erature of a people is almost invariably in verse: the
literature that comes from the heart of a people, and is not the
production of a few learned folk. In early days, there was little
reading or writing, except in the shelter of the great monasteries. The
common folk-literature, which is a very precious thing, is preserved, in
such times as we are thinking of, in people's memories, and circulated
by recitation, this recitation being accompanied by music or by
rhythmical movements of the body. We all know how much easier it is to
remember a page of verse than a page of prose. Thus, the form that could
most easily be carried in the memory and recited, would naturally be the
first to flourish.

We have seen something of early English religious poetry in Caedmon's
work and that of his followers; and next we shall come back to poetry
with Cynewulf, who made great and holy verse.

But beside such work as these poems which were written by cultivated
men, many poems and fragments of verse were floating about the land,
come over from the old native country with the first Angles and Saxons
who made their home in Britain. These were dear to the people and dear,
as we shall see, to the greatest among their kings, Alfred, who was, we
may say, the founder of English prose. It was not English prose as we
know English prose, because the language was then more like German than
anything else; but it was prose in the native tongue, and this was a
good and great thing to begin.

In our gratitude to Alfred, we must not forget our gratitude to the
English scholars of older days, none of whom had put us under so great a
debt as our dear old Benedictine of Jarrow.

A later writer than St Bede, though not so great as he, was Alcuin of
York, who was invited by no less a man than Charlemagne to teach his
children, and who became, as it has been phrased, a sort of Minister of
Public Education in his empire.

Alcuin was good as well as great, and I will give you a little instance
of the rightness of his thought. In a Dialogue which he wrote, in his
teaching days, he supposes Prince Pepin to ask the question, "What is
the liberty of man?" and the answer is, "Innocence."

But the evil days of invasion and war and trouble had swept learning
from its northern home; and Alfred's work was to bring it back to
another part of England.

CHAPTER VI

Decay of learning in England. Revival under Alfred. His translations.
Edits English Chro