and makes us feel the fairy charm of nature, although it has not
the strength, the downrightness, we might say, of the English.
It has been said that every poet has somewhere in him a Celtic
strain. That is, perhaps, too much to believe. But it is,
perhaps, the Celtic love of beauty, together with the Saxon love
of strength and right, to which we owe much of our great
literature. The Celtic languages are dying out, but they have
left us something which will last so long as our literature
lasts.

And now, having talked in the beginning of this book of the
stories which we owe to our Celtic forefathers, let us see what
the Saxons brought us from over the sea.

Almost the oldest Anglo-Saxon book that we have is called
Beowulf. Wise men tell us that, like the tales of Arthur, like
the tales of Ossian, this book was not at first the work of one
man, but that it has been gradually put together out of many
minstrel songs. That may be so, but what is sure is that these
tales are very old, and that they were sung and told for many
years in the old homes of the English across the sea before they
came to Britain and named it Angleland.

Yet, as with the old Gaelic and Cymric tales, we have no very old
copy of this tale. But unlike these old tales, we do not find
Beowulf told in different ways in different manuscripts. There
is only one copy of Beowulf, and that was probably written in the
tenth or eleventh century, long years after the English were
firmly settled in the land.