d again. In English
literature out of the unknown past rose the Anglo-Saxon lyric and epic,
_Deor's Complaint_, _Beowulf_, and the poems of Caedmon and Cynewulf.
From the death-like sleep of our language which followed the Norman
Conquest rose the heights of thirteenth-century romance. From the dull
poetic pedantries of the age which succeeded Chaucer rose the glittering
pinnacles of Shakespeare and his fellows. From the coldness and
shallowness of the eighteenth century rose the rich and varied tableland
of whose occupants Burns was one of the first and Tennyson and Browning
perhaps the last. No other literature has shown such recuperative power,
a thought full of hope and consolation in these days, for those who can
take pleasure in the anticipated joys of their great-grandchildren.

If this philosophising be thought dull, we have only repaid popular
estimates in their own coin; for these sweeping generalisations, which
condemn whole centuries as periods of depression, have been largely made
for us by popular opinion, and like all generalisations, they have to be
very considerably whittled down as soon as we descend to particulars. On
a nearer view we find that the curves of literary progress have not been
rolled smooth by any steamroller, but that the great chain of hills is
connected by numberless ridges, some of which are already rising, long
ere others have touched the plain. A pleasant book by an American
professor (the _History of Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century_, by
Henry A. Beers) has helped to draw attention to many of these rising
ridges of romance in the century which most people connect only with the
name of Pope; and I hope in these few pages to show that the fifteenth
century, of which we are so contemptuous, was at least not all flat
country.

For the poor esteem into which this period has fallen we must lay some
of the blame at the door of the literary historians who have, until
recent days, placed the English Mandeville nearly half a century too
early, postponed the consideration of the dramatic productions till they
reached the middle of the sixteenth century, when they gave a meagre
summary of 'earlier attempts,' and chronicled the industry of
translators, which had been in full swing ever since about 1380, as a
special feature of the sixteenth century, helping thus to account for
the great Elizabethan outburst of original work. No poor period of
literature was ever more mercilessly or wanton