classic Original English (or Saxon) was simply the neglect of that language on the part of the Romish Churchmen, and the preference they were led to give, for literary purposes, to the Latin. But how was it that this cause did not begin to operate till the twelfth century? In England, as elsewhere, Latin had been the professional language of the clergy from the first introduction of Christianity, and had been all along the language in which they usually wrote: witness Beda, Nennius, Asser, and others who lived before the Conquest. Why did not the corruption of the regular into the irregular English, if this was the sole cause of it, take place in the eighth or ninth century?

We venture to think that our recent philology has gone much too far in denying all connexion between the breaking up of the inflectional system of the native language and the Norman Conquest. The view which formerly prevailed was erroneous in regard to the modus operandi, or manner in which it was supposed that the effect was produced; it must be admitted that it was not by the Conquest letting in a new language to destroy the purity of the old one by intermixing with it, or to drench it and dissolve its cohesion like an inundation. But that it was really this great political and social revolution which occasioned, though in another way, the extinction, or disuse as a living tongue, of the ancient language of the country in the form in which we have it preserved in the literary works and other writings that have come down to us from the times before the Conquest, seems too evident to admit of being seriously questioned. The facts are only to be explained upon that assumption. There is no similarity between this case and that of the other Germanic and Scandinavian languages which are asserted to have passed

from a highly inflected to a comparatively uninflected state; even if it could be admitted to have been clearly shown that the dissolution or derangement of the original inflectional structure of the other Low Germanic and Scandinavian tongues which have been referred to had been always a purely spontaneous process. The peculiarity of the case of the English is, that it had been highly cultivated and largely employed as a literary language. It may be safely affirmed that no instance can be produced of a language so circumstanced which can be shown to have undergone anything like the same complete and rapid disintegration or metamorphosis except under the operation of external causes. Although the principle of change is continually at work in language, as in everything else that is not absolutely dead (as if movement and life were one), its action is always extremely gradual and slow where it has to contend with the conservative force of a living literature. The Latin language preserved its grammatical structure in complete integrity so long as it continued to be employed as the literary language of the West; the Greek did the same for a thousand years longer, while it occupied a similar position in the East; and there seems to be no reason for thinking that either might not have done so to the present day. It was evidently only the overthrow of the Western Roman empire and of western civilisation that occasioned the extinction of the old grammatical Latin as a living language; and the destruction of the Christian civilisation of the East when Constantinople was conquered and taken possession of by the Turks that brought the old Greek in like manner to an end. The stream of the Latin literature, in the one case, after having flowed on for some eight centuries from the date of the poets Livius Andronicus and Cneius Nævius, ceased with Boethius and Cassiodorus; that of

the Greek, in the other, was as suddenly arrested after an existence three times as long. And, in both cases, with the literature the literary language expired. Precisely in the same circumstances and in the same way the old grammatical English appears to have passed out of existence or use. The Conquest of England by the Normans overthrew the peculiar civilisation of which it was at once the creation and the exponent, and the entire social system and condition of things to which it addressed itself and by which it was fed and sustained; after the Conquest there was no demand for any literature written in the old language, or any public to read it, any more than there remained any public in Italy after the middle of the sixth century sufficiently educated to appreciate works written in good Latin and to stimulate their production, or any educated and wealthy Greek public in Eastern Europe after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks. In all the three cases we have exactly the same sequence of events, the same chain of causes and consequences :first, the overthrow of the old social system; next, the cessation of the literature, which was part and parcel of the abolished condition of society and of civilisation; lastly, the breaking up of the language, which had hitherto been preserved from that fate only by its constant employment in literature. If even so slightly inflected a language as our present English were to cease to be written and to be read, how long would it continue to be correctly spoken? Hardly for a generation probably.

"The birth of a new language," Mr Bunsen well observes, "presupposes the death of an old one. No language dies without a great crisis occurring in the tribe or nation which speaks it. This crisis may be a great physical revolution, or a voluntary change of country by emigra

tion, or a dissolution of the ancient form of political society by external human force, by invasion, conquest, subjugation. A new language and a new nation are so far identical, that a new language cannot originate without the dissolution of an ancient nationality" (Christianity and Mankind, iv. 93).

XIV. In reference to the progress of the vernacular language, the space from about the middle of the Eleventh to the middle of the Thirteenth century, or the first two centuries after the Conquest, has been designated the Period of Semi-Saxon. In the popular dialect of this period we have a work of considerable length in verse, the Chronicle of Layamon.

LAYAMON'S work has been edited by Sir Frederic Madden, under the title of "Layamon's Brut, or Chronicle of Britain; a poetical Semi-Saxon Paraphrase of the Brut of Wace," with a literal translation, notes, and a glossary, in 3 vols. royal 8vo, London, 1847. Wace was a Norman poet, whose metrical chronicle of Britain, called Brut d'Angleterre, was written about the middle of the twelfth century. Layamon, who calls himself a priest of Ernleye upon Severn, that is, of Areley-Regis, near Stourport, in Worcestershire (as first pointed out by Mr Guest in Penny Cyclopædia, xx. 488), otherwise called Lower Areley, appears to have written in the latter part of the same century, or in the first half of the second century after the Conquest. Sir Frederic Madden thinks that his work, which extends to above fourteen thousand long verses (divided by Sir Frederic into double that number of hemistichs), was probably completed about a.d. 1200. The views that have been taken of his language, even by the most competent among recent authorities, are not