(2) It will help us to see the successive influences that have been at work in the formation of English literature. (3) It will help us to see the relations between the literary history of each period and its general history as presented in politics, social life, religion, science, and art. (4) It will help us to connect the traits of each author with those of his own period, and to see their mutual relations. A very reasonable system for the division of English literature into periods is one which identifies its several great epochs with the several great epochs of the language in which it is written. Thus, during the twelve centuries in which the English language has existed, there have been at least four great epochs in its development. During the first epoch, extending from 670 to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the language may be described as First English, or Anglo-Saxon. During the second epoch, extending from the Norman Conquest to the middle of the fourteenth century, when Chaucer's career began, the language may be described as Transitional English. During the third epoch, extending from the middle of the fourteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century, near the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's reign, the language may be described as Early Modern English. During the fourth epoch, extending from the middle of the sixteenth century to the present, the language may be described as Modern English. In the following treatise, therefore, we shall break up the twelve centuries of English literature into four great periods corresponding to these four great stages in the development of the English language. I. Period of First English, or Anglo-Saxon, 670-1066. II. Period of Transitional English, 1066-1350. III. Period of Early Modern English, 1350-1550. IV. Period of Modern English, 1550 to the present. Of these four periods, the first two can be conveniently dealt with in bulk, each by itself; but, for the last two periods, the literature is so immense, and the transitions in literary spirit and form are so rapid, that each needs to be broken up into smaller and subordinate divisions. It is a great help to clearness of apprehension on the part of the student, as well as to fixedness of recollection, if these smaller and subordinate divisions of English literary history can be made to correspond to those simple and natural divisions of English history in general, with which all readers are familiar, namely, divisions into centuries and half-centuries. Accordingly, in this work, beginning with 1350,- at the threshold of our Period of Early Modern English, we have arranged English writers and their works in groupings of half-centuries, as "The First Half of the Eighteenth Century," "The Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," and so forth. The only exception to this practice is in the case of the fifteenth century, of which the entire literary record is so meagre, that it does not need to be divided into halves. Thus the student will be accustomed, from the outset, to associate his knowledge of the literary history of England with his knowledge of its general, social, political, or military history in the same spaces of time, and thereby to see more truly how all these several expressions of the national life of England were swayed at every point by the same influences, how each remains as a witness and a clew to the character of all the others, and how, at last, all need to be studied together, if he would deeply know the history whose meaning he is trying to master. CHAPTER I. THE FORMING OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 1. The Earliest Europeans.-2. The Celts.-3. The Teutons.-4. Their Blending into the English People.-5. Traits contributed by the Celts.-6. Traits contributed by the Teutons. 1. ONCE Europe was peopled only here and there by men who beat at the doors of nature, and upon the heads of one another, with sharp flints. What knowledge they struck out in many years was bettered by instruction from incoming tribes, who, beginning earlier or learning faster, brought higher results of experience out of some part of the region that we now call Asia. Generation after generation came and went, and then Europe was peopled by tribes different in temper, some scattered among pastures with their flocks and herds, or gathering for fight and plunder around chiefs upon whom they depended; others drawing together on the fields they ploughed, able to win, and strong to hold, the good land of the plain in battle under chiefs whose strength depended upon them. But none can distinguish surely the forefathers of these most remote forefathers of the Celt and Teuton, in whose unlike tempers lay some of the elements from which, when generations after generations more had passed away, a Shakespeare was to come. 2. The first of these great tribes who came into the British Isles were the Celts; and of these there were two distinct families, the Gaelic Celts and the Cymric Celts. The former, migrating by sea from Spain, struck on the eastern coast of Ireland and on the south-western shores of England, and thence spread thinly over both islands. Afterwards the Cymric Celts, who had been seated in Belgium and the north of France, being crowded and hustled by an advancing Teutonic tribe, fled across the Channel, landed on the south coast of England, and gradually forced the main body of their predecessors in Southern |