was completed, had already created the literatures of the Continental nations. In a country ruled by Norman princes, all governmental and aristocratic influences were unfavorable to the cultivation of the native speech, and the growth of a national literature. The Romish church, too, in England, as everywhere else, was hostile to all intellectual effort which in any degree diverged from the path marked out by ecclesiastical habit and tradition, and very many important English benefices were held by foreign priests quite ignorant of the English tongue. Robert of Gloucester, who flourished about two hundred years after the conquest, says:

Wyllam, þys noble duc, po he adde ydo al þys,
þen wey he nome to Londone he & al hys

As kyng & prince of lond, wyp nobleye ynou.

Agen hym wyþ vayre processyon þat fole of town drou,

And vnderuonge hym vayre ynou, as kyng of þys lond.

pus come lo! Engelond into Normannes honde,

And þe Normans ne coupe speke po bote her owe speche,

And speke French as dude atom & here chyldren dude al so teche.

So þat heymen of þys lond, þat of her blod come,

Holdep alle pulke speche, þat hii of hem nome.

Vor bote a man coupe French, me tolp of hym wel lute.

Ac lowe men holdep to Englyss, & to her kunde speche yute.

Ich wene per ne be man in world contreyes none,

þat ne holdep to her kunde speche, bote Engelond one,

Ac wol me wot vorto conne bothe wel yt ys

Vor pe more pat a man con, þe more worp he ys.*

And in the following century, as we learn from an old chronicler, "John Cornewaile, a maister of grammar, changed the lore in grammar scole, and construction, of Frenche into Englische: so that now, the year of our Lord a thousand three hundred and 4 score and five, and of the seconde Kyng Richard after the conquest nyne, in alle the grammar scoles of

* Robert of Gloucester, p. 364.

Engelond children leveth Frensche, and construeth and lerneth on Englische."

Under such circumstances, it is by no means strange, that the progress of the language and literature of England should have been slow, and it is rather matter of surprise that the fourteenth century should have left so noble monuments of English genius, than that the literary memorials of that era should be so few. But, although the long reign of Edward III. was as remarkable for the splendid first-fruits of a great national literature as for its political and martial triumphs and reverses, the language was not at that time sufficiently cleared of dialectic confusion, and sufficiently settled in its forms and syntax, to admit of grammatical and critical treatment, as a distinctly organized speech. While, therefore, the thirteenth century produced in Iceland a learned and complete treatise on the poetic art as suited to the genius of the Old-Northern tongue,* and Jacme March, a contemporary of Chaucer, had composed a Catalan vocabulary and dictionary of rhymes, with metrical precepts and examples, the English had not even a dictionary or grammar, still less critical treatises, until a much later period. It will be evident from all this, that the remains of the English speech, in its earliest forms, as a literary medium, must be relatively few, and that it is by no means easy to trace the progress of changes which ended in the substitution of our present piebald dialect for the comparatively homogeneous and consistent Saxon tongue. A language which exists, for centuries, only as the jargon of an unlettered peasantry and a despised race, will preserve but few memorials of its ages of humiliation, and as I have before noticed, the indifference with which English philology

*The prose Edda, or Edda of Snorri Sturluson.

has been hitherto too generally regarded has suffered to perish, or still withholds from the public eye, a vast amount of material which might have been employed for the elucidation of many points of great historical, literary, and linguistic interest. Halliwell's Dictionary, containing more than fifty thousand archaic and provincial words and obsolete forms, is illustrated with citations drawn in the largest proportion from unpublished manuscript authorities, and it is evident from the titles of the works quoted and the character of the extracts, as well as from the testimony of scholars, that many of them must be of very great philological value.*

