(Hrothgar spake, helm of the Scyldings:  ’Ask not after good tidings.  Sorrow is renewed among the Dane-folk.  Dead is AEschere, Yrmenlaf’s elder brother, who read me rune and bore me rede; comrade at shoulder when we fended our heads in war and the boar-helms rang.  Even so should we each be an atheling passing good, as AEschere was.’)

This is simple, manly, dignified.  It avoids the besetting sin of the Anglo-Saxon gleeman—­the pretentious trick of calling things ’out of their right names’ for the sake of literary effect (as if e.g. the sea could be improved by being phrased into ‘the seals’ domain’).  Its Anglo-Saxon staccato, so tiresome in sustained narrative, here happens to suit the broken utterance of mourning.  In short, it exhibits the Anglo-Saxon Muse at her best, not at her customary.  But set beside it a passage in which Homer tells of a fallen warrior—­at haphazard, as it were, a single corpse chosen from the press of battle—­

[Greek:  polla de chermadia megal aspidas estuphelixam
marnamenon amph auton o d en strophaliggi konies
keito megas megalosti, lelasmenos ipposunaom.]

Can you—­can anyone—­compare the two passages and miss to see that they belong to two different kingdoms of poetry?  I lay no stress here on ‘architectonics.’  I waive that the “Iliad” is a well-knit epic and the story of “Beowulf” a shapeless monstrosity.  I ask you but to note the difference of note, of accent, of mere music.  And I have quoted you but a passage of the habitual Homer.  To assure yourselves that he can rise even from this habitual height to express the extreme of majesty and of human anguish in poetry which betrays no false note, no strain upon the store of emotion man may own with self-respect and exhibit without derogation of dignity, turn to the last book of the “Iliad” and read of Priam raising to his lips the hand that has murdered his son.  I say confidently that no one unable to distinguish this, as poetry, from the very best of “Beowulf” is fit to engage upon business as a literary critic.

In “Beowulf” then, as an imported poem, let us allow much barbarian merit.  It came of dubious ancestry, and it had no progeny.  The pretence that our glorious literature derives its lineage from “Beowulf” is in vulgar phrase ‘a put up job’; a falsehood grafted upon our text-books by Teutonic and Teutonising professors who can bring less evidence for it than will cover a threepenny-piece.  Its run for something like that money, in small educational manuals, has been in its way a triumph of pedagogic reclame.

Our rude forefathers—­the author of “The Rape of the Lock” and of the “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard”—­knew nothing of the Exeter and Vercelli Books, nothing of the Ruthwell Cross.  But they were poets, practitioners of our literature in the true line of descent, and they knew certain things which all such artists know by instinct.  So, before our historians of thirty-odd