ctual production and
gradual transformation of English language and literature generally
may occupy us in the earlier part.

It is to be hoped that by this time a middle way, tolerably free from
molestation, may be taken between those historians of English who
would have a great gulf fixed before Chaucer, and those who insist
upon absolute continuity from Caedmon to Tennyson. There must surely be
something between dismissing (as did the best historian of the subject
in the last generation) Anglo-Saxon as "that nocturnal portion of our
literature," between calling it "impossible to pronounce with
certainty whether anything in it is artistically good or bad,"[88] and
thinking it proper, as it has sometimes been thought, in an
examination in English literature, to give four papers to Caedmon,
AElfric, and Wulfstan, and one to the combined works of Addison, Pope,
Johnson, and Burke. Extravagances of the latter kind have still, their
heyday of reaction not being quite past, a better chance than
extravagances of the former. But both may surely be avoided.

[Footnote 88: See Craik, _History of English Literature_, 3d ed.
(London, 1866), i. 55.]

[Sidenote: _Decay of Anglo-Saxon._]

The evidence is rendered more easy in the present connection by the
fact, recognised by the most competent authorities in First English or
Anglo-Saxon itself, that for some time before the arbitrary line of
the Conquest the productive powers of the literature had been failing,
and the language itself was showing signs of change. No poetry of the
first class seems to have been written in it much after the end of the
ninth century, little prose of a very good class after the beginning
of the eleventh; and its inflexions must in time have given way--were,
it is said by some, actually giving way--before the results of the
invasion and assimilation of French and Latin. The Conquest helped;
but it did not wholly cause.

This, however, is no doubt open to argument, and the argument would
have to be conducted mainly if not wholly on philological
considerations, with which we do not here meddle. The indisputable
literary facts are that the canon of pure Anglo-Saxon or Old-English
literature closes with the end of the Saxon Chronicle in 1154, and
that the "Semi-Saxon," the "First Middle English," which then makes
its appearance, approximates, almost decade by decade, almost year by
year, nearer and nearer to the modern type. And for our purpose,
though