Amenities of Literature Part 10

The vernacular idiom in Italy was still so little in repute, while the prejudice in favour of the Latin was so firmly rooted, that their youths were prohibited from reading Italian books. A curious anecdote of the times which its author has sent down to us, however, shows that their native productions operated with a secret charm on their sympathies; for VARCHI has told the singular circ.u.mstance that his father once sent him to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his inveterate pa.s.sion for reading works in the vernacular tongue.

The struggle for the establishment of a vernacular literature was apparent about the same period in different countries of Europe; a simultaneous movement to vindicate the honour and to display the merits of their national idiom.

JOACHIM DE BELLAY, of an ill.u.s.trious literary family, resided three years with his relative the Cardinal at Rome; the glory of the great vernacular authors of Italy inflamed his ardour; and in one of his poems he developes the beauty of "composing in our native language," by the deeper emotions it excites in our countrymen. Subsequently he published his "Defense et Ill.u.s.tration de la Langue Francoise," in 1549, where eloquently and learnedly he would persuade his nation to write in their own language. FERREIRA, the Portuguese poet, about the same time, with all the feelings of patriotism, resolved to give birth to a national literature; exhorting his countrymen to cultivate their vernacular idiom, which he purified and enriched. He has thus feelingly expressed this glorious sentiment--

Eu desta gloria so' fico contente Que a minha terra amei, e a minha gente.

In Scotland we find Sir DAVID LYNDSAY, in 1553, writing his great work on "The Monarchie," in his vernacular idiom, although he thought it necessary to apologise, by alleging the example of Moses, Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and Cicero, who had all composed their works in their own language.

In our own country Lord BERNERS had antic.i.p.ated this general movement.

In 1525, when he ventured on the toil of his voluminous and spirited Froissart, he described it as "translated out of Frenshe into our _maternal English tongue_;" an expression which indicates those filial yearnings of literary patriotism which were now to give us a native literature.

The predominant prejudice of writing in Latin was first checked in Germany, France, and England by the leaders of that great Revolution which opposed the dynasty of the tiara. It was one of the great results of the Reformation, that it taught the learned to address the people.

The versions of the Scriptures seemed to consecrate the vernacular idiom of every nation in Europe. Peter Waldo began to use the vernacular language in his version, however coa.r.s.e, of the Bible for the Vaudois, those earliest Reformers of the Church; and though the volume was suppressed and prohibited, a modern French literary historian deduces the taste for writing in the maternal tongue to this rude but great attempt to attract the attention of the people. The same incident occurred in our own annals; and it was the English Bible of Edward the Sixth which opened the sealed treasures of our native language to the mult.i.tude. Calvin wrote his great work. "The Inst.i.tute of the Christian Religion," at the same time in the Latin language and in the French; and thus it happens that both these works are alike original. Calvin deemed that to render the people intelligent their instructor should be intelligible; and that if books are written for a great purpose, they are only excellent in the degree that they are multiplied. Calvin addressed not a few erudite recluses, but a whole nation.

It is unquestionable that the Reformation began to diminish the veneration for the Latin language. Whether from the love of novelty, or rather by that transition to a new system of human affairs, the pedantry of ancient standing was giving way to the cultivation of a national tongue. A great revolution was fast approaching, which would give a new direction to the studies of the scholastic gentry, and introduce a new mode of addressing the people. It was a revolution alarming those who would have walled in public opinion by circ.u.mscribing all knowledge to a privileged cla.s.s. A remarkable evidence of this disposition appears in an incident which occurred to Sir THOMAS WILSON, the author of two English treatises on the arts of Logic and of Rhetoric. An emigrant in the days of the Papistic Mary, he was arraigned at Rome before the Inquisition, on the general charge of heresy, but especially for having written his "Arts of Logic" and "of Rhetoric" in a language which, at least we may presume, the whole conclave could not have criticised. The torture was not only shown to him, but he tells us that "he had felt some smart of it." The dark inquisitors taught our critic a new canon in his own favourite arts; and our English Aristarchus soon discovered how far those perfidious arts of reasoning and of eloquence may betray the hapless orator, when his words are listened to by malicious judges, equally skilled in mutilating sentences, or catching at loose words.

