remote period, perhaps long anterior to the invasion of Julius Cæsar; and even in those parts of the country which have been successively occupied by very different races, many appellations of pure Celtic antiquity have survived the inundations of new peoples, and may still be marked, like ́some venerable Druidical cromlech, standing in hoar mysterious age in the midst of a more recent civilization. Thus the termination "don" is in some instances the Celtic word "dun," a rock or natural fortress. Again, the termination "caster" or chester" is unquestionably a monument of the Roman occupation of the island, indicating the spot of a Roman " castrum or fortified post.*

§ 4. The true foundations of the English laws, language, and national character were laid, between the middle of the fifth and the middle of the six centuries, deep in the solid granite of Teutonic antiquity. The piratical adventurers whom the old German passion for plunder and glory, and also, perhaps, the entreaties of the "miserable Britons," allured across the North Sea from the bleak shores of their native Jutland, Schleswig, Holstein, and the coasts of the Baltic, were the most fearless navigators and the most redoubted sea-kings of those ages. On their arrival in Britain, concerning which the early chronicles are filled with vague and picturesque legends, like that of Hengist and Horsa, these rovers were in every respect savages, though their rugged energetic Teuton nature, so admirably sketched by Tacitus at a preceding period, offered a rich and fertile soil capable of being developed by Christianity and civilization into a noble type of national character. Successive bands of the same race, attracted by the reports of their predecessors respecting the superiority of the new settlement over their own barren and perhaps over-peopled father-land, gradually established themselves in those parts of Britain which the Romans had occupied before them. But the same causes which prevented the Romans from penetrating into the mountainous districts of Wales and Scotland, continued to exclude the Saxons also from those inaccessible fastnesses. Gradually, and after sanguinary conflicts, they succeeded, as the armies of Rome had done before, in driving back into these regions the wild Celtic populations which had descended thence with the hope of reconquering their inheritance; and this historical fact receives confirmation from the circumstance that the present inhabitants of these mountain regions are in the present day of pure Celtic blood, retaining the language of their British ancestors, and forming a race as completely distinct from the English people properly so called, as the Finn or the Lett, for example, from the Slavonic occupier of the land of his forefathers. The level, and consequently more easily accessible, portion of Scotland was gradually peopled by the AngloSaxon race; and their language and institutions were established there as completely as in South Britain itself. This fact alone ought to be

*In the same way some other Latin words appear in other names of places; as strata, "paved roads," in Strat-ford, Stret-ton; colonia, in Lin-coln; port-us, in Ports-mouth, &c.

sufficient to destroy the prejudice, so common not only among foreigners, but even among Englishmen, of regarding all the inhabitants of Scotland as Celts alike; of representing William Wallace, for instance, in a Highland kilt — a mistake as ludicrous as would be that of painting Washington armed with a tomahawk, or adorned, like a Cherokee chief, with a belt of scalps or a girdle of wampum. It is probable that even the half-Romanized Britons who first invited the Saxon tribes to come to their assistance were speedily involved by their dangerous allies in the same persecution as their savage mountain countrymen: at all events one fact is certain, that the Celt in general, whether friendly or hostile, possessing a less powerful organization and a less vigorous moral constitution than the Teuton, was in the course of time either quietly absorbed into the more energetic race, or gradually disappeared, with that fatal certainty which seems to be an inevitable law regulating the contact of two unequal nationalities, just as the aboriginal Indian has disappeared before the descendants of the very same Anglo-Saxons in the New World. It is only a peculiar combination of geographical conditions that has enabled the primeval Celt to retain a separate existence on the territory of Great Britain, while the predominance numerical predominance only- of the Celtic race in the population of Ireland may be traced to other, but no less exceptional causes.

