Secondly: Whatever we may believe as to the extent of the influence exercised by the Danes or Norwegians on any of the provincial dialects, it is certain that the Northmen of both races have left us a large number of local names, extending over the whole ground of their settlements. The most frequent is the word By, "a town," in such names as that of Grimsby, a place whose origin we formerly found to be sought in a Danish legend. Wich or Wic, the same in meaning, is likewise Scandinavian. The word Hustings, and two or three others, are said to be Danish.

Thirdly Many foreign languages have contributed, espepecially in modern times, to make up for us a considerable stock of exotics. Those of each group relate to the history, institutions, or geography, of the country whence they come; and, while it was formerly the fashion among literary men to attempt giving them a native dress, the inclination at present is to leave them unaltered. The matter is too trifling to justify many examples. From Spain and Portugal we have, with change, the names of two kinds of wine: the Persic furnishes the word Turban, and the Arabic (from its learning in the middle ages) such scientific terms as Algebra, alkali, alembic, besides a few names of social distinctions. Of late, also, there have been a good many convenient importations from the native tongues of India, and some undesirable ones from the provincialisms of our kinsmen in the United States.

10. It has already been observed, that the Numerical Proportion of words, considered without regard to their kinds, is a very unsafe test of the comparative importance of the elements constituting a language. But, as a matter of curiosity, it may justify a little inquiry, limited strictly to our mothertongue.

Two questions occur. What proportion of the Anglo-Saxon words have we lost? What proportion to the bulk of Modern English is borne by the Anglo-Saxon words which we have in substance retained?

In answer to the first query, it has been said, on a calculation somewhat rough, that, of the words constituting the language used in Alfred's time, we have dropped about one-fifth. Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary containing from twenty-six to twenty-eight thousand words, between five and six thousand of these are obsolete.*

The Extinct portion contains many Uncompounded Words,

*Edinburgh Review, as before cited.

whose place is supplied from other quarters. But its numbers are swelled by a huge mass of lost Compounds, a fact which it is interesting to remark, though not, at all points, very easy to account for. It shows that the new language, besides speedily acquiring an inaptitude to the making of compounds for itself, gave up very many of those which it inherited from its parent.

Most of the obsolete compounds are embraced in two classes. The first consists of Verbs formed by prefixing prepositions or adverbs to the radical word. Thus the old representatives of our words "Come and Go," brought with them many such words as these: To out-come and out-go; to in-come and in-go; to upcome and up-go; to off-come and off-go; to before-come and before-go. Nearly all such old compounds of these two words are out of use, and have their places filled by words from the French; while, of the few which we still have, there is probably not one that is used otherwise than figuratively.

The second class of compounds (in which, by the way, the modern German is ponderously prolific) united two Substantives, the former of which took an adjectival or genitival meaning. Instances still surviving are such terms as these: Thundercloud, thunderstorm, earthquake, swordbearer. Our vocabulary of art and science has been greatly affected by our abandonment of one group of such words, formed from the Anglo-Saxon name for Art, which is the parent of our modern Craft. Examples are furnished by terms which, in modern English, would be represented by the following: Song-craft, book-craft, star-craft, number-craft, leechcraft. These we have Latinized into Poetry, literature, astronomy, arithmetic, and medicine: and we have named from the same source all the rest of our most ambitious pursuits. Of the ancient family once so flourishing, the sole survivors are Handicraft and Witchcraft; names which were borne up through all the storms of the middle ages by the unceasing interest taken in the things they denote. *

11. The answer to our second query, which relates to the Proportion of Saxon Words retained in our language, may be sought by two methods.

The one leads us to the Dictionaries of Modern English. They are said to contain about thirty-eight thousand words, derivatives

* Woodcraft, if the word is now alive at all, is so only after having been disinterred by Sir Walter Scott. It was not used by the Anglo-Saxons; because they had not, till the Norman times, the thing it signifies. Nor do they seem to have had the word Priestcraft. Saint Dunstan might have given occasion for it; but among the Saxon clergy we read of very few Dunstans.

and compounds included. Of these, we are told, about twentythree thousand come from the Anglo-Saxon, which thus yields a little less than five-eighths of the whole number.

The other test has been applied to the proportions in this way. Passages have been analyzed, from the authorized version of the Scriptures, and from fourteen popular writers, both in prose and verse, of whom the poet Spenser is the earliest, and Samuel Johnson the latest. Of the whole number of words examined, those that are not of Saxon origin make less than one-fifth, leaving more than four-fifths as native. The proportions in the several cases vary widely. The translators of the Bible are by far the purest. An extract from the book of Genesis has, of foreign words, one twenty-sixth; and another from the Gospel of Saint John has one thirty-seventh; the average of the two being one twentyninth. Among the other writers, the extreme places are held by Dean Swift, whose foreign words amount to fewer than one-ninth; and Gibbon the historian, who has considerably more than onethird. *

This somewhat whimsical investigation is not worth prosecuting into our own century. To be really useful, for so much as the groundwork of a general classification of the words in the language, the examples would have to be both copious and many, and the topics treated in the extracts should be very various. As a criterion by which to judge of an author's style, such an analysis is, for many reasons, useless in all cases except such as present extreme peculiarities.

*The particulars may be amusing; though they will perhaps confirm the opinion expressed in the text, that style cannot fairly be tried by such a standard. The whole number of words is 1696, of which the foreign ones are 303. The writers stand thus, in the order of their proportional purity : Translators of Bible, having foreign words, Swift, less than ; Cowley, less than ; Shakspeare, less than ; Milton, full; Spenser, Addison, and the poet Thomson, less than ; Locke and Young, full; Johnson, full ; Robertson, the historian, less than ; Pope, ; Hume, the historian, full ; Gibbon, much more than -The passages examined will be found in Turner's Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. (ed. 1836); the words were counted by the Edinburgh Reviewer before cited; and the proportions have now been reckoned in detail.

SECTION FIRST: SCHOLASTIC AND ECCLESIASTICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLAND.

INTRODUCTION. 1. Impulses affecting Literature-Checks impeding it-The Reforination-State Affairs - Classical Learning. 2. Influence of the Age on the Literature of the Next-Its Social Importance. CLASSICAL LEARNING. 3. Benefits of Printing -Greek and Latin Studies-Eminent Names-THEOLOGY. 4. Translations of the Holy Scriptures-Tyndale's Life and Labours-Coverdale-Rogers-CranmerReigns of Edward the Sixth and Mary-Increase of Printers. 5. Original English Writings in Theology-Their General Character-Ridley-Cranmer-Tyndale's Controversial Treatises-Latimer's Sermons-Character of Latimer's Oratory.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD.

1. THE great frontier-line, between the Literary History of the Middle Ages and that of the times which we distinguish as Modern, lies, for England at least, in the early years of the sixteenth century. Intellect then began to be stirred by impulses altogether new; while others, which had as yet been held in check, were allowed, one after another, to work freely.

Yet there did not take place any sudden or universal meta morphosis, either in literature, or in those phenomena, social, intellectual, and religious, by which its forms and its spirit were determined. No such suddenness or completeness of change is possible. As well might the traveller, in descending southward from the pine-forests and icy peaks of the Alps, hope to find himself transported at once into the orange-groves of Naples, or to see the palms of Sici y waving above his head.

All the influences by which English Literature was thence. forth to be affected, were of such a nature that their operation could not but be slow; and some of them manifested themselves in a fashion, which caused their immediate effects to be very unlike those that might have been expected to flow from them. Both of these things are true.in regard to the Protestant Reformation, the mightiest of the forces which imprinted a new stamp on intellectual activity; and the first of them is true in regard to that new Revival of Classical Learning, which was the second of the predominating literary influences.

The change of faith, a change destined to generate the most beneficial and elevating developments of opinion and sentiment, was yet, through the very earnestness and intensity with which it concentrated the minds of thinking men on theological and ecclesiastical questions, decidedly unfavourable, for a time, to the more imaginative departments of literary exertion. The zeal, again, with which the purest models of Latin literature began anew to be studied, and the enthusiasm, yet keener, which attended the novel studies of our countrymen in the literature of Greece, produced, as it had in Italy not long before, both a dearth of originality and an inattention to the cultivation of the living tongue. Neither Protestant truth and freedom, nor Classical taste and knowledge, could ripen those literary fruits which were their natural offspring, until a process of training had been undergone, for which, in any circumstances, a generation or two would scarcely have been sufficient. But the circumstances which actually occurred, were such as necessarily suspended, for a time yet longer, the salutary operation of the purer and more active of the two influences. The student of history does not require to be reminded, how corruptly prompted, how incomplete and inconsistent in themselves, and how tyrannically and obnoxiously enforced, were the steps by which Henry the Eighth became the instrument of throwing off the yoke of Rome. We all know, likewise, how the short reign of Henry's admirable son was inadequate for enabling him and his advisers to purify thoroughly and found solidly the revolution thus superficial and incomplete; and how it thus became possible for Mary to compel, for a while, formal submission to a church in which few of her subjects now trusted, but whose evil nature still fewer of them knew well enough to be willing to sacrifice life as the penalty of dissent.

2. When, in a word, we reflect on the public events which marked the reigns of those three sovereigns; when we consider, also, that every new kind of knowledge requires to suffer a process of digestion, before it can nourish the mind to healthy strength