his age.

_Alfric_, surnamed Grammaticus, (died 1006,) was an Archbishop of
Canterbury, in the tenth century, who wrote eighty homilies, and was, in
his opposition to Romish doctrine, one of the earliest English reformers.

_John Scotus Erigena_, who flourished at the beginning of the ninth
century, in the brightest age of Irish learning, settled in France, and is
known as a subtle and learned scholastic philosopher. His principal work
is a treatise "On the Division of Nature," Both names, _Scotus_ and
_Erigena_, indicate his Irish origin; the original _Scoti_ being
inhabitants of the North of Ireland.

_Dunstan_, (925-988,) commonly called Saint Dunstan, was a powerful and
dictatorial Archbishop of Canterbury, who used the superstitions of
monarch and people to enable him to exercise a marvellous supremacy in the
realm. He wrote commentaries on the Benedictine rule.

These writers had but a remote and indirect bearing upon the progress of
literature in England, and are mentioned rather as contemporary, than as
distinct subjects of our study.


THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.--We now reach the valuable and purely
historical compilation known as the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, which is a
chronological arrangement of events in English history, from the birth of
Christ to the year 1154, in the reign of Henry the Second. It is the most
valuable epitome of English history during that long period.

It is written in Anglo-Saxon, and was begun soon after the time of Alfred,