a

§ 5. The true parentage, therefore, of the English nation, is to be traced to the Teutonic race. The language spoken by the Northern invaders was a Low-Germanic dialect, akin to the modern Dutch, but with many Scandinavian forms and words. Like the people who spoke it, it was possessed of a character at once practical and imaginative; at once real and ideal; and required but the influence of civilization to become a noble vehicle for reasoning, for eloquence, and for the expression of the social and domestic feelings. In the modern English, all ideas which address themselves to the emotions, and all those which bring man into relation with the great objects of nature and with the sentiments of simple existence, will be invariably found to derive their linguistic representatives directly from the Teutonic tongue. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity, which took place in the sixth century, brought them into contact with more intellectual forms of life, and with a higher type of civilization: the transfer of their religious allegiance from Thor, Woden, Tuisk, and Freya to the Saviour, while it softened their manners, exposed their language to the modifying influences of the corrupt but more civilized Latin literature of the Lower Empire, and gave rapid proof how improvable a tongue was that in which they had hitherto produced nothing, probably, but rude war-songs and sagas like that of Beowulf. A very varied and extensive literature soon arose among the Anglo-Saxons, embracing compositions on almost every branch of knowledge, law, historical chronicles, ecclesiastical and theological disquisitions, together with a large body of poetry in which their very peculiar metrical system was adapted to subjects derived either from the Scriptures, or from the mediæval lives of the saints. The curious, but rather tedious, versified

paraphrase of the Bible by Cædmon generally attributed to the middle of the seventh century - was long considered to be one of the most ancient among the more considerable Saxon poems; but the discovery, at Copenhagen, of the Lay of Beowulf, to which we have just alluded, has furnished us with a specimen of Anglo-Saxon poetry decidedly more ancient, as well as far more interesting; inasmuch as, having been composed in all probability at a period anterior to the general conversion of the race to Christianity, it is free from any traces of that imitation of the rhetorical style of the lower Latinity which prevents Cædmon from being a good representative of the national literature of his race. This poem, the picturesque vigor of which gives it a right to be placed among the most interesting monuments of early literature, is not inferior in energy and conciseness to the Nibelungen-Lied, though undeniably so in extent of plot and development of character. The subject is the expedition of Prince Beowulf, a lineal descendant of Woden, from England to Norway, on the adventure of delivering the king of the latter country from a kind of demon or monster which secretly enters the royal hall at midnight, and destroys some of the warriors who are sleeping there. This monster, called in the poem the Grendel, is probably nothing but the poetical personification of some dangerous exhalations from a marsh, for it is represented as issuing from a neighboring swamp, and as taking a refuge in the same abode, when, after a furious combat, Beowulf succeeds in driving it back, together with another evil spirit, into the gloomy abyss. The description of the voyage of Beowulf in his "foamy-necked" ship along the "swan-path" of the ocean, of his arrival at the Norwegian court, and his narrative of his own exploits, are in a very similar style to the ancient Scandinavian Sagas. The versification of this, as well as of all Saxon poetry in general, is exceedingly peculiar; and the system upon which it is constructed for a long time defied the ingenuity of philologists. The Anglo-Saxons based their verse not upon any regular recurrence of syllables, accented and unaccented, or regarded, as among the Greeks and Romans, as long or short; still less upon the employment of similarly sounding terminations of lines or parts of lines, that is, upon what we call rhyme. With them it was sufficient to constitute verse, that in any two successive lines — which might be of any length there should be at least three words beginning with the same letter. This very peculiar metrical system is called alliteration.*

The language in which these works are composed is usually called Anglo-Saxon; but in the works themselves it is always styled English, and the country England, or the land of the Angles. The term AngloSaxon, is meant to distinguish the Saxons of England from the Saxons of the Continent, and does not signify the Angles and Saxons. But why English became the exclusive appellation of the language spoken by the Saxons as well as the Angles, is not altogether clear. It has

*For a fuller account of Anglo-Saxon literature, see Notes and Illustrations (A).

been supposed by some writers that the Saxons were only a section of the Angles, and consequently that the latter name was always recognized among the Angles and Saxons as the proper national appellation. Another hypothesis is, that, as the new inhabitants of the island became first known to the Roman see through the Anglian captives who were carried to Rome in the sixth century, the name of this tribe was given by the Romans to the whole people, and that the Christian missionaries to Britain would naturally continue to employ this name as the appellation both of the people and the country.* Some modern writers have proposed to discard the term Anglo-Saxon altogether, and employ English as the name of the language, from the earliest date to the present day. But, as has been already observed in a previous work of the present series, "a change of nomenclature like this would expose us to the inconvenience, not merely of embracing within one designation objects which have been conventionally separated, but of confounding things logically distinct: for, though our modern English is built upon and mainly derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the two dialects are now so discrepant, that the fullest knowledge of one would not alone suffice to render the other intelligible to either the eye or the ear." For all practical purposes, they are two separate languages, as different from one another as the Italian from the Latin, or the present English from the German.

