at our glorious literature derives its lineage from "Beowulf" is in
vulgar phrase 'a put up job'; a falsehood grafted upon our text-books by
Teutonic and Teutonising professors who can bring less evidence for it
than will cover a threepenny-piece. Its run for something like that
money, in small educational manuals, has been in its way a triumph of
pedagogic _reclame_.

Our rude forefathers--the author of "The Rape of the Lock" and of the
"Elegy written in a Country Churchyard"--knew nothing of the Exeter and
Vercelli Books, nothing of the Ruthwell Cross. But they were poets,
practitioners of our literature in the true line of descent, and they
knew certain things which all such artists know by instinct. So, before
our historians of thirty-odd years ago started to make Chaucer and
Beowulf one, these rude forefathers made them two. 'Nor am I confident
they erred.' Rather I am confident, and hope in succeeding lectures to
convince you, that, venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to be studied
as the mother of our vernacular speech (as for a dozen other reasons
which my friend Professor Chadwick will give you), its value is
historical rather than literary, since from it our Literature
is not descended. Let me repeat it in words that admit of no
misunderstanding--_From Anglo-Saxon Prose, from Anglo-Saxon Poetry our
living Prose and Poetry have, save linguistically, no derivation_. I
shall attempt to demonstrate that, whether or not Anglo-Saxon
literature, such as it was, died of inherent weakness, die it did, and
of its collapse the "Vision of Piers Plowman" may be regarded as the
last dying spasm. I shall attempt to convince you that Chaucer did not
inherit any secret from Caedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves his old title,
'Father of English Poetry,' because through Dante, through Boccaccio,
through the lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to the
Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a commerce in the true
intellectual mart of Europe. I shall attempt to heap proof on you that
whatever the agency--whether through Wyat or Spenser, Marlowe or
Shakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, or
even Wordsworth--always our literature has obeyed, however
unconsciously, the precept _Antiquam exquirite matrem_, 'Seek back to
the ancient mother'; always it has recreated itself, has kept itself
pure and strong, by harking back to bathe in those native--yes,
_native_--Mediterranean springs.

Do not presum