English Literature, from the Beginning to the Conquest. By Stopford
A. Brooke. (Macmillan and Co. is. 6d.)—This is a "recast," with abridgments and also with additions, of Mr. Stop- ford Brooke's larger work on "Early English Literature up to the Days of Alfred." It is made for the use of students in schools, but it has none of the dryness of the text-book; it is a readable, enjoyable, leisurely résumé of all that is known of our earliest poets and their works, and the influences, natural, social, and political, that shaped their character. In the first chapter, which is called "The Relation of Early Britain to English Literature." the contrasting effects of wild scenery upon the Celt
and the Teuton are discussed with much interesting suggestiop, The Celt "delighted in wild nature, the German feared it," and
out of both, "the Celtic love and the German fear has grown at last the modern poetry of nature, a mingled web of love and awe." Mr. Brooke considers that, on the whole, "the in- fluence of British Christianity on English Literature is all but imperceptible, that of the Roman occupation still more so." After allowance made for the exaggeration of personal feeling in the account given by Gildas of the condition of the British Kingdoms when the Romaos left, we may still take what he says as evidence that the Roman rule had totally failed to root out the desire of the tribes for self-government. "Rome left the land, and the land forgot with joy. What happened is what would happen now in India if the English B.aj were withdrawn. In a few generations an invader would scarcely be aware, save by their public works, that the English people had ever been in the the provinces of India." But we are not to think with Gildas that destruction of the signs of Reiman government was an irreparable evil. "The English tongue, the English spirit, and the English law were secured to mankind by the merciless carnage of the early years of the [Anglo.Sexon] Conquest," and "the true influence of Rome came back again with the Roman Christianity, and brought with it Rome's amalgamating power, not in the political, but in the spiritual realm ; and a mighty influence it had on the development of a national literature!' The book falls naturally into two, or perhaps we should say three, parts, counting the very full chapter devoted to King Alfred as the third. The first part gives us a historical review of the early English poets, Beowulf, Csedmon, Cynewulf, and their anonymous contemporaries and successors. The second part is occupied by critical discussion of their works, and questions of uncertain authorship. Long passages are given in metrical translation, and no trouble is spared to bring home to the reader the full poetic beauty of the early British poems, the deep religious inspiration of Credmon and Cynewulf, and the very iuteresting transformation which the fundamental ideas of this early literature underwent as its poets changed from being pagan " makers " to Christi an singers.
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