"They brought down my great heart by telling me plainly that my _defence_ had put me into further peril." Our baffled rhetorician saw that his only safety was to abstain from using the great instrument of his art, which was now locked up in silence. He was left, as he expresses himself, "without all help and without all hope, not only of liberty, but also of life." He escaped by a strange incident. It would seem that in an insurrection of the populace they set fire to the prison, and in a burst of popular freedom, forgetful of their bigotry, or from the spirit of vengeance on their hateful masters, they suffered the heretics to creep out of their cells; an ebullition of public spirit in "the worthy Romans," which the luckless English expounder of logic and rhetoric might well account as "an enterprise never before attempted." On Wilson's return to England be was solicited to revise his admirable "Art of Rhetoric," but he strenuously refused to "meddle with it, either hot or cold." Still smarting from the torture which his innocent progeny had occasioned, he seems to have alleviated his martyrdom with the quaint humour of a querulous prologue.

In these awful transitions from one state of society to another, even the most sagacious are predisposed to discover what they secretly wish.

Erasmus foresaw that a great change was approaching; but although he has delivered a prediction, it seems doubtful whether he had discerned the object aright. "I see," he writes, "a certain golden age ready to arise, which perhaps will not be my lot to partake of, yet I congratulate the world, and the younger sort I congratulate, in whose minds, however, Erasmus shall live and remain, by the remembrance of good offices he hath done." These "good offices" were restricted to his ardent labours in cla.s.sical literature; but did Erasmus foresee in the change the subversion of the papal system by which Luther had often terrified the timid quietness of our gentle recluse, or the rise of the vernacular literature which had yet no existence? Erasmus, indeed, was so little sensible of this approaching change, that his amusing Colloquies, and his Panegyric on Folly, whose satirical humour had been so happily adapted to open the minds of men, he confined to the lettered circles; as Sir Thomas More did his "Utopia," which, had it been intelligible to the people, might have impressed them with some principles of political government. The Sage of Rotterdam imagined that the great movement of the age was to restore the cla.s.sical pursuits of antiquity, and never dreamed of that which, in opposition to the ancient, soon obtained the distinction of "the New Learning," as it is expressed by Roger Ascham--the knowledge which was adapted to the wants and condition of the people. Erasmus would have been startled at the truth, that the language of antiquity would even be neglected by the generality of writers; that every European nation would have cla.s.sics of their own; and that the finest geniuses would make their appeals to the people in the language of the people.

The predilection for composing in the Roman language long continued among the most ill.u.s.trious writers both at home and abroad. A judicious critic in the reign of James I., Edmund Bolton, in his "Nero Caesar,"

recommends that the history of England should be composed in Latin by the cla.s.sical pen of the learned Sir Henry Saville, the editor of "Chrysostom." It is indeed a curious circ.u.mstance that when an English play was performed at the University of Cambridge before Queen Elizabeth, the Vice-Chancellor was called on to remonstrate with the ministers of Elizabeth against such a derogation of the learning and the dignity of the University. This very Vice-Chancellor, who had to protest against all English comedies, had, however, himself been the writer of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," which was long considered to be the first attempt at English comedy.[6] This conduct of the University offered no encouragement to men of learning and genius to compose in their vernacular idiom.

The genius of VERULAM, whose prescient views often antic.i.p.ated the inst.i.tutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, appears never to have contemplated the future miracles of his maternal tongue. Lord BACON did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can discover or poetry can invent; that his country, at length, would possess a national literature, and exult in models of its own. So little did Lord Bacon esteem the language of his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and what he had written in English he was anxious to have preserved, as he expresses himself, in "that universal language which may last as long as books last." It might have surprised Lord Bacon to have been told that the learned in Europe would one day study English authors to learn to think and write, and prefer his own "Essays," in their living pith, to the colder transfusions of the Latin versions of his friends. The taste of the philosophical Chancellor was probably inferior to his invention. Our ill.u.s.trious CAMDEN partook largely of this reigning fatuity when he wrote the reign of Elizabeth--the history of his contemporaries, and the "Britannia"--the history of our country, in the Latin language; as did BUCHANAN that of Scotland, and DE THOU his great history, which includes that of the Reformation in France. All these works, addressed to the deepest sympathies of the people, were not imparted to them.

