A Literary History of the English People | Page 6

scaffolds or pageants, dresses, boxes, scenery,
machinery--Miniature by Jean Fouquet--Incoherences and
anachronisms 456
III. Literary and Historical value of Mysteries.--The ancestors' feelings
and tastes--Sin and redemption--Caricature of kings--Their
"boast"--Their use of the French tongue--They have to maintain
silence--Popular scenes--Noah and his wife--The poor workman and
the taxes--A comic pastoral--The Christmas shepherds--Mak and the
stolen sheep 476
IV. Decay of the Mediæval Stage.--Moralities--Personified
abstractions--The end of Mysteries--They continue being performed in
the time of Shakespeare 489
CHAPTER VII.
THE END OF THE MIDDLE AGES.
I. Decline.--Chaucer's successors--The decay of art is obvious even to
them--The society for which they write is undergoing a
transformation--Lydgate and Hoccleve 495
II. Scotsmen.--They imitate Chaucer but with more freedom--James
I.--Blind Harry--Henryson--The town mouse and the country
mouse--Dunbar--Gavin Douglas--Popular ballads--Poetry in the
flamboyant style 503
III. Material welfare; Prose.--Development of the lower and middle
class--Results of the wars--Trade, navy, savings. Books of
courtesy--Familiar letters; Paston Letters--Guides for the traveller and
trader--Fortescue and his praise of English institutions--Pecock and his
defence of the clergy--His style and humour--Compilers, chroniclers,
prosators of various sort--Malory, Caxton, Juliana Berners, Capgrave,
&c. 513

IV. The Dawn of the Renaissance.--The literary movement in
Italy--Greek studies--Relations with Eastern men of letters--Turkish
wars and Greek exiles--Taking of Constantinople by Mahomet
II.--Consequences felt in Italy, France, and England 523
Index 527

BOOK I.
THE ORIGINS.
CHAPTER I.
BRITANNIA.
I.
The people that now occupies England was formed, like the French
people, by the fusion of several superimposed races. In both countries
the same races met and mingled at about the same period, but in
different proportions and under dissimilar social conditions. Hence the
striking resemblances and sharply defined contrasts that exist in the
genius of the two nations. Hence also the contradictory sentiments
which mutually animated them from century to century, those
combinations and recurrences of esteem that rose to admiration, and
jealousy that swelled to hate. Hence, again, the unparalleled degree of
interest they offer, one for the other. The two people are so dissimilar
that in borrowing from each other they run no risk of losing their
national characteristics and becoming another's image; and yet, so
much alike are they, it is impossible that what they borrowed should
remain barren and unproductive. These loans act like leaven: the
products of English thought during the Augustan age of British
literature were mixed with French leaven, and the products of French
thought during the Victor Hugo period were penetrated with English
yeast.

Ancient writers have left us little information concerning the remotest
period and the oldest inhabitants of the British archipelago; works
which would be invaluable to us exist only in meagre fragments.
Important gaps have fortunately been filled, owing to modern Science
and to her manifold researches. She has inherited the wand of the
departed wizards, and has touched with her talisman the gate of
sepulchres; the tombs have opened and the dead have spoken. What
countries did thy war-ship visit? she inquired of the Scandinavian
viking. And in answer the dead man, asleep for centuries among the
rocks of the Isle of Skye, showed golden coins of the caliphs in his
skeleton hand. These coins are not a figure of speech; they are real, and
may be seen at the Edinburgh Museum. The wand has touched old
undeciphered manuscripts, and broken the charm that kept them dumb.
From them rose songs, music, love-ditties, and war-cries: phrases so
full of life that the living hearts of to-day have been stirred by them;
words with so much colour in them that the landscape familiar to the
eyes of the Celts and Germans has reappeared before us.
Much remains undiscovered, and the dead hold secrets they may yet
reveal. In the unexplored tombs of the Nile valley will be found one
day, among the papyri stripped from Ptolemaic mummies, the account
of a journey made to the British Isles about 330 B.C., by a Greek of
Marseilles named Pytheas, a contemporary of Aristotle and Alexander
the Great, of which a few sentences only have been preserved.[1] But
even now the darkness which enveloped the origin has been partly
cleared away.
To the primitive population, the least known of all, that reared the
stones of Carnac in France, and in England the gigantic circles of
Stonehenge and Avebury, succeeded in both countries, many centuries
before Christ, the Celtic race.
The Celts ([Greek: keltai]) were thus called by the Greeks from the
name of one of their principal tribes, in the same way as the French,
English, Scottish, and German nations derive theirs from that of one of
their principal tribes. They occupied, in the third century before our era,
the greater part of Central Europe, of the France of to-day, of Spain,

and of the British Isles. They were neighbours of the Greeks and Latins;
the centre of their possessions