violations of the most ordinary grammatical rules, which have been laboriously cleared up by Dr. Abbott in his admirable Shakespearian Grammar.

But though the new English had fairly established itself as a national and literary language it was still in a state of rapid growth and development, destined to undergo considerable changes in grammar, and even more in orthography, ere it settled down into the form which it has retained without any material alteration from the time of the Stuarts to the present day.

When Chaucer wrote printing was not yet invented; a number of scribes, whose attainments did not perhaps go beyond the mere mechanical art of writing, were accustomed to work together while one read aloud the book to be copied, and each spelling as he was in the habit of pronouncing, and probably not seldom misapprehending the meaning of the author, it was inevitable that countless variations should arise in the text, some representing the sound of the spoken word, others the changes which had taken place in the pronunciation between the dates of the original MS. and the particular copy, and others still such clerical blunders as are even now familiar to every one who has had to correct the proofs of any literary work.

After the sixteenth century, when our language had become stereotyped as it were in grammar and orthography, various attempts were made to modernize the spelling of so popular a poet as Chaucer so as to make him intelligible to ordinary readers, but with the most unhappy results; the men who undertook the task being almost entirely ignorant of the essential features of the language of the original work.

With a prose writer the consequences might not have been more serious than the loss to posterity of an invaluable philological landmark; but where metre and rime were involved, the result has been the entire destruction of all that constitutes the outward form of poetry; while by the subsequent attempts of editors to restore to the mangled verses something like metrical rhythm, the language itself has been wrested and corrupted to an extent which would have rendered hopeless all idea of its restoration, were it not that in the Harleian MS. 7334 we possess a copy executed by a competent hand very shortly after the author's death, and though not free from clerical errors, on the whole remarkably correct. The late learned antiquary Mr. Thomas Wright adopted it in his edition, with a few emendations; but since the publication by Mr. F. T. Furnivall of his six-text edition of Chaucer we have the

means of collating it with the Ellesmere, Hengwrt, Corpus, Lansdowne, Petworth, and Cambridge MSS. Dr. Morris has availed himself of the first three in his edition of the "Prologue, the Knightes and the Nonnes Tales" (Clarendon Press Series); but though he has consulted the last three also in cases of difficulty, he has found them of little real use.

Chaucer himself seems to have had forebodings of the mutilations which were to befall his works, having already suffered from the negligence of his amanuensis, for in the closing stanzas of his "Troilus and Cressida," he says,

"Go litel booke, go litel tragedie,
And for ther is so grete diversitè

In Englisch and in writing of our tong.
So pray I God that non miswrite thee,
Ne thee mismetre for defaut of tong.
And rede wherso thou be or eles song
That thou be understond."

And in language more forcible than elegant he imprecates a curse on this unlucky man

"Adam Scrivener, if evere it thee bifal

Boece or Troilus for to write new,

Under thy long lokkes maist thou have the scall,

But after my making thou write more trew.

So ofte a day I mote thy werke renew,

It to correct and eke to rubbe and scrape,

And al is thorow thy negligence and rape."

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE TO THE TIME OF CHAUCER.

The term Anglo-Saxon, which is currently used to designate the language supposed to have been spoken by our forefathers before the Norman Conquest, is an invention of modern times, and has not even the advantage of convenience to recommend it.

It was not until the close of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth century, when the fusion of races was followed by the rise of a truly national spirit and an outburst of literary activity, that a national language had any existence. The greater part of the thirteenth century was a period of dearth and degradation, a

dark age to the student and lover of our glorious tongue. What little was written was in Latin or French, English being considered not only by the proud nobles, but unhappily also by a pedantic priesthood, as unworthy of cultivation, and consequently, being relegated to the ignorant peasantry, it suffered the loss of thousands of good old words. Hitherto the clergy had written in the language of the people to whom they belonged, and had produced many works of great literary merit. These, however, may be easily recognized as belonging to two great dialectic divisions-a northeastern and south-western, besides minor subdivisions. The great sundering line may roughly be drawn from Shrewsbury through Northampton and Bedford to Colchester, and represents the original partition of the country between the Angles and the Saxons. On the former fell the full force of the Danish invasions, and as we go further north we find the proportion of Scandinavian words and forms to increase.

In the earliest times these languages were almost as distinct as High German and Low German (Platt Deutsch), and the so-called Anglo-Saxon dictionaries confound and mingle the two without distinction. The infusion of Danish or Norse into the Anglian led naturally to a clipping and paring down of inflections, a feature common to all mixed languages; whereas the speech of Wessex, the kingdom of Alfred, preserved much longer its rich inflectional character. Yet even these south-western people seem to have called themselves English rather than Saxons. At any rate King Alfred tells us that his people called their speech English, and Robert of Gloucester says of English, "The Saxones speche yt was, and thorw hem ycome yt ys." Bede, an Angle, calls them Saxons, but the word is of rare occurrence before the thirteenth century. Procopius in the sixth century calls them Frisians.