For a long period the Saxon colonization of Britain was carried on by detached Teutonic tribes, who established themselves in such portions of territory as they found vacant, or from which they ousted less warlike occupants; and in this way there gradually arose a number of separate and independent states or kingdoms. This epoch of our history is generally denominated the Heptarchy, or Seven Kingdoms, the names of the principal of which may still be traced in the appellations of our modern shires, as Essex and Northumberland. As might easily have been foreseen, one of these tribes or kingdoms, growing gradually more powerful, at last absorbed the others. This important event took place in the ninth century, in the reign of Egbert, from which period to the middle of the eleventh century, when there occurred the third great invasion and change of sovereignty to which the country was destined, the history of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy presents a confused and melancholy picture of bloody incursions and fierce resistance to the barbarous and pagan Danes, who endeavored to treat the Saxons as the Saxons had treated the Celts. The only brilliant figure in this period is the almost perfect type of a patriot warrior, king, and philosopher, in the person of the illustrious Alfred; whose virtues

*For further particulars see the "Student's Manual of the English Language," pp. 14, 15. It is there shown that the common account of the imposition of the name of England upon the country by a decree of King Egbert, is unsupported by any contemporaneous or credible testimony; and that the title of Angliæ or Anglorum Rex, is much more naturally explained by the supposition that England and English had been already adopted as the collective names of the country and its inhabitants.

would appear to posterity almost fabulous, were they not handed down in the minute and accurate records of a biographer who knew and served him well. The two fierce races, so obstinately contending for mastery, were too nearly allied in origin and blood for their amalgamation to have produced any very material change in the language or institutions of the country. In those parts of England, principally in the North and East, as in some of the maritime regions of Scotland, where colonies of Danes established themselves, either by conquest or by settlement, the curious philologist may trace, in the idiom of the peasantry and still more clearly in the names of families and places, evident marks of a Scandinavian instead of an Anglo-Saxon population. As examples of this we may cite the now immortal name of Havelock, derived from a famous sea-king of the same name, who is said to have founded the ancient town of Whitby, the latter being the Scandinavian Hvitby. As to memorials of the Saxons, preserved in the names of men, families, or places, or in the less imperishable monuments of architecture, they are so numerous that there is hardly a locality in the whole extent of England where a majority of the names is not pure and unaltered Saxon; the whole mass of the middle and lower classes of the population bears unmistakable marks of pure Saxon blood: and the sound and sterling vigor of the popular language is so essentially Saxon, that it requires but the re-establishment of the now obsolete inflections of the Anglian grammar, and the substitution of a few Teutonic words for their French equivalents, to recompose an English book into the idiom spoken in the days of

Alfred.

§ 6. It would be, however, an error to suppose that all the words of Latin origin found even in the earlier period of the English language were introduced after the introduction into England of the NormanFrench element; that is to say, after the conquest of the country by William in the eleventh century. For a long time previous to that event the cultivation of the Latin literature in the monasteries and among the learned, as well as the employment of the Latin language in the services of the Church, must have tended to incorporate with the Saxon tongue a considerable number of Latin words. Alfred, we know, visited Rome in his youth, acquired there a considerable portion of the learning which he unquestionably possessed, and exhibited his patriotic care for the enlightenment of his countrymen by translating into Saxon the "Consolations" of Boëthius. The Venerable Bede, and other Saxon ecclesiastics, composed chronicles and legends in Latin, and we may therefore conclude that, though the sturdy Teutonic nationality of the Anglo-Saxon language guarded it from being corrupted by any overwhelming admixture of Latin, yet a considerable influx of Latin words may have become perceptible in it before the appearance of Normans on our shores. It is also to be remarked that the superior civilization of the French race must have exerted an influence on at least the aristocratic classes; and the family connections between the last Saxon dynasty and the neighboring dukes of Normandy, of which