LECTURE XIX.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING.

I.

THE material conditions to which the art of book-making, in all its branches, is subject, have not only been powerfully instrumental in the modification of single words, and in determining those minor questions, upon which the ready and commodious use of a written or printed volume depends, but they have exerted an important influence upon the more genral forms of literature, and even upon the character and tendency of mental action. Let me illustrate by a comparison between the ancient and modern methods of recording the processes and results of human thought. The oldest manuscripts have scarcely a single point of resemblance to modern books. The Latin word volumen, (whence our volume,) derived from the verb volvo, I turn or roll, indicates the most usual form of the ancient book. It was a long, narrow roll of parchment or papyrus generally divided transversely into pages or columns, the words written closely together without any separation by spaces, without distinctive forms of letters, capitals being employed for all purposes alike, . without marks of punctuation, without divisions of chapters,

paragraphs or periods, and frequently made still more illegible by complicated and obscure abbreviations or contractions of whole syllables, or even words, into a single character. The modern book is an assemblage of leaves, of convenient form and dimensions, securely united at one edge, with pages regularly numbered, impressed with characters of different, but fixed forms, according to their several uses, words separated by spaces, members of the periods, and the periods themselves, distinguished by appropriate points, and the whole cut up into paragraphs, sections and chapters, according to the natural divisions of the subject, or the convenience of the writer, printer or reader, and, finally, abundantly provided with explanatory notes and references, and ample tables of contents and indexes.

It may not be here irrelevant to make a remark or two on the etymology of the Latin and English words for book. Volumen, derived as I have just said from volvo, is a younger and less common Latin name for book than either liber, the generic term for all books, or codex, properly the specific designation of manuscripts composed of leaves of any material, while volumen was the proper appellation of the roll. The word liber, (whence our library,) origi nally signifying the inner bark of trees, was applied to books, because bark was one of the earliest materials on which the Latin people wrote. Codex, or caudex, whence our code, signifies the trunk or stem of a tree. Thin tablets of wood, split from the stem and covered with a layer of wax, at a very early period supplied the place of the more modern papyrus, parchment and paper, the writing being inscribed upon the wax with a hard point or style.

The Gothic tribes also used slips of wood for the same

purpose, and the wood of the beech being found best adapted for writing-tablets, its primitive name (in Anglo-Saxon, boc,) became the designation of the most important object formed from it, and hence our English book, and the German Buch. It is a probable suggestion, that the form now universally adopted for the book owes its origin to the employment of wood or of leaden tablets in this way. Slips of wood could not well make a roll, and if connected at all, they would naturally be gathered like leaves of modern paper. The Upsal copy of the Moso-Gothic translation of the Gospels, generally known as the Codex Argenteus, believed to be of the fifth, or beginning of the sixth century, and one of the oldest parchments existing, is written on leaves of vellum arranged in book-fashion, as are also most of the Greek and Latin manuscripts now extant, the superior convenience of that form having led to its general adoption not far from the commencement of the Christian era, though the Herculanean and Egyptian papyri are all rolls.

To an unpractised eye, however familiar with the individual characters, an ancient manuscript or inscription is but a confused and indistinct succession of letters, and no little experience is required to enable us readily to group these letters into syllables, the syllables into words, and to combine the words into separate periods. Indeed, the accidental omission of a space in printing between two successive words in our own language sometimes seriously embarrasses us, and if a whole sentence were thus printed, we should find it almost as unintelligible as a complicated cipher.*

The following sentence from Fuller's Worthies will serve to show the dif ficulty of reading an unbroken succession of words:

ITWILLPOSETHEBESTCLERKTOREADYEATOSPELLTHATDEEDWHEREINSENTENCESCLAUS

ESWORDSANDLETTERSAREWITHOUTPOINTSORSTOPSALLCONTINUEDTOGETHER.

An ancient scholar, on the other hand, would be hardly less puzzled, were he to be asked to read a composition, even of his own, divided and arranged according to the rules of modern typography. He would be distracted with the variety of characters, capitals, small letters, and italics, with the multiplicity of marks of punctuation, and the shattering of the periods into fragmentary members; perplexed with the often illogical divisions of the sentences and chapters, and embarrassed by the constant recurrence of references and annotations, all which would seem to him to serve little other purpose than to break the continuity of argument or narration, and to divert the attention of the reader from closelyfollowing the thoughts of his author. We may find an illustration of this in the unhappy dislocation and confusion of the narratives of the evangelists, by the division into chapter and verse, so injudiciously executed by Stephens, in the sixteenth century, and unwisely followed in all more recent translations. If we read the Gospels as they were written, each as a continuous whole, we gain a very different impression from that derived from perusing them as we habitually do, in fragmentary sections and periods, and in fact, the restoration of the ancient integrity of form is almost the only change, which most scholars would willingly see made in our English New Testament.

Manuscript, indeed, even in our own language, can never be read in the thoughtless, half-mechanical way, in which we skim over the pages of a modern romance, or the columns of a newspaper, for the finest, clearest and most uniform chirography falls short of the regularity and easy legibility of typography, and the highest compliment we can pay a handwriting is to say that it reads like print.

The Oriental nations, whose manuscripts rest.nble those of the ancients in wanting capitals, italics and punctuation, are leisurely readers, and as they follow the writing with the eye, they very frequently articulate the words, or at least move the lips, as we are apt to do in deciphering a difficult chirography. Indeed, such is the difficulty of reading manuscript so penned, that in cases where etiquette or other reasons require a written instead of a verbal message, the letter is sometimes accompanied by a reader to explain its purport to the recipient. A curious passage in the Confessions of St. Augustine seems to imply that the ancients usually articulated the words in their private reading; for it is remarked as a note-worthy particular in the habits of St. Ambrose, that he read by the eye alone, when engaged in private study.

"When Ambrose was reading," says Augustine, "his eye passed over the page, and his mind searched out the sense of his author, but his organs of speech were silent. We often saw him studying in this inaudible way, and never otherwise, and we supposed that he feared, that if he read aloud, he should be interrupted by those who heard him with questions about the meaning of obscure passages; or, perhaps, the desire of sparing his voice, which was easily fatigued, was a still better reason for this silent study."*

But the ancient habits of thought were wholly irreconcilable with the inconsecutive, discontinuous style of relation or discussion and expression so prevalent in our time. Sententious, indeed, and highly elliptical the classical writers often were, but the thoughts were neverthe.ess consequent, and logically connected, though some links of the chain might be left to the reader's sagacity to supply. Besides

*Couf. Lib. VI., § 3.