atoEtLEY'S ENGLISH WRITERS.*

Tills is a laborious and a valuable book, though in parts not a little clumsy in its structure. As a first instalment of a general repertory about English writers, Mr. Morley has here given us a Book I. on the authors who preceded Chaucer in the land,—Saxon, Fiend), Welsh, or Latin,—and an Introduction, on the Four Periods of English Literature, which is chiefly occu- pied with the times that separate Chaucer from the commence- ment of the presant century. This introduction seems to us deficient in method and proportion, but its proper subject is not so much the original characteristics that have developed them- selves in our authors, as the particular species of foreign influ- ence to which they have subjected themselves, especially in the -externals of their style and manner, at the various periods speci- .fied,— a circumstance affording no satisfactory standard of their native powers of thought or expression, which are to be first fully discussed, we suppose, in the body of the work hereafter.

It is a prominent defect in this volume that it has no well designed commencement, but endeavours to cniginate itself, like the natural effacts of which it treats, in a region of remote and inexplora,ble antecedents, and, we may perhaps say, final causes. The arrangement of the /Eneid would have been somewhat similar if it had begun with the "fluid de grate nepotes,"—the kings, generals, and Cresars foreshadowed in the Sixth Book,—and then darted back to the siege of Troy, or rather to the eggs of Leda. In fact, some of the topics of the first two chapters, as the Origin of Language, the Indo-European Theory, and the Stone, Brass, and Iron Ages, have such a merely embryological relation to our national literature that it would require quite a Shandean turn of mind to cause a summary of dogmas thereon to be valued in this concatenation. On the other hand, the preced- ing analysis of a "period of Italian influence" reckoned from Chau- cer to Dryden (despite the intense originality of the Elizabethan era), then a period of French influence, and, thirdly, a crowning one of "English popular influence, which was established gradually but should be dated from Defoe,"—this is all a series Of choice excerpts, seemingly intended to discount the instruction due to general readers from a treatise requiring too many dry prelimi- naries for their patience. The vagueness and extensiveness of the author's plan make him appear superficial on many subjects, in spite of the great amount of curious reading from which he has derived his materials. Thus, in touching on the "Indo-European Theory," he quotes side by side the most methodical etymologists and the shallowest amateurs who have compared Sanscrit and 'English, or Persian and English, words,—as, e. g., an American Chase, spoken of as the author of a valuable list, who derives Ass from Aeva, a home. Further on he quotes Mr. Garnett's ex- amples of affinities between English and Gaelic, including "market " and " maracadh," which both evidently come from

• .Latin " mercatus" (It. "mercato"). Again, the Roman sources -emir civilization, the only ones in which our author seems to . have no genuine interest, are inconsiderately disparaged in the following fallacious reflections (chap. ii.) :—

"Thus, for about four hundred years from the surrender of Car- ac- teens, A.D. 51, the Romans maintained military possession of England, and in all that time they set no mark of theirs upon the language of its people. For we can hardly account as a mark on language the inevitable attachment to the soil of four or five military words indicative of their

What is meant here by "the language of the people "—Welsh or English ? It is certainly ascertainable that the Romans set a much deeper mark upon the Welsh language than is here implied, although not perhaps in the few words that may have become English through that medium. And, on the other hand, the intercourse of Rome and Britain may have been productive of wealth and civilization none the less because the traces thereof were in great part obliterated by the Saxon and other invasions of later times. Who doubts the wealth and civilization of old Mexico and Peru because they were blasted by the invasions of the Spanish Goths in the sixteenth century ? Or does Mr. Morley think that a really civilizing intercourse must have made a species of Latin the vernacular tongue of the Britons, and of the

• English Writers. The Writers before Chaucer; with an Introductory Sketch of the Four Periods of English Literature. By Henry Morley. London : Chapman and Hail. 1861.

Saxons after them, as it became the vernacular tongue of France? But this would rather have argued an intercourse by which the

majority of the native population were reduced to personal servitude.

When Mr. Morley has once embarked on his proper task of quoting and epitomizing the old insular authors, his work

shows a very persevering and comprehensive industry, and is relieved by a vein of original reflection which is sensible and agreeable, although not brilliant. His style in traaslating is uncouth and obscure, but such as we are accustomed to meet with among the admirers of Norse minstrelsy. For a good specimen of the work he has done we may refer to the chapter on "Beowulf," where an abstract of this our pagan epic is extended over ten pages of small print, and illustrated with some fifty alliterative lines, like

"Steep, stony gorges, A strait road,

Weird, narrow way, Wastes unknown, Naked high nesses, Nicker houses many."

