whilst in England they were similarly introduced, and became immortalised, in the famous history of the Britons, by Geoffrey of Monmouth. It is true, that the earliest and most poetical of the Carlovingian romances which we at present know, the fine Chanson of Roland, was certainly written in England. This Chanson, however, hardly belongs to the real Carlovingian cycle, which was so absolutely national, that we rarely find any one of them in a manuscript which was not written in France. Their subjects are by no means confined to the wars of Charlemagne with the Saracens; a much greater number relate to his real or imaginary feuds with his vassal barons and kings; and not a few belong to the reigns of his predecessors, or of the kings of his line who followed him. Many of them are in fact the reflection of much more ancient national mythological legends, which became gradually identified with the personages of his age. The number of these romances which once existed, must have exceeded all calculation which can at present be hazarded; we are sure that few of our readers are aware of the great number which are still extant. It has been proposed by the French Government Committee for the publication of historical monuments, to print the whole mass (a truly national undertaking);—and it was calculated that at the lowest estimation, if printed in double columns, with small type, they would make at least five or six thick quarto volumes. What steps the Committee is at present taking to carry this project into execution, we do not know. But, in the mean time, Mr. Techener is gradually publishing a selection of the best of these romances in a neat and popular form; and this series, of which we have given a list at the beginning of this article, has just reached its fifth volume. This popular series will, we have no doubt, be more generally acceptable than the larger collection, although it is highly desirable that the whole mass should be printed and given in a tangible form, for it is by so doing only that we may hope to set in a right light many difficult points of literary history. As literary productions, these romances are extremely unequal. Those contained in Techener's collection are favourable specimens; it is true that the romance of the Saxons, or Wituchind, owes its interest less to its poetic beauties than to other circumstances; but the simple and elegant style of Berte aux Grans Piés and of Parise la Duchesse, and the lively and spirited scenes in the story of Garin and the family of the Lorrains, contrast strongly with the long and tedious monotony of many of the inedited romances which belong to this series. The fault of the greater part of them is that they are spun out to a toilsome length, and are filled with a tedious repetition of similar incidents and scenes. But to him who loves to make himself acquainted with the manners and character of the people of former days, there is not one of these romances which does not present points of great interest. The first volume of Techener's series appeared originally in the beginning of the year 1832, but the increase in the number of purchasers of such works rendered, four years afterwards, a second impression necessary, in order to complete a larger number of sets than had originally been contemplated. The person of Berte belongs to the remotest period of Teutonic mythology; in early times she had been the object of Pagan worship; but here she is the heroine of a story which, with different modifications, was often repeated in the literature of the middle-ages, until it finally dwindled into the humble tale of the Children in the Wood. Berte, according to this story, is the daughter of the king and queen of Hungary, Floire and Blanchefleur, who also were the subject of a very popular romance. Berte is betrothed to King Pepin, and repairs with her train to France; but there, by the treason of those to whom she is entrusted, the daughter of a serf is introduced to Pepin in her place, and the true queen is carried off by a party of ruffians to be murdered in the forest of Mans. The murderers, however, quarrel, some refusing to consent to the execution of the crime; and their victim is left in the wood, where she wanders about in danger of perishing from hunger, if she had not accidentally found shelter in the family of a woodman. Here she lives several years, whilst the false Queen of France bears two sons to Pepin, and draws upon herself the hatred of the whole kingdom by her avarice and extortion. At last a visit from the Queen of Hungary leads to the discovery of the whole plot; the guilty persons are punished, and their victim, who is supposed to be dead, is universally lamented. At last, by a fortunate accident, Pepin recovers his long lost queen, who becomes the mother of the famous Charlemagne. To our taste, there are few old poems so truly pleasing as the romance of Berte aux Grans Piés. It abounds with natural and affecting description more than any other poem we know of the same class. We are tempted to give a short extract from this poem as a specimen of the derision with which our neighbours then treated the good ale of old England. The epithet which the natives applied to the national beverage, became in the mouths of foreigners an integral part of the name, godale, which they gave to it. The poet is describing his heroine wandering in the forest, wet, weary, torn, and faint with hunger and thirst; and adds— "Une riviere trouve qui d'un pendant avale; Volentiers en béust, mais