forms and the puerile inventions of the rude Saxon artist, profusely exhibited in the drawings of the original manuscript of Cadmon*, with the noble conceptions and the immortal designs of the Sistine Chapel.

* These singular attempts at art may be inspected in above fifty plates, in the Archæologia, vol. xx. We may rejoice at their preservation, for art, even in the attempts of its children, may excite ideas which might not else have occurred to us.

80

BEOWULF; THE HERO-LIFE.

THE Anglo-Saxon poetical narrative of "The Exploits of Beowulf" forms a striking contrast with the chronological paraphrase of Cadmon. Its genuine antiquity unquestionably renders it a singular curiosity; but it derives an additional interest from its representation of the primitive simplicity of a Homeric period-the infancy of customs and manners and emotions of that Hero-life, which the Homeric poems first painted for mankind:-that Hero-life of which Macpherson in his Ossian caught but imperfect conceptions from the fragments he may have collected, while he metamorphosed his ideal Celtic heroes into those of the sentimental romance of another age and another race.

The northern hordes under their petty chieftains, cast into a parallel position with those princes of Greece whose realms were provinces, and whose people were tribes, often resembled them in the like circumstances, the like characters, and the like manners. Such were those kinglings who could possess themselves of a territory in a single incursion, and whose younger brothers, stealing out of their lone bays, extended their

dominion as " Sea-Kings" on the illimitable ocean *. The war-ship and the mead-hall bring us back to that early era of society, when great men knew only to be heroes, flattered by their bards, whose songs are ever the echoes of their age and their patrons.

We discover these heroes, Danes or Angles, as we find them in the Homeric period, audacious with the self-confidence of their bodily prowess; vaunting, and talkative of their sires and of themselves; the son ever known by denoting the father, and the father by his marriage alliance-that primitive mode of recognition, at a period when, amid the perpetual conflicts of rival chieftains, scarcely any but relations could be friends; the family-bond was a sure claim to protection. Like the Homeric heroes, they were as unrelenting in their hatreds as indissoluble in their partisanship; suspicious of the stranger, but welcoming the guest; we find them rapacious, for plunder was their treasure, and prodigal in their distributions of their golden armlets and weighed silver, for their egotism was as boundless as their violence. Yet pride and glory fermented the coarse leaven of these mighty marauders, who were even chivalric, ere chivalry rose into an order. The religion of these ages was wild

* See the curious delineation of the Vikingr of the North, in Turner's Hist. of the Anglo-Saxons, i. 456, third edition.

as their morality; few heroes but bore some relationship to Woden; and even in their rude paganised Christianity, some mythological name cast its lustre in their genealogies. In the uncritical chronicles of the middle ages it is not always evident whether the mortal was not a divinity. Their mythic legends have thrown confusion into their national annals, often accepted by historians as authentic records*. But if antiquaries still wander among shadows, the poet

* Mr. KEMBLE, the translator of BEOWULF, has extricated himself out of an extraordinary dilemma. The first volume, which exhibits the Anglo-Saxon text, furnished in the preface, with an elaborate abundance, all the historical elucidations of his unknown hero. Subsequently when the second volume appeared, which contains the translation, it is preceded by "A Postscript to the Preface," far more important. Here, with the graceful repentance of precipitate youth, he moans over the past, and warns the reader of "the postscript to cut away the preface root and branch," for all that he had published was delusion! particularly "all that part of my preface which assigns dates to one prince or another, I declare to be null and void!" The result of all this scholar's painful researches is, that Mr. Kemble is left in darkness with Beowulf in his hand 1; an ambiguous being, whom the legend creates with supernatural energies, and history labours to reduce to mortal dimensions.

The fault is hardly that of our honest Anglo-Saxon, as trustful of the Danes as his forefathers were heretofore. It is these our old masters who, with Count Suhm, the voluminous annalist of Denmark, at their head, have "treated mythic and traditional matters as ascertained history. It is the old story of Minos, Lycurgus, or Numa, furbished up for us in the North." What a delightful phantasmagoria comes out while we remain in darkness ! But a Danish Niebuhr may yet illuminate the whole theatre of this Pantheon.

cannot err.

BEOWULF may be a god or a nonentity, but the poem which records his exploits must at least

be true, true in the manners it paints and the emotions which the poet reveals-the emotions of his contemporaries.

BEOWULF, a chieftain of the Western Danes, was the Achilles of the North. We first view him with his followers landing on the shores of a Danish kingling. A single ship with an armed company, in those predatory days, could alarm a whole realm. The petty independent provinces of Greece afford a parallel; for Thucydides has marked this period in society, when plunder well fought for was honoured as an heroic enterprise. When a vessel touched on a strange shore, the adventurers were questioned "whether they were

* These Teutonic heroes were frequently denominated by the names of animals, which they sometimes emulated: thus, the hero, exulting in bone and nerve, was known as "the Bear;" the more insatiable, as "the Wolf;" and "the Wild Deer" is the common appellative of a warrior. The term "Deer" was the generic name for animal, and not then restricted to its present particular designa

tion.

"Rats and Mice, and such SMALL DEER,"

baffled our Shakespearean commentators, who rarely looked to the great source of the English language--the Anglo-Saxon, and, in their perplexity, proposed to satisfy the modern reader by a botch of their own-and read geer or cheer. Percy discovered in the old metrical romance of Sir Bevis of Southampton, the very distich which Edgar had parodied. Warton, iii. 83.