the tenth century, Edgar the Peaceable, on his accession to the throne, exclaims, that all the monasteries in England were in a ruinous condition, and consisted only of rotten boards. Alfred's most magnificent building, his monastery of Æthelingey, the admiration and wonder of the age, was constructed only, of wood. Sculpture and painting could scarce be said to give even a tolerable representation of nature animate or inanimate; slaves, however as they were to the corruptors of christianity, they certainly had attained sufficient excellence for the employment they were destined to. Poetry indeed had not altogether ceased to breathe its magic influence, nor the art and its professors to excite admiration. Had the productions of the bards been adequate to the encouragement and honours they received, we should, most probably, have been able to display some splendid specimens of their talents, but they had greatly degenerated from their predecessors, and though their barbarous effusions had power to delight a rude and ignorant people, they are unworthy of the notice of more polished periods, otherwise than

+ W. Malms. lib. ii. p. 32.

as occasionally conveying some historical information, or elucidating the manners and customs of their age. If we can credit the authenticity of the works of Ossian, a strain of the most pathetic and sublime poetry was known to this island long before the arrival of the Saxons; and from the mountains of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland descended, in the fifth century, the wild and heroic fictions of the Edda, while about the same time flourished in Wales, the renowned Taliesin, and his celebrated brother poets Ancurin, Cian, Llewellyn &c. The songs of these venerable and romantic bards are said to have achieved the most astonishing effects, to have inspired valour or compassion, joy or sorrow, magnanimity or revenge at pleasure, and from the reliques of their genius we now possess, it must be affirmed, that they were imbued with the genuine spirit of poetic enthusiasm. But during the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries, though a love for poetry still existed, and Alfred, Aldhem, and a few other extraordinary men gave every incitement toward its cultivation, their efforts were ineffectual to produce excellence, and poetry partook of the general

imbecillity that during these unfortunate periods degraded Europe. The art of war, unhappily for mankind, too much an object of attention in the dark ages, being destructive of rather than capable of promoting literature or science, I shall pass over without further notice, and hasten to conclude, what the history of such ages must be deemed, the unpleasant part of our subject.

From the brief review we have now taken of the state of Christian Europe during this dismal portion of its annals, it will not be too harsh to say, that a superstition the most gross, a credulity the most excessive, an ignorance almost total with regard to literature and science, are its leading features; and, in conformity to this gloomy picture, all historians have agreed in branding it with every epithet imagination could suggest as adequate to express their sense of its barbarism and degradation; turning, therefore, from an object so humiliating to the lover of letters and of civilized life, let us devote our attention to the more fertile regions of the east, where, during a great part of this period, the Caliphat of the

Abassides, in all its height of splendor, in all its luxury of literature, offers to the view the charm of contrast. Our succeeding sketch. will therefore attempt a delineation of the court of Bagdad, and a transient survey of the Ommiades of Spain, who, whilst Christian Europe was immersed in ignorance and sloth greatly encouraged all that was beneficial and ornamental to human life.