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metal. The balladmongers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries concerned themselves as little about a vowel as the Orientals, and where the convenience of rhyme or metre required a heroic license, they needed only the consonants of one syllable of a genuine root as a stock whereon to grow any conceivable variety of termination. Although they did not hesitate to conjugate a weak verb with a strong inflection, or to reverse the process, thus adding or subtracting syllables at pleasure, yet their boldest liberties were with the letterchange in the strong inflection. We cannot indeed hold them guilty of corrupting

the language of the nation With long-tailed words in -osity and -ation;

but we can fairly convict them of making it more desperately Gothic in its forms than even the Moso-Gothic of Ulphilas.

The confusion into which the English inflections were thus thrown combined with other circumstances to discourage the attempts of philologists to reduce its accidence to a regular system, and English scholars had shown very respectable ability in the elucidation of other tongues, before they produced any thing that could fairly be called a grammar of their own. Analogous causes had prevented the cultivation. of native philology in Northern France, and though the langue d'oc, or Provenzal, was early a matter of careful study, the langue d'oil, the only French dialect known to the Norman race, possessed no grammar until it was provided with one by an Englishman.*

*The French grammar of Palsgrave, to which I allude, prepared for the use of the Princess Mary, sister of King Henry VIII., and printed in 1530, under the title of Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, is, under the circumstances, the most remarkable, if not the most important work, which had appeared in

The function of grammar is to teach what is, not what ought to be, in language. English, as I have said, was too irregular, fluctuating and incongruous in its accidence and syntax to be reduced to form and order until the close of the sixteenth century, and as its literature was of later origin than that of the continent, there was not, before that period, a sufficient accumulation of classical authorship to serve as illustration and authority in grammatical discussion.*

modern philology before the commencement of the present century. Although it was designed only to teach French grammar, yet, as it is written in English, and constantly illustrates the former tongue by comparison with the latter, it is hardly a less valuable source of instruction with reference to the native than to the foreign language. In the careful reprint lately executed at the expense of the French government, it makes a large quarto of 900 pp., more than half of which is occupied with comparative tables of words and phrases, so that while it is a remarkably complete French grammar, it is much the fullest English dic tionary which existed before the time of Elizabeth. It is also one of the amplest collections of English phrases and syntactical combinations which can be found at the present day, and at the same time the best authority now extant for the pronunciation used in French, and, so far as it goes, in English also, at the period when it was written.

* One of the earliest English grammars which can lay claim to scientific merit is the brief compend drawn up by Ben Jonson, and published some time after the death of the author. It is too meagre to convey much positive instruction, but it exhibits enough of philological insight to excite serious regret for the loss of Jonson's complete work, the manuscript of which was destroyed by fire. This little treatise throws a good deal of light on the orthoepy of English at that period, for the learning and the habitual occupations of Jonson make it authoritative on this point, so far as it goes, but there are statements concerning the accidence, which are not supported by the general usage of the best authors, either of Jonson's own time, or of any preceding age of English literature. For instance, he lays down the rule that nouns in z, s, sh, g, and ch, make the possessive singular in is, and the plural in es, and as an example he cites the word prince, (which, by the way, does not end in either of the terminations enumerated by him,) and says the possessive case is princis, the plural princes. That individual instances of this orthography may be met with, I do not deny, but it is certain that it never was the general usage, and Jonson was doubtless suggesting a theory, not declaring a fact, and he introduces the rule rather as furnishing an explanation of what he calls the "monstrous syntax," of using the pronoun his as the sign of the possessive case, than as a guide to actual practice. It is curious that Palsgrave lays down the same rule, though he elsewhere

The same reasons which deterred early English scholars from laying down rules of grammatical inflection, would render it impossible at the present day to construct a regular accidence of the forms of the language at any period before the writers of the Elizabethan age had established standards of conjugation, declension, orthography, and syntax. The English student therefore can expect little help from grammarians in mastering the literature of earlier periods, and he must learn the system of each great writer by observation of his practice. But the inflections in English are so few, that the number of possible variations in their form is embraced within a very narrow range, and all their discrepancies together do not amount to so great a number as the regular changes in most other languages. With respect to the vocabulary, the difficulties are even less. Most good editions of old authors are provided with glossaries explaining the obsolete words, and where these are wanting, the dictionaries of Nares, Halliwell, Wright, and others, amply supply the deficiency. In fact, a mere fraction of the time demanded to acquire the most superficial smattering of French or Italian

contradicts it, and in practice disregards it. "Also where as we seme to have a genityve case, for so moche as, by adding of is to a substantyve, we sygnifye possessyon, as, my maisteris gowne, my ladyis boke, which with us contrevailleth as moche as the gowne of my maister, the boke of my ladye," &c. Introduction, XL.

