the summit of a pyramid he did not climb, I think no traveller looks on the record of a visit to one of the tombs of the Egyptian kings by an ancient Greek-who expresses his disappointment at finding nothing to admire, ἐι μή τὸν λίθον — or at the inscription rudely cut on the legs of a gigantic statue at the entrance of the great rock-temple of Abou Simbel, to commemorate the halt of a detachment of Roman soldiery sent up into Nubia in search of deserters- or even at the bare name which, three hundred years ago, the old herbalist, Belon, scratched with the point of his dagger on the smoky wall of a convent kitchen, now in ruins, in Arabia Petræa-without feeling that he has added to his stores of knowledge both a historical fact and a 'form of words,' which will adhere to his memory when many an eloquent phrase shall have vanished from it. THE LECTURE X. ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY TO THE TIME OF CAXTON. WHEN the political and mental agitations of the fourteenth century which had been, if not occasioned, at least greatly increased by the antipapal schism had once subsided, the intellectual activity of the age of Langlande and Wycliffe and Chaucer suddenly ceased, and was followed by a long period of repose, or perhaps I might rather say, of lethargy. The literary monuments we possess of the early part of the fifteenth century exhibit few traces of original power. In some of them, even the language seems to have rather retrograded than advanced; nor did it manifest much substantial progress, until the new life, which the invention of printing infused into literature, made itself felt in England. The English mind, brilliant as were its achievements in the era we have just passed over, was not yet so thoroughly roused and enlivened, that it was able to go on in the path of creative literature by its own inherent energies. It still required external impulse; and it was only by the succession of electric shocks it received from the four greatest events in modern history, which so rapidly followed each other - the invention of printing, the discovery of the passage around the Cape of Good Hope, and of the American continent, and the Reformation—that it was fully awakened and inspired with that undying energy which, for three hundred years, has filled the world with its renown. The first important poetical writer of the fifteenth century, whose works have come down to us, is Thomas Occleve, a lawyer, who is supposed to have flourished about the year 1420. Most of his works exist only in manuscript, and those that have been printed are not of a character to inspire a very lively desire for the publication of the remainder. They are principally didactic, and in great part translations, the most important of them being a treatise on the Art of Government, taken principally from a Latin work of Egidius, a Roman writer of the thirteenth century. The diction of Occleve is modelled after that of Chaucer, of whom he professes to have been a pupil, but there are some grammatical differences, the most noticeable of them being the constant omission of the n final in the infinitive mood, and in the third person plural of the verbs. This, though not uncommon, was but of occasional, or at least of very irregular occurrence in the preceding century. I can find nothing better worthy of citation from this author than his lamentation upon Chaucer, which Warton gives from an unpublished manuscript: But weleawaye, so is myne hertè wo, That the honour of English tonge is dede, Of which I wont was han counsel and rede! O mayster dere, and fadir reverent, O universal fadir in science, Alas, that thou thine excellent prudence What eyled Deth? Alas why would he sle the! That is to all this lond enlumyning. The versification of this extract is interesting as showing that the e final, which seems to have become silent soon after, was still pronounced in Occleve's time, at least in poetry, as it had been in Chaucer's; for bequeath, spelt bequethe, is made to rhyme to sle the In thy bed mortel mightest not bequethé! What eyled Deth? Alas why would he sle the? The e final, which is mute in prose, is still counted in French versification, and not unfrequently requires a prosodical accent, though in actual reading of poetry, it is not much dwelt upon. That it was once normally articulated in prose, in both English and French, there can be no doubt. At what period it became silent in either, it is difficult to determine, partly because orthography seldom accurately represents orthoepy, and partly because the change, like other orthoepical and grammatical revolutions, came in gradually, and locally, so that while one province or writer in a given century may have dropped the e, another may have retained it many years later. The cause of the loss of this articulation is the same in both languages, namely, the tendency of both to discard inflectional syllables a tendency much aggravated in English by the confusion introduced into its grammar through a mixture of unrelated tongues discordant in their accidences. Changes of this sort are not received in literature until they have been long established in speech, and the fact, that in French poetry the e final still counts as a syllable, while it has been null in English verse for certainly three centuries, would seem to imply that it continued to be colloquially pronounced in France much longer than in England. Contemporaneously with Occleve lived James I. of Scotland, who was illegally seized, in his early childhood,* by Henry IV. There is a good deal of discrepancy among the authorities as to the date of King James's capture- or rather as to his age at the time-and the duration of his imprisonment. In the third and fifth stanzas of the second canto of the King's Quair, the king himself says that he was taken prisoner at the age of of England in the year 1405, and kept for nearly twenty years a prisoner. His captor caused him to be well educated, and besides several pieces written, as it is said, unequivocally in the Scottish dialect- the criticism of which does not come within the plan of this course he wrote, in English, as it seems, a poem in about fourteen hundred lines, called the King's Quair, or book. This is a eulogistic rhapsody on the Lady Jane Beau three, and in the sixth stanza of the same canto, he states that he had already been imprisoned eighteen years, when he first saw his mistress: III. Not far passit the state of innocence But nere about the nowmer of zeiris thre, Of Goddis will, or other casualtee, V. Upon the wevis weltring to and fro, So infortunate was we that fremyt day, We weren all, and bro' in thaire contree, VI. Quhare as in strayte ward, and in strong prison, Wtout confort in sorowe, abandoune The secund sistere, lukit hath to tuyne, Nere, by the space of zeris twice nyne, Till Jupiter his merci list advert, And send confort in relesche of my smert. In Holinshed's History of Scotland, reprint of 1808, vol. vi. p. 407, it is said: 'taken he was in the ninth yeare of his age, the 33 (sic) day of March, in the yeare of our incarnacion 1406, and was kept in captivitie of the Englishmen by the space of eightéene yeares.' On page 426, the king is said to have been murdered on the 21 of February 1436, in the 44 yéere of his age,' If King James was forty-three years old in 1436, he must have been more than eight in 1406, and upon the whole I think it safer to follow King James's own chronology than that of historical compilers. |