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First among English scholars, first among English theologians, first among English historians, it is in this monk of Jarrow that English learning strikes its roots.

2. Supremacy of Ecgberht.*

But Ecgberht had wider dreams of conquest than those of supremacy over Mercia alone; and, setting an under-king on its throne, he marched in the following year to the attack of Northumbria. In the silence of her annals, we know not why the realm which seventy years before had beaten back Æthelbald,* and which had since carried its conquests to the Clyde, now yielded without a blow to Ecgberht's summons. The weariness of half a century of anarchy had, no doubt, done much to break the spirit of northern independence, while terror of the pirates who were harrying the Northumbrian coast may have strengthened the dim longing for internal unity which was growing up under the influence of the Church. But whatever may have been the causes of their action, the Northumbrian thegns* met Ecgberht on their border, at Dore, in Derbyshire, and owned him as their overlord. There is something startling in so quiet and uneventful a close to the struggles of two hundred years; for with the submission of Northumbria the work that Oswiu and Æthelbald had failed to do was done. In a revolution which seemed sudden, but which was in reality the inevitable close of the growth of natural consciousness through these centuries of English history, the old severance of people from people had at last been broken down; and the whole English race in Britain was for the first time knit together under a single ruler. Though the legend which made Ecgberht take the title of King of England is an invention of later times, it expresses an historic truth. Long and bitter as the struggle for separate existence was still to be in Mid-Britain and the North, it was a struggle that never wholly undid the work which his sword had done; and from the moment when the Northumbrian thegns bowed to their West-Saxon overlord, England was made in fact, if not as yet in name. The Making of England (1882).

*Mr. Green returns to the Anglo-Saxon spelling: Ecgberht for Egbert; Æthel for Ethel; thegn for thane.

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[In rich variety of music, and in weird grandeur of description, this poem equals, if it does not surpass, anything Mr. Swinburne has previously achieved.-Athenæum (1881.)]

Miles, and miles, and miles of desolation!

Leagues on leagues on leagues without a change!

Sign or token of some eldest nation

Here would make the strange land not so strange.
Time-forgotten, yea since time's creation,

Seem these borders where the sea-birds range.

Slowly, gladly, full of peace and wonder
Grows his heart who journeys here alone.
Earth and all its thoughts of earth sink under
Deep, as deep in water sinks a stone.
Hardly knows it if the rollers thunder,
Hardly whence the lonely wind is blown.

Tall the plumage of the rush-flower tosses,
Sharp and soft in many a curve and line
Gleam and glow the sea-colored marsh-mosses,
Salt and splendid from the circling brine.

Streak on streak of glimmering sea-shine crosses
All the land sea-saturate as with wine.

Far, and far between, in divers orders,
Clear gray steeples cleave the low gray sky;
Fast and firm as Time unshaken wanders,
Hearts made sure by faith, by hope made high.
These alone in all the wild sea-borders

Fear no blast of days and nights that die.

All the land is like as one man's face is,

Pale and troubled still with change of cares.
Doubt and death pervade her clouded spaces:
Strength and length of life and peace are theirs,—
Theirs alone amid these weary places,

Seeing not how the wild world frets and fares.

Firm and fast where all is cloud that changes,
Cloud-clogged sunlight, cloud by sunlight thinned,
Stern and sweet, above the sand-hill ranges

Watch the towers and tombs of men that sinned
Once, now calm as earth whose only change is
Wind, and light, and wind, and cloud, and wind.
By the North Sea (1881).

THE CONTINENTAL HOMESTEAD.

BROTHER AZARIAS.

(Professor of English Literature in Rock Hill College, Maryland.)

Three neighboring races invaded the island of Britain. They found it occupied by a kindred race known as the Kelt. After a long and fierce struggle they established themselves upon the island; drove the greater part of the natives to the west, where they became known to them as Welsh, or aliens; subjugated others, and finally imposed upon all their laws and government. In their continental homestead they were known as Jutes, Saxons, and Angles or English; in their new insular home they called themselves Englishmen, and their language English.

