Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TRANSLATOR'S NOTE. In submitting this work to English readers, it is proper that I should indicate the nature of the revision which the author has consented to make, and which can scarcely fail to render it more valuable. While leaving the body of the book substantially unchanged, he has not disregarded the suggestions of critics nor ignored the results of recent investigation. Hence some passages have been modified, a number of footnotes have been added, and an Appendix touching in detail various points of controversy, has been prepared. The English of the Appendix is the author's own, written at first hand to save the labour of translation. I would acknowledge my grateful indebtedness to the author for the acute and learned criticisms with which he has aided my own work of translation; but as I have had final oversight on all points bearing upon the translation, as such, it is only just to add that the author must not be held acconntable for its faults. Like the original, this volume will be found to contain a large number of extracts, in prose and verse, from Old and Early English authors. These have, without exception, been translated from the original texts into modern English. In rendering the poetical passages cited, I have tried to reproduce the ancient metre and tone. HORACE M. KENNEDY. EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. AFTER the settlement of the English tribes on British soil, some time passed before English literature began. Yet literary monuments are not lacking which, to judge from their substance, are descended from a pre-literary age, and point back to an epoch when the Teutonic conquerors of Britain, either wholly or partially, still inhabited their earlier home. Dim and varying is the light which these most ancient products of the English muse shed upon...