted much thought to training in character and manners and in the wisdom of life. Their wisdom they formulated in proverbs, apophthegms, essays, and formal treatises. The training in character and manners was given in part by oral instruction and example, and in part by history and fiction presenting the ideals of the time. In the Renaissance the favorite literary form for this purpose was the "courtesy book"; in earlier times the romance- metrical or prose was the usual medium, as some of the romances expressly inform us; still earlier the epic and the heroic tale served the purpose.

--

It is this purpose which gives unity to the Beowulf. The poem presents pictures of an ideal prince from early manhood to old age and death, and even the allusions to persons and events belonging to other tales are explicable and justifiable by this basic theme.

Our extracts show clearly the nobility of the ideals of both manhood and womanhood. Only lack of space prevents us from giving also the fine pictures of Beowulf as an aged king sacrificing his life to his duty to his people and of the steadfast loyalty of young Wiglaf.

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE

CYNEWULF AND CYNEHEARD

P. xxv. For general information about the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle see page 758. The account of Cynewulf and Cyneheard is the earliest entry that is of interest to modern readers. This tragic narrative, said the great English scholar Henry Sweet, "stands out conspicuously among the brief, dry notices of which the Chronicle up to the time of Alfred is mainly composed: we do not meet with so vivid and circumstantial a piece of history till more than a hundred years later. It is no doubt contemporary with, or, at any rate, only a few years later than, the events

it tells it is, in short, by far the oldest historical prose in any Teutonic language. The style is of the rudest character, contrasting remarkably with the polished language of the later portions of the Chronicle, - abrupt, disconnected, obscure, and full of anacoluthons."

The greatest difficulty in following the narrative arises from the writer's failure to make clear when "they" means the prince's men and when it means the king's men. I have tried to retain the rough style of the original and, at the same time, secure a reasonable degree of clearness by care in sentence and paragraph division.

This Cynewulf, king of the West-Saxons, is of course not the author of the religious poems mentioned below (see next page, cl. 2); Cynewulf, the writer, is believed by scholars to have been a bishop of about the same date living in Northumbria.

RIDDLES

Pp. xxv f. Riddles, conundrums, and other similar puzzles are of very great antiquity and have been a favorite form of amusement even among very primitive peoples. Even the poetic riddle is of very ancient lineage; the famous riddle with which Samson puzzled the Philistines three days at his wedding feast was in verse:

Out of the eater came forth meat;

And out of the strong came forth sweetness.

From the Orient probably came the first poetic riddles known among the Latins those of Symphosius in the fifth century after Christ. These set a fashion followed by many learned men of the Middle Ages. In the seventh century Bishop Aldhelm, famous for his learning and for gathering crowds to hear his preaching by singing popular songs in English, wrote riddles in Latin verse; and in the eighth century Tatwine archbishop of Canterbury, Eusebius abbot of Wearmouth, Alcuin archbishop of York, and the great scholar Bada followed his example. The riddles in Anglo-Saxon verse, of which a few are here given in translation, belong to a collection of more than ninety preserved in the Exeter Book -- one of the few collections of Anglo-Saxon poetry that have come down to us. Some of these riddles were composed in the eighth century. The principal merit of many of them is their ingenuity. A few are so puzzling that scholars have differed over their solutions. Our two selections not only display ingenious thought and skill in composition but possess some poetic charm.