Now we know the names of a few histories by historians of English-speaking countries. There are many other histories written by Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, and others. Before we leave books of history, shall we look at a history of English literature, so that we may mark down for ourselves the names of the periods, or times, when some of the great writers lived? There was an Anglo-Saxon period before William the Conqueror came to England. Poets and writers lived then, but only learned scholars read now the works they composed. You are likely to read at some time of Beowulf, who is supposed to have written about 520, and of Cædmon, who is said to have been a servant at the monastery of Whitby under the Abbess Hilda. The first great English poet, who was the master of a period of English poetry, was Chaucer. His work brings us to the fourteenth century. He had a number of less famous contemporaries. Many of the old ballads were made probably in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. {186} Sir Thomas Malory wrote his book _Morte d'Arthur_ in the fifteenth century. The first book was printed in England by Caxton in 1477. The Elizabethan Age, as you know, is one of the most famous periods in English literature. It is generally divided into an earlier and a later period. Spenser belonged to the earlier time; and Shakespeare marked the later period, along with other notable writers. The Elizabethan age is reckoned to have lasted longer than Elizabeth's reign, because writers still wrote in the same fashion and spirit. The authorized translation of the Bible into English was written at this time. In the time of the Commonwealth and later, when England was largely puritan, the great poet Milton lived, and John Bunyan, who wrote _The Pilgrim's Progress_. Dryden, a poet, belongs to the second part of the seventeenth century. Pope, another poet, lived most of his life in the eighteenth century. A number of novelists, Defoe, who wrote _Robinson Crusoe_, of an earlier date than the others, and Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, all great novelists, come in the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries. A group of distinguished men, some of whom we will learn a little about in the next chapter, lived in the eighteenth century. Their names are Johnson; Goldsmith; Burke, the statesman; Gibbon, the historian; Garrick, an actor; and Reynolds, the painter. Swift, Addison, Steele, and other essayists, wrote earlier in the same century. {187} You do not need to remember specially the various ages in which writers lived. But we understand now that people often speak of periods in English literature; it is interesting to fit into their proper places great writers whose names we know. Scott and Jane Austen belong to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century.