assured King Louis XIV. that "the arts and sciences sometimes leave a
country to go and honour another with their presence. Now they have gone
to France, and scarcely any vestiges of them have been left here," April
2, 1663. "A French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II.," 1892, p.
205.

CHAPTER IV.

_LITERATURE IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE._

I.

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 and silence, and this was not without
some happy results. The first duty of a master is to impose silence on
his pupils; and this the conquerors did not fail to do. There was
silence for a hundred years.

The clerks were the only exception; men of English speech remained mute.
They barely recopied the manuscripts of their ancient authors, the list
of whose names was left closed; they listened without comprehending to
the songs the foreigner had acclimatised in their island. The manner of
speech and the subjects of the discourses were equally unfamiliar; and
they stood silent amidst the merriment that burst out like a note of
defiance in the literature of the victors.

Necessity caused them to take up the pen once more. After as before the
Conquest the rational object of life continued to be the gaining of
heaven, and it would have been a waste of time to use Latin in
demonstrating this truth to the common people of England. French served
for the new masters, and for their group of adherents; Latin for the
clerks; but for the mass of "lowe men," who are always the most
numerous, it was indispensable to talk English. "All people cannot,"
had said Bishop Grosseteste in his French "Chateau d'Amour," "know
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin"--"nor French," adds his English translator
some fifty years later; for which cause:

On Englisch I-chul mi resun schowen
Ffor him that con not i-knowen
Nouther Ffrench ne Latyn.[324]

The first works written in English, after the Conquest, were sermons and
pious treatises, some imitated from Bede, AElfric, and the ancient Saxon
models, others translated from the French. No originality or invention;
the time is one of depression and humiliation; the victor sings, the
vanquished prays.

The twelfth century, so fertile in Latin and French works, only counts,
as far as English works are concerned, devotional books in prose and
verse. The verses are uncouth