English Literature.

HISTORY AND PROGRESSIVE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

BY GEORGE L. CRAIK.

LESSON I.

BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

1. We shall have upon the whole a just enough conception, as well as a simple and easily-remembered one, of the manner in which the various classes of languages spoken in Europe are distributed, if we say that those of the Tschudic stock (or of the Fins and Laplanders) prevail generally in the north,-the Celtic (including the Irish and the Welsh) in the west, those derived from the Latin, often called the Neo-Latin, or Romance (that is, Roman) tongues (such as the Italian, Spanish, and French) in the south,-the Slavonic (of which the principal varieties are the Russian and the Polish) in the east, and, lastly, what, for want of a better name, we may call the Gothic tongues over the whole central region. The chief exception is, that one Tschudic language, the Magyar, is spoken by a population established in Hungary, in the south-east corner of the field of survey. But with that stock of languages English philosophy has less to do than with any of the others that have been enumerated. It is more or less connected with the Latin, with the Slavonic, and with the Celtic tongues; hardly at all with the Tschudic.

2. The stock, however, to which the English language in its original form itself belongs is what we have called the Gothic, or that which may be said to have the central portion of the European continent for its proper domain. Now, without minding the extinct variety known by the name of the Maso-Gothic, which was once spoken by a people seated on the Lower Danube, we may regard the existing Gothic languages as forming three great subdivisions, which may be generally

named the High-Germanic, the Low-Germanic, and the Scandinavian. Each of these subordinate groups or clusters of tongues has a certain character of its own, in addition to the common character by which they are all allied among themselves and distinguished from those belonging to quite other stocks. They may be said to present different shades of the same colour. And even in their geographical distribution they lie as it were in so many successive ridges :-the High-Germanic farthest south; next to them, the Low-Germanic, in the middle; and then, farthest north, the Scandinavian. The High-Germanic may be considered to be principally represented by the modern classic German; the Low Germanic, by the language of the people of Holland, or what we call the Dutch; the Scandinavian, by the Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic.

3. And it is farther remarkable that the gradation of character among these three sets of languages corresponds to their geographical position. That is to say, their resemblance is in proportion to their proximity. Thus, the High-Germanic and the Scandinavian groups are both nearer in character, as well as in position, to the Low-Germanic than they are to each other; and the Low-Germanic tongues, lying in the middle, form as it were a sort of link, or bridge, between the other two extreme groups. Climate and the relative elevation of the three regions may have something to do with this. The rough and full-mouthed pronunciation of the High-Germanic tongues, with their broad vowels and guttural combinations, may be the natural product of the bracing mountain air of the south; the clearer and neater articulation of the Low-Germanic ones, that of the milder influences of the plain; the thinner and sharper sounds of the Scandinavian group, that of the more chill and pinching hyperborean atmosphere in which they have grown up and been formed.

4. The name by which our own language is known, and which, so far as appears, it has always borne, the English language, means unquestionably the language of the Angles; as England, originally Engla-land, means

the land of the Engles, or Angles. The Angles and Saxons figure in all the old accounts as the two chief bodies or divisions of the invading bands who came over and established themselves in the island of Britain after its abandonment by the Romans, by whom the dominion of thesouthern part of it had been held from about the middle of the first till after the commencement of the fifth century of our era. The Angles and Saxons certainly spoke the same language, with at most only dialectic differences, or such as did not prevent them from being mutually intelligible; they were, therefore, there is every probability, only two divisions of the same people. The natural and ordinary tendency of languages in an early state of society is rather to break up and split into a diversity of forms; no cause, of the nature of which we have any knowledge or experience, could account for the Angles and Saxons speaking the same language if they had not had one language from the first; and that could scarcely have been the case unless they had been all along only different tribes of one and the same people. The probability is that the Angles, or English, was and always had been the national appellation, and that the Saxons were merely a section of the English. The fact, at any rate, is, that, after they had acquired the possession of Britain, they both concurred, Angles and Saxons alike, in calling their common country England, or the land of the Angles, and their common language English, as there can be little doubt it had been called from the time when it first became known as a distinct form of human speech.*

