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Coppee, Henry

"English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History Designed as a Manual of Instruction"


_John Scotus Erigena_, who flourished at the beginning of the ninth
century, in the brightest age of Irish learning, settled in France, and is
known as a subtle and learned scholastic philosopher. His principal work
is a treatise "On the Division of Nature," Both names, _Scotus_ and
_Erigena_, indicate his Irish origin; the original _Scoti_ being
inhabitants of the North of Ireland.
_Dunstan_, (925-988,) commonly called Saint Dunstan, was a powerful and
dictatorial Archbishop of Canterbury, who used the superstitions of
monarch and people to enable him to exercise a marvellous supremacy in the
realm. He wrote commentaries on the Benedictine rule.
These writers had but a remote and indirect bearing upon the progress of
literature in England, and are mentioned rather as contemporary, than as
distinct subjects of our study.

THE ANGLO-SAXON CHRONICLE.--We now reach the valuable and purely
historical compilation known as the _Anglo-Saxon Chronicle_, which is a
chronological arrangement of events in English history, from the birth of
Christ to the year 1154, in the reign of Henry the Second.


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