regard to our forms of versification, the chief employment of our earliest versifiers certainly was to transplant the fictions of the Norman school, and to naturalise them in our language.

iambic structure, considering that structure not as classical but accentual metre. Take, for example, these verses :

"Quando Christus Deus noster

Natus est ex Virgine-"

which go precisely in the same cadence with such modern trochaics as
"Would you hear how once repining
Great Eliza captive lay."

And we have many such lines as these :

"Ut floreas cum domino

In sempiterno solio

Qua Martyres in cuneo," &c.

which flow exactly like the lines in 'L'Allegro :'

"The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty.

*

*

*

*

And pomp, and feast, and revelry,

With masque, and antique pageantry."

Those Latin lines are, in fact, a prototype of our own eight syllable iambic. It is singular that rhyme and such metres as the above, which are generally supposed to have come into the other modern languages from the Latin rhymes of the church, should not have found their way from thence into the Anglo-Saxon vernacular verse. But they certainly did not, we shall be told; for there is no appearance of them in the specimens of Anglo-Saxon verse before the Conquest. Of such specimens, however, it is not pretended that we have anything like a full or regular series. On the contrary, many Saxon ballads, which have been alluded to by Anglo-Norman writers as of considerable antiquity, have been lost with the very names of their composers. And from a few articles saved in such a wreck, can we pronounce confidently on the whole contents of the cargo? The following solitary stanza, however, has been preserved, from a ballad attributed to Canute the Great:

66

Merry sungen the Muneches binnen Ely,

The Cnut Ching reüther by,

Roweth Cnites noer the land,
And here we thes Muniches sang."

"Merry sang the Monks in Ely,
When Canute King was sailing by:

Row, ye knights, near the land,
And let us hear these Monks' song."

I have

There is something very like rhyme in the Anglo-Saxon stanza. no doubt that Canute heard the monks singing Latin rhymes; and I have some suspicion that he finished his Saxon ballad in rhyme also. Thomas of Ely, who knew the whole song, translates his specimen of it in Latin lines, which, whether by accident or design, rhyme to each other. The genius of

The most liberal patronage was afforded to Norman minstrelsy in England by the first kings of the new dynasty. This encouragement, and the consequent cultivation of the northern dialect of French, gave it so much the superiority over the southern or troubadour dialect, that the French language, according to the acknowledgment of its best informed antiquaries, received from England and Normandy the first of its works which deserve to be cited. The Norman trouveurs, it is allowed, were more eminent narrative poets than the Provençal troubadours. No people had a better right to be the founders of chivalrous poetry than the Normans. They were the most energetic generation of modern men. Their leader, by the conquest of England in the eleventh century, consolidated the feudal system upon a broader basis than it ever had before possessed. Before the end of the same century, chivalry rose to its full growth as an institution, by the circumstance of martial zeal being enlisted under the banners of superstition. The crusades, though they certainly did not give birth to jousts and tournaments, must have imparted to them a new spirit and interest, as the preparatory images of a consecrated warfare. And those spectacles constituted a source of description to the romancers, to which no exact counterpart is to be found in the heroic poetry of antiquity. But the growth of what may properly be called romantic poetry was not instantaneous after the Conquest; and it was not till "English Richard ploughed the deep "that the crusaders seem to have found a place among the heroes of romance. Till the middle of the twelfth century, or possibly later, no work of professed fiction, or bearing any semblance to epic fable, can be traced in Norman verse-nothing but songs, satires, chronicles, or didactic works, to all of which, however, the name of Ro

the ancient Anglo-Saxon poetry, Mr. Turner observes, was obscure, periphrastical, and elliptical; but, according to that writer's conjecture, a new and humble but perspicuous style of poetry was introduced at a later time in the shape of the narrative ballad. In this plainer style we may conceive the possibility of rhyme having found a place; because the verse would stand in need of that ornament to distinguish it from prose, more than in the elliptical and inverted manner. With regard to our anapastic measure, or triple-time verse, Dr. Percy has shown that its rudiments can be traced to Scaldic poetry. It is often found very distinct in Langlande; and that species of verse, at least, I conceive, is not necessarily to be referred to a Norman origin.

mance, derived from the Roman descent of the French tongue, was applied in the early and wide acceptation of the word. To these succeeded the genuine metrical romance, which, though often rhapsodical and desultory, had still invention, ingenuity, and design, sufficient to distinguish it from the dry and dreary chronicle. The reign of French metrical romance may be chiefly assigned to the latter part of the twelfth, and the whole of the thirteenth century; that of English metrical romance to the latter part of the thirteenth, and the whole of the fourteenth' century. Those ages of chivalrous song were, in the mean time, fraught with events which, while they undermined the feudal system, gradually prepared the way for the decline of chivalry itself. Literature and science were commencing, and even in the improvement of the mechanical skill employed to heighten chivalrous or superstitious magnificence, the seeds of arts, industry, and plebeian independence were unconsciously sown. One invention, that of gunpowder, is eminently marked out as the cause of the extinction of chivalry; but even if that invention had not taken place, it may well be conjectured that the contrivance of other means of missile destruction in war, and the improvement of tactics, would have narrowed that scope for the prominence of individual prowess which was necessary for the chivalrous character, and that the progress of civilisation must have ultimately levelled its romantic consequence. But to anticipate the remote effects of such causes, if scarcely within the ken of philosophy, was still less within the reach of poetry. Chivalry was still in all its glory, and to the eye of the poet appeared as likely as ever to be immortal. The progress of civilisation even ministered to its external importance. The early arts made chivalrous life, with all its pomp and ceremonies, more august and imposing, and more picturesque as a subject for description. Literature, for a time, contributed to the same effect, by her jejune and fabulous efforts at history, in which the athletic worthies of classical story and of modern romance were gravely connected by an ideal genealogy.† Thus the dawn of

The practice of translating French rhyming romances into English verse, however, continued down to the reign of Henry VII.

+ Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, of which the modern opinion seems to be, that it was not a forgery, but derived from an Armorican original, and

human improvement smiled on the fabric which it was ultimately to destroy, as the morning sun gilds and beautifies those masses of frost-work which are to melt before its noonday heat.

The elements of romantic fiction have been traced up to various sources; but neither the Scaldic, nor Saracenic, nor Armorican theory of its origin can sufficiently account for all its materials. Many of them are classical, and others derived from the Scriptures. The migrations of Science are difficult enough to be traced; but Fiction travels on still lighter wings, and scatters the seeds of her wild flowers imperceptibly over the world, till they surprise us by springing up with similarity in regions the most remotely divided.* There was a vague and unselecting love of the marvellous in romance, which sought for adventures, like its knights errant, in every quarter where they could be found; so that it is easier to admit of all the sources which are imputed to that species of fiction, than to limit our belief to any one of them.†

the pseudo-Turpin's Life of Charlemagne,' were the grand historical magazines of the romancers.-Ellis's Met. Rom., vol. i. p. 75. Popular songs about Arthur and Charlemagne (or, as some will have it, Charles Martel) were probably the main sources of Turpin's forgery and of Geoffrey's Armorican book. Even the proverbial mendacity of the pseudo-Turpin must have been indebted for the leading hints to songs that were extant respecting Charlemagne. The stream of fiction, having thus spread itself in those grand prose reservoirs, afterwards flowed out from thence again in the shape of verse, with a force renewed by accumulation. Once more, as if destined to alternations, romance, after the fourteenth century, returned to the shape of prose, and in many instances made and carried pretensions to the sober credibility of history.

* [It is common fairness to Mr. Campbell to say that the late Mr. Price has cited this passage as one distinguishable alike for its truth and its beauty, that establishes the fact that popular fiction is in its nature traditive. Introd. to Warton's Hist., p. 92.]

t[Various theories have been proposed for the purpose of explaining the origin of romantic fiction. Percy contended for a Scandinavian, Warton for an Arabian, and Leyden for an Armorican birth, to which Ellis inclined; while some have supposed it to be of Provençal, and others of Norman invention. If every argument has not been exhausted, every hypothesis has. But all their systems, as Sir Walter Scott says, seem to be inaccurate, in so far as they have been adopted exclusively of each other, and of the general proposition that fables of a nature similar to the Romances of chivalry, modified according to manners and the state of society, must necessarily be invented in every part of the world, for the same reason that grass grows upon the surface of the soil in every climate and in every country.-Misc. P. W. vol. vi. p. 174. "In reality," says Southey, "mythological and romantic tales are current among all savages of whom we have any full

Norman verse dwelt for a considerable time in the tedious historic style, before it reached the shape of amusing fable; and we find the earliest efforts of the Native Muse confined to translating Norman verse, while it still retained its uninviting form of the chronicle. The first of the Norman poets, from whom any versifier in the language is known to have translated, was Wace, a native of Jersey, born in the reign of Henry II.* In the year 1155 Wace finished his 'Brut d'Angleterre,' which is a French version of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of Great Britain,' deduced from Brutus to Cadwallader, in 689. Layamon, a priest of Ernleye-upon-Severn, translated Wace's Metrical Chronicle' into the verse of the popular tongue; and, notwithstanding Mr. Ellis's date of 1180 [1185 ?], may be supposed, with equal probability, to have produced his work within ten or fifteen years after the middle of the twelfth century. Layamon's translation may be considered as the earliest specimen of metre in the native language posterior to the Conquest; except some lines in the Saxon Chronicle' on the death of William I., and a few religious rhymes, which, according to Matthew Paris, the Blessed Virgin was pleased to dictate to St. Godric, the hermit, near Durham; unless we add to these the specimen of Saxon poetry published in the Archæologia' by Mr. Conybeare, who supposes that composition to be posterior to the Conquest, and to be the last expiring voice of the Saxon Muse. Of the dialect of Layamon, Mr. Mitford, in his 'Harmony of Languages,' observes that it has "all the appearance of a language thrown into confusion by the circumstances of

account; for man has his intellectual as well as his bodily appetites, and these things are the food of his imagination and faith. They are found wherever there is language and discourse of reason,-in other words, wherever there is man. And in similar stages of civilisation, or states of society, the fictions of different people will bear a corresponding resemblance, notwithstanding the difference of time and scene."-Pref. to Morte d'Arthur.]

Warton

*[Ellis (p. 44) says Henry I., whom he professes to have seen. (p. 67) says he was educated at Caen, was canon of Bayeux, and chaplain to Henry II.]

Two specimens of the ancient state of the language-viz. the stanzas on Old Age, beginning" He may him sore adreden," and the quotation from the Ormulum, which Dr. Johnson placed, on the authority of Hickes, nearly after the Conquest-are considered by Mr. Tyrwhitt to be of a later date than Layamon's translation. Their language is certainly more modern.