been expounded by Mr Kemble and by Mr Garnett in several papers read before the Philological Society in 1844 and 1845, and printed in the second volume of the Society's Proceedings.

Although the Gothic conquerors of Britain were collectively called Saxons by the Celts whom they dispossessed (that having been the name by which the latter had been accustomed to know the persevering enemies from the opposite continent by whom their coasts had been so long assailed), they and their language were commonly called English, that is, Anglian, by themselves, and the country England, or the land of the Angles. This, it has been argued, would seem to indicate that the said language was probably first employed in literature, not by the Saxons Proper of the south, but by the Angles of the north. Even the political supremacy which was at last acquired by the former never was able to obliterate the appellations bestowed upon the nation and upon the language by or with reference to the latter, any more than the Language spoken by the Romans ever ceased to be called Latin, either by themselves or others.

But

The head district of the Angles, as distinct from the Saxons, in Britain was the Kingdom of Northumbria, which in its full extent stretched from the Humber to the Frith of Forth, and included the modern counties of Northumberland, Durham, and York, with at least the eastern parts of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire, besides all the south-east of Scotland. East Anglia, comprehending modern Norfolk and Suffolk, with Cambridgeshire and a part of Bedfordshire, was also, as its name implies, an Anglian kingdom. So was Mercia in the main. Now these parts of the island, which had been taken possession of by the Angles in the sixth century, were also those that fell under the power of the

Danish invaders of the ninth century, and in which they settled in considerable numbers. The Danelagh, as the range of country in question came to be called from the time of Guthrun's treaty with Alfred the Great (in 878), appears to have comprehended all East Anglia and the greater portion of Mercia and Northumbria. The remarkable circumstance of the Danes having thus seated themselves exclusively in the Anglian districts cannot but awaken a suspicion that they found in the Angles a race more nearly related to themselves in blood and in language than the Saxons were.

Specimens of the Anglian dialect of Northumbria have come down to us, extending certainly from the close, possibly from the commencement, of the seventh century to the latter part of the tenth, and therefore embracing a considerable period both before and after the Danish invasion. Mr Kemble arranges them in three classes: the first, consisting of a few inscriptions upon stones, mostly in runic characters, and of "uncertain, but probably very great, antiquity;" the second, consisting of proper names found upon coins; the third and most important, of literary compositions. Of these last the principal are, a translation of the Psalms in one of the Cotton Manuscripts, which has been conjectured to be possibly as old as the beginning of the seventh century; a fragment of verse attributed to the poet Caedmon, which, if it be genuine, must be of the latter half of that century; a hymn composed on his death-bed by Beda, who died in the year 735; and two works which appear to belong to the latter part of the tenth century, the one known as the Durham Ritual, the other a Gloss, or literal interlined translation, of the Latin Gospels, in what is called St Cuthbert's or the Durham Book.

This succession of specimens of the Anglian dialect,

examined in chronological order, appears to afford evidence that the dialect, after the Danish occupation, gradually underwent certain changes which would be accounted for by the supposition of its having been subjected to the action of a Scandinavian element or influence.

The most remarkable of these changes is that of the proper termination of the infinitive an into the old Norse termination a. The form a, or e, appears in two or three instances in one of the stone inscriptions, that on the Ruthwell Cross, which Mr Kemble, by whom it was first deciphered and explained, conjectures to be probably of the ninth century; but in the Durham Ritual and in St Cuthbert's Book, which are both of the latter part of the tenth century, the new infinitive in a is used in all verbs, with the exception only of the substantive verb, bian, to be.

Mr Garnett further adduces, in support of this theory of the gradually increased Scandinavianisation of the Anglian dialect under the contagion of that of the Danish settlers, the evidence afforded by certain specimens of the Northumbrian English of the fourteenth century, and also various peculiar forms and vocables still retained in the speech of the northern counties.

The topographical nomenclature of the country occupied by the Danes is to this day partially Scandinavian. It is known historically, indeed, that they gave their present names to the towns of Derby and Whitby, the terminating syllable of which is the Norse form of the word for a town (otherwise wic, or wich, as in many English names, or vic, as in the Latin vic-us), and the same which makes part of the compound bye-laws (properly the laws of the town as distinguished from the general laws of the realm).

In the twelfth century Giraldus Cambrensis, and in the thirteenth John of Wallingford, speak of both the

population and the language of the northern parts of England as still bearing manifest traces of a Danish origin. And in the middle of the fourteenth century Higden, after having mentioned the mixture of the original English, first with the Danes, and then with the Normans, adds, that the whole speech of the Northumbrians, especially in Yorkshire, was so harsh and rude that the southern men, of whom he himself was one, could hardly understand it.

It is generally admitted that, whatever may be the case with the standard English, several of its provincial dialects still exhibit more or less of a Danish or Scandinavian element. Dr Latham (English Language, third edit. pp. 551, &c.), while he regards the Lowland Scotch as being "probably more Danish than any South British dialect," describes the Danish admixture as very great in the dialect of Northumberland, as considerable in the dialects of the North and part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, at its minimum in those of Shropshire, Staffordshire, and West Derbyshire; the language of Lincolnshire he characterises as only "not Danish in proportion to the other signs of Scandinavian intermixture to be found in the district, such as the prevalence of the Danish termination by in the names of towns, the Danish traditions, and the Danish physiognomy of the people;" and the language of the old metrical romance of "Havelok the Dane," the subject of which is a Lincolnshire tradition, he declares to be "preeminently Danish."

Mr Guest, nevertheless (English Rhythms, ii. 186-207), finds traces of Danish "neither in our MSS. nor in our dialects." He admits, indeed, that there may possibly be something of the kind in the language of certain parts of the British islands which were "wholly peopled with Northmen-as the Orkneys, Caithness, and much of the

eastern coast north of Forth;" but, as for the vestiges of Dano-English commonly produced, he observes that "these may be found in districts where the Northman never settled, and are missing from counties where he certainly did; " and he argues that the peculiarities which have always distinguished northern from southern English are to be sufficiently accounted for by the fact of the Angles having, before they left the continent, been the neighbours of the Danes. At the same time he holds that the language brought over by the Danes who settled in the country in the ninth century cannot have differed very much from English-that it must have been "little more than an English dialect." But is this likely after a separation of more than three centuries, even if the two languages had been previously ever so nearly related?

In an article on the "Saxon Language and Literature” in the Penny Cyclopædia (published in 1841), Mr Guest refers to the Gloss in St. Cuthbert's Book and to the Durham Ritual as furnishing the strongest of all the arguments against the supposed influence of the language of the Danish settlers, inasmuch, he observes, as we have all the peculiarities of the northern dialect in every page of the Gloss, and in many parts of the Ritual, although both were written before the Danish settlement took place. But, as we have seen, so far is this last assumption from being established that the Gloss and the Ritual are both assigned by others to the latter part of the tenth century. This is the judgment, not only of Mr Garnett and Mr Kemble, but also, at least as to the Ritual, of Dr Latham (English Language, 549). Nor is the Ritual assigned by its editor (Mr Stevenson), as Mr Guest supposes, to the early part of the ninth century; Mr Stevenson only expresses an opinion that no part of the writing can be older than the commencement of that century. The Gloss,