The Sun.
London, England, 1834-09-11 00:00:00

LITURATURE

LARDNER'S CABINET CYCLORZEDIA
Var.. IV. -LONG MAN AND CO., 1834.

EUROPE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES

The compiler of this history is one of those sincere
and eloquent enthusiasts, who seldom fail in commu-
nicating to others a portion of their own ardour. It
may be that in the outset the reader is inclined to
quarrel with him for not sufficiently discriminating be-
tween that which is only curious, and that which is
really useful ; but this disposition wears off; and the
judgment begins to slumber, as we get more and more
warmed by the fascinating details, till at length, if we do
not quite imagine the author of Beowulfh to be a Homer,
or Bede a Thucydides, we are at least willing to allow
they have hitherto been abandoned to unmerited ne-
glect. It is time to sweep off, if possible, the accu-
mulated dust and cobwebs from the old Anglo-Saxon
poet, and place him on our libraries by the side of
the no less romantic Niebelungen.
With the preceding volumes, three in number, it is
to be presumed the reader is acquainted. Most of the
so called histories are nothing more than the annals of
monarchs, their wars, and their crimes ; but this is
pre-eminently the history of a people, their arts, their
sciences, and their literature. The present volume, to
speak of it under its most. comprehensive title, contains
the intellectual history of the Anglo-Saxons, with the
religious and intellectual history of England from the
Norman Conquest to the ascension of Henry the Se-
venth ; this again naturally branches out. into the se-
condary divisions of arts, literature, and science ; nor
do we know where else the same quantity of informa-
tion relative to these topics could be found in the same
space, and so pleasantly conveyed. It is truly a de-
lighful production.
When the Saxons first landed in England, they
found in the Britons a race of barbarians to the full as
savage and as worthless as themselves. With the in-
troduction of Christianity a new light broke in upon
them ; the Roman missionaries, so often the subject of
ignorant censure, brought with'them the arts'and know-
ledge of more civilized life, and quickly opened a new
path to that spirit of ambition, which, till then, had
neither found nor sought any road to fame but in the
" strife of spears." In less than two centuries Eng-
land, by the acknowledgment of the best foreign critics,
was superior in mental cultivation to the rest of Eu-
rope, though in some arts she was undoubtedly sur-
passed both by Gaul and Italy.
It is a part of the rash, unreflecting, ignorance of the
present day to talk of the monks as being the drones
of the social hive, consuming much and producing
nothing. Never has prejudice mocked itself by
a greater fallacy. To the monks we owe the
first attempts, rude as they might be, to do any
thing deserving of the name of husbandry : while the
serf, having no part or portion in the soil, laboured
with slave-like reluctance for his task-master—the
monks, doubly impelled by interest and religious obli-
gation, devoted themselves with unflinched zeal to
agriculture, and made harvests start from the fens of
Lincolnshire, and the waste of Northumberland. To
them we are indebted for the first seeds of that
knowledge, which is now hour by hour ripening into
so glorious a harvest ; amidst the wild deserts of
savage ignorance the monasteries stood alone, the fa-
voured Goshens of art and science ; and whatever we
wish to learn of our earlier history, must be gathered
from their labours. But for then, what woul have
become of those classic treasures, which have been to
literature what the polar star was to the seaman ? At
a time when printing was unknown, and copies could
be multipled only by the laborious use of the pen, these
drones devoted the leisure hours of their solitude to the
unceasing and wearisome task of transcription, and, by
keeping alive the knowledge of the Roman language, ren-
dered its authors intelligible from generation to genera-
tion. It is perfectly true that this praise does not apply to
the whole body; but the general fact is not altered by the
consideration of less or greater numbers. If barba-
rism must be allowed to have prevailed to no small ex-
tent even among the ecclesiastics, it is no less true
that their more enlightened members raised the coun-
try in literary fame, beyond all the nations of the same
period, and maintained it there, so long as it con-
tinued undisturbed by foreign invasion. Hence we
may easily infer, how general ignorance might co-exist
with individual pre-eminence, and how, in a land,
justly priding itself in the venerable names of Bede and
Bridferth, the mass might yet remain brutal and un-
enlightened. It was the same with architecture. The
first buildings that merit any notice, were the churches,
and these undoubtedly were raised by the ecclesiastics;
who not only designed them, but most probably as.
sisted in their execution, holding out by their ex•
ample the best lessons of instruction to their ignoran
workmen.

In considering the learning of the period, we shall
not pause upon the Latin productions, though they
form so large a portion of the literary mass, and
amongst them are the volumes of the venerable Bede,
who will always command the respect of scholars. A
more general topic will be found in the poets, or ra-
ther in one poet, the author of " Beowulf 11," whom
some have not hesitated to call the Homer of the
Anglo-Saxons. This is the earliest known attempt
in any vernacular dialect of modern Europe to produce
an epic poem. It consists of forty-three cantos, pre-
ceded by an introduction, and has the merit, which
does not belong to epics of our own times, of being
anything rather than a dull imitation of Greek
and Roman models. It is a purely Gothic crea-
tion. Yet the characters are drawn with
fidelity and force, the descriptions are vivid, and the
style remarkable for its simple energy. There is per-
haps to be objected to it, that the story ends and be-
gins again, the poem consisting of two distinct adven-
tures, connected only by the person of the hero. The
double fable is briefly this :—ln the prime of his life,
Boewulfh combats with Grendel and his mother, two
goblins, the foes of Hrothgar, King of Denmark; in
his old age he fights with Steore-heort, the fiery dra-
gon, that during a thousand
,years had brooded over
unprofitable gold, by which last encounter he loses his
life, though lie has the good fortune to slay his enemy.
The classical scholar may, in the narrowness of his
taste, be inclined to smile at Epoem with dragons and
goblins for its supernatural machinery ; but we may
be permitted to doubt whether the monsters of Beo-
wulfh are a whit more absurd.than the gods and god-
desses of the Iliad.

We regret, with our auth6r, that the " IVletrical
Chronicle of Britain" has not yet been published. It
is supposed to have been wilito4bs.7 Layaman, a priest
on the Severn, early in the., Ahirteenth century. A
learned Dane, Dr. Grundtrig, would have presented
us with this and other treasures of a similar nature ;
hut, to the eternal disgrace of our literary character,
his proposals could not secure even eighty subscribers.
At such a period, it will readily be conceived that
popular superstitions must have abounded. A single
fable, relative to the celebrated Merlin, may serve as a
specimen of the current credulity of the times :....._
When the Saxons were in possession of the southern and
western coasts, and too powerful to be expelled, Vortigern,
says the abbot, convoked his nobles, and asked them what he
should do They advised him to build a fortress where he
might defy the assaults of the enemy. Accompanied by his
magicians, he hastened into the west to discover a suitable site
for his fortress. None seemed so well adapted as Snowdon,
which his magicians assured him would be impregnable to the
end of all time. With extreme diligence he caused workmen