There was a peculiar absurdity in composing modern history in the ancient language of a people alike foreigners to the feelings as well as to the nature of the transactions. The Latin had neither proper terms to describe modern customs, nor fitting appellatives for t.i.tles and for names and places. The fastidious delicacy of the writers of modern latinity could not endure to vitiate their cla.s.sical purity by the Gothic names of their heroes, and of the barbarous localities where memorable transactions had occurred. These great authors, in their despair, actually preferred to shed an obscurity over their whole history, rather than to disturb the collocation of their numerous diction. Buchanan and De Thou, by a ludicrous play on words, translated the proper names of persons and of places. A Scottish worthy, _Wiseheart_, was dignified by Buchanan with a Greek denomination, _Sophocardus_; so that in a history of Scotland the name of a conspicuous hero does not appear, or must be sought for in a Greek lexicon, which, after all, may require a punster for a reader. The history of De Thou is thus frequently unintelligible; and two separate indexes of names and places, and the public stations which his personages held, do not always agree with the copy preserved in the family. The names of the persons are latinised according to their etymology, and all public offices are designated by those Roman ones which bore some fancied affinity. But the modern office was ill indicated by the ancient; the constable of France, a military charge, differed from the _magister equitum_, and the marshals of France from the _tribunus equitum_. His equivocal personages are not always recognised in this travesty of their Roman masquerade.

A remarkable instance of the gross impropriety of composing an English history in Latin, and of the obstinate prejudice of the learned, who imagined that the ancient idiom conferred dignity on a theme wholly vernacular, appeared when the delegates of Oxford purchased ANTHONY WOOD'S elaborate work on "The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford." Our honest antiquary, with a true vernacular feeling, had written the history of an English university, during an uninterrupted labour of ten years, in his artless but natural idiom. The learned delegates opined that it was humiliating the Oxford press, to have its history pa.s.s through it in the language of the country; and Dr. Fell, with others, was chosen to dignify it into Latin. What was the result of this pompous and inane labour? The author was sorely hurt at the sight of his fair offspring disguised in its foreign and fantastic dress. What was clear in English, was obscure in the circ.u.mlocution of rotund periods and affected phraseologies; the circ.u.mstantial narrative and the local descriptions, so interesting to an English reader, were not only superfluous, but repulsive to the foreigner. ANTHONY WOOD indignantly re-transcribed the whole of his English copy, and left the fair volumes to the care of the university itself, not without the hope which has been realized, that his work should be delivered to posterity stamped by its author's native genius.[7]

Such was the crisis, and such the difficulties and the obstructions of that native literature in whose prosperous state every European people now exults. h.o.m.ogeneous with their habitual a.s.sociations, moulded by their customs and manners, and everywhere stamped by the peculiar organization of each distinct race, we see the vernacular literature ever imbued with the qualities of the soil whence it springs, diversified, yet ever true to nature. Had the native genius of the great luminaries of literature not found a vein which could reach to the humblest of their compatriots, they who are now the creators of our vernacular literature had remained but pompous plagiarists or frigid babblers, and the moderns might still have been pacing in the trammels of a mimetic antiquity.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Sidonius Apollinaris.

[2] An ingenious literary antiquary has given us a copious vocabulary, as complete evidence of Latin words merely abbreviated by omitting their terminations, whence originated those numerous monosyllables which impoverish the French language. In the following instances the Gauls only used the first syllable for the entire word, d.a.m.num--_d.a.m.n_; aureum--_or_; malum--_mal_; nudum--_nud_; amicus--_ami_: vinum--_vin_; h.o.m.o--_hom_, as anciently written; curtus--_court_; sonus--_son_; bonus--_bon_: and thus made many others.

The nasal sound of our neighbours still prevails; thus Gracchus sinks into _Gracque_; t.i.tus Livius is but _t.i.te Live_; and the historian of Alexander the Great, the dignified Quintus Curtius, is the ludicrous _Quinte Curce_!--Auguis, "Du Genie de la Langue Francoise."

[3] Turner's "History of England."

[4] See "Curiosities of Literature," article Recovery of Ma.n.u.scripts.

[5] ERASMUS composed a satirical dialogue between two vindictive Ciceronians; it is said that a duel has been occasioned by the intrepidity of maintaining the purity of a writer's latinity. The pedantry of mixing Greek and Latin terms in the vernacular language is ridiculed by RABELAIS in his encounter with the Limousin student, whom he terrified till the youngster ended in delivering himself in plain French, and left off "Pindarising" all the rest of his days.--"Pantagruel," lib. ii. c. 6.