trouble est com godale." "She finds a river which flows from a precipice; She would willingly have drunk, but it was muddy like ale." The romance of Garin le Loherain, which is but a branch of the much larger romance in which the adventures of that family are told, belongs also to the reign of Pepin, and pictures to us the bitter feuds among the vassals of the crown which were then continually devastating the kingdom. Its beauties are of an entirely different class to those which characterise Berte. Its writer excels in grouping his personages; in bold spirited pictures of feudal warfare; in broad sketches of personal character. In some parts we might believe ourselves reading the Iliad; and we feel the same interest in almost every blow that is given. This poem, above all the others, gives us an interesting picture of the manners of the middle-ages. The romance of Parise la Duchesse, analogous, in many respects, to that of Berte, for its subject also is the sufferings of a lady, belongs to the reign of Charlemagne. Parise, the daughter of Duke Garnier de Nanteuil, is the wife of Raimond "dux de Saint Gile," who resided at Vauvenice. The "douze pers" of Vauvenice, the murderers of Garnier de Nanteuil, were anxious to destroy every branch of the family towards which they had thus shown such deadly enmity, and attempt to carry off the Duchess (who was near the time of giving birth to her first child) by means of poisoned apples, a method of committing murder which seems then to have been not uncommon. By hazard, the lady escapes the snare, but Raymond's brother, Buéves, eats one of the apples and dies. The conspirators, disappointed in their first intention, now accuse the duchess of the murder, and the result of a long series of wicked intrigues is the banishment of the lady. While wandering about, without knowing where to seek a shelter, she is suddenly seized in the middle of a wild wood with the pains of labour, and is delivered of a son, who is afterwards named Hugues, and who is stolen away by robbers the very night after his birth. Parise, disconsolate for the loss of her offspring, at last arrives at Cologne, and there, disguising her true name and origin, she is received into the household of the Count of Cologne, Thierri, to nurse his infant son, and she soon conciliates the love and respect of his family. Meantime her own child is carried by the robbers to the court of the king of Hungary, who brings him up in his own house until he has reached the age of fifteen years, when he determines to marry him to his only daughter, and make him heir to his crown. But the young Hugues becomes engaged in a murderous affray with the sons of the Hungarian nobles, who had reproached him as a foundling without father or mother, and, in consequence, he flies the country, resolved to wander over the earth until he has discovered his parents. By a series of accidents he arrives at Cologne, and discovers his mother, who relates to him the history of her banishment and his birth. After a short stay at the court of Thierri, Hugues sets out, in company with Thierri's son, and seven hundred knights, in search of his father, and finds the kingdom, to which he is rightful heir, torn by civil war. After various deeds of arms the son becomes known to his father, reconciles him with his injured lady, and procures the punishment of the traitors who had been the chief cause of her ill treatment. ` Besides their claims to attention on account of the beauty of the poetry, or the good management of the plot, or the delineations of ancient manners, there is something extremely interesting in these numerous pictures of female constancy under sufferings which the middle-ages have left us. They are no exaggerations of the imagination, none of the ladies of later romance who occupied themselves in weaving scarfs for the knight errants who were to go about spreading the fame of their beauty; but they exhibit those private and unostentatious virtues which are the highest attributes of female character. When king Flore parts with his daughter Berte, and sends her to be the wife of Pepin, his last prayer is that she should never cease to feel for the sufferings of the poor and the injured. The fifth volume of this series of romances, published within the last month, contains part of the romance of Wituchind; and gives us what remained in the thirteenth century of the Frankish traditions of the struggles of the Saxons against the power of Charlemagne. As is the case in all the Carlovingian romances, these traditions are much altered and deformed by the mixtures of ideas which had originated in the Crusades. It is for this reason that we find in the romances of Wituchind, or of the Saxons, scarcely any of the allusions to the old Teutonic mythology, which its title would have led us to expect. But although, in its present form, it originated only in the thirteenth century, we think we may still perceive a few traces of its older form. We will mention one which seems to us very remarkable, and which, as far as we are aware, has not yet been pointed out, namely, the singular distinction between the langue romane and the lingua Francorum. When the emperor gives his orders to the nobles of his own court, he speaks in romanz, i. e. in that corrupted form of the Latin or Roman language which formed the groundwork of the modern French. L'ampereres de Rome choisi antre les Frans Saveri et Lambert, si lor dist an romans: etc.