But on page 191, he says:

"Where we, in our tonge, use to putte s to ouze substantyves whan we wyll express possessyon, saying, 'a mannes gowne, a woman [s] hose,' &c., &c., and afterwards, 'this is my maisters gowne, he dyd fette his maisters cloke.'" A similar passage occurs on page 141, and I have not observed a single instance where Palsgrave himself makes the possessive in is, except that above quoted from page XL., where it is used by way of exemplifying the rule as he states it.

Alexander Gil's remarkable Logonomia Anglica is interesting rather in an orthoepical, than in a grammatical point of view, and it will be particularly noticed in a Lecture on orthoepical changes in English, post.

will enable the student to obtain such a knowledge of early English, that he can read with facility every thing written in the language, from the period when it assumed a distinct form to its complete development in the seventeenth century.

Critical discussions of the literary merit of English authors would be foreign to the plan of the present course, and in noticing writers of different periods, I shall refer chiefly to their value as sources of philological instruction. First in time, and not least in importance, is the Ormulum, a very good edition of which was published in 1852. This is a metrical paraphrase of a part of the New Testament, in a homiletic form, and it probably belongs to the early part of the thirteenth century. Its merit consists mainly in the purity of its Saxon-English, very few words of foreign origin occurring in it. The uniformity of its orthography, and the regularity of its inflections, are far greater than are to be found in the poetical compositions even of the best writers of the succeeding century. One reason of this is that the unrhymed versification adopted by the author relieved him from the necessity of varying the terminal syllables of his words for the sake of rhyme, which led to such anomalous inflections in other poetical compositions, and it accordingly exhibits the language in the most perfect form of which it was then capable. In fact, the dialect of the Ormulum is more easily mastered than that of Piers Ploughman, which was written more than a century later, and it contains fewer words of unknown or doubtful signification. It is, moreover, especially interesting as a specimen of the character and inherent tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon language as affected by more advanced civilization and culture, but still uncorrupted by any considerable mixture of foreign ingredients; for we

discover no traces of the Norman element in the vocabulary, and but few in the syntax of this remarkable work.* Piers Ploughman, on the contrary, employs Latin and French words in quite as large a proportion as Chaucer,† although the forms and syntax of the latter author are much nearer the modern standard. The compliment which Spenser bestows upon Chaucer's "Well of English undefiled " is indeed well merited, if reference be had to the composite character that English assumed in the best ages of its literature, but it would be more fitly applied to the Ormulum, as a repository of the indigenous vocabulary of the Anglican tongue. In any event, no student of the works of Chaucer will dispute Spenser's opin

ion that

"In him the pure well-head of poesy did dwell,"

and it is no extravagant praise to say that the name of Chaucer was the first in English literature, until it was, not eclipsed, but surpassed by those of Shakespeare and Milton.

In the earliest ages of all literature, poetry seems to be little more than, an artificial arrangement of the dialect of common life, but as literary culture advances, both the phraseology and the grammar of metrical compositions diverge from the vulgar speech, and poetry forms a vocabulary and a syntax of its own. Although, therefore, the practice of

*The vocabulary of the Ormulum consists of about twenty-three hundred words, exclusive of proper names and inflected forms. Among these I am unable to find a single word of Norman-French origin, and scarcely ten which were taken directly from the Latin. The whole number of words of foreign etymology previously introduced into Anglo-Saxon, which occur in the Ormulum, does not exceed sixty, though there is some uncertainty as to the origin of several words common to the Latin and the Gothic languages in the earliest stages in which these latter are known to us.-See Lecture vi.

See Lecture vi.

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