We owe Mr. Stopford Brooke earnest gratitude for bringing this heroic ideal of the youth of our nation within reach of the unlearned. But what have we been about to let a thousand years and more go by without ever drawing on the inspiration of this noble ideal in giving impulse to our children’s lives. We have many English heroes, it may be objected: we have no need of this resuscitated great one from a long buried past. We have indeed heroes galore to be proud of, but somehow they have not often been put into song in such wise as to reach the hearts of the children and the unlearned. We have to thank Tennyson for our Arthur, and Shakespeare for our Henry the Fifth, but we imagine that parents will find their children’s souls more in touch with Beowulf than with either of these, because, no doubt, the legends of a nation’s youth are the pages of history which most easily reach a child, and Beowulf belongs to a younger stage of civilisation than even Arthur. We hope the author of “Early English Literature” will sometime give us the whole of the poem translated with a special view to children, and interspersed with his own luminous teaching as we have it here. The quaintness of the metre employed gives a feeling of _eld_ which carries the reader back, very successfully, to the long ago of the poem. We have already quoted largely from this “History of Early English Literature,” but perhaps a fuller extract will give a better idea of the work and of its real helpfulness to parents. The cost of the two rather expensive volumes should be well repaid if a single child were to be fired with emulation of the heroic qualities therein sung:-- “The action of the poem now begins with the voyage of Beowulf to the Danish coast. The hero has heard that Hrothgar, the chief of the Danes, is tormented by Grendel, a man-devouring monster. If Hrothgar’s warriors sleep in Heorot--the great hall he has built--they are seized, torn to pieces, and devoured. ‘I will deliver the king,’ thought Beowulf, when he heard the tale from the roving seamen. ‘Over the swan road I will seek Hrothgar; he has need of men.’ His comrades urged him to the adventure, and fifteen of them were willing to fight it out with him. Among the rest was a sea-crafty man who knew the ocean-paths. Their ship lay drawn up on the beach, under the high cliff. Then--