-P. 149. When Sebile, the queen of the Saxons, addresses Berard, a Frankish knight, she speaks to him in the language of the Franks, i. e. as we are inclined to interpret it, in the Teutonic dialect, which belonged to their race, and which united them in blood with the other Teutonic tribes. Sebile li escrie à la langue francor: "Vassax, bien estes dignes d'avoir nobile amor." etc.-P. 222. In the thirteenth century this distinction of languages could scarcely have been understood, and we are strongly inclined to regard them as expressions taken from some older works, perhaps from popular ballads. The form francor (francorum) seems also to us to be a mark of antiquity. This romance of Wituchind, commonly known by the title of the Chanson des Saxons, was composed in its present form by Jean Bodel, a poet of Artois who flourished towards the middle of the thirteenth century. As we have only a part of the poem in this first volume, we cannot give the outline of the plot. The interest of events is by no means so well kept up as in the romance of Garin le Loherain; yet the adventures of some of Charlemagne's knights, that enliven the long period during which the hostile armies quietly observe each other from the opposite banks of the Rhone, are not destitute of that spirit and beauty which make such a poem pleasing. All the volumes of this series are, to use the booksellers' phrase, “nicely got up." The three first romances in the series are illustrated by useful explanatory notes; but, philologically speaking, the last is certainly the best, and for the close accuracy of its text, and the frequent various readings given at the foot of the pages, deserves the warmest thanks of every one who reads old French poetry, with an eye to the language in which it is written. Of the old French, in contradistinction from the Anglo-Norman dialect, we have no hesitation in saying that the most important of all monuments are the romances, or chansons de geste. On this account, as well as for the interest excited by their style and subject, for the position they hold in literary history, for their historical value in painting manners and customs of a remote age, we would recommend this popular series to every reader who is attached to the literature of the middle ages. REVIEW OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. An Essay on the State of Literature and Learning under the AngloSaxons; introductory to the first section of the Biographia Britannica Literaria of the Royal Society of Literature. By Thomas Wright, Esq. M.A. F.S.A. 8vo. HOW much the early literature of our own country had been neglected, and all but forgotten, even to a period close to the present, may be known by the singular fact, that in Dr. Johnson's time, a very slight and superficial knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon language was all that was deemed requisite for an English Lexicographer to possess ; and the little which he commanded, was not obtained from original inquiries, but collected from Skinner and Junius, and other authorities of the same kind. Horne Tooke, whose sagacity was greater than his scholarship, saw the defects of Johnson and others, and pointed out the true path of future inquiry. To him have succeeded scholars of scarcely less ingenuity and more profound investigation: the genius and powers of that important and beautiful language have been examined; some of its finest works well and critically edited, and the riches of its literature made known. "It may truly be asserted that the literature of no other country can boast of the preservation of such a long and uninterrupted series of memorials as that of England. Even through the early ages of Saxon rule, though at times the chain is slender, yet it is not broken. We want neither the heroic song in which the scóp or poet told the venerable traditions of the fore-world to the chieftains assembled on the 'mead-bench,' nor the equally noble poems in which his successor sang the truths as well as the legends of Christianity. We have history and biography as they came from the pen of the Saxon writers, science, such as was then known, set down by those who professed it, and these written sometimes in the language of their fathers; whilst at other times they are clothed in that tongue which the misGENT. MAG. VOL. XII. sionaries had introduced, and in which the learning of Bede and Alcuin was revered, when the Saxon language was no longer understood. We have the doctrine of the church, both as it was discussed among its sented in simpler form to the ears of the profoundest teachers, and as it was premultitude. Lastly, amongst the numerous manuscripts which the hand of time has spared to us, the lighter literaitself continually under many varying ture of our Saxon forefathers presents forms." Copious, then, as this literature is, and deeply interesting as being native to us, and the parent of our own, Mr. Wright has undertaken no ungrateful task when he proposes, as in the present Essay, to give us a summary view of the state of learning and accomplishment among our Anglo-Saxon forefathers; and he has executed it in a manner which must command our warm approbation. We will briefly mention the different heads into which the general subject is divided, and through which the inquiry is pursued. The first, treating of Anglo-Saxon poetry and romance, is of prominent interest, and therefore occupies a considerable space. In the following extract, we are obliged, from want of space, to omit the specimens which Mr. Wright has given. "The Poet, or Minstrel, was held in