of rhyme took the place of the old-fashioned alliteration of the earliest age of English poetry.

1066

to

It is to the credit of the Norman kings that they were always favorable to learning. William the Conquer1087. or-although his reign was busy with the broils and intrigues which engaged a king struggling to keep his hold on a new kingdom-was never deaf to the claim of letters. As soon as he was fairly at home in England, he brought over the good Lanfranc, the Italian scholar who had founded the famous school in Normandy, and made him Archbishop of Canterbury. William's son, Henry I, bore the sirname of Beauclerc, "Fine Scholar," and there were few princes of Norman line in England who did not feel, or pretend to feel, an interest in literature.

The history of England was still kept up in Latin. The first great successor of Beda and Alfred in this field was Ordericus Vitalis, who brought English history down to the year 1141; following him came William of Malmesbury, who told the story of the English from their landing in Britain to the reign of King Stephen de Blois, and then came Henry of Huntingdon, who ended his work about the time Henry the II came to the throne.

1154

to

In the reign of Henry the II literature took a great stride forward. There were many events that helped to this. 1189. The king himself was a patron of literary men, and his queen, Eleanor, had come from the very home and birthplace of the Troubadours, and could herself make songs such as the singers of that day sang to their gay lutes. There had been two crusades to the Holy Sepulchre, and the united armies of Europe had brought back from the east many refinements of taste and many poetical ideas new to them. The system of Chivalry, which did much to polish manners, was the ruling force in society, and it was this spirit that found expression in the lays of the Troubadour and exalted the office of the singer, till knights and princes were proud to be called verse-makers. With these influences to foster

literature it is not surprising that a number of remarkable. names should appear in England in this reign.

Among the first of these names is that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was not English, but Welsh, and belonged to the old British nation, so long since driven to Wales by the English advance into British territory. These Britons had imparted very little to their English conquerors, although, as I have told you previously, they had a literature of which they were justly proud. There are still remaining some manuscripts in the Kymric tongue older than any in the English.

The Welsh felt less bitterness against the Norman than his ancestors had felt against the English, and the tendency of Norman rule had been to break down the barriers which kept all knowledge of British history and poetry out of England, and thus to bring a fresh element into our literature. In 1147 this Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was a priest living under the patronage of the English court, wrote a history of his people which is very interesting indeed. Geoffrey says he was not the author of this book, but that it was a translation out of the ancient Kymric tongue, which he, like all true Britons, could read and speak, and that it was one of the old books which the Welsh had carried over to Brittany, when some of them fled there after the English invaded England. This book is very interesting to us because in it we find the history of the famous King Arthur and his prophet Merlin, and an account of how the order of Knights of the Round Table was founded.

The history begins by telling us that the race of Britons began with Brutus, a great grandson of Æneas of Troy, who after the manner of his famous grandsire, took his household gods and went to found a city in the island of Albion. After slaying a number of giants he found there, the chief of whom was Gogmagog, Brutus built the city of Troynovant (New Troy) which is now London, and began the race of the Britons. From him in lineal order came King Arthur, greatest and best of British kings.

There is now-a-days a great deal of doubt about the reality of King Arthur, and most people regard him merely as a myth of the old historians, or the later poets. But although we may be sure that the story about Brutus, and, indeed, most of the accounts of Arthur, are untrue, still I do not see why there may not once have been a noble king among the Britons, called Arthur, who ruled wisely and well; nor why some of the deeds told by Geoffrey may not have been founded on fact. At any rate Geoffrey was for years believed in as an undoubted historian, and from his time Arthur, and Merlin, and The Knights of the Table Round, began to figure largely in literature, even to the present day, where we find them in so many of the modern poets.

Two other remarkable men of Henry II's time were also Welsh by birth, Walter Map, and Gerald de Barri. They were both priests, as were most literary men in these early days, but Map was a shrewd, outspoken man, and a clever writer, who did not let his office blind his judgment, and he had a very sharp pen to use against the abuses of the church. Some of the songs which were called "songs of Walter Map," are the first protests in England against religious corruption, which we shall see wax strong in the time of Wycliffe and the reformers, two hundred years later. Map also wrote a sort of court journal which gives us little peeps into that old time, showing it as if the people in it were still alive. But his great work in literature was his addition to the Romances of the Round Table, which had now begun to be current in Europe and to draw to them other romances, which Brittany, a country so rich in fiction, was ready to add to the story of her favorite King Arthur. The characters of Lancelot du Lac, Tristram and Isoud, Gallahad, the Quest for the Holy Grail, and many other incidents, which religion and chivalry had interwoven with the original legends of Arthur and his knights, were spreading over Europe. It was natural that Walter Map, himself of Kymric race, should have found delight in the

story of the British Arthur. He bound in one the scattered stories, bringing them together on English soil and making them absolutely the property of English literature. Walter Map was preceded by two trouveres, one of whom, Geoffrey Gaimar, put the History of Geoffrey of Monmouth into metre, calling it "Estorie des Engles," and the other named Wace, who also wrote the same history in verse, in a much better fashion, and presented it, when done, to Queen Eleanor. And from the time of these three-Map, Gaimar and Wace, to that of Alfred Tennyson, the names of Arthur and his knights are familiar to all readers of English poetry. A literary contemporary of Map, Gerald de Barri (also known as Giraldus Cambrensis, or Gerald of Wales), seems to have been a bright, witty fellow, who, although he wrote in Latin, wrote in an easy, popular vein, like one who uses his spoken language. He himself said, "Since words only give expression to what is in the mind, and man is endowed with the gift of speech only for the purpose of uttering his thoughts, what can be greater folly than to lock up and conceal things we wish to be clearly understood in a tissue of unintelligible phrases and sentences. Is it not better, as Seneca says, to be dumb, than to speak so as not to be understood?" But alas, for us who would like to read Gerald in his native tongue, he, as well as all the other writers, except the trouveres of whom I have just spoken, wrote in Latin, and the 13th century opens before we hear any great utterance in English speech after the time the Normans set foot in England.

TALK VIII.

ON THE STRUggles of the ENGLISH SPEECH TO HOLD ITS OWN AGAINST THE NORMAN-of old BalladS, ESPECIALLY THE ROBIN HOOD BALLADS-THE OLD GESTE OF ROBIN HOOD AND GUY OF GISborne.

ALL this time you may imagine how our sturdy English speech was struggling to keep from being entirely driven out of the land by more fashionable rivals. The language of the church and of letters was Latin; that of the court, the troubadours and the trouveres, was Norman-French. Yet the common people held stoutly to their mother tongue. In those parts where the conquerors were most thickly settled it was often crowded to the wall; but in provinces more remote, where the Norman had not made his way, the English language was fairly spoken. It was not easy to uproot from the land the grand old speech brought to England by our forefathers. It was one of the grievances of the Englishman that his speech was neglected for the more fashionable Norman. You remember, if you have read Ivanhoe,* what Wamba, the witless, says to Gurth, the swineherd, as they are watching the swine.

"What call you those grunting beasts running about on their four legs?" asked Wamba.

66 Swine, fool, swine," said Gurth; "every fool knows that." "And swine is good Saxon," said Wamba, "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"

"Pork," answered the swineherd.

"I am glad every fool knows that, too," said Wamba,

* One of the Waverley Novels, by Walter Scott.

་་