Or, in more modern English: And whoso willeth this my book With all such rhythm as here is set, In English write the words aright, It is one of the most interesting questions in all literature, how far the original text of Shakespeare has suffered from the license, the negligence, or the indolence of those who, with type and pen, have multiplied his works. The dispute is likely to be a long one, and if Collier's folio does not prove the existence of myriads of errors in the current editions, it at least shows an alarming boldness of commentators in the way of conjectural emendation. LECTURE XX. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING. II. THERE are circumstances peculiar to the history of English literature, which have rendered the mechanical conditions and imperfections of the typographical art more powerfully influential upon the language itself, than was elsewhere, in general, the case. Caxton, the first English printer, was indeed both an Englishman by birth and a man of scholarly attainments, but he acquired the art at Cologne, and it is probable, though not certain, that his first production, "The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye," was printed either at Cologne or at Bruges. When he established his press at Westminster soon after the year 1470, he brought over workmen from the continent, and, were stronger evidence wanting, the names of his successors, Lettou and Machlinia, Wynkyn de Worde, Pynson, Berthelette, Faques, Treveris, would sufficiently indicate that they also were of foreign birth. Indeed it appears from Strype's Memoirs of Cranmer,* that as late as 1537, the printers in England were generally "Dutchmen that could neither speak nor write true English," and when Grafton applied for an exclusive privilege for the translation of the Bible which goes by his name, he represented that "for covetousness' sake, these foreign printers would not employ learned Englishmen to oversee and correct their work," so that, as he complains, "paper, letter, ink, and correction would be all naught." Three years later, Grafton asked permission to print the Bible at Paris, where he says that not only could he procure better and cheaper paper, but that the workmen were more skil ful. Any one, who has had occasion to print so much as a familiar quotation in a foreign tongue, can judge whether a volume printed in a language unknown to the compositor would be likely to prove very correct. Besides this, it must be remembered that the art of calligraphy had been less cultivated in England than on the continent, that the characters in common use differed somewhat from those employed in the other European languages, and that the contractions and abbreviations stood, of course, for different combinations of sounds or letters. An instance of this is the employment of p and 8 for the two sounds of th, in the AngloSaxon and Old-English alphabets, a trace of which long remained in the confounding of p with y. In black-letter, the character y much resembles the p, and hence y was often used instead of it, and this gave rise to the forms ye for the, and yt for that. Thus many circumstances combined to make an English manuscript extremely illegible to a printer unacquainted with the language. While in almost every Continental country, the early printers were generally learned men, and sometimes among the most eminent scholars of their time, the followers of Caxton were for nearly two centuries principally mere handicraftsmen, and typography fell far short both of the dignity and the artistic perfection to which it elsewhere attained almost immediately after its invention. For all these reasons it is obvious that early English printed books must have been very unfaithful copies of the manuscripts they attempted to reproduce, and the great incorrectness of their execution had a prejudicial effect upon the forms of the language and sometimes on the meaning and use of important words. There is a large class of words of Latin and French origin belonging to the dialect of books, and at first, of course, used exclusively by literary men who could not be ignorant of their etymology or true orthography, but which are found very vaguely spelled in the printed books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, the printers did not discriminate between eminent and imminent, president and precedent, ingenuous and ingenious, and these words were used or rather printed interchangeably almost to the beginning of the eighteenth century. A passage in Fuller, however, clearly marks the distinetion between ingenuousness and ingenuity as then recognized, and it is not probable that scholars could ever have been insensi ble to the differences between all of them.