Our early minstrelsy, with all its comparative rudeness, was not without its gentle elements; and we can conceive how it helped to civilize the people, when we observe how much of pathos is woven into it, how it tells of the tenderness and pity that are congenial with courage and with the love of fierce adventure, springing often out of the sternest heart: the pathos is social, too, so free from sentimentalism, and told so simply. When Edom of Gordon, in his fierce assault on the castle, adding the terrors of fire to those of the sword, not staying his spear's point from the little girl who is lowered over the wall: as his victim lies before him, the blood dripping over her yellow hair, remorse is in the words he said:

I might have spared that bonny face,

To have been some man's delight."

He calls his men away from his fierce victory

"Ill dooms I do guess;

I cannot look on that bonny face,

As it lies on the grass."

This transition of feeling is sometimes given in these rude strains with deep effect: observe it, for instance, in the contrast between the opening and the close, in these few detached stanzas:

"Beardslee rose up on a May morning,

Called for water to wash his hands; 'Gar loose to me the good gray dogs,

That are bound wi' iron bands.'"*

Edom of Gordon, Percy's Reliques, vol. i. p. 240. Johnie of Beardslee, Motherwell's Ancient and Modern Minstrelsy, vol. i. p. 169.

The outlaw's mother, with a presentiment of his fate, entreats him to give over what was to prove a woful hunting, but in vain; and in spite of her forebodings and the terrors of the forest-laws, he goes forth. The rude and animated strain continues:

"Beardslee shot, and the dun deer leap'd,

And he wounded her in the side;

But a'tween the water and the brae,
His hounds, they laid her pride.

And Beardslee has bryttled the deer so well,
That he's had out her liver and lungs;

And with these he has feasted his bloody hounds,

As if they had been Earl's sons."

The hunter and his dogs fall asleep, and are surprised by the foresters, who overpower him, and, after a desperate conflict, leave him dying in the lonely wood. The outlaw's breath passes away in a very gentle strain :

"O! is there no a bonny bird

Can sing as I can say,

Would flee away to my mother's bower

And tell to fetch Beardslee away.

There's no a bird in a' this forest

Will do as mickle for me,
As dip its wing in the wan water,
And streak it on my e'e bree."

Another characteristic of this poetry is the remarkable dramatic power that pervades it, the vividness of the dialogue. This is shown in that, the finest specimen of all, which Coleridge called "the grand old ballad of Sir Patrick Spens."* It is a poem with a certain air of historical

* Coleridge's Poems, Dejection, an Ode, p. 282.

interest, heightened by the mysterious uncertainty of its incidents, and remarkable both for the power of description and its depth of passion. It has come down from a remote antiquity, and has manifestly escaped the tampering of modern hands. Let me mention, respecting it, that after I had quoted it in a lecture of a former course, I was told by one of my very kind friends that I had carried him back to the days of his childhood in the old country, when he had heard this very ballad chaunted by the old Scotch people, who must have been familiar with it only by tradition, and not by books. I mention this incident, because it brought home to my mind most distinctly the manner in which the minstrel literature has been perpetuated.*

When the earliest poetry of Greece, the mighty song of Homer, was a tradition from age to age, on the shores and the islands of the Ægean, with no surer abiding-place than the memories and the tongues of the Rhapsodists, the wisest of Athenian lawgivers, and one of the most politic of Athenian statesmen, made it a part of their wisdom and their policy to gather the scattered poetry into safer keeping for the good of all after generations. No British Solon, no British Pisistratus, took like heed for Britain's early popular poetry. Doubtless, much of it has perished, and the names of the minstrels, like the names

"The very kind friend," to whom my brother refers, was the Reverend Doctor Wylie, for many years Vice Provost and Professor of Ancient Languages in the University of Pennsylvania, a man of great learning and eminent purity of character and feeling. He died in 1852. He was a native of the North of Ireland, and for many years pastor of the First Reformed Presbyterian Church in this city. He was a man beloved by all who knew him. W. B. R.

of the great church architects of the Middle Ages, have perished utterly. They did their appointed work in their day and generation; and again, when in the last century, (as I proprose to show at a later part of the course,) English poetry became artificial, feeble, unreal, and sophisticated, the early song was revived, to breathe into it again health, and strength, and truth.

Dawn of letters a false illustration-Intellectual gloom from Edward III. to Henry VIII.-Chaucer to Spenser-Caxton and the art of printing-Civil wars— -Wyatt and Surrey-The sonnet naturalized in English poetry-Blank verse-Henry VIII.-Edward VI.Landor's sonnet--Sternhold and Hopkins-Bishop Latimer--Goodwin Sands and Tenterden Steeple-" Bloody Mary"-Sackville"The Mirror of Magistrates"-His career-Age of Elizabeth-Contrasts of her life-The Church as an independent English powerShakspeare-His journey to London-Final formation of the English language "The well of English undefiled"-The Reformation -Sir Philip Sydney-The Bishop's Bible-Richard Hooker-Spenser and Shakspeare-Wilson's Criticism - Sir Walter Raleigh -Shakspeare's Prose.

IN approaching the early English literature in my last lecture, I stated that, in forming a general notion of the extent of it, we may regard the era of our literature as a period of five centuries, from about 1350 to the present time-the middle of the fourteenth century down to the middle of the nineteenth. The student would, however, be misled, were he to believe as he might naturally do, that, during those five centuries, there was a continuous and uninterrupted progress, that the light of literature was faithfully handed from sire to son, and that new fires were kindled, in due succession, to light the new ages as the world moved on. Looking to that little island of our forefathers, we shall see, in its history, how

* January 31, 1850.