the literatures of the Elizabethan, the Augustan, and the Victorian eras are in Modern English. Its nouns had Old English was a highly inflected language. four cases and two declensions, adjectives were similarly inflected, verbs had two moods and two tenses, and the personal pronoun had a dual number. All inflections were strongly pronounced, and they influenced the order of words in the sentence. The vocabulary of Old English received a few words from the aboriginal Celtic tongue, but otherwise, Celtic influence upon English is not discernible. The Celts were driven away by the invaders, and did not live among them except as slaves. Latin contributed some words, as street, choose, pound, ounce, and the terminations caster or chester for castrum, a camp, and coln as in Lincoln, standing for a Roman colonia. But Old English was almost exclusively Teutonic. Of two thousand words taken from Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, five hundred and thirty-five are found in Modern English. The others are obsolete. In Middle English many inflections had disappeared. Those retained were not so strongly uttered. The vocabulary became greatly enlarged by words received from the Latin of the churchmen and from Norman French. From the Norman Conquest (1066) until the reign of Edward III., each author wrote in the language and dialect most familiar to him. There was no standard. Step by step the English won its way, and at the middle of the fourteenth century, French was little spoken even in the households of the nobles. English was made the language of courts of law (1362-63), and from that time it has been the undisputed language of the English nation. Modern English is the period of lost inflections. There yet remain a few terminations of grammatical significance, as in the personal pronouns; time is denoted in verbs by a change of the stem-vowel or an added sound; there is a possessive case. But auxiliary and relational words have displaced nearly all of the old inflections. The vocabulary has grown to huge dimensions, and the language has shown unexampled capacity for receiving and assimilating the words of other languages. In this chapter the following points have been considered 1. What Literature is.-2. Its Beginnings in Poetic Forms.-3. The Origin of the English Language.4. The Three Stages of its Development. CHAPTER II. HISTORICAL EPOCHS. BEFORE studying the lives and the writings of poets, philosophers, historians, and novelists who have contributed to the riches of English literature, we must remind ourselves of the epochs of English history in which successive generations of authors have lived. The relations of literature and history are very close, and neither can be understood without knowledge of the other. A literature naturally divides itself into epochs corresponding to epochs in its nation's history, and each literary epoch is characterized by qualities of thought and feeling peculiar to its age. The changes from one epoch to another may be marked by changes in the form of the language, in style, in diction, and even in the themes of which poets sing and essayists write. Burns could not have sung the strains of Spenser or Shakespeare, nor could any writer in the age of Queen Anne have written the poems of Tennyson. English literature developed by periods corresponding closely to the great historical eras of the national life. If we know what transformations were wrought by changes in faith, by foreign conquests, by civil war, by commerce, by social upheavals, and by the progress of education, we shall more readily comprehend our literature and retain its outlines more firmly. The epochs of English history are clearly defined, and this is their order: I. From the dawn of literature in England to the Norman Conquest, 650-1066. II. From the Norman Conquest to the Tudors, 10661485. III. The Tudor Period, including the Elizabethan Age, 1485-1603. IV. The Stuart Period, including the Augustan Age, 1603-1714. V. The Hanoverian Period, to the First Empire of Napoleon, 1714-1804. VI. The Modern and Victorian Period. Neither in literature nor in social history can epochs be cleft asunder like geologic strata. They blend and pass imperceptibly into one another. A great national movement culminates, and a new social order begins. As new influences are liberated, new types of literary productiveness disclose themselves. We note, briefly but carefully, the characteristics of the several epochs in English history. I. From the Dawn of Literature to the Norman Conquest (650-1066), or the Period of Old English. The most ancient inhabitants of the British Islands were of that Celtic race which once occupied a large portion of Western Europe. They were barbarians; they neglected agriculture, they had no cities, they had no laws, and by tattooing and staining their bodies they gave infallible proof of their barbarism. The first important intercourse between the primitive Britons and any foreign nation resulted from the invasion of the country by the Romans under Julius Cæsar. The resist55 B.C. ance of the Britons, though obstinate and ferocious, was overpowered by the Roman armies in the first century of the Christian era. Early in the fifth century, the Emperor Honorius withdrew the Roman legions from Britain. For nearly four centuries the island had been a Roman province, and from the English Channel to the great walls erected as barriers against the northern Picts, the people were subjugated. The Romans left a colony of Britons, who, while retaining their own language, had adopted Roman usages, and had accepted the Christian religion. This colony, beset by wild Celts from the north, was eventually conquered by Germanic invaders. The history of the conquest is obscure, but its main points are known. A native leader, Vortigern, taking the Roman title of duke, asked the Romans to return and defend the colony against its fierce neighbors. Failing to secure this help, he called the Teuton brothers, Hengist and Horsa, to his aid. In 449 they came with their followers, and soon afterwards turned their arms against Vortigern, and began to establish a colony of their own in Kent. From this time on for a hundred and sixty years, their clansmen continued to arrive, conquering the land foot by foot through hard fighting, the Saxons gaining possession from the Stour River to Devonshire and Somerset; the Angles from the Forth to the Stour and the Thames. The features of this conquest to be especially noted are, that the invaders were heathen; that they brought with them their own political institutions; that they offered the natives exile, or slavery, or death; that they established a number of petty sovereignties, often at war with one another; that the Celtic people called them all Saxons, while the invaders termed themselves Angles; and that eventually their three principal kingdoms, Mercia, Northumberland, and Wessex, were blended into an English nation under the royal government of Egbert of Wessex (827). The Teutonic conquest was an extirpation or removal of the natives, an overthrow of a Roman colony, an extinction of Christianity in the land, and the transplanting of a Teutonic race to British soil. In 597 Saint Augustine, or Austin, a missionary sent by Pope Gregory I., came to the kingdom of Kent. He is sometimes spoken of as the Apostle to the Anglo-Saxons. He began a work of evangelization which was carried on with such devo |