at one shilling, to instruct the
meanest of us in our common father's actual name--Beowulf.

_Beowulf_ is an old English Epic.... There is not one word about our
England in the poem.... The whole poem, pagan as it is, is English
to its very root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of
our origins.

Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with you the more recondite
beauties of "Beowulf" but providentially forbidden the attempt by the
conditions laid down for this Chair. I gather--and my own perusal of the
poem and of much writing about it confirms the belief--that it has been
largely over-praised by some critics, who have thus naturally provoked
others to underrate it. Such things happen. I note, but without
subscribing to it, the opinion of Vigfusson and York Powell, the learned
editors of the "Corpus Poeticum Boreale," that in the "Beowulf" we have
'an epic completely metamorphosed in form, blown out with long-winded
empty repetitions and comments by a book poet, so that one must be
careful not to take it as a type of the old poetry,' and I seem to hear
as from the grave the very voice of my old friend the younger editor in
that unfaltering pronouncement. But on the whole I rather incline to
accept the cautious surmise of Professor W. P. Ker that 'a reasonable
view of the merit of Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm
may have made too much of it; while a correct and sober taste may have
too contemptuously refused to attend to Grendel and the Firedrake,' and
to leave it at that. I speak very cautiously because the manner of the
late Professor Freeman, in especial, had a knack of provoking in gentle
breasts a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily converted
to a prejudice against his matter: while to men trained to admire
Thucydides and Tacitus and acquainted with Lucian's 'Way to Write
History' ([Greek: Pos dei istorian suggraphein]) his loud insistence that
the art was not an art but a science, and moreover recently invented by
Bishop Stubbs, was a perpetual irritant.

But to return to "Beowulf"--You have just heard the opinions of scholars
whose names you must respect. I, who construe Anglo-Saxon with
difficulty, must admit the poem to contain many fine, even noble,
passages. Take for example Hrothgar's lament for AEschere:--

Hrothgar mathelode, helm Scyldinga:
'Ne frin thu aefter saelum; sorh is geniwod
Denigea leodum; dead is AEschere,