PROFESSIONAL INSTITUTIONS. 439 



indigenous deity, but one of foreign origin came to be bis priests ; 

 and in tbat capacity praised biin, sometimes in poetical, sometimes 

 in oratorical, form. Throughout Christendom from early times 

 down to ours, religious services have emphasized in various pro- 

 portions the different attributes of the deity now chiefly his 

 anger and revenge, now chiefly his goodness, love, and mercy ; 

 but they have united in ceaseless exaltation of his power; and 

 the varieties of oral admiration, of invocation, of devotion, have 

 been partly in prose and partly in verse. All along the Church- 

 service has had for its subject-matter this or that part of the divine 

 story, and all along it has embodied its ideas and feelings in a 

 semi-rhythmical liturgy, in hymns, in the orations which we call 

 sermons : each of them having in one way or other the laudatory 

 character. So that the Christian priest has throughout stood in 

 substantially the same relation to the being worshiped, as did the 

 pagan priest, and has perpetually used kindred vehicles of ex- 

 pression. 



While the Christian priest has been officially one who repeated 

 the laudations already elaborated and established, he has also 

 been to a considerable extent an originator, alike of orations and 

 poems. Limiting ourselves to our own country, and passing over 

 the ancient bards, such as Taliesin and Merlin, whose verses were 

 in praise of living and dead pagan heroes, and coming to the poets 

 of the new religion, we see that the first of them Cssdmon, a con- 

 vert who became inmate of a monastery, rendered in metrical 

 form the story of creation and sundry other sacred stories a 

 variously elaborated eulogy of the deity. The next poet named 

 is Aldhelm, a monk. The clerical Bede again, known mainly by 

 other achievements, was a poet, too ; as was likewise bishop Cyne- 

 wulf. For a long time after, the men mentioned as writers of 

 verse were ecclesiastics ; as was Henry of Huntingdon, a prior ; 

 Geraldus Cambrensis, archdeacon ; Layamon, priest ; and Nicholas 

 of Guildford. Not until Edward Ill's reign do we find mention 

 of a secular song-writer Minot ; and then we come to our first 

 great poet, Chaucer, who, whether or not " of Cambridge, clerk," 

 as is suspected, became court-poet and occupied himself mainly 

 with secular poetry. After this the differentiation of the secular 

 verse- writer from the sacred verse-writer became more marked, 

 as we see in the case of Gower ; but still, while the subject-matter 

 of the poems became more secularized, as with Langland and 

 with Barbour, the ecclesiastical connection remained dominant. 

 Lydgate was priest, orator and poet ; Occleve, poet and civil serv- 

 ant ; William of Massington, proctor and poet ; Juliana Berners, 

 prioress and secular poetess ; Henryson, schoolmaster and poet ; 

 Skelton, priest and poet laureate ; Dunbar, prior and secular poet ; 

 Douglas, rector and court-poet ; Barclay, priest and poet ; Hawes, 



