Category: Classics of Literature
The mother country of the Germanic invader--Tacitus--Germans and Scandinavians--The great invasions--Character of the Teutonic nations--Germanic kingdoms established in formerly Roman provinces. Jutes, Frisians, Angles, and Saxons--British resistance and defeat--Problem of the...
The new nation had its poet, Geoffrey Chaucer. By his origin, his education, his tastes, his manner of life, as well as by his writings, Chaucer represents the new age; he paint...
35. CHAPTER VI.The desire for amusement and the craving for laughable things never disappeared entirely, even in the darkest days; the sources of the lay drama began to spring and flow, owing...
25. CHAPTER III.The ties with France were close ones; those with Rome were no less so. William had come to England, politically as the heir of the Anglo-Saxon kings, and with regard to ecclesia...
24. CHAPTER II.What previous invaders of the island had been unable to accomplish, the French of William of Normandy were finally to realise. By the rapidity and thoroughness of their conquest...
34. CHAPTER V.For a long time, and up to our day, the title and dignity of "Father of English prose" has been borne by Sir John Mandeville, of St. Albans, knight, who, "in the name of God glo...
21. CHAPTER IV.Augustine, prior of St. Martin of Rome, sent by Gregory the Great, arrived in 597. To the Germanic pirates established in the isle of Britain, he brought a strange teaching. The...
37. Book iii., chap xxii. First edition, 1513. The work had been composed[841] A selection of his detached poems, mixed with many apocryphal ones, was edited by Halliwell: "A Selection from the minor Poems of Dan John Lydgate" (Percy Society), 1840,...
26. CHAPTER IV.English in the meanwhile had survived, but it had been also transformed, owing to the Conquest. To the disaster of Hastings succeeded, for the native race, a period of stupor an...
32. CHAPTER III.The nation was young, virile, and productive. Around Chaucer was a whole swarm of poets; he towers above them as an oak towers above a coppice; but the oak is not isolated like...
33. CHAPTER IV.Gower's books were made out of books. Chaucer's friend carries us in imagination to the paradise of Eros, or to a Patmos of his own invention, from whence he foretells the end o...
36. CHAPTER VII.In the autumn of the year 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer, the son of the Thames Street vintner, universally acknowledged the greatest poet of England, had been borne to his tomb in the...
27. CHAPTER I.In the course of the fourteenth century, under Edward III. and Richard II., a double fusion, which had been slowly preparing during the preceding reigns, is completed and sealed...
20. CHAPTER III.Towards the close of the fifth century, the greater part of England was conquered; the rulers of the land were no longer Celts or Romans, but men of Germanic origin, who worship...
23. CHAPTER I.Germanic England gave itself a king for the last time at the death of Edward the Confessor. Harold, son of Godwin, was elected to succeed him. A momentous crisis, the greatest i...
16. CHAPTER I.The people that now occupies England was formed, like the French people, by the fusion of several superimposed races. In both countries the same races met and mingled at about t...
18. CHAPTER II."To say nothing of the perils of a stormy and unknown sea, who would leave Asia, Africa, or Italy for the dismal land of the Germans, their bitter sky, their soil the culture an...
28. xxxi. Judge Hengham interrupts a counsel, saying: "Do not interpret thestatute in your own way; we know it better than you, for we made it."--"Ne glosez point le statut; nous le savoms meuz de vous, qar nous le feimes." _Ibid._
31. Book v. st. 233. Troilus had written at great length, of course, "the[523] Pierre de Beauveau's translation of the passage (in Moland and d'Hericault, "Nouvelles francoises en prose, du XIVe Siecle," 1858, p. 303) does not differ much from the or...
19. book vi.[30] The arms of the Franks and those of the Anglo-Saxons, the former preserved in the Museum of St. Germain, and the latter in the British Museum, are similar, and differ widel...
17. Book iv.[14] See, with reference to this, the "Navigation of Mael-Duin," a christianised narrative, probably composed in the tenth century, under the form in which we now possess it, bu...
22. book ii. of the original. Most of it is added by Alfred, who gives in it[118] The anonymous translation of the Gospels compiled in the time of Alfred was copied and vulgarised in this period; ed. Skeat, "The Gospels in Anglo-Saxon," Cambridge, 1871-...
30. Book ii. st. 210. Says the Nurse:[512] Turned later into English verse by Lydgate, to be read as a supplementary Tale of Canterbury: "Here begynneth the sege of Thebes, ful lamentably told by Johnn Lidgate monk...
10. CHAPTER II.I. Youth of Chaucer.--His London life--London in the fourteenth century--Chaucer as a page--His French campaigns--Valettus camerae Regis--Esquire--Married life--Poetry a la mode...
13. CHAPTER V.I. Translators and Adaptators.--Slow growth of the art of prose--Comparison with France; historians and novelists--Survival of Latin prose--Walsingham and other chroniclers--The...
7. CHAPTER III.I. The Ties with Rome.--William I., Henry II., John--Church lands--The "exempt" abbeys--Coming of the friars--The clergy in Parliament--Part played by prelates in the State--War...
11. CHAPTER III.I. Metrical Romances.--Jugglers and minstrels--Their life, deeds, and privileges--Decay of the profession towards the time of the Renaissance--Romances of the "Sir Thopas" type-...
14. CHAPTER VI.I. Origins. Civil Sources.--Mimes and histrions--Amusements and sights provided by histrions--How they raise a laugh--Facetious tales told with appropriate gestures--Dialogues a...
12. CHAPTER IV.I. Life and Works.--A general view--Birth, education, natural disposition--Life at Malvern--His unsettled state of mind--Curiosities and failures--Life in London--Chantries--Dis...
4. CHAPTER IV.III. Christian Poems.--The genius of the race remains nearly unchanged--Heroical adventures of the saints--Paraphrase of the Bible--Caedmon--Cynewulf--His sorrows and despair--"...
6. CHAPTER II.III. Epic Romances.--The Song of Roland and the Charlemagne cycle--Comparison with "Beowulf"--The matter of Rome--How antiquity is _translated_--Wonders--The matter of Britain--...
9. CHAPTER I.I. Fusion of Races and Languages.--Abolition of the presentment of Englishery, 1340--Survival of the French language in the fourteenth century--The decline--Part played by "lowe...
15. CHAPTER VII.III. Material welfare; Prose.--Development of the lower and middle class--Results of the wars--Trade, navy, savings. Books of courtesy--Familiar letters; Paston Letters--Guides...
5. CHAPTER I.I. The Invaders of the Year 1066.--England between two civilisations--The North and South--The Scandinavians at Stamford-bridge. The Normans of France--The army of William is a...
8. CHAPTER IV.I. Pious Literature.--A period of silence--First works (pious ones) copied, translated or composed in English after the Conquest--Sermons--Lives of saints--Treatises of various...
3. CHAPTER III.I. The Poetry of the North.--The Germanic period of English literature--Its characteristics--Anglo-Saxon poetry stands apart and does not submit to Celtic influence--Comparison...
1. CHAPTER I.2. CHAPTER II.The mother country of the Germanic invader--Tacitus--Germans and Scandinavians--The great invasions--Character of the Teutonic nations--Germanic kingdoms established in formerly...