The hapless man long had kepi it, Slthen his Maker him bad doomed.
On Cain's kin the slaughter avenged The eternal Lord,—for that ho Abel slew ; For Joy'd ho in that fend, hut him out Brave Ills Maker, for the eta, far from mankind.
Thence evil births all proceeded, Ettyns, nod Elves and Orknees; So too the Giants, that with God fought A long throw—for It he paid them raced !" The Goths seem to have peopled every solitude with a race of monsters called the Fifel-kin. The sea, the moor, the fen, the march, or desert track which surrounded the territory of every Gothic tribe, were their dwelling-place. The battle, by which Of settled the marches between the Engle and the Swede, was fought nt Eifel-door (see Gleeman's Song'), and Alfred, when he brings his hero from Troy, launches him on Eifel-stream, that is, the monster-deep. Ettyns were long remembered in our popular superstitions :— " They say tho king of Portugal cannot sit at his meat, but the giants and Myna will come to snatch it from him." Rennin. and Fl. Knight of the Burning Pestle.
Elves still live iu our poetry ; and genuine Gothic giants (notwith standing the worthy monk tried hard to convert them into rebel angels) still terrify or amuse the nursery. The Orknces are probably the same monsters as the Orks of the Italian romancers.
Some of the oldest pieces of poetry, written after the removal of the Engle to this country, and now extant, are the songs of Qedmon. The circumstances which first called forth the talents of this poet are related by Bede; and as he must have known many of Ctedmon's con temporaries, his account may be looked upon as a simple narrative of facts. Ctcdmon, it appears, was nettherd to the monastery of Whitby, then under the government of its first abbess, the celebrated Ilild. One day at supper, as the harp was passing from hand to hand, and it came to his turn to amuse the company, he stole from the room in one of those fits of diffidence which so often overtake the sensitive poet. As he slept in the neathousc, some one, he thought, encouraged him to sing, and the song be composed, and which was next day repeated to an admiring audience, established his reputation as a poet, and gained hint the patronage of the abbess. He became a monk : was
looked upon as one who had received the gift of song from above ; and on his death his body was enshrined, and valued as one of their most precious relics by the monks of Whitby.
Only six of Catdmon's poems have reached us. The subject of the first is the Creation ; that of the second, the Temptation and Fall, to which is added, rather inartificially, a narrative of the events recorded in Genesis, to the offering of Isaac ; the third relates the Exodus; the fourth, the story of Daniel ; and the Torments of the Damned, and Christ's Harrowing of Hell, followed by his Ascension and Glory, are the subjects of the other two. Bede tells us that lie also wrote on our Lord's Incarnation and his Passion, as also on the Advent of the Holy Ghost, and the teaching of the Apostles. What remains is equal in length, to about one half_ of the Paradise Lost.' [Cameo's, in Blots Dry.] We have called the Battle of Fins-burgh' an historical poem : another poem of the same class was written on the death of Byrthnoth, who bravely fell in resisting one of the Daniell inroads, A.D. 993.
Works, now lost, were written in the llth century, by Leofrie, Here ward's chaplain, on the warriors of our early history; and the songs cwunenorative of Ilercward's exploits, which Ingulf tells us were in Ilia day so popular, were probably written by the same hand. There can be little doubt also that many of the Old-English romances, as liorn," Havelok, lievis of Southampton," Guy of Warwick,' &c., are mere adaptations of Anglo-Saxon poems. Occasionally the subject was taken from foreign sources, of which the Tale of Judith,' pro — bably written in the 10th century, affords a splendid example. The ' Tale of Apollonius of Tyre' is in prose, and a mere translation from the Latin.