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Anglo-Saxon Literature by John Earle
page 43 of 297 (14%)
themselves for a rarity to deck their own shelves withal. The poems are
six in number: 1. A Legend of St. Andrew; 2. The Fortunes of the Twelve
Apostles; 3. The Departed Soul's Address to the Body; 4. A Fragment; 5.
A Dream of the Holy Rood; 6. Elene, or The Invention of the Cross.

In 1851 the first notice of a book of homilies older than Ælfric,--the
property of the Marquis of Lothian, and preserved in the library of
Blickling Hall, Norfolk,--was made public by Mr. Godwin in the
transactions of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.[27]

In 1860 was discovered the valuable fragment of an epic poem on King
Waldhere, and the manner of the find shall be told in the words of
Professor George Stephens, which I quote from the Editio Princeps of
"Waldhere," published by him in the same year. "On the 12th of January,
1860, Professor E.C. Werlauff, Chief Librarian of the Great National
Library, Cheapinghaven [Copenhagen], was engaged in sorting some bundles
of papers, parchment leaves, and fragments, mostly taken from books, or
book-backs, which had not hitherto been arranged. While thus occupied,
he lighted upon two vellum leaves of great antiquity, and bearing an Old
English text. He kindly communicated the discovery to me, and the
present work is the result."


II.


INSCRIPTIONS

of the Anglo-Saxon period exist both in the learned and the vernacular
language. It is peculiarly interesting, when an inscription is exhumed
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