WITH A NEW METRICAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE LINES OF PART OF THE ORIGINAL TEXT, AND AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM H. F. BOSANQUET, ESQ. LONDON LONGMAN, GREEN, LONGMAN, AND ROBERTS PREFACE. THE earliest poetry of the English or Anglo-Saxons is so far above the poetry of any other country of Europe at the same period, and Cædmon's first poem, "The Fall of Man, or Loss of Paradise," is so far above all other Anglo-Saxon poetry, that it will not be thought a useless labour to make some effort to put this fine poem into language intelligible to persons not familiar with the Anglo-Saxon dialect, and in the form of the original. There is only one manuscript of Cadmon's poems in existence, which is now in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and supposed to be of the tenth century. The first printed copy of the poems was edited by Junius, without a translation, in 1655, the year |