[6] Collier's "History of Dramatic Poetry," ii. 463.

[7] We now possess this valued literary history, which none, perhaps, but Anthony a Wood could have so fervently pursued: "The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford," in five volumes, quarto.

Edited by John Gutch. It is a distinct work from the far-known "Athenae Oxonienses." Why did this great work, as well as some others, come forth with a Latin t.i.tle? This absurdity was a remaining taint of the ancient prejudice. But an English work was not the more cla.s.sical for bearing a Latin t.i.tle.

ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Johnson p.r.o.nounced it impossible to ascertain when our speech ceased to be Saxon and began to be English; and although since his day English philology has extended its boundaries, the lines of demarcation are very moveable for the literary antiquary. At whatever point we set out, we may find that something which preceded has been omitted; a century may pa.s.s away and leave no precise epoch; and transitions of words and styles, like shades melting into each other, may elude perception. Too often wanting sufficient data, the toil of the antiquary becomes baffled, and the microscopic eye of the philologist pores on empty s.p.a.ce. The learned have their theories; but in darkness we are doomed to grope, and in a circle we can fix on no beginning.

The elegant researches of Ellis, the antiquarian lore of Ritson, the simplicity of taste of Percy, the poetic fervour of Campbell, the elaborate diligence of Sharon Turner, and more recent names skilled in Saxon lore, have given opposite hypotheses, conjectures, and refutations. "A modification of language is not in reality a change,"

observes a powerful researcher in literary history,[1] who is at a loss "whether some compositions shall pa.s.s for the latest offspring of the mother, or the earliest fruit of the daughter's fertility"--a shrewd suspicion which the genealogists of words may entertain concerning the legitimate and the illegitimate, or the pure and the corrupt.

The Saxon language had been tainted by some Latin terms from the ecclesiastics, and some fas.h.i.+onable Normanisms from the court of the Confessor; when the Norman-French, fatal as the arrow which pierced Harold, by a single blow struck down that venerable form--and never has it arisen! And now, with all its pomp, such as it was, it lies entombed and coffined in some scanty ma.n.u.scripts.

We indeed triumph that the language of our forefathers never did depart from the land, since it survived among the people. What survived? It soon ceased to be a written tongue, for no one cared to cultivate an idiom no longer required, and utterly contemned. After the Conquest, the miserable Saxons lost their "book-craft." We find nothing written but the continuation of a meagre chronicle. A few pietists still lingered in occasional homilies, and a solitary charter has been perpetuated; but the style was already changed, and as a literary language the Anglo-Saxon had for ever departed! It had sunk to the people, and they treated the ancient idiom after their fas.h.i.+on--the language of books served not simple men; laying aside its inflections, and its inversions, and its arbitrary construction, they chose a shorter and more direct conveyance of their thoughts, and only kept to a language fitted to the business of daily life. This getting free from the enc.u.mbrances of the Anglo-Saxon we may consider formed the obscure beginnings of THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. All the gradual changes or the sudden innovations through more than two centuries may not be perceivable by posterity; but philologists have marked out how first the inversion was simplified, and then the inflections dropped; how the final E became mute, and at length was ejected; how ancient words were changed, and Norman neologisms introduced. As this English cleared itself of the nebulosity, the anomalies, and all the complex machinery of the mother idiom, a natural style was formed, very homely, for this vaunted Saxon now came from the mouths of the people, and from those friends of the people, the monks, who only wrote for their humble brother-Saxons. The English writers who were composing in French, and the more learned who displayed their clerks.h.i.+p by their Latinity, had a standard of literature which would regulate or advance their literary workmans.h.i.+p; but there was no standard in the language of bondage: it had mixed, as Ritson oddly describes it, "with one knows not what," a disorganization of words and idioms. Numerous DIALECTS pervaded the land; the east and the west agreed as ill together as both did with the north and the south; and they who wrote for the people each chose the dialect of their own s.h.i.+re.

