HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

THE PEOPLE

Our First Home.-In one of his most interesting books Nathaniel Hawthorne speaks of England as Our Old Home. Of course, in a sense, England is our old home; but it is not our oldest home. The Americans are to-day the largest part of the English-speaking people, and the English-speaking people have had three homes, of which England was the second. If you will open your geography at the map of Germany and place a one-cent piece over the city of Hamburg, it will lie upon the ancient territory of both the Angles and the Saxons. These were our ancestors and their home was our first home. They were a small part of the great Germanic or Teutonic race. They were large, fearless, blue-eyed people who loved their home, but loved a sea fight better. The little district of Angeln, north of Hamburg, actually preserves to-day the old name of the Angles or English. It would seem that no other place in the world would have quite the same interest for an Englishman or an American as this district of Angeln, which still keeps the name of our old homestead.

Our Second Home.-The year 449 A. D. is in English history what the year 1607 is in American history. Each date marks the close of a century of invasions for booty and the beginning of a permanent settlement. By 449 the

English had found their first home too small for them. They gladly accepted itation from the British Celts

and began to move over into what is now called England. The Celts wanted the English to help them drive out some troublesome neighbors from the north; but the English liked the new country so well that, with the exception of the American branch, most of them have remained in England to this day.

Our Third Home.-In 1492-but every student of this book knows what took place in that year. It was not, however, till many years later that the English began to form permanent settlements along the American coast. The close of the sixteenth century found the English language confined to England, though Sir Walter Raleigh had made heroic attempts to settle an English colony on the coast of North Carolina. At last, in 1607, an English colony was planted at Jamestown, Virginia, and another in 1620 at Plymouth, Massachusetts. Soon the Atlantic seaboard began to be dotted by towns and cities. Then came the great movement westward. The English language was now heard from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The descendants of the sturdy old Angles and Saxons had occupied their third and largest home.

The Americans, says the English historian Green, have become "the main branch" of the English-speaking people. "In the days that are at hand the main current of that people's history must run along the channel, not of the Thames or the Mersey, but of the Hudson and the Mississippi." Mark Twain says that the English language is "the King's English" no longer; that it has gone into

the hands of a company, and that a majority of the stock is on our side of the Atlantic.

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THE LANGUAGE

Three Periods in the History of the English Language. As the people of English stock have had three homes, so there have been three distinct periods in the growth of the English language. But these three periods have nothing to do with the sojourn in the three homes. The English wrote no books in their first home, and not much is known of the language that they spoke. The history of the English language begins for us after the settlement in England. Between the settlement in England and the settlement in America the language had so changed that only a close student of it would see that it is to-day the same language. These changes divide the language into three periods:

1. The Period of Old English or Anglo-Saxon (4491150).

).

2. The Period of Middle English (1150-1500). 3. The Period of Modern English (1500The Period of Old English (449-1150).—It was during this period that Christianity was brought to England by the missionaries of Pope Gregory the First (597), for the English would not accept Christianity from the Celts. About sixty years later Cædmon,* the first English poet whose name has come down to us, began to sing the story of the creation. The foundations of English prose were laid by King Alfred, "England's darling," who ruled from

*Pronounced kǎd'mon.

871 to 901. In the year 1066 the Normans under William the Conqueror defeated the Old English warriors in the great battle of Senlac, or Hastings, and settled permanently on English soil. It looked for a while as if the English language would be blotted out by the Norman French. It was not blotted out, but it underwent the severest strain that it has ever had to undergo. By 1150, about a hundred years after the Norman Conquest, the language had become so changed by new words and the loss of endings that scholars take that year as the dividing line between Old English and Middle English.

A Specimen of Old English.-The following verses from the Bible, Matthew 13: 3-4, will give you some idea of the quaint but strong and straightforward language that was spoken in Old English times.

And bẽ spræc tō hym fela on bigspellum, cwethende: Sōth= And he spake to them many (things) in parables, saying: Trulice, ūt-eōde sẽ sædere bys sæd to sāwenne: and tbā-thã hẽ ly, out went the seeder his seed to sow: and when-then he seow, sume bie feollon with weg, and fuglas cōmon and æton thā. sowed, some they fell along (the) way, and fowls came and ate them.

The Period of Middle English (1150-1500).-During the early years of this period the dialects spoken in different parts of England were so unlike that a man from the north could hardly understand a man from the south. And yet England is just the size of Alabama! Very soon, however, the dialect spoken in London became the standard, and the poets and prose writers modeled their language