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One night Caedmon crept away as usual, and went "out of the house where the entertainment was, to the stable, where he had to take care of the horses that night. He there composed himself to rest. A person appeared to him then in a dream and, calling him by name, said, 'Caedmon, sing some song to me.
Out of all those who wrote in what was the best period of our old poetry, a period that lasted some hundred and fifty or seventy-five years, we know the names of two only, Caedmon and Cynewulf.
The appearance of the "Faerie Queen" in 1590 is the one critical event in the annals of English poetry; it settled in fact the question whether there was to be such a thing as English poetry or no. The older national verse which had blossomed and died in Caedmon sprang suddenly into a grander life in Chaucer, but it closed again in a yet more complete death.
"Hurrah!" cried Melick, "we've got him to Sanscrit at last! Now, Oxenden, my boy, trot out the 'Hitopadesa, the 'Megha Dhuta, the 'Rig Veda. Quote 'Beowulf' and Caedmon. Gives us a little Zeno, and wind up with 'Lalla Rookh' in modern Persian." "So I conclude," said Oxenden, calmly, ignoring Melick, "that the Kosekin are a Semitic people.
For here it was that Caedmon, the "Father of English Song," lived and died. At Whitby there was a monastery ruled over by the Abbess Hilda. This was a post of great importance, for, as you know, the monasteries were the schools and libraries of the country, and they were the inns too, so all the true life of the land ebbed and flowed through the monasteries.
One gathers from it that not only isolated monks and nuns were received into the community but sometimes whole families. Caedmon entered "cum omnibus suis," which is generally taken to mean that his whole family were received with him.
Taking the writings of Caedmon, Baeda, Pope Gregory, and Boethius; translating, editing, commentating, and adding his own to the views of others upon a wide range of subjects. He was indeed the father not alone of a legal system in England, but of her culture and literature besides.
Since the Paraphrase has been attributed to Caedmon on the authority of the Saxon historian Bede, born in 673, we shall quote Bede himself on the subject, from his famous Ecclesiastical History:
The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem which passes under the name of Caedmon has this one point of resemblance to the plot of Paradise Lost, that in it the seduction of Eve is Satan's revenge for his expulsion from heaven. As Francis Junius was much occupied upon this poem of which he published the text in 1655, it is likely enough that he should have talked of it with his friend Milton.
Then first the spirit of our own race was revealed to us in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton; then first we thrilled to that music which has never faltered since Caedmon found his voice in answer to the heavenly vision.
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