INTRODUCTION. ON THE STUDY OF THE ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. THE history of a language is in truth the history of a people. In seeking for the elements of which the one is composed, we are necessarily obliged to inquire into the vicissitudes that the other has undergone. Every change that has taken place in the condition of a people, and every revolution that has marked its existence, may as distinctly be traced in the structure of the language of that people, as the age of a tree may be known by the successive layers of which it is composed, or that of the earth itself deduced from the geological evidences in its crust. No better example could possibly be adduced of this philological truth, than an examination of the English tongue in connection with the history of Britain,—a history that might almost as clearly be derived, if we were deprived of every other source, from a careful, minute, and skilful analysis of the language itself, as the Indian hunter is said to derive the precise characteristics of the animal he is pursuing, from an accurate examination of the footprints it has left in the sand, or of the marks it has made in its progress. The early history of the inhabitants of Britain, like that of all the ancient nations, is lost in the twilight of fable, and the imagination of their descendants has been, from time to time, exercised in accounting by fanciful and, often, supernatural causes for that origin which is either entirely unknown, or so wrapped in mystery as to deserve but little consideration. Unable to give any satisfactory account of their true origin, poetry was permitted to supply the place of history, and, veiling ignorance under myths and allegories, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans, were not behind the Britons, the Celts or the Saxons, in supposing that they had sprung, like plants, from the ground, or were descended from the gods,* or had existed before the moon herself. It is in vain, therefore, to attempt to penetrate those mysteries in which ancient history, beyond a certain period, is hopelessly involved, or to lift that veil by which, no doubt with some wise design, the unknown is separated from the known. One truth seems, however, to be as firmly settled by those marks which the successive migrations of tribes and of nations have left behind them, in their advance westward, as by the Pentateuch itself; and that is, the fact recorded by Moses, that man originated in the eastern portions of the world, to which region the various inhabitants of the different parts of the earth, in successive centuries, may be referred with something like certainty. There first began those associations of men, which were the basis of states, kingdoms, and empires; and there were first cultivated the arts and the sciences. Civilization, in the course of time, began, as a necessary consequence, to grow up in that quarter, and in its train followed all those evils which flow from ease, luxury, and refinement. Increased wants on the part of the people, and habits of indolence and indulgence, gave rise to inventions and to crimes; and that spirit of generosity and of noble bearing which seems the natural offspring of freedom from control, gradually gave way to less honorable feelings, until, strange as it may seem, *The story of Cadmus, of Mars and Rhea Sylvia, and the Grecian fables, are well known. + See Potter's Antiquities, vol. i. p. 1. |