Imatges de pàgina
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ALDHELM.

(Circa 656-709.)

Aldhelm was the son of Kenred, or Kenter, kinsman of Ina, king of the West Saxons. He was born in 656, at Caer Bladon, now Malmesbury, in Wiltshire. He had part of his education abroad and part at home, under Meildulf, an Irish monk, who had built a little cell among the ruins of an ancient town in the forest which then covered the north-eastern districts of Wiltshire. Upon the death of Meildulf, Aldhelm, by the help of Eleutherius, Bishop of Winchester, built (circa 683) a monastery where the cell had stood, and was himself its first abbot. When Hedda, Bishop of the West Saxons, died, Wessex was divided into two dioceses, Winchester and Shireburn; and King Ina promoted Aldhelm to the latter see, comprehending Dorsetshire, Wiltshire, Devonshire, and Cornwall. He was consecrated at Rome by Pope Sergius I.; and Godwin tells us that he had the courage to reprove his Holiness for his incontinence. Aldhelm, by the directions of a diocesan synod, wrote a book against the mistake of the Britons concerning the celebration of Easter, which brought over many of them to the Catholic usage in that point. He likewise produced a work, partly in prose and partly in hexameter Latin verse, in praise of virginity, dedicated to Ethelburga, Abbess of Barking, and published amongst Bede's Opuscula, besides several other treatises, which are mentioned by Bale and William of Malmesbury, the latter of whom gives him the following character as a writer : "The language of the Greeks is close and concise, that of the Romans splendid, and that of the English pompous and swelling : as for Aldhelm, he is moderate in his style, and seldom makes use of foreign terms, and never without necessity. His Catholic meaning is clothed with eloquence, and his most vehement assertions adorned with the colours of rhetoric. If you read him with attention, you would take him for a Grecian by his acuteness, a Roman by his elegance, and an Englishman by the pomp of his language." The monkish authors, according to custom, have ascribed various miracles to Aldhelm. That he was the first Englishman who ever wrote in Latin, he himself tells us in one of his treatises on metre: “These things have I written concerning the kinds and measures of verse, collected with much labour, but whether useful I know not; though I am conscious to myself I have a right to boast as Virgil did:

'I first, returning from th' Aonian hill,

Will lead the Muses to my native land."

William of Malmesbury tells us, after King Alfred, that the people

in Aldhelm's time were half barbarians, and little attentive to religious discourses; wherefore the holy man, placing himself upon a bridge, used often to stop them, and sing ballads of his own composition. He thereby gained the favour and attention of the populace ; and insensibly mixing grave and religious things with those of a jocular kind, he by this means succeeded better than he could have done by severity. As a composer of Anglo-Saxon verse, King Alfred places Aldhelm in the first rank; and we learn from William of Malmesbury that, so late as the twelfth century, some pieces which were attributed to him continued to be popular. He was also eminent as a musician. As a poet his best work is considered to be the Enigmata, written in imitation of Symposius. Aldhem lived in great esteem till his death, which happened at Ditton, near Westbury, May 25th, 709. He was buried at Malmesbury.

TATWINE.
(Died 734.)

Tatwine was a monk of Bredon, in Worcestershire, who, by his religion, his prudence, his solid knowledge of the Scriptures, and his talents, attained the dignity of Archbishop of Canterbury, on the 10th June, 731. He is presumed to have been at that time an old man ; at all events, he did not enjoy his honours long, for he died on the 30th July, 734. He had, however, the satisfaction, during his brief prelacy, of successfully pleading, before Pope Gregory III., the supremacy of Canterbury over York; and he himself received, as metropolitan, the pallium from the Pope's hands. Besides a volume of Enigmata, in Latin hexameters, the versification of which has considerable merit, Bale informs us that Tatwine wrote other poems, which, however, are not now extant.

ETHELWOLF.
(Circa 765.)

Ethelwolf, the third Anglo-Latin poet of whom we have any memorial, was born about the year 765, in Northumberland; and became, about 780, an inmate of a monastery dependent upon the great monastery of Lindisfarne. The work by which he entitled himself to a place among the poets of Britain, is a history, in Latin hexameters, of the abbots and other eminent persons of the monas

tery to which he belonged. The poem, which is dedicated to Egbert, Bishop of Lindisfarne (802-818), has little metrical merit ; but it is to a certain extent valuable as an historical document, and interesting as the only specimen we have of the Anglo-Latin poetry of that period. Ethelwolf was the author also of another Latin poem, in honour of some contemporary ecclesiastics, among whom he sings the praises of his monastic instructor, Father Iglac.

CORMAC, KING OF MUNSTER.
(Circa 780.)

Cormac united the pontifical and regal dignities; he was, at the same time, Archbishop of Cashel and King of Munster. He was likewise a poet; and to his capacity in this respect we owe the completion of the Psalter of Cashel, of which he disposes in his poetical will, "My Psalter," which is given at full length in Keating's History of Ireland.

WULFSTAN.

(Circa 990.)

Wulfstan, one of the singing-men of the church of Winchester, is the author of a narrative of the miracles of St. Swithun, in Latin hexameters, with a prologue in elegiacs, addressed to Alfheh Bishop of Winchester. The work, Mr. Wright says, is a remarkable monument of the Anglo-Latin poetry of the tenth century. Although undeserving of the extravagant praise bestowed upon it by Leland, it contains many tolerable passages. In the introduction the poet gives an account of the rebuilding of the church of Winchester. Wulfstan was also the author of a treatise On the Harmony of Tones, which William of Malmesbury eulogises as of very great ability; and of a life of his master, Ethelwold, Bishop of Winchester, in very wretched Latin prose.

GODFREY OF WINCHESTER.

(Circa 1100.)

Godfrey, Prior of Winchester, was an epigrammatist in the reign of Henry I., very much admired by Camden, who, in his Remains, quotes several of his epigrams, and takes occasion to commend Winchester as a nursery of men excelling in the poetical faculty, adding that the very genius loci doth seem poetical.

TUROLD.

(Circa 1140.)

Turold, an English minstrel in the reign and perhaps at the court of Stephen (1135-1154), is known to us as the author of the earliest existing romance in the Anglo-Norman language, the Chanson de Roland. The theme is the disastrous battle of Roncevaux, which had already been made popular in the Latin story incorrectly ascribed to Bishop Turpin, and which has been so repeatedly sung by the poets of later ages. "The composition," says Mr. Wright, "is one in which, though devoid of the artificial ornaments of more refined poetry, the story marches on with a kind of lofty grandeur, which was well calculated to move the hearts of the hearers for whom it was intended, and which, even to a modern reader, is not without its charms. The primitive form of the language has also a certain degree of dignity, which was lost in its subsequent transformations. The form of the verse has some peculiarities: it is one of the oldest poems in which, instead of rhyming couplets, we have a continuous series of lines, varying in number, bound together by one final rhyme ; and this rhyme, or rather assonance, rests upon the last two or three vowels, entirely independent of the consonants. As in most of the early romances, the largest portion of the poem of Turold consists of battle-scenes, descriptions most suitable to the taste of a warlike age, which are told with somewhat of Homeric vigour; while, in relating the disasters of the war, the poet introduces pathetic traits which sometimes possess considerable beauty."

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