With the introduction of Christianity, English verse took a new direction.  It was chiefly occupied in devotional and sacred poetry, or rather, such poems only have come down to us, as the monks transcribed them alone, leaving the half-heathen war-songs of the minstrels attached to the great houses to die out unwritten.  The first piece of English literature which we can actually date is a fragment of the great religious epic of Caedmon, written about the year 670.  Caedmon was a poor brother in Hild’s monastery at Whitby, and he acquired the art of poetry by a miracle.  Northumbria, in the sixth and seventh centuries, took the lead in Teutonic Britain; and all the early literature is Northumbrian, as all the later literature is West Saxon.  Caedmon’s poem consisted in a paraphrase of the Bible history, from the Creation to the Ascension.  The idea of a translation of the Bible from Latin into English would never have occurred to any one at that early time.  English had as yet no literary form into which it could be thrown.  But Caedmon conceived the notion of paraphrasing the Bible story in the old alliterative Teutonic verse, which was familiar to his hearers in songs like Beowulf.  Some of the brethren translated or interpreted for him portions of the Vulgate, and he threw them into rude metre.  Only a single short excerpt has come down to us in the original form.  There is a later complete epic, however, also attributed to Caedmon, of the same scope and purport; and it retains so much of the old heathen spirit that it may very possibly represent a modernised version of the real Caedmon’s poem, by a reviser in the ninth century.  At any rate, the latter work may be treated here under the name of Caedmon, by which it is universally known.  It consists of a long Scriptural paraphrase, written in the alliterative metre, short, sharp, and decisive, but not without a wild and passionate beauty of its own.  In tone it differs wonderfully little from Beowulf, being most at home in the war of heaven and Satan, and in the titanic descriptions of the devils and their deeds.  The conduct of the poem is singularly like that of Paradise Lost.  Its wild and rapid stanzas show how little Christianity had yet moulded the barbaric nature of the newly-converted English.  The epic is essentially a war-song; the Hebrew element is far stronger than the Christian; hell takes the place of Grendel’s mere; and, to borrow Mr. Green’s admirable phrase, “the verses fall like sword-strokes in the thick of battle.”

In all these works we get the genuine native English note, the wild song of a pirate race, shaped in early minstrelsy for celebrating the deeds of gods and warriors, and scarcely half-adapted afterward to the not wholly alien tone of the oldest Hebrew Scriptures.  But the Latin schools, set up by the Italian monks, introduced into England a totally new and highly-developed literature.  The pagan Anglo-Saxons had not advanced beyond the