LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY. THE subject of the course upon which I am about to enter will be, as nearly as I am able to express it in a comprehensive title, the Origin and History of the English Language, and of the Early Literature it embodies. I shall not notice the works of those natives of England who have written, on domestic as well as on more general topics, in foreign tongues, Latin and French, because those works, though composing a part of the national literature, do not belong to the literature of the English language, which alone is embraced in the plan of the present readings. I confine myself to the history of early English literature for two reasons. The first is the impossibility of surveying, in so short a series of discourses, the whole field of English intellectual action; the second, that the harmonious execution of my purpose - which is to discuss the two branches of the subject, language and literature, with constant reference to their reciprocal influence on each other-excludes those periods when their history had ceased to be concurrent. The English language had already gone through its principal phases when the earliest of the works, which are now collec B tively known to most grammarians, lexicographers, and common readers as the body of English literature, made its appearance. A single epoch witnessed the completion of that organic action by which the English speech was developed from its elements, and the beginning of that one era of English authorship, the products of which still subsist as a consciously-felt and recognised agency in the world of letters. The language had passed the stages of infancy and youth, attained to the ripe perfection of manhood, and thus completed its physiological history, before the existing period of its literature began. In treating the two, then, the speech and its literature, conjointly, I am necessarily limited to the centuries when both were undergoing the successive processes of evolution and growth, and when the progress of each was dependent on that of the other, and conditioned by it. This period extends from a little before the commencement of the reign of Henry III. to the latter years of Queen Elizabeth, and thus embraces not far from four hundred years. During this space, the intellect of England, stirred at once by inborn impulses, and by external influences, had become luxuriantly productive, and was constantly struggling to find articulate symbols and syntactical combinations, wherein to embody and communicate the vivid images, deep thoughts, and earnest aspirations which it had either spontaneously originated, or appropriated from the literatures of ancient or foreign nations, while the language, stimulated to a continually renewed evolution of organic action by the necessities of a regenerated literary, political, social, and commercial life, was gradually expanding into a largeness of capacity, and moulding itself into a fitness of form, to serve as a vehicle for the vast, and varied, and strange conceptions it was now called upon to express. This process, or rather this double series of processes, was completed, as I have said, about the end of the sixteenth century, and our view of the language and its monuments will embrace little which belongs to later dates, except so far as I may incidentally refer to subsequent verbal forms or intellectual products, as results of tendencies already manifested in the English mind and its speech, in the era which we are more particularly considering. The tongue of England and her intellectual culture had now respectively attained to a stage of advancement where neither imperiously demanded new capabilities in the other. The language no longer showed the want of that affluence, and polish, and clearness, and force, which human speech can acquire only by long use as the medium of written composition in the various forms of narrative, imaginative and discursive literature, and, in modern times at least, by the further aid of exposure to the stimulating and modifying influences of the history, and poetry, and philosophy, and grammar, and vocabulary of foreign tongues. The English mind and heart, meanwhile, had been gathering knowledge, and experience, and strength, and catholicity of sympathy, and they were now able to expand to the full dimensions of their growth, gird themselves to their mightiest moral and intellectual efforts, and burst into song, or sermon, or story, or parliamentary or forensic harangue, without fear that the mother-tongue of England would want words to give adequate and melodious expression to their truest feelings, their most solemn convictions, and their loftiest aspirations.* The history of this philological and intellectual progress is the too vast theme of the present course; and if I shall succeed in conveying a general notion of the gradual living processes by which the English tongue and its literature grew up, from the impotent utterance and feeble conceptions of the thirteenth century, to the divine power of expression displayed in Tyndale's version of the New Testament, in the sixteenth, and the revelation of man's moral nature in the dramas of Shakespeare, at the commencement of the seventeenth, I shall have accomplished the task I have undertaken. See Illustration I. at the end of this lecture. The linguistic facts and literary illustrations required for the comprehension of such a sketch will be drawn chiefly from sources familiar indeed to many of the audience, but which do not come within the habitual observation and knowledge of what is called the reading public; but I shall endeavour not to advance theories, employ technical terms, or introduce citations, which will not easily be understood by any person possessed of sufficient literary culture to feel an intelligent interest in the subject. In all inquiries into the history of past ages, whether as respects the material concerns or the intellectual action of men, the question constantly presents itself: what was the inherent worth, or what is the surviving practical importance, of the objects, or the acts, the monuments of which we are investigating?—and hence we must ask: what was the actual significance of that bygone literature, into which, both for its own sake as an interesting chapter in the annals of the human mind, and for the sake of the language, of whose changes it constitutes the only record, we propose to look? The few examples which can be cited will not, of themselves, suffice to convey an adequate conception of the special character, still less of the wealth, of old English literature; but I shall endeavour to illustrate them by such biographical or historical notices as may serve to show their connection with the social and intellectual life of the periods and the people to which they belong, and thus help my hearers to arrive at conclusions for themselves which I may not think it necessary in all cases formally to express. I shall strive thus to invest my subject with a higher philosophical interest than belongs to mere historical grammar, and the considerations which suggest themselves in our survey will, I hope, give some additional incitement to the impulse now beginning to be felt by so many scholars towards the study of the neglected and forgotten authors of ages which want, indeed, the polish and refinement of subsequent centuries, but are, nevertheless, animated and informed with a spontaneous life, a freshness, and vigour, rare in the productions of eras more advanced in artificial culture. A literature which extends through four centuries, and which was successively exposed to the stimulating influences of such radical revolutions in Church and in State, of such important advances in every branch of knowledge, such achievements in fine and industrial art, and such triumphs of human power over physical nature, cannot be described by any one series of epithets, nor, indeed, were its traits always so marked that all its products are recognizable as unmistakably of English growth. But it may be said, in general, that, more than most other equally imaginative literatures, it was practically and visibly connected with the actual social being of man, with his enjoyments and sufferings in this world, and his hopes and fears in reference to another. It was a reflection of the waking life of an earnest, active nation, not, like so much of the contemporaneous expression of Continental genius, a magic mirror showing forth the unsubstantial dreams of an idle, luxurious, and fantastic people. The eminently practical character of old English literature is due, in a considerable degree, to the political condition of the English government. The insular position of England made that kingdom, from the beginning, more than any other European state, independent of the international combinations which, in a great degree, controlled the destiny and moulded the institutions and characters of the Continental peoples, and this isolation of the government was felt and shared by the nation. It entered into the English heart, and has, in all the best periods of English literature, constituted a marked and peculiar characteristic of its genius. While the writers of most other European countries have had their periods and their schools, when now classic, now romantic, now Gallic, and now Gothic influences predominated, and stamped with a special character, not merely the works of individual authors, but the entire literary effort of the time, the literature of England has never |