Bayeux. William carried the two French idioms into England with the adventurers who joined him from both sides of the Loire.

But, in the preceding ages, whilst the Gauls were forming their language from the ruins of the Latin, Britain, from which the Romans had long withdrawn, and where the nations of the North had successively established themselves, had retained its primitive idioms.

Thus then the history of the English language divides itself into five epochs.

1. The Anglo-Saxon epoch, from 450 to 780. Augustin, the monk, introduced the Roman alphabet into England in 570.

2. The Danish-Saxon epoch, from 780 to the invasion of the Normans. The principal relics of this epoch are the manuscripts called Alfred's and two translations of the four evangelists.

3. The Anglo-Norman epoch, commencing in 1066. The Norman language was no other than the Neustrian, that is, the French language of this side the Loire, or the language of Oil. In order to preserve the memory of their songs, the Normans employed characters, called runstabath: these are the Runic letters, and to them were joined those which Ethicus had previously in

vented and for which St. Jerome had furnished the signs.

4. The Norman-French epoch. When Eleonore of Guienne had brought to Henry II. the western provinces of France from the Lower Loire to the Pyrenees, and princesses of the blood of St. Louis had successively married English monarchs, states, possessions, families, customs, manners, were so blended. that French became the ordinary language of the nobility, the ecclesiastics, the scholars, and the traders of the two kingdoms. In the Domesday book, a topographical survey and register of landed property, drawn up by command of William the Conqueror, the names of places are written in Latin, according to the French pronunciation. Thus a multitude of Latin words became incorporated directly with the English language, by religion and by its ministers, whose language was Latin, and indirectly through the medium of Norman and French words. The Norman of William the Bastard retained also the Scandinavian or Germanic expressions, which the children of Rollo had introduced into the idiom of the Frankish country conquered by them.

5. The epoch properly called English, when English was written and spoken as it exists at present.

These five epochs will be treated of separately, in the five parts into which this work is divided.

These five parts naturally range themselves under these heads :

1. Literature during the time of the AngloSaxons, the Danes, and the middle ages.

2. Literature under the Tudors.

3. Literature under the first two Stuarts, and during the Commonwealth.

4. Literature under the last two Stuarts.

5. Literature under the House of Hanover.

When we study the literature of different countries, a great number of allusions and traits escape us, if we do not bear in mind the manners and customs of the respective nations. A view of literature, apart from the history of nations, would create a prodigious fallacy to hear the successive poets calmly singing their loves and their sheep, you would figure to yourself the uninterrupted existence of the golden age on the earth. And yet, in that same England of which we are treating, these strains resounded amid

the invasion of the Romans, the Picts, the Saxons, the Danes; amid the conquest of the Normans, the insurrections of the Barons, the quarrels of the first Plantagenets for the crown, the civil wars of the Red and White Rose, the ravages of the Reformation, the executions commanded by Henry VIII., and the burnings ordered by Mary, amid the massacres and slavery of Ireland, the desolations of Scotland, the scaffolds of Charles I. and Sidney, the flight of James, the proscription of the Pretender and the Jacobites-the whole intermingled with parliamentary storms, court crimes, and a thousand foreign wars.

Social order, separated from political order, is composed of religion, intelligence, and material industry. In every nation, even at the moment of the direst catastrophes and of the greatest events, there will always be a priest who prays, a poet who sings, an author who writes, a philosopher who meditates, a painter, a sculptor, an architect, who paints, chisels, builds, and a workman who labours. These men, surrounded by revolutions, seem to lead a life apart: if you look at them only, you see a real, a genuine, an immutable world, the base of the human edifice, but which

appears fictitious and foreign to the society of convention, the political society. The priest, indeed, in his hymns, the poet, the philosopher, the artist, in their compositions, the artisan in his work, mark occasionally the time in which they live, and the recoil of the events which wrung from them in more abundance their sweat, their complaints, and the productions of their genius.

To destroy this illusion of two views presented separately; to avoid creating that fallacy to which I have alluded, in the course of this chapter; and that I may not suddenly throw the reader unprepared into the history of the poetry, works, and authors of the first stages of English literature, I think it right to introduce here a general picture of the middle ages. These preliminary matters will facilitate the understanding of the subject.