high esteem among the Saxons. His genius was looked upon as a birth-right, not an acquired art, and it obtaind for him everywhere the respect and protection of the great and the powerful. His place was in the hall of princes, where he never failed to earn admiration and applause, attended generally with advantages of a more substantial nature. The early poem of Beowulf affords us many evidences of the high place which poetry held amongst the enjoyments of life. If the poet would paint to us the joy which reigned in the royal hall of Heorot, he tells us of the song that resounded there; as, on the contrary, the absence of the wonted minstrelsy is a sure sign of sorrow and distress. "The poetry of the Anglo-Saxons has 3 C preserved to us many traits of the character and office of the ancient minstrel. He was sometimes a household retainer of the chief whom he served, as we see in the poem of Beowulf; sometimes he wandered through different countries, visiting the courts of various princes. "It was the minstrel's duty, not only to tell the mythic history of the earlier ages, but to relate contemporary events, and to clothe in poetry the deeds which fell under his eye, to turn into derision the coward or the vanquished enemy, and to laud and exalt the conduct of his patrons. "It was by means of his songs that the intelligence of contemporary events was, in the earlier ages, carried from one court to another. At times the Bard raised his song to higher themes, and laid open the sacred story of the cosmogony, and the beginning of all things. "These minstrel-poets had, by degrees, composed a large mass of national poetry, which formed collectively one grand mythic cycle. Their education consisted chiefly in committing this poetry to memory, and it was thus preserved from age to age. They rehearsed such portions of it as might be asked for by the hearers, or as the circumstances of the moment might require, for it seems certain that they were in the habit of singing datached scenes even of particular poems, just as we are told was done with the works of Homer in the earlier times of Greece. In their passage from one minstrel to another, these poems underwent successive changes; and since, like the religion taught by the priests, the poetry belonged to the whole class, without being known severally as the work of this or that individual, it happens that all the AngloSaxon national poetry is anonymous." Mr. Wright next treats of the poetic measures of the Anglo-Saxons, the chief and universal characteristic of which was-Alliteration : so arranged, that in every couplet there should be two principal words in the first line beginning with the same letter, which letter must also be the initial of the first word on which the stress of the voice falls in the second line. The only approach to a metrical system yet discovered, is that two risings and two fallings of the voice seem necessary to each perfect line. In the MSS. the Saxon poetry is always written continuously like prose; but the division of the lines is generally marked by a point. On the romances of the AngloSaxons, Mr. Wright observes: "The Romances of the Anglo-Saxons hold historically the same place in literature which belongs to the Iliad or the Odyssey. Their subjects were either exclusively mythological, or historical facts, which, in their passage by tradition from age to age, had taken a mythic form. Beowulf himself is, probably, little more than a fabulous personage-another Hercules destroying monsters of every description, natural or supernatural, nicors, ogres, grendels, dragons. No weak or selfish feelings ever interfere with his straight course of heroic probity. Courage, generosity, and fidelity are his virtues. The coward, the niggard, and the traitor, whenever they are mentioned, are spoken of with strong marks of abhorrence. The weaker sex, though it has scarcely any share in the action, is always treated with extreme delicacy and respect. The plot of the poem is at once simple and bold. Among the other romances, that of Finn had for its subject the mutual injury of two hostile tribes, and acts of vengeance repeated until the one was vanquished and became dependent on the other. Sometimes the ladies stand forth as more active and powerful agents. Thus the romance of Offa was founded on the marriage of a king with a wood-nymph, and the hatred with which she was regarded by his mother, a story frequently reproduced in the romances of the thirteenth century. The old German romance of the Niebe. lungen has for its subject the disastrous consequences which arose out of the vani. ty and petulance of two royal dames. The subject of that of Waltharius, preserved to us only in a Latin dress, is the escape of a prince and his affianced bride from the court of the Huns, where they had been detained as hostages. "The only perfect monument of AngloSaxon romance, which the hand of time has left us, is Beowulf. In it we discover, what was rendered more than probable by other considerations, that, after the Saxons had embraced Christianity, they carefully weeded out from their national poetry all mention of, or allusion to, those personages of the earlier mythology, whom their forefathers had worshipped as Gods. But they went no further than this; the subordinate beings of the ancient superstition, the elves, nicors, and all the fantastic creatures of the popular creed, still held their places; for the Christian missionaries themselves believed in the spiritual and unseen world as extensively as |