The "Saxon Chronicle," which closes with the year 1155, had been continued at progressive intervals by different writers; this authentic doc.u.ment of the Anglo-Saxon diction exhibits remarkable variations of style; and a critical Saxonist has detected the corruptions of its idiom, its inflections, and its orthography--in a word, that through successive periods it had suffered a material alteration in its character.[2]

Somewhat more than a century after the Norman invasion, about 1180, Layamon made an English version of Wace's "Brut"--that French metrical chronicle which the Anglo-Norman had drawn from the Latin history of "Geoffry of Monmouth." Here we detect an entire changeableness of style, or rather a transformation; but what to call it the most skilful have not agreed. George Ellis drew a copious specimen of a writer unnoticed by Warton; but, confounded by "its strange orthography," and mournfully doubtful of his own meritorious glossary, he considered the style, "though simple and unmixed, yet a very barbarous Saxon." A recent critic opines that Layamon "seems to have halted between two languages, the written and the spoken." Mr. Campbell imagines it "the dawn" of our language; while some Saxonists have branded it as semi-Saxon. It seems a language thrown into confusion, struggling to adapt itself to a new state of things; it has no Norman-French, it is saturated with Saxon, but the sentences are freed from inversions.[3]

About the same period as Layamon's version of Wace, we have a very original attempt of a writer, in those days of capricious p.r.o.nunciation, to convey to the reader the orthoepy by regulating the orthography. As it is only recently that we have obtained any correct notion of a writing which has suffered many misconceptions from our earlier English scholars, the history of this work becomes a bibliographical curiosity.

An ecclesiastic paraphrased the Gospel-histories. He was a critical writer, projecting a system to which he strictly adhered, warning his transcribers as punctually to observe, otherwise "they would not write the word right;" they were therefore "to write those letters twice which he had written so." The system consisted in doubling the consonant after a short vowel to regulate the p.r.o.nunciation. He wrote broth_err_ and afft_err_; is _iss_, and it _itt_.[4]

It is evident that this critical was also a refined writer; for it indicated some delicacy, when we find him apologising for certain additions in his version, which was metrical, not found in the original, and merely used by him for the convenience of filling up his metre. The first literary historians to whose lot it fell to record this anomalous work, among whom were HICKES and WANLEY, judging by appearances, in the superabundance of the rugged consonants, deemed this refined Anglo-Saxon's writing as the work of an ignorant scribe, or as a rude provincial dialect, or harsh enough to be the work of an English Dane; its metrical form eluded all detection, as the verses were a peculiar metre of fifteen syllables, all jumbled together as prose: as such they gave some extracts, but it is evident that this was done with little intelligence of their author. TYRWHIT, occupied on his "Chaucer," had a more percipient ear for these Anglo-Saxon metres, and discovered that this prose was strictly metrical; but he surely advanced no farther--he did not discover the writer's design that "the Ennglisshe writ" was for "Ennglisshe menn to lare"--to learn. Indeed, Tyrwhit, who complains that Hickes in noticing this peculiarity of spelling "has not explained the author's reason for it," himself so little comprehended the system of the double consonants, that in his extract, humorously "begging pardon"

of this old and odd reformer whom the critic was not only offending, but ma.s.sacring, "for not following his injunctions," he discards "all the superfluous letters!" not aware that it was the intention of the writer to preserve the orthoepy. Even our Anglo-Saxon historian missed the secret; for he has remarked on the words, that they were "needlessly loaded with double consonants." Yet he was not wholly insensible to the substantial qualities of the writer, for he discovered in the diction that "the order of words is uniformly more natural, the inflections are more unfrequent, and the phrases of our English begin to emerge." And, finally, our latest authority decides that this work, so long misinterpreted, is "the oldest, the purest, and by far the most valuable specimen of our old English dialect that time has left us."[5]

What is "old English" is the question. The t.i.tle of this work may have perplexed the first discoverers as much as the double consonants. The writer was an ecclesiastic of the name of ORM, and he was so fascinated with his own work for the purity of its diction, and the precision of its modulated sounds, that in a literary rapture he baptized it with reference to himself; and _Orm_ fondly called his work the _Ormulum_!

One hardly expected to meet with such a Narcissus of literature in an old Anglo-Saxon, philologist of the year so far gone by, yet we now find that Orm might fairly exult in his Ormulum!