It is, however, from the East Midland chiefly that the new English arose, where the monks of Peterborough compiled the history of England in English, in chronicles which were copied and scattered throughout the land. Their dialect incorporating all that was good from the others laid the foundation of that literary language which, again taking up a large French element, was destined to become the speech of the nation at large.

Early in the fourteenth century Robert of Brunne, called also Robert Manning, living in Rutland, in the same linguistic province as the monks of Peterborough, wrote The Handlyng Synne, which marks an era in the history of our language and literature. In it

may be seen actually or foreshadowed every feature of language, idiom, and grammar which distinguishes the English of to-day from that of King Alfred and from the Teutonic languages of the Continent. His English is no longer inflectional but analytic, the difference being one of kind not of degree merely, as was the case in the Old Anglian when compared with the speech of the West Saxons. Of the language of The Handlyng Synne we may say as Sir Philip Sidney did of the Elizabethan age, "English is void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods, and tenses, which I think was a piece of the Tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learne his mother tongue; but for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde, which is the ende of speech, that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world."

Of scarcely less value as marking another feature of our present language is the Ancren Riwle, written about 1220 by a learned prelate, into which French and Latin words are imported wholesale. Chaucer has been accused of corrupting our language; but if we compare his works with the Ancren Riwle, written a century and a half earlier, we shall find that the affectation of French words and idioms by the author of the Riwle, an example which for nearly a hundred years none had dared to follow, puts Chaucer rather in the light of a restorer of our language, and justifies Spenser's description of him as 66 'a well of English undefiled." He did not affect a retrograde course, but endeavoured to develop the new powers which English had acquired from this "happy marriage," the fruit of which has been described by none in more glowing terms than by the profound German scholar Grimm. "None of the modern languages has through the very loss and decay of all phonetic laws, and through the dropping of nearly all inflections, acquired greater force and vigour than the English, and from the fulness of those vague and indefinite sounds which may be learned but can never be taught, it has derived a power of expression such as has never been at the command of any human tongue. Begotten by a surprising union of the two noblest languages of Europe, the one Teutonic, the other Romanic, it received that wonderfully happy temper and thorough breeding, where the Teutonic supplied the material strength, the Romanic the suppleness and freedom of expression.

In wealth, in wisdom, and strict economy, none of the living languages can vie with it." Such being the character of the language in which Chaucer wrote, it is not necessary to give in

detail the grammatical forms and inflections of the older English dialects.

It will be sufficient to indicate such as were still in use, but have been subsequently dropped or so worn down as to be no longer easily recognized, and to show at the same time how these are modified by the necessities of metrical composition, so as to be lost to the ear though properly retained in the orthography, in accordance with rules of prosody not unlike those familiar to readers of Latin and French poetry, and which held their ground more or less in English down to the time of Milton.

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The use of the final e in the language of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries presents the greatest difficulty to all who are unacquainted with the grammatical construction of the early and middle English. It was not, as it now is, a merely conventional sign for marking the long sound of the preceding vowel, as in the modern words băr and bāre, for which purpose it is indifferent whether it is placed at the end of the syllable or immediately before the vowel to be lengthened, as in bāre or beār, sēre or seer; nor was it, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inserted or omitted at the whim of the writer or convenience of the printer, when we may often see the same word spelled with and without it in the same or consecutive lines; nor was it, as in the artificial would-be antiquated diction of Spenser's Faerie Queene, employed without any certain rule either as an aping of the ancients," as Ben Jonson called it, or for lengthening out the line to the number of syllables required by the peculiar metre borrowed from the Italian poets, and to which the more rigid English tongue would otherwise have refused to bend; but it was a real grammatical inflection, marking case and number, distinguishing adverbs from the corresponding adjectives, and in certain verbs of the "strong" form representing the -en of the older plural, e.g. he spak, thei spake, for spaken, like the German er sprach, sie sprachen; so that to write, as the modernized texts have it, he spake, would be a blunder as gross as the converse they speaks would be now, and to pronounce they spake as we do is to rob the line of a syllable and the verse of its rhythm and metre, and, if the word be at the end, it may be of its rime, as for instance where the indirect objective cases timé and Romé rime with by me and to me.

The following summary of the peculiar features of Chaucer's grammar is founded on the essay of Prof. Child, and Dr. Morris' Introduction to his Chaucer's Prologue, &c., mentioned above.