The marvellous incident on which the history of Cædmon revolves may only veil a fact which has nothing extraordinary in itself when freed from the invention which disguises it. Legends like the present one were often borrowed by one monastery from another, and an exact counterpart of the dream and history of our Saxon bard, in a similar personage and a like result, has been pointed out as occurring in Gaul. A vernacular or popular version of the Scriptures being required, it was supplied by a _peasant wholly ignorant of the poetic art till he had been instructed in a_ DREAM.[1] Scriptural themes were common with the poets of the monastery.[2] The present enterprise, judging from the variety of its fragments from both Testaments and from the Apocrypha, in its complete state would have formed a chronological poem of the main incidents of the Scriptures in the vernacular Saxon. This was a burden of magnitude which no single shoulder could have steadily carried, and probably was supported by several besides "the Dreamer." Critical Saxonists, indeed, have detected a variation in the style, and great inequalities in the work; such discordances indicate that the paraphrase was occasionally resumed by some successor, as idling monks at a later period were often the continuators of voluminous romances. I would class the Cædmonian poem among the many attempts of the monachal genius to familiarize the people with the miraculous and the religious narratives in the Scriptures, by a paraphrase in the vernacular idiom. The poem may be deemed as equivocal as the poet; the text has been impeached; interpolations and omissions are acknowledged by the learned in Saxon lore. The poem is said to have been written in the seventh century, and the earliest manuscript we possess is of the tenth, suffering in that course of time all the corruptions or variations of the scribes, while the ruder northern dialect has been changed into the more polished southern. If we may confide in a learned conjecture, it may happen that Cædmon is no name at all, but merely a word or a phrase; and thus the entity of the Dreamer of the Monastery of Whitby may vanish in the wind of two Chaldaic syllables![3] Be this as it may, for us the poem is an entity, whatever becomes of the pretended Dreamer. It has become an arduous inquiry whether MILTON has not drawn largely from the obscurity of this monkish Ennius? "In reading Cædmon," says SHARON TURNER, "we are reminded of Milton--of a 'Paradise Lost' in rude miniature." Conybeare advances, "the pride, rebellion, and punishments of Satan and his princes have a resemblance to Milton so remarkable that _much of this portion might be almost literally translated by a cento of lines from the great poet_."[4] A recent Saxonist, in noticing "the creation of Cædmon as beautiful," adds, "it is still more interesting from _its singular correspondence even in expression with 'Paradise Lost_.'"