SEMI-SAXON LITERATURE.


Moore, in his beautiful poem, "The Light of the Harem," speaks of that
luminous pulsation which precedes the real, progressive morning:

... that earlier dawn
Whose glimpses are again withdrawn,
As if the morn had waked, and then
Shut close her lids of light again.

The simile is not inapt, as applied to the first efforts of the early
English, or Semi-Saxon literature, during the latter part of the twelfth
and the whole of the thirteenth century. That deceptive dawn, or first
glimpse of the coming day, is to be found in the work of _Layamon_. The
old Saxon had revived, but had been modified and altered by contact with
the Latin chronicles and the Anglo-Norman poetry, so as to become a
distinct language--that of the people; and in this language men of genius
and poetic taste were now to speak to the English nation.


LAYAMON.--Layamon[15] was an English priest of Worcestershire, who made a
version of Wace's _Brut_, in the beginning of the thirteenth century, so
peculiar, however, in its language, as to puzzle the philologist to fix
its exact date with even tolerable accuracy. But, notwithstanding the
resemblance, according to Mr. Ellis, to the "simple and unmixed, though
very barbarous Saxon," the character of the alphabet and the nature of the
rhythm place it at the close of the twelfth century, and present it as
perhaps the best type of the Semi-Saxon. The poem consists partly of the