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A

COMPENDIOUS HISTORY

OF

ENGLISH LITERATURE,

AND OF

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE,

FROM

THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

WITH NUMEROUS SPECIMENS.

BY

GEORGE L. CRAIK, LL. D.,

ROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN QUEEN'S COLLEGE, Belfast

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL I

UNIVERSITY.
Library.

Of California.

LONDON:

CHARLES GRIFFIN AND COMPANY,

STATIONERS' HALL COURT.

MDCCCLXXI.

PREFACE.

IN the largest or loosest sense of the expression a History of English Literature might be taken to mean an account of everything that has been written in the language. But neither is the literature of a language everything that has been written in it, nor would all that has been written in the language necessarily comprehend all its literature, for much true literature may exist, and has existed, without having been written. Literature is composed of words, of thought reduced to the form of words; but the words need not be written; it is enough that they be spoken or sung, or even only conceived. All that writing does is to record and preserve them. It no more endows them with any new character than money acquires a new character by being locked up in a desk or paid into a bank.

But, besides this, if the history of a national literature is to have any proper unity, it can rarely embrace the language in its entire extent. If it should attempt to do so, it would be really the history not of one but of several literatures. In some cases it might even be made a question when it was that the language properly began, at what point of the unbroken thread-which undoubtedly connects every form of human speech with a succession of preceding forms out of which it has sprung-we are to say that an old

language has died and a new one come into existence; but, at any rate, even when the language is admitted to be the same, it not unfrequently differs almost as much in two of its stages as if it were two languages. We have a conspicuous example of this in our own English. We may be said to have the language before us in complete continuity from the seventh century; but the English of the earliest portion of this long space of time, or what is commonly called Anglo-Saxon, is no more intelligible to an Englishman of the present day who has not made it a special study than is German or Dutch.

The case is even a great deal worse than that. Dutch and German and other foreign tongues are living; our earliest English has been dead and buried for centuries. Nay, for a long time even the fact that it had once existed was all but universally forgotten. And even since it has come to be once more studied we know it only as a fossil-as the dust and dry bones of a language. Of the literature written in it we may indeed acquire such a conception as we might of a living human being from a skeleton; but nothing more.

Of that nocturnal portion of our literature, as it may be called, no critical survey is attempted in the present work. Only the principal compositions of which it consists, and the names of their authors, are rapidly enumerated by way of Introduction, along with the leading particulars of the same kind belonging to the histories of the Latin, the Welsh, and the Irish literatures of the same early period.

7

The history of any national literature, in fact, naturally divides itself into three portions, all very distinct from one another, and demanding each a treatment of its own. First, there is the portion which, as has just been said, may be named after the night, not perhaps

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