5. This original English was certainly not a High*The Saxons are first mentioned by Ptolemy in the second century. He places them along with the Angli in the same district which Tacitus in the first century represents as occupied by the Angli and Chauci, and Pliny of the same date by the Ingavones, of whom he makes the Chauci to have been a subordinate division. Suppose the Chauci to have been the same with the Saxons, and the Ingavones with the Angli, and we have at once the reason of the Angles, or English, being the national appellation. It was the general name of the race, or stock, of which the Saxons were only a branch. Further: upon this supposition it is not improbable that the name English is really the same with Indian. We have the root-syllable, apparently, in the names of places and populations, in the various forms of Ang, Ant, Eng, Ent, Ing, Int, Ind.

Germanic language. None of the historic notices that we have of the Angles or Saxons place either the one or the other in the south of Germany. Nor is their language, of which, as spoken or written in Britain, we have abundant specimens from the sixth century downwards, marked by the distinguishing characteristics of a High-Germanic dialect. It differs generally from the High-Germanic languages in the same respects as the Dutch and the Flemish (or the native popular speech of Flanders). It would appear, therefore, to belong, with these tongues, to the Low-Germanic branch of the Gothic stock of languages.

6. And, among the Low-Germanic languages, it was probably, even before it was brought over to Britain, one of those that inclined most in character towards those of the Scandinavian group. The continental seats of the Angles and Saxons appear to have been mostly to the north of the Elbe, and along the coast of the Baltic. They would therefore be in close neighbourhood or in contact with the countries in which the Scandinavian forms of the Gothic prevailed. And after they came over to Britain their language was exposed there to a new Scandinavian influence. Before the end of the eighth century bodies of Daues, or Northmen as they were also called, began to make plundering descents upon the English coast. Within a century from the date of their first recorded appearance, these Danish invaders had compelled the English king Alfred to consent to their occupation of a large portion of the country; and in little more than another century a Danish dynasty was seated on the throne. It was impossible that the English language, however purely Low-Germanic it may have originally been, should not have received more or less of a Scandinavian tincture from these events. This effect, accordingly, although it may not have shown itself very distinctly in the written language before the Norman Conquest came to put an end to the first form of English literature, became sufficiently apparent when the popular speech after a time rose again out of the ground into which it had been trodden by that catastrophe, and a new native literature began to grow up.

7. But how was it that the extinction of the original Anglo-Saxon literature, which indisputably took place about the time of the Norman Conquest, was actually brought about? Let us endeavour, before we go farther, to obtain a clear and right understanding of how and to what extent the language of the country really was affected by the great political and social revolution under which almost everything else in it that was of native growth was thrown down or changed. It is a question which has been much discussed, and upon which very opposite opinions have been advanced. Formerly it used to be held that the pure English (or Anglo-Saxon, as it has been called by modern philologists) of the times before the Conquest was broken up or destroyed by its having become mixed with the French of the foreigners who after that event acquired the sovereignty of the country: it was imagined that in this way there was produced a new language, which was in fact nothing else than a jumble of the two that had thus met and coalesced. Of late it has been argued, on the contrary, that the two things, the destruction of the old native language of the country and that of its old political and social system, had no connexion whatever, but that the language would have in all probability run exactly the course which it did at this time, and undergone the same fate, if the Norman invasion and conquest had never taken place.

8. The facts of the case are shortly these :-The authentic remains of the Anglo-Saxon of which we are in possession show that, although, of course, like every other language, and, we may say, everything human, everything belonging to this world, it was always changing somewhat, yet its movement had been so gradual as quite to escape ordinary observation from the time it began to be used in literature till we come to the eleventh or twelfth century: it had continued through all that space of four or five centuries to be substantially the same language. But from the date of the Norman Conquest, in the middle of the eleventh century, its history assumes altogether a new character. Hitherto it has been like a river, passing, indeed, through a