Thus Anglo-Saxon literature, in spite of the efforts of Cynewulf, Alfred, Dunstan, and AElfric goes on repeating itself. Poems, histories, and sermons are conspicuous, now for their grandeur, now for the emotion that is in them; but their main qualities and main defects are very much alike; they give an impression of monotony. The same notes, not very numerous, are incessantly repeated. The Angles, Saxons, and other conquerors who came from Germany have remained, from a literary point of view, nearly intact in the midst of the subjugated race. Their literature is almost stationary; it does not perceptibly move and develop. A graft is wanted; Rome tried to insert one, but a few branches only were vivified, not the whole tree; and the fruit is the same each year, wild and sometimes poor. The political state of the country leaves on the mind a similar impression. The men of Germanic blood established in England remain, or nearly so, grouped together in tribes; their hamlet is the mother country for them. They are unable to unite against the foreign foe. Their subdivisions undergo constant change, much as they did, centuries before, on the Continent. A swarm of petty kings, ignored by history, are known to have lived and reigned, owing to their name having been found appended to charters; there were kings of the Angles of the South, kings of half Kent, kings with fewer people to rule than a village mayor of to-day. They are killed, and, as we have seen, the thing is of no importance. The Danes come again; at one time they own the whole of England, which is thus subject to the same king as Scandinavia. Periods of unification are merely temporary, and due to the power or the genius of a prince: Alfred, AEthelstan, Cnut the Dane; but the people of Great Britain keep their tendency to break up into small kingdoms, into earldoms, as they were called in the eleventh century, about the end of the period; into tribes, in reality, as when they inhabited the Germanic land. Out of this chaos how can a nation arise? a nation that may give birth to Shakespeare, crush the Armada, people the American continent? No less than a miracle is needed. The miracle took place: it was the battle of Hastings. FOOTNOTES: