& wass wipp hemm till patt he wass

and was with them till that he was

Off prittig winnterr elde. of thirty winters' age. & ure laffdiz Marze toc and our lady Mary took

All patt zho sahh & herrde
all that she saw and heard

Off hire sune Jesu Crist,
of her son Jesus Christ,

& off hiss Goddcunndnesse, and of his Divinity,

& lezzde itt all tosamenn agz
and laid it all together aye

Inn hire pohhtess arrke.
in her thought's ark.

& hire sune wex & praf
And her son waxed and throve
I wissdom & inn elde,

in wisdom and in age,

& he wass Godd & gode menn
and he was (to) God and good men
Well swipe lef & dere;
well very pleasing and dear;

& tatt wass rihht, forr he wass Godd,
and that was right, for he was God,

& god onn alle wise.
and good in all ways.

Her endepp nu piss Goddspell puss
Here endeth now this Gospel thus

& uss birrp itt purrhsekenn,
and us (it) becomes it to through-search,
To lokenn whatt itt lærepp uss

to observe what it teacheth us

Off ure sawle nede.

of our soul's need.

NOTES. I have already stated the general principle of Orm's orthography. There are apparent deviations from his own rules, but these, when not mere accidents, are doubtless explicable as special cases, though we cannot always reconcile them to his usual practice. It will be seen that in words beginning with p, and now pronounced with the th sound, t is often substituted, but this is always done in conformity with

what was doubtless an orthoepical rule. After words ending in d, t, and sometimes ss, þ becomes t, as in the first line of the above extract. There are some exceptions to this rule, but they are not important enough to be noticed. frend, the sign of the plural is here omitted;wass-bilefedd. This corresponds with the German war geblieben;-witt, we-two, dual form;. -whatt wass zuw, what was to you, what had you, what ailed you; -me birrp, the verb is here an impersonal, as ought sometimes was at a later period;-faderr wille, the omission of the possessive sign after words indicative of family relation was very common for at least two centuries after the time of Orm;-zhōt, contraction for zho itt.

188

LECTURE V.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF THE FIRST PERIOD: FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE THIRTEENTH TO THE MIDDLE OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

As I have remarked in a former lecture, the change from Anglo-Saxon and Semi-Saxon to English was so gradual, that the history of the revolution can be divided only by arbitrary epochs; and I have given some reasons for thinking that whatever date we may assign to the formation of the English speech, English literature cannot be regarded as having had a beginning until the English tongue was employed in the expression of the conceptions of a distinctively national genius. This, as we have seen, cannot be said to have taken place until after the middle of the fourteenth century; but the incipient chemical union of Saxon and French was attended with an effervescence which threw off some spirited products, though it must be confessed that most of what is called the English literature of the thirteenth century, when compared with the contemporaneous poetry of Continental Europe, and especially of France, resembles dregs and lees rather than anything more ethereal.

To the grammarian and the etymologist, the history of the transition period, or the larva and chrysalis states, is of interest and importance as necessary to a clear view of the physiology of the English speech; but, both because I aim to exhibit the literary adaptations of the language rather than its genesis

or its linguistic affinities, and because of the extreme difficulty of intelligibly presenting niceties of grammatical form to the ear alone, I attempt nothing beyond a very general statement of the leading facts of this period of English philological history.

We shall have time and space to criticise only the more conspicuous writers and their dialect, and even among these writers I must confine myself to those who were something more than merely products of their age and country. I can notice only two classes, namely, such as are emphatically important witnesses to the state of English philology in their time, and such as contributed by the popularity of their writings and their sympathy with the tendencies of the yet but half-developed nationality which was struggling into existence-to give form and direction to contemporaneous and succeeding literary effort, and are consequently to be regarded, not as examples, results, simply, but as creative influences in English letters.

Of the former class, the most celebrated is the short proclamation issued in the year 1258, in the reign of Henry III., which many English philologists regard as the first specimen of English as contradistinguished from Semi-Saxon.* There is no very good grammatical reason for treating this proclamation as belonging to an essentially different phase of English philology from many earlier writings of the same century; for though it is, in particular points, apparently more modern than

* I suppose the editors of the great English Dictionary now in course of preparation under the auspices of the London Philological Society, consider this state-paper as not English, but Semi-Saxon; for it is not among the monuments enumerated as examined for Coleridge's Glossarial Index to the English literature of the thirteenth century. Short as it is, it contains, besides some variant forms not noticed by Coleridge, these words not found in the Glossarial Index: a, always, aye; aforesaid (toforeniseide); besigte, provision, ordinance; freme, profit, good; fultume, help; moge, nobles [?]; ourself (usselven); redesman, councillor; setness (isetness), law, decree; sign (iseined), verb; worsen (iwersed); worthnesse, honour. We may hence infer that the still unpublished relics of the literature of the thirteenth century will furnish a considerable number of words not yet incorporated into English vocabularies.