PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.
The highest summit of our literature—and indeed of the literature of the world—is Shakspeare. He brings us life in the greatest force and volume, of the highest quality, and clothed in the richest beauty. His age, which was practically identical with the reign of Elizabeth, is the golden age of English letters; and taking it for a basis of division, we have the Pre-Shakspearian Age from 600 to 1559, the Shakspearian Age from 1559 to 1620, and the Post-Shakspearian Age from 1620 to the present.
The first age is divided into three periods.
First, the Early Period, from 600 to the Norman Conquest in 1066, which holds the names of Beowulf,[2] Cædmon,[3] Bæda,[4] Cynewulf, and Ælfred, the great king who did so much for the learning of his country, bringing many great scholars into England from all over the world, and himself writing the best prose that had been produced in English, and changing the "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle"—till his time a mere record of noble births and deaths—into a valuable periodical, the progenitor of the vast horde that threatens to expel the classics in our day. The literature of this period has little claim upon us except on the ground of breadth. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and the poems of Beowulf, Cædmon, and Cynewulf, should be glanced at to see what sort of people our ancestors were.
[2] An epic poem, full of the life, in peace and war, of our Saxon fathers before they came to England.
[3] The writer of a paraphrase on the Bible; a feeble Milton.
[4] A very learned man, who gathered many scholars about him, and who finished translating the Gospel of John on his death-bed and with his latest breath.
Second, the Period of Chaucer, from 1066 to the death of Chaucer in 1400. The great books of this period were Mandeville's Travels, Langland's "Piers the Ploughman." Wycliffe's translation of the Bible (these two books, with Wycliffe's tracts, went all over England among the common people, rousing them against the Catholic Church, and starting the reformation that afterward grew into Puritanism, and gained control of the nation under Cromwell), Gower's Poems, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Those in italics are the only books that claim our reading. Mandeville travelled thirty years, and then wrote all he saw and all he heard from the mouth of rumor. Chaucer is half French and two-thirds Italian. He drank in the spirit of the Golden Age of Italy, which was in the early part of his own century. Probably he met Petrarch and Boccaccio, and certainly he drew largely from their works as well as from Dante's, and he dug into poor Gower as into a stone quarry. He is still our best story-teller in verse, and one of our most musical poets; and every one should know something of this "morning star of English poetry," by far the greatest light before the Elizabethan age, and still easily among the first five or six of our poets.
Third, the Later Period, from 1400 to 1559, in which Malory's Morte D'Arthur, containing fragments of the stories about King Arthur and the knights of his round table, which like a bed-rock crop out so often in English Literature, should be read while reading Tennyson's "Idylls of the King," which is based upon Malory; and Sir Thomas More's Utopia also claims some attention on the plea of breadth, as it is the work of a great mind, thoroughly and practically versed in government, and sets forth his idea of a perfect commonwealth.
In this age of nine and a half centuries there were, then, ten noteworthy books and one great book; eight only of the eleven, however, have any claim upon our attention, the last three being all that are entitled to more than a rapid reading by the general student; and only Chaucer for continuous companionship can rank high, and even he cannot be put on the first shelf.