which is not by any means exhausted, there comes a much larger and wider
field of inquiry as to the relation existing between this Miltonic part
(if I may so speak) and the Old Saxon poem of the "Heliand." The
investigation has been admirably started by Mr. Edouard Sievers in a
little book containing this portion of the text, and exhibiting in
detail the peculiar intimacy of relation between it and the "Heliand,"
in regard to vocabulary, phraseology, and versification. This part of
Mr. Sievers' work is complete. Probably no one who has gone through his
proofs will be found to question his conclusion, that there is between
the "Heliand" and the Saxon "Paradise Lost" such an identity as
isolates those two works from all other literature, and makes it
necessary to trace them to one source. What remains is only to determine
the order of their affiliation. His theory is that our "Cædmon" contains
a large insertion which has been borrowed, not, of course, from the
"Heliand," because the "Heliand" is a poem solely on the Gospel history,
but from a sister poem to the "Heliand," a corresponding poem on the Old
Testament. Professor George Stephens, of Copenhagen, offered a simpler
explanation. He supposed that our piece is a purely domestic remnant of
that school of English poetry which Bede described, and that the
"Heliand" is a continental offspring of the same school, being a
monument of the poetic culture which was planted along the borders of
the Rhine by the Anglo-Saxon missionaries.

ALCUIN'S name connects the Anglian period with the great
Frankish revival of literature under Charlemagne. And as he bears a
prominent part in the establishment of literature in its next European
seat, so also he had the grief of witnessing the earlier stages of that
devastation which extinguished the light in his own country. This is how
he writes on hearing of the invasion of Lindisfarne by the northern
rovers in 793, to Bishop Hugibald and the monks of Lindisfarne:--