But what if it should turn out that we have our own Homer, our own Ulysses? Mr. Stopford Brooke has made a great discovery for us who look at all things from the child standpoint. Possibly he would not be gratified to know that his “History of Early English Literature,” invaluable addition as it is to the library of the student and the man of letters, should be appropriated as food for babes. All the same, here is what we have long wanted. The elemental emotions and heroic adventures of the early English put into verse and tale, strange and eerie as the wildest fairy tale, yet breathing in every line the English temper and the English virtue that go to the making of heroes. Not that Beowulf, the hero of the great poem, was precisely English, but where the English came from, there dwelt he, and Beowulf was early adopted as the national hero, whose achievements were sung in every hall. The poem, says Mr. Stopford Brooke, consisting of three thousand one hundred and eighty-three lines, is divided into two parts by an interval of fifty years; the first, containing Beowulf’s great deeds against the monster Grendel and his dam; the second, Beowulf’s conquest of the Fire-drake and his death and burial. We are told that we may fairly claim the poem as English, that it is in our tongue and in our country alone that it is preserved. The hero Beowulf comes of brave and noble parents, and mildness and more than mortal daring meet in him. When he comes to Hrothgar to conquer Grendel it is of his counsel as much as of his strength that we hear. The queen begs him to be friendly in council to her sons. Hrothgar says to him, “Thou holdest thy faith with patience and thy might with prudence of mind. Thou shalt be a comfort to thy people and a help to heroes.” None, it is said, could order matters more wisely than he. When he is dying he looks back on his life, and that which he thinks of the most is not his great war deeds, but his patience, his prudence, his power of holding his own well and of avoiding new enmities. “Each of us must await the close of life,” says he; “let him who can, gain honour before he die. That is best for a warrior when he is dead. But do thou throughout this day have patience of thy woes; I look for that from thee.” Such the philosophy of this hero, legendary or otherwise, of some early century after Christ, before His religion had found its way among those northern tribes. Gentle, like Nelson, he had Nelson’s iron resolution. What he undertook to do he went through without a thought, save of getting to the end of it. Fear is wholly unknown to him, and he seems, like Nelson, to have inspired his captains with his own courage. “I swore no false oaths,” he said when dying; so also he kept his honour in faithfulness to his lord. On foot, alone, in front, while life lasted, he was his king’s defence. He kept it in equal faithfulness when his lord was dead, and that to his own loss, for when the kingdom