employment of the word as a designation of the language and literature is much more recent.*

The Anglo-Saxon language, though somewhat modified by Scandinavian influence, differs too widely from the Old Northern or Icelandic, (which I use as synonymous terms,) to afford any countenance to the supposition that either of them is derived from the other. Nor is there any good reason for rejecting the term Anglo-Saxon, and, as has been proposed, employing English as the name of the language, from the earliest date to the present day. A change of nomenclature like this would expose us to the inconvenience, not merely of embracing, within one designation, objects which have been conventionally separated, but of confounding things logically distinct; for though our modern English is built upon and mainly derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the two dialects are now so discrepant, that the fullest knowledge of one would not alone suffice to render the other intelligible to either the eye or the ear. They are too unlike in vocabulary and in inflectional character, to be still considered as one speech, though in syntactical structure they resemble each other more closely than almost any other pair of related ancient and modern tongues. But even in this respect, the accordance is not so strict as some writers conceive it to be. Sir Thomas Browne, for instance, in the eighth of his Miscel

The pretended formal imposition of the name of England upon the AngloSaxon possessions in Great Britain, by a decree of King Egbert, is unsupported by any contemporaneous or credible testimony. It is rejected as fabulous by most historical investigators, and it is certainly very improbable that a king, himself a Saxon by birth and name, ruling Saxon subjects and Saxon provinces, should have voluntarily chosen for his realm a designation borrowed from an other people and another territory. The title of Angliæ or Anglorum rex is much more naturally explained by the supposition that England and English had been already adopted as the collective names of the country and its inhabitants.

lany Tracts, has, by a compendious process, established very nearly an absolute identity between the two. Taking, or, more probably, composing a page or two of English, from which all words of Latin or French origin are excluded, he has turned, or, to use a Germanism here not inappropriate, overset it into Anglo-Saxon, by looking out the corresponding terms in a Saxon Dictionary, and arranging them word for word as in English, with scarcely any attention to grammatical form, and has thus manufactured a dialect bearing no greater relation to Anglo-Saxon than the macaronic compositions of the sixteenth century do to classical Latin.

In the want of more extensive means than the press has yet made accessible for the study of the dialects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries-the transition period--we cannot assign any precise date to the change from AngloSaxon to English; nor, indeed, is there any reason to suppose that any such sudden revolution occurred in the Anglican speech as to render it hereafter possible to make any thing more than an approximative and somewhat arbitrary determination of the period. For the purposes of an introductory course, no nice distinctions on this point are necessary, and it will suffice to say that the dialect of the period between the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the thir teenth centuries partakes so strongly of the characteristics of both Anglo-Saxon and English, that it has been usually, and not inappropriately, called Semi-Saxon.

It is a matter of still greater difficulty to refer the subsequent history of English to fixed chronological epochs. The name of Old-English has been applied to the language as spoken from the latter date to the end of the reign of Edward III. in 1377; that of Middle-English to the form of

speech extending from the close of Edward's reign to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, while all its subsequent phases are embraced under the common designation of Modern-English. This is, in many respects, an objectionable division of our philological history. The Old-English era would include many of the works of Chaucer, which belong properly to a later stage of our literature, and at the same time exclude the English Bible of Wycliffe and his fellowlaborers, whose style is more archaic than that of Chaucer. Middle-English would embrace the Confessio Amantis of Gower, who, philologically, is older than Chaucer, and the entire works of Hooker, as well as many of the plays of Shakespeare, both of whom belong unequivocally to the Modern-English period. It would, I think, be more accurate to commence the second era about the year 1350, and to terminate it with the third quarter of the sixteenth century.

The first marked and specific change in the English language took place in the time, and in a very considerable degree, by the influence of Wycliffe, Gower, and Chaucer, the period of whose lives extended through the last three quarters of the fourteenth century, and included the brilliant reign of Edward III., and the glorious history of the Black Prince. The works of Wycliffe and his school, including their translations of the Bible, which are known to have been widely circulated, undoubtedly exerted a very important influence on the prose, and especially the spoken dialect. "The moral Gower," as Chaucer calls him, was inferior in ability to his two great contemporaries, and his literary influence less marked; but his contributions to the improvement of his native tongue are of some importance; and if it is true, as Fuller quaintly remarks, that he "left English very bad," it

is also true, as Fuller further observes, that he found it " very very bad." The great poetical merit of Chaucer, the popular character of his subjects, and his own high social position, gave him an ascendency in the rising literature of England that scarcely any subsequent writer has attained; and there is perhaps no English author who has done more to mould, or rather to fix, the standard of the language, and to develop its poetical capabilities, than this great genius.* From this period to the introduction of printing by Caxton, and the consequent diffusion of classical literature in England, about the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, the language remained nearly stationary; but at that period a revolution commenced, which was promoted by the Reformation, and, for a hundred years, English was in a state of transition. At the close of the period to which I have proposed to apply the name Middle-English, or about the year 1575, that revolution had produced its first great and most striking effect upon the structure and vocabulary of our tongue, and thus rendered possible the composition of such writings as those of the great theologian and the great dramatist, which signalized the commencement of the last and greatest era of our literature. English now became fixed in grammar and vocabulary, so far as a thing essentially so fleeting as speech can ever be said to be fixed, and for nearly three centuries it has undergone no very important change. Our orthography has indeed become more uniform, and our stock of words has been much enlarged, but he that is well read in Spenser, Hooker, and Shakespeare, not to speak of other great luminaries of that age, and above all, of the

*See Lectures i., v., vi., and vii.

standard translation of the Bible, which, however, appropriately belongs to an earlier period, will doubt whether it has gained much in power to expand the intellect or touch the heart.*

Besides the words which express the general subject of the present course, I must here notice certain other terms of art, and apologize for an occasional looseness in the use of them, which the poverty of the English grammatical nomenclature renders almost unavoidable. Our word language has no conjugate adjective, and for want of a native term, English scholars have long employed the Greek derivative, philological, in a corresponding sense. But philology, and its derivative adjective, have acquired, in the vocabulary of Continental science, a different meaning from that which we give them, more comprehensive in one direction, more limited in another, and, to supply the want which a restriction of their earlier sense has created, linguistic or linguistics, a term Latin in its radical, Greek in its form, has been introduced. Philology was originally applied in Germany to the study of the classical languages and literature of Greece and Rome, as a means of general intellectual culture. In its pres

"I take this present period of our English tung to be the verie height thereof, bycause I find it so excellently well fined both for the bodie of the tung itself, and for the customarie writing thereof, as either foren workmanship can giue it glosse, or as home-wrought hanling can giue it grace. When the age of our people which now vse the tung so well, is dead and departed, there will another succede, and with the people the tung will alter and change; which change in the full haruest thereof maie prove comparable to this, but sure for this which we now vse, it seemeth euen now to be at the best for substance, and the brauest for circumstance, and whatsoever shall become of the English state, the English tung cannot prove fairer than it is at this daie, if it maie please our learned sort so to esteme of it, and to bestow their trauell upon such a subject.”— Mulcaster, First Part of the Elementarie, p. 159. A. D. 1582.