Nearly a century after Layamon, in the same part of England, the monk, ROBERT OF GLOUCESTER, wrote his "Chronicle," about 1280. This honest monk painfully indited for his brother-Saxons the whole history of England, in the shape of Alexandrine verse in rhyme; the diction of the verse approaches so nearly to prose, that it must have been the colloquial idiom of the west. The "Ingliss," as it was called in the course of the century between Layamon and Robert of Gloucester, betrays a striking change; and modern philologists have given the progressive term of "middle English" to the language from this period to the Reformation.[6] Our chronicler has fared ill with posterity, of whom probably he never dreamt. Robert of Gloucester, who is entirely divested of a poetical character, as are all rhyming chroniclers, has had the hard hap of being criticised by two merciless poets; and, to render his uncouthness still more repulsive, the black-letter fanaticism of his editor has vauntingly arrayed the monk whom he venerated in the sable Gothic, bristling with the Saxon characters.[7] It has therefore required something like a physical courage to sit down to Robert of Gloucester. Yet in the rhymer whom Warton has degraded, Ellis has discovered a metrical annalist whose orations are almost eloquent, whose characters of monarchs are energetic, and what he records of his own age matter worthy of minute history.

Another monk, ROBERT MANNYNG, of Brunne, or Bourne, in Lincolns.h.i.+re, who had versified PIERS LANGTOFT'S "Chronicle," has left a translation of the "Manuel des Peches," ascribed to Bishop Grosteste, who composed it in politer French. In this "Manual of Sins," or, as he terms it, "A Handlyng of Sinne," according to monkish morality and the monkish devices to terrify sinners, our recreative monk has introduced short tales, some grave, and some he deemed facetious, which convey an idea of domestic life and domestic language. It is not without curiosity that we examine these, the earliest attempts at that difficult trifle--the art of telling a short tale, Robert de Brunne is neither a Mat Prior nor a La Fontaine, but he is a block which might have been carved into one or the other, and he shows that without much art a tale may be tolerably told.[8] His octosyllabic verse is more fluent than the protracted Alexandrine of his "Chronicle." The words fall together in natural order, and we seem to have advanced in this rude and artless "Ingliss."

But the most certain evidence that "the English" was engaging the attention of those writers who professedly were devoting their pens to those whom they called "the Commonalty," is, that they now began to criticise; and we find Robert de Brunne continually protesting against "strange Ingliss." This phrase has rather perplexed our inquirers.

"Strange Ingliss" would seem to apply to certain novelties in diction used by the tale-reciters and harpers, for so our monk tells us,

"I wrote In symple speeche as I couthe, That is _lightest in manne's mouthe_.

I mad (made) nought for no disours (tale-tellers), Ne for no seggers nor harpours, Bot for the luf (love) of symple menu That _strange Inglis_ cann not ken."

It was about this time that the metrical romances, translated from the French, spread in great number, and introduced many exotic phrases. In the celebrated romance of "Alisaundre" we find French expressions, unalloyed by any attempt at Anglicising them, overflowing the page. The phrase is, however, once applied to certain strange metres which our monk avoided, for many "that read English would be confounded by them."

Whatever Robert de Brunne might allude to by his "strange Ingliss,"[9]

the same cry and the identical expressions are repeated by a writer not many years afterwards--RICHARD ROLLE, called "the Hermit of Hampole." He produced the earliest versions of the Psalms into English prose, with a commentary on each verse; and a voluminous poem in ten thousand lines, ent.i.tled "The Prikke of Conscience," translated from the Latin for "the unletterd men of Engelonde who can only understand English." In the prologue to this first Psalter in English prose he says, "I seke no _straunge Ynglyss_, bot _lightest_ and _communest_, and wilk (such) that is most like unto the Latyn; and thos I fine (I find) no proper Inglis I felough (follow) the wit of the words, so that thai that knowes noght (not) the Latyne, be (by) the Ynglys may come to many Latyne wordys."

Here we arrive at open corruption! Already a writer appears refined enough to complain of the poverty of the language in furnis.h.i.+ng "proper Inglis" or synonymes for the Latin; the next step must follow, and that would be in due time the latinising "the Ynglys."

A great curiosity of the genuine homeliness of our national idiom at this time has come down to us in a ma.n.u.script in the Arundel Collection, now in our national library. It is a volume written by a monk of St. Austin's at Canterbury, in the Kentish dialect, about a century and a half after Layamon, and half a century after Robert of Gloucester, in 1340. This honest monk, like others of the Saxon brotherhood, was writing for his humbled countrymen, or, as he expresses himself, with a rude Doric simplicity,

Vor Vader and for Moder and for other Ken.