The English inhabited that part of Europe now known as the Schleswig-Holstein provinces and the Netherlands. This was their second homestead. Many centuries previously they lived in their cradle-land in Asia. They bear kinship with the Persian and Hindu; but their difference of occupation, the nature of their soil, and the influence of climate, so changed their

natures, and gave such direction to their thoughts, that it were difficult to imagine them originally one people with the Hindu, did they not retain evidence of the relationship in their language. And that proves them to be of the same stock. In both do we find words identical in sound and in meaning; as the term naman, which means "name" both in Sanskrit and Old English. Sometimes, while the word remains, its primitive meaning becomes changed in one or other of the languages. Such is the word path, which as a verb means "to go." In this sense it is used in Shakspeare, in a passage over which the critics have been greatly exercised

"For, if thou path, thy native semblance on,
Not Erebus itself were dim enough

To hide thee from prevention."

Julius Cæsar, ii. 1.

It is the privilege of genius to strike the original meaning of a word long after it has passed from the common intelligence. Such was Shakspeare's in this instance. Again, in our irregular verbs we have forms which can be accounted for only by a comparative study of the Sanskrit. Take, for example, the verb to be. The forms is and am come from the verb as of the same meaning, and its first person singular asmi; the form was is found in the verb vas, to dwell; and the form be is one with bhu, a word having also the same meaning. And it is only in a language cognate to the Sanskrit that we find the root-word of our comparative better. "In the Persian," says Cardinal Wiseman, 66 we have exactly the same comparative, behter, with exactly the same signification, regularly formed from its positive beh, good; just as we have in the same language badter, worse, from bad."

The English, then, are a branch of the Aryan family. That primitive people, the mother race of Kelt and Teuton and Hindu, was devoted to the cultivation of the soil: the English have at all times shown a fondness for the tillage of the land, except when brought face to face with almost insurmountable difficulties, as the encroachments of the sea. That mother race

was passionately attached to nature-worship: the English retained that inherited love for nature-they deified the elements, even as did their sister peoples the Greeks and Hindus, and as did their Aryan mother prior to either. With impetuous feelings rushed they to the hunt; with reckless eagerness they

committed themselves to the mercy of wind and wave. The Aryan was a people fond of philosophical speculation; the common problems and the nearly common solutions, inherited by the Aryan nations, prove as much. But the English of old became too besotted with heavy and coarse drinks, which they indulged in to excess, to be able to speculate with the acuteness of Greek or Hindu. With the Aryan, home was a sacred refuge, and all the family relations were held in reverence as well as honor; this became, with the English, one of their most widely cherished and deeply rooted sentiments. The Aryan fell under the influences of his senses, to the clouding of his spiritual parts; so were the English greatly wrapped up in their material natures. The Aryan was given to poetry in which man and nature were blended; so were the English, but with a difference. Living in the land of the sunny East, the ancestral race rejoiced in the harmonies and beauty of form and color; but in their woody, mist-enveloped land, the English lost sight of these things, and they ceased to be for them what they were for the Kelt and the Greek, a passion.

Development of English Literature (1879).

NAPOLEON.

THOMAS CARLYLE (1795-1881).

"False as a bulletin" became a proverb in Napoleon's time. He makes what excuse he could for it: that it was necessary to mislead the enemy, to keep up his own men's courage, and so forth. On the whole, there are no excuses. A man in no case has liberty to tell lies. It had been, in the long run, better for Napoleon too if he had not told any. In fact, if a man have any purpose reaching beyond the hour and day, meant to be found extant next day, what good can it ever be to promulgate lies? The lies are found out; ruinous penalty is exacted for them. No man will believe the liar next time even when he speaks truth, when it is of the last importance that he be believed. The old cry of wolf!-A lie is no-thing; you cannot of nothing make something; you make nothing at last, and lose your labor into the bargain.

Yet Napoleon had a sincerity: we are to distinguish between what is superficial and what is fundamental in insincerity.

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