Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when ’bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ and come down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason.  Pope at one time proposed to write a History of English Poetry, and the draft scheme of that History has been preserved.  How does it begin?  Why thus:—­

ERA I.

1.  School of Provence Chaucer’s Visions. Romaunt of the Rose.
                          Piers Plowman. Tales from Boccace.  Gower.

2.  School of Chaucer Lydgate. 
                          T. Occleve. 
                          Walt. de Mapes (a bad error, that!). 
                          Skelton.

3.  School of Petrarch E. of Surrey. 
                          Sir Thomas Wyatt. 
                          Sir Philip Sidney. 
                          G. Gascoyn.

4.  School of Dante Lord Buckhurst’s Induction.  Gorboduc.
                          Original of Good Tragedy.  Seneca his model.

—­and so on.  The scheme after Pope’s death came into the hands of Gray, who for a time was fired with the notion of writing the History in collaboration with his friend Mason.  Knowing Gray’s congenital self-distrust, you will not be surprised that in the end he declined the task and handed it over to Warton.  But, says Mant in his Life of Warton, ’their design’—­that is, Gray’s design with Mason—­’was to introduce specimens of the Provecal poetry, and of the Scaldic, British and Saxon, as preliminary to what first deserved to be called English poetry, about the time of Chaucer, from whence their history properly so called was to commence.’  A letter of Gray’s on the whole subject, addressed to Warton, is extant, and you may read it in Dr Courthope’s “History of English Poetry.”

Few in this room are old enough to remember the shock of awed surmise which fell upon young minds presented, in the late ’seventies or early ’eighties of the last century, with Freeman’s “Norman Conquest” or Green’s “Short History of the English People”; in which as through paring clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary as well as political, radiantly legitimised; though not, to be sure, in the England that we knew—­but far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick!  ’Its pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, its prim little townships looking down on inlets of purple water, were then but a wild waste of heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless woodland, broken here and there with meadows which crept down to the marshes and to the sea.’  But what of that?  There—­surely there, in Sleswick—­had been discovered for us our august mother’s marriage lines; and if the most of that bright assurance came out of an old political skit, the “Germania” of Tacitus, who recked at the time?  For along followed Mr Stopford Brooke with an admirable little Primer published at one shilling, to instruct the meanest of us in our common father’s actual name—­Beowulf.