* They must first have been confounded by typographical error. The confusion once introduced, educated men became involved in it, and it was long before the words and the ideas they expressed were disentangled from it. Printed books, however incorrect, would, from their greater legibility, always be preferred to manuscript, and their wide circulation would make them at once popular standards of authority in all matters of orthography and grammatical inflection. The confusion and irregularity of their spelling would accordingly powerfully tend to increase the uncertainty of orthography, especially at a period when the usage of the learned even was discordant, and the language still in process of formation. It is, no doubt, in these circumstances that we are to find the explanation of the otherwise paradoxical fact, that the spelling of the English language, as practised by educated persons in the fifteenth, and even the latter part of the fourteenth century, more nearly resembles that of the present day than do the printed books of the sixteenth century. The foreign printers ignorantly corrupted the spelling of their copy, and their books, again, the orthography of the nation. In carefully executed recent editions, printed directly from very early manuscripts, we find a surprisingly close resemblance to the spelling of modern periods. In the best manuscripts of Chaucer, and more especially of Gower, and in some of the Paston Letters, as, for example, in a letter * Though men understood imperfectly in this life, yet if all understood equally imperfectly, upon the supposition of equal ingenuousness to their ingenuity, (that is, that they would readily embrace what appears true unto them,) all would be of the same judgment. Infant's Advocate, Part II., p. 8. Does Trench, in treating of desynonymised words, (Study of Words, Lecture V.,) mean to say that ingenious, (Latin ingeniosus, proximately from ingenium,) and ingenuous, (Latin ingenuus, directly from the verbal root,) were ever really the same word ? Et si, huic non absimile incommodum etiam accederet, ut prælo corrigendo non doctus præesset sed aliquis de grege mercatorum qui Germanicè et Anglicè loqui posset, corrumpi necesse erat orthographiam nostram ; et quia tempestiva medela adhibita non esset, in hominum usum corruptam transire. Atque hanc sane existimo unicam fuisse causam corruptela. A. Gil. Logonomia Anglica, 2d edition, 1621. of Lord Hastyngs written before the year 1480, we find indeed obsolete words, but the orthography of those which are still employed conforms more closely to the present standard than does that of the English Bible of 1611.* The original edition of that translation furnishes abundant illustrations of a practice to which I referred in the last lecture, that, namely, of clipping or lengthening words according to the space which it was convenient to give them in arranging the printed lines. Thus in Deuteronomy ix. 19, hot is spelt whot, because a long word was required to fill out the space; in Joshua ix. 12, Judges ii. 14, iii. 20, it is spelt hote, there being a smaller space to occupy, and in other passages, where the ordinary form hot was long enough, that spelling is employed. In verse 13, of chapter xiii. of Judges, ye and we are both printed with a single e, but in verse 15, of the same chapter, each with two ee. In verse 2 of chapter xv., the second person singular, imperfect tense of the verb to have, is spelt haddest, in Genesis xxx. 30, hadst. In Genesis xxxi. 8, the future of the substantive verb to be is printed shall bee, with two ll and two ee; but in chapter xxx., verse 33, it is printed in one word, shalbe, and both these forms occur in verse 17 of chapter xlii. of Isaiah. So in the life of Reynolds in Abel Redivivus, in one *See letter from Lord Hastyngs, Paston Letters, II., 296. Pauli, in the Introductory Essay to his edition of Gower's Confessio Amantis, London, 1857, states, that he has adopted the "judicious and consistent orthography" of a manuscript probably of the end of the fourteenth century, as the basis for the spelling in this new edition." He also describes the orthography of a manuscript of the same author, of the fifteenth century, as having been “carried through almost rigorously according to simple and reasonable principles." Pauli's text is founded on an edition by Berthelette, of the year 1532, but conformed in its orthography to the first manuscript above mentioned. Berthelette printed from an edition by Caxton, but substituted the dialect and spelling of his own time, and carried the process of modernization still farther in a sub sequent edition. In that from which Pauli printed, the "orthography and metre had been disturbed in innumerable places by Berthelette," and he ob serves that in the oldest manuscripts, the promiscuous use of y and i, u and ¤, so common in all old English printed books, does not occur. The spelling of Pauli's edition, thus restored to its original integrity, is, in a very large proportion of the words, identical with that of the present day. The following fac-simile from one of the two editions of 1611, shows the arrangement of two lines of the verse referred to, and the reason for it: 17 C They shall bee *turned backe, they shalbe greatly ashamed, that trust |