love, while early English writers said: I love, but we loven, you loven, they loven.

In modern French, and there is every reason to believe in Old Norman-French also, the three persons of the singular and the third person of the plural of the verb, though the latter has an additional syllable in writing, are pronounced alike, the terminal syllable being silent in speech; for the plural aiment is pronounced aime, just like the singular, aime. Of the six persons, singular and plural, the French pronounce four alike, rejecting the plural ending ent altogether, and this fact probably contributed to facilitate the dropping of the new English plural ending in en, which did not long remain in

use.

Another new form of expression first exemplified, so far as I know, in the thirteenth century, is the use of the plural pronoun instead of the singular, in addressing a single person. I do not observe this use of the pronoun in contemporaneous French, nor in any of the Northern Gothic languages, but it was already common in Dutch, and it is possible that the English borrowed it from that source. Not many English words or forms are derived from the Dutch, but Chaucer quotes a Flemish proverb, and one of the words occurring in it, quad or qued, bad, evil, is found in the Owl and Nightingale, the Surtees Psalter, as well as in other early English writers. Bidine, too, common in old ballads, occurs in the Surtees Psalter.* These words are not AngloSaxon, and as they were probably taken from the Dutch, other words and forms may have been received from the same language.

But though the plural pronoun was thus early applied to single persons, the complete separation of the two, and the confinement of the singular thou to the religious dialect, are very much later. They seem to have been employed indiscriminately for several centuries, and in the Morte d'Arthur, printed in 1485, thou and you, thy and your are constantly occurring in the same sentence, and addressed to one and the same person.

* Huydecoper, in his Breedere aantekeningen op Melis Stoke, I., 227, examines the etymology of bideen at considerable length. It is a compound of the particle by and the demonstrative pronoun: by dien, the primitive meaning being, thereby, thereupon, and hence, immediately.

LECTURE VI.

COMMENCEMENT OF SECOND PERIOD:

FROM 1350 TO THE

TIME OF THE AUTHOR OF PIERS PLOUGHIMAN.

We are now to enter on a new philological and literary era, an era in which English genius first acquired a self-conscious individuality, and the English language and its literature disentangled themselves from the confusion in which the conflicting authority of Saxon precedent and French example had involved them. In this second period, the speech of England became, no longer an ill-assorted mixture of discordant ingredients, but an organic combination of well assimilated, though heterogeneous elements, animated by a law of life, and endowed with a vigour of constitution which has given it a luxuriant youth and a healthful manhood, and still promises it a length of days as great, an expansion as wide, as have fallen to the lot of any of the tongues of man.

Considering English, then, as primarily and radically a Gothic speech, invested with a new aspect, and inspired with a new life by Romance influences-just as animals are so modified, in habits, instincts, size and specific characteristics, by changes of nutriment, climate, and other outward circumstances, that the unscientific observer hesitates to recognise them as still belonging to the primitive stock - let us inquire for a moment into the nature of the action by which external forces could produce such important revolutions.

There are two principal modes in which foreign conquest and foreign influence affect language. The first and most

obvious is, by the introduction of foreign words, idioms, and grammatical forms, which may be carried far without any very appreciable effect upon the radical character of the language, or upon the spirit of the people who use it. The other is the more slowly and obscurely manifested action of new institutions, laws, and opinions upon the intellectual constitution and habits of thought of the people, and, indirectly, upon the logical structure of the language as the vehicle of the expression of the national mind and character.

We should suppose, à priori, that the first influence of a cultivated language, employed by a conquering people, upon the less advanced speech of a ruder subject race, would be to denationalize its vocabulary by the introduction of a large number of foreign words, and that syntactical changes would be slower in finding their way into the grammar; but the history of the modern languages known in literature seems to show that this is not universally the case.

I have already mentioned the curious inversion of periodic arrangement which the Turkish has produced in the modern Armenian, without much affecting the vocabulary; and I have given reasons for believing that both Meso-Gothic and AngloSaxon were influenced, in certain points of their grammar, by Greek and Latin syntax. The Gothic languages, which seem to have modified the structure of the Romance dialects, have not bestowed upon them any very large proportion of Northern words; and though the syntax of the native speech of England underwent important changes between the Norman Conquest and the close of the period we have just dismissed, yet the number of Romance words which had been naturalized in England was, thus far, by no means considerable. As has been before observed, the whole number of Greek, Latin, and French words found in the printed English authors of the thirteenth century, even including those which Anglo-Saxon had borrowed from the nomenclature of theology and ethics, scarcely exceeds one

thousand, or one eighth part of the total vocabulary of that era; and in the actual diction of any one English writer of the period in question, not above one word in twenty or twentyfive is of Latin or Romance derivation.

But while these influences were so slow and so gradual in their operation on the lexical character of English, moral causes were at work, which, at the critical moment, gave new energy to the assimilative power of the English tongue, and when the craving for a more generous intellectual diet was distinctly felt, and larger facilities were demanded, English suddenly enriched itself by a great accession of Latin and Romance words. It is a remarkable fact, as we shall see more fully hereafter, that at the very moment when it was naturalizing this foreign element with the greatest rapidity, it asserted most energetically its grammatical independence, and manifested a tendency to the revival of Anglo-Saxon syntactical forms which had become well-nigh obsolete.

Hitherto, change had been principally in the way of disorganization, decomposition, but when the inhabitants of England no longer consisted of a corporation of foreign lords and a herd of aboriginal serfs, when a community of interest had grown up between the native and the stranger, and mutual sympathies were born, then a new, heroic and genial nationality sprang into being, revived the sparks that yet slumbered in the ashes of departed Saxondom, and fed them with a fuel borrowed alike from the half-forgotten stores of native growth and from the more abundant products of sunny and luxuriant France.

Romance words and forms had been imposed by foreign authority upon a reluctant and unreceptive speech, the sufficient medium of communication for a people too rude and uncultivated to feel its own debasement, and to know the extent of its own intellectual deficiencies; but when revived, or rather newborn, England awakened to a consciousness of the wants which make themselves so imperiously felt, whenever a new national

life is developed, it proceeded to supply those wants by the summariest methods, from all accessible sources.

Thenceforward, to use the comparison of St. Jerome, it seized and appropriated foreign words as a conqueror,- no longer unwillingly received and bore than as a badge of servitude to an alien yoke.

English, as distinguished from Anglo-Saxon, thus far can hardly be said to have gained other than a negative existence, for it had lost the formal characteristics of the old speech, and had not yet acquired the shape or spirit of the new. The spoken and written dialect was but a corrupted and denaturalized jargon, or rather congeries of jargons, for every district had its local patois which was broadly distinguished from the speech of other shires. The necessities of social and political life, indeed, compelled the occasional employment of these native dialects in written communication, by persons whose scholastic training was Latin or French; but until the close of the thirteenth century, there was no indigenous public which possessed a written vernacular, to any such extent as to be accessible to literary influences. For all the purposes of common national culture, therefore, English may be regarded as still unwritten.

I have before remarked that the popular ballads, which existed in local dialects, did not constitute a literature, and that England had no peculiar literature of her own till after the middle of the fourteenth century. The mass of those who spoke the native tongue, of those who listened to, and even those who composed, the popular ballads, were, in all probability, wholly ignorant of letters, and for them English existed only as a spoken language. The traditions and the legends, the ballads and the war-songs, which float from mouth to mouth, in any unwritten speech, cannot constitute a literature, for they cannot exist in fixed and permanent forms. In the retentive memory of the humblest class of bards and narrators,