had collected an hundred volumes on theological and fifty on profane subjects, imagined he had formed a splendid library!

Among the constitutions given to the monks of England, in the year 1092, the following injunction occurs: "At the beginning of Lent the librarian is ordered to deliver a book to each of the religious." A whole year is given for the perusal of the book, and at the returning Lent those monks who had neglected to read the books they had respectively received, are recommended to prostrate themselves before the abbot, and to supplicate his indulgence.

In this age of cheap and too often trashy literature, we can hardly believe that when a book was bought in those olden times, it was customary to assemble persons of consequence and character, and to make a formal record that they were present on this occasion. If a person gave a book to a religious house, he believed that so valuable a donation merited eternal salvation, and offered it on the altar with great ceremony.

Living at this favored period in human progress, when book-making is facilitated by inventive genius; when our clever inventors cunningly devise type-setting machines, that put us in print as deftly as the frost etches his silvery landscapes on our windows in the still winter moonlight, we can hardly conceive the weary hours of intense labor that must have been given to the production of a single book before the art of printing became known to our ancestors. Take, for example, the Holy Scriptures alone, which so many zealous monks have spent their entire lives in transcribing and illuminating. In Longfellow's "Golden Legend" we find a beautiful and graphic picture of a monk in the scriptorium of his convent, transcribing and illuminating a manuscript of the Gospels, which

vividly impresses upon us the arduous labor of such a work, and the fervor with which it may have been pursued.

It is recorded that the library of the University of Oxford, so late as the year 1300, consisted only of a few books chained, or kept in chests, in the choir of St. Mary's church; and though the invention of paper toward the close of the eleventh century contributed to multiply manuscripts and consequently to facilitate knowledge, even so late as the reign of Henry VI., Warton discovers this instance of the impediments to study, which must have been produced by the scarcity of books. "One of the statutes of St. Mary's College is this: Let no scholar occupy a book in the library above one hour, or two hours at most, so that others shall be hindered from the use of the same.''

6

For three centuries after the decay of the earliest English scholarship, at its height among our Saxon ancestors about the ninth century, owing almost entirely to the efforts of good King Alfred, the principal productions of the most eminent monasteries were incredible legends which discovered no marks of invention, unedifying homilies and trite expositions of the Scripture. Many bishops and abbots began to consider learning as pernicious to true piety, confounding illiberal ignorance with Christian simplicity. In the mean time, from perpetual commotions, the manners of the people had degenerated from that mildness which a short interval of peace and letters had introduced. In the beginning of the eleventh century England at last received from the Normans the rudiments of that cultivation which it has preserved to the present time.

The Conqueror, we are told, was himself a lover and patron of letters. He filled the bishoprics and abbacies of England with the most learned of his countrymen, who had been educated at the University of Paris, at that time

the most flourishing school in Europe. Geoffrey, a learned Norman, was invited from that university to superintend the direction of the school of the priory of Dunstable, where he composed a play called "The Play of Saint Katharine," which was acted by his scholars. Warton supposes this to be the first spectacle of the kind ever attempted, and the first trace of theatrical representation which appeared in England. It is related that he borrowed copes from the sacrist of the neighboring abbey of St. Albans to dress his characters.

After the Norman Conquest, though the Conqueror himself was, it is said, far from showing any aversion to the English language, and when he first came over, applied himself to learn it, that he might without the aid of an interpreter understand the causes that were pleaded before him, persevering in his endeavor "till a more iron time of necessity compelled him to give it up," the exclusive language of government and legislation was French. "The whole land," says an old writer, "began to lay aside the English customs and to imitate the manners of the French in many things; for example, all the nobility in their courts began to speak French, as a great piece of gentility, and to draw up their charters and other writings after the French fashion;" and he adds that "they [the Normans] held the language of the natives in such abhorrence that to boys in the schools the elements of grammar were taught in French and not in English."

Thus it came to pass that for some ages after the Conquest the French was the only language spoken by kings and the nobility. Ritson affirms that neither William the Bastard, his son, Rufus the Red, his daughter Maud, nor his nephew Stephen, did or could speak the AngloSaxon or English language. It is supposed that the two Henrys I. and II. had some knowledge of the Eng

lish language, though they might not be able to speak it. Richard I. did not know a word of English. We find no important fact relating to this subject in connection with John; but it is asserted that in no instance was Henry III. known to have expressed himself in English. Edward I. constantly spoke the French language; Edward II. married a French princess and himself used the French tongue; and there is on record only a single instance of Edward III.'s use of the English language. He appeared in 1349 in a tournament at Canterbury with a white swan for his impress, and this motto embroidered on his shield, which is so heartily English that one could imagine it the very roar of the old Lion himself: —

"Hay, Hay, the wythe swan!

By Godes soul I am thy man!"

"Yet under all these disadvantages, the national tongue," observes Craik, "possessing as it did the one only great advantage of being the ancestral speech of the people, and having a substantial existence in poems and histories, the memory of its old renown could not altogether pass away; and after a time, though in an altered form, we find it again employed in writing."

AT

CHAPTER III.

CHAUCER.

T the time when Chaucer wrote, in the latter half of the fourteenth century, the two languages, French and English, like the two nations, had become widely separated. The French had gone almost entirely out of use as a medium of common conversation, - though still the speech of the court, and the English had, by throwing off most of its primitive rudeness, become more fit for literary composition. Chaucer, with true nobility of soul, “made choice of the people's speech, rather than the Latin of the learned, or the French of the noble."

"The King's English" he called it. Thus he quaintly says: "Let then clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the property of science, and the knowing of that faculty; and let Frenchmen also enditen their queint termes, for it is kindly to their mouths; and let us shew our fantasies in such words as we learnden of our Dame-tongue," advice that might not come amiss in our own day.

Langland, whose "Vision of Piers Ploughman" has been noticed in the preceding chapter, was our earliest original writer; yet though his "Vision" is written in verse, it is not poetry. Langland had but sipped at Helicon; Chaucer drank deep and long. He was England's first great poet, "the true father of our literature, compared with whose productions all that precedes is barbarism."