Excerpt from The Adventures of Beowulf: Translated From the Old English and Adapted to the Use of SchoolsF any one were to ask you why you are proud of England, and why you would rather belong to it than to any other country in the world, you would no doubt have a great many answers ready. You might say, because it is so rich, or so powerful, or because the people living in it have so much liberty. But perhaps one reason for admiring and loving it would not occur to you till the last; yet it is a very good one, and one that seems better and better the older you grow, and the more you read and learn. And it is this. England has had better writers and poets than any other land except Greece; as far back as we know anything about our countrymen they were poets as well as soldiers and sailors. But the soldiers and sailors and poets all helped to make one another famous; for the soldiers and sailors did great deeds, and the poets made great verse about them.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.