* Until very lately, the modernization of every reprint of an English classic was almost as much a settled practice as the adoption of a fashionable style of binding. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have not scrupled to lay a profane hand upon Chaucer, a mightier genius than either, and Milton is not allowed to appear in the orthography which he deliberately and systematically employed. Archbishop Parker was so zealous for the preservation, or rather the restoration, of ancient forms, that he printed even the Latin of Asser's life of Alfred in the Anglo-Saxon character. The association which takes its name from Parker, in republishing the English theological writings of the sixteenth century, a series extending to more than fifty volumes, and which, unmutilated, would have been invaluable as a treasure of genuine, primitive, nervous English, has clipped and restamped the whole in such a manner as to deprive these works of all their interest, except for professional theological inquirers, and very greatly to diminish their value even for them. The recently-discovered manuscript of the Earl of Devonshire's translation of Paleario's Treatise on the Benefits of Christ's Death is evidently a copy made by an ignorant transcriber, and its orthography is extremely incorrect and variable. In preparing it for the press, it was, unfortunately, deemed expedient to reform the spelling, for the sake of making it more uniform and intelligible, as well as correct, and the task has been executed with great care, and in as good faith as the erroneous principle adopted would admit of. As a frontispiece, a fac-simile of one of the very small pages of the manuscript is given, containing eighteen lines, or about one hundred and twenty-five words. In printing the text of this page, the editor has omitted a comma in the seventh line, and thereby changed, or, at least, obscured, the meaning of a very important and very clear passage, which contained the marrow of the whole treatise. Of course, any departure from the letter in a weighty period, unless it is supposed to be a mere typographical accident, destroys the confidence of critical readers in the edition, and the book, in a grammatical point of view, becomes worthless. The manuscript in question is

I have already sufficiently stated my reasons for believing that a colloquial or grammatical knowledge of other tongues is not essential to the comprehension and use of our own, and, considered solely as a means to that end, without reference to the immense value of classical and modern Continental literature as the most powerful of all instruments of general culture, I have no doubt whatever that the study of the Greek and Latin languages might be advantageously replaced by that of the Anglo-Saxon and primitive English. An overwhelming proportion of the words which make up our daily speech is drawn from Anglo-Saxon roots, and our syntax is as distinctly and as generally to be traced to the same source. We are not then to regard the ancient Anglican speech as in any sense a foreign tongue, but rather as an older form of our own, wherein we may find direct and clear explanation of many grammatical peculiarities of modern English, which the study of the Continental languages, ancient or modern, can but imperfectly elucidate. With reference to etymology, the importance of the Anglo-Saxon is too obvious to require argument. It is fair to admit, however, that the etymology of compound words, and of abstract and figurative terms, must in general be sought elsewhere, for we have borrowed our scientific, metaphysical, and æsthetical phraseology from other sources, while the vocabulary of our material life is almost wholly of native growth. In determining the signification of words, modern usage is as binding an authority as ancient practice, inasmuch as, at present, we know no ground but use for either the old meaning or the new; but a knowl

one of the most important recent acquisitions to the theology of the Reformation and the early literature of England, and the voluntary admission of any changes in its text shows a want of exact scholarship in a quarter where we had the best right to expect it.

edge of the primitive sense of a word very often enables us to discover a force and fitness in its modern applications which we had never suspected before, and accordingly to employ it with greater propriety and appositeness. The most instructive and impressive etymologies are those which are pursued within the limits of our own tongue. The native word at every change of form and meaning exhibits new domestic relations, and suggests a hundred sources of collateral inquiry and illustration, while the foreign root connects itself with our philology only by remote and often doubtful analogies, and when it enters our language, it comes usually in a fixed form, and with a settled meaning, neither of which admits of further development, and of course the word has no longer a history.

The knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is important as a corrective of the philological errors into which we may be led by the study of early English, and especially of popular ballad and other poetry, without such a guide. The introduction of Norman French, with a multitude of words inflected in the weak or augmentative manner, naturally confused what was sufficiently intricate and uncertain before, the strong inflection, or that by the letter-change, in the Anglo-Saxon. The range of letter-change in Anglo-Saxon grammar was indeed wide, but not endless or arbitrary. It however became so, at least in the poetic dialect, as soon as Norman influence had taught English bards independence of the laws of Saxon grammar. Many of the barbarous forms so freely used in popular verse are neither obsolete conjugations revived, nor dialectic peculiarities, but creations of the rhymesters who employed them, coin not uncurrent merely, but counterfeit, and without either the stamp or the ring of the genuine