ve come down to us, as the monks transcribed
them alone, leaving the half-heathen war-songs of the minstrels attached
to the great houses to die out unwritten. The first piece of English
literature which we can actually date is a fragment of the great
religious epic of Caedmon, written about the year 670. Caedmon was a poor
brother in Hild's monastery at Whitby, and he acquired the art of poetry
by a miracle. Northumbria, in the sixth and seventh centuries, took the
lead in Teutonic Britain; and all the early literature is Northumbrian,
as all the later literature is West Saxon. Caedmon's poem consisted in a
paraphrase of the Bible history, from the Creation to the Ascension. The
idea of a translation of the Bible from Latin into English would never
have occurred to any one at that early time. English had as yet no
literary form into which it could be thrown. But Caedmon conceived the
notion of paraphrasing the Bible story in the old alliterative Teutonic
verse, which was familiar to his hearers in songs like _Beowulf_. Some
of the brethren translated or interpreted for him portions of the
Vulgate, and he threw them into rude metre. Only a single short excerpt
has come down to us in the original form. There is a later complete
epic, however, also attributed to Caedmon, of the same scope and purport;
and it retains so much of the old heathen spirit that it may very
possibly represent a modernised version of the real Caedmon's poem, by a
reviser in the ninth century. At any rate, the latter work may be
treated here under the name of Caedmon, by which it is universally known.
It consists of a long Scriptural paraphrase, written in the alliterative
metre, short, sharp, and decisive, but not without a wild and passionate
beauty of its own. In tone it differs wonderfully little from _Beowulf_,
being most at home in the war of heaven and Satan, and in the titanic
descriptions of the devils and their deeds. The conduct of the poem is
singularly like that of _Paradise Lost_. Its wild and rapid stanzas show
how little Christianity had yet moulded the barbaric nature of the
newly-converted English. The epic is essentially a war-song; the Hebrew
element is far stronger than the Christian; hell takes the place of
Grendel's mere; and, to borrow Mr. Green's admirable phrase, "the verses
fall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle."

In all these works we get the genuine native English note, the wild song
of a pirate race, shaped in