After this follows an epitome of an elaborate controversy as to whether the scene of this poem should be placed in England or in Denmark ; at Hartlepool in Durham, or at Hjortholm in the Isle of Zealand (properly Steland), or in an altogether imaginary and indeterminable region ; and whether we are to infer that this tale of "giant-killing" was brought over by the Angles from their original settlements into our island, or here composed among them, or freely translated from some Danish production. A. Danish locality has lately been claimed for the action by Dr. Greinof Cassel, who is described as the best Anglo-Saxon scholar on the Continent ; and an English locality by a Mr. Haigh, who chiefly defends his view by the local names which he would connect with the personages mentioned in Beowulf. Of these he finds such a host that we are tempted to suspect him of being only too ingenious a reasoner on such matters, especially as he supposes the Saxon names "Sceaf" and "Heremod " to have been in vogue since the Biblical Sheba and the Greek Harmodins. Mr. Morley contributes no original arguments to this debate, but he inclines to Mr. Haigh's conclusion, which might be an important one in respect to the comparative pro- ficiency of the early Angles and Danes in the cultivation of a national martial poetry.

After this we have full particulars of Ca3dmon, the paraphrast of Genesis, &c., of the ideas in which he appears to have anti- cipated the "Paradise Lost," and of the circumstances which render it probable that the remains of his works were known to Milton. Presently the whole mythic history of Britain, in- cluding its colonization by Brutus, the son of /Eneas, the bulk of the story of King Arthur, that of the Sanct Graal, &c., is care- fully traced to its earliest comtneneements in Welsh authors.

It is curious to see how this system was fortified or ornamented

by conjectural derivations of words, as of Britain from Brutus, Trinobantes from Troja Nova, or Troynovant, by the same method

as is still occasionally maintained to connect the names of mod- em European tribes with Scriptural genealogies, Saxons with Ashkenaz, and so on. But we find that Geoffrey of Monmouth, one of the most distinguished labourers in this grave style of fiction, though eagerly read and translated in his own day, and destined to be very respectfully quoted by a succeeding series of chroniclers, did not escape the penalty of some very abusive censures from the scholars of his own century. William of Newbury, towards the end of this period, complains that Geoffrey has made the "little finger of his Arthur stouter than the back of Alexander the Great," and represented his Merlin as a British Isaiah, "except that he dared not prefix to his prophecies 'Thus saith the Lord,' and blushed to write Thus saith the Devil.'" On the subject of the same "History of the Britons," Giraldus Cambrensis, who intends, as Mr. Morley observes, "to knock down fiction with fact," gives us the following anecdote :—

" There was in our time a Welshman at Caer Leon named Melerius, who having always an extraordinary familiarity with unclean spirits, by seeing them, knowing them, talking with them, and calling each by his proper name, was enabled through their assistance to foretell future

events He knew when any one spoke falsely in his presence, for he saw the devil, as it were leaping and exulting on the tongue of

the liar If the evil spirits oppressed him very much, the Gospel of St. John was placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished. But when that book was removed and the History of the Britons by Geoffrey Arthur' was substituted in its place, they instantly re-appeared in greater numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the book."

In his observations on one of Chaucer's translations from the

French, air. Morley seems to have trusted too much to editorial summaries, and remained with a false impression of what he might have found in the text of his authors. He writes :—

" The 'Roman -de is Rose' was the fashionable book at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It was the work of two writers very dif- ferently minded. Guillaume de Loris, in the thirteenth century, meant to substitute for the romance of chivalry a symbolic dream of the ex- , periences of the lover. . . . De Loris represented Beauty as the Rose, and produced the Passions that attend on Love as persons of his drama Upon this the second writer, Jean De Meting, who lived between the years 1269 and 1320, entering into the new temper of the time, grafted his satire against women, nobles, and the clergy. . . . It was one of Chaucor's earlier labours to translate literally and almost line for line into English this fashionable French romance. The part written by Guillaume de Loris, in the more simple Provencal style, he translated entire. The part written by Jean De Meting, with Which his own mind and his later original work were most in harmony, he compressed .br the selection of passages."

This would convey the idea that Chaucer's " Romaunt of the Rose" was a methodical abridgment of the French ; whereas it is simply an unfinished version, wanting essential passages in the

middle as well as at the end, and so little revised as far as it goes that one of the chief personages enters with a French name Bialacoil (Bel-accueil), and departs with a Saxon, Fair welcoming.

But the untranslated part has been liberally used in Chaucet's other poems, and to good purpose, especially in the "Wife of Bath's Prologue." The account given of the authorship of the French romance should be corrected by reference to a memoir by M. Raynouard (.Tournal des Savans, October, 1816). Jean De `Meung was not a mere continuator of the poem, for Loris had already concluded it in his own way; he enlarged it by interca- lations in various parts. Mr. Morley ends the present volume among the other French writers to whom Chaucer was indebted, -and leaves for hereafter the suggestions which our poet derived .from his sojourn in Italy. It is curious to observe that at this time the Italian language had scarcely been cultivated an entire century, while the monuments of Saxon English .were seven or eight hundred years old. Yet the Italian language was compa- ratively settled, while the English had not got through its age of revolution. Thus the language of Chaucer is now far more antiquated than that of Dante ; and this not merely from our orthographical fashions, which are partly arbitrary and artificial, bat because it was still replenished from the vocabulary of a foreign colony, with words to which the national ear could only accommodate itself by extensively transposing their accents and docking their final syllables.