OF THE HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE FOR THE USE OF THE JUNIOR CLASSES IN COLLEGES AND THE HIGHER CLASSES IN SCHOOLS. BY GEORGE L. CRAIK, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN Fifth Edition, Revised and Improved. LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193, PICCADILLY. 1864. 302. f. 4. ADVERTISEMENT. THESE OUTLINES are an abstract from a portion of the Course of Lectures delivered in the Class of the English Language in Queen's College, Belfast, which is attended by undergraduates of the first year; but the work has been drawn up with the design of presenting a connected though succinct view of the essentials of its subject, and so as to be adapted for the general reader as well as for being used as a Text-book in any place of education in which English Philology is one of the departments of study. To the series of propositions printed in a larger type, which embody the leading facts constituting the History of the Language, and which perhaps might be advantageously committed to memory by young persons, have been subjoined the more important of those minor and subsidiary particulars brought forward in the Lectures of which I had been accustomed to direct that notes should be taken. In this way the student or reader is put in possession of all the information necessary for the complete understanding of the general statements, and for following the survey of the subject so far as they carry it. Compendious, too, and elementary as the book is, it is constructed in part with a view to its serving as an introduction both to English History and to so much of the great modern science of Ethnology as depends upon the descent and relationship of languages. In this new Edition the work has again been carefully revised throughout, and, although not much has been altered, a few slight additions have been introduced here and there. The customary terms Saxon and Anglo-Saxon have now been everywhere discarded, as not only unauthorised by the facts of the case, but self-contradictory and eminently misleading. If the people were Saxons, and the language Saxon, before the Norman Conquest, nothing in that catastrophe could possibly have converted either the one or the other into English. But, in truth, they have been always English ;—which is, and can be, the only reason why they are English now. January, 1864. |