The same principle of progressive action seems to preside over their development as has, in our own age, by means of steam-ships, rail-roads, and factories, shortened the toil of former ages, rendered the communication among nations more frequent, and made the necessaries and conveniencies of life of more general and easy acquisition. The same process of generation which has converted Anglo-Saxon into modern English has been exemplified in the formation of the present Roman, Scandinavian, and Germanic languages from their ancient originals; and, in like manner, the Romaic of the modern Greeks is the legitimate but deformed daughter of the tongue in which Homer sung and Demosthenes roused to activity the indolent citizens of Athens. A law so extensive must be regarded as resting upon some general principle of mind, and as being the natural form in which languages develop themselves; and we can scarcely entertain a doubt that Anglo-Saxon would have undergone similar changes had the Normans never set foot upon English ground.

But though we are to seek for the causes of the disorganization of the Anglo-Saxon in the inherent and necessary laws of language, yet these may be considerably accelerated or impeded by events quite independent of them. We must always take external circumstances into account when we would determine how soon or how far the exciting cause is to operate. Modern German retains its present complicated grammatical structure, its power of inversion, and its facility in coining from its own sources words adequate to express every new idea, solely because the Maso-Gothic was, from political and other circumstances, prevented from following the general laws of language. The process of destruction may, however, be only retarded, and Nature may yet deal with this language as it has dealt with others of the same stock. But should such an event ever happen, it must be preceded by some great social disorganization which will paralyze the energies of the German people, and cast their literature into the same oblivion as that into which the literature of Rome was cast when the Romance languages were being moulded and matured.

While, then, we think that we are

warranted in tracing the changes of the Anglo-Saxon to a source higher than the confusion which resulted from political commotion, and in attributing the loss of its grammatical forms to intrinsic causes which arose among the people, who thought in and spoke the Saxon language, we cannot leave out of consideration the influence which the Norman Conquest had in accelerating the progress and increasing the number of the mutations; for it is difficult to imagine such free and imperative necessity to exist in any internal principle of language as would necessitate the complete transformation of an ancient tongue in so short a period as two centuries. We would, à priori, expect that powerful external causes were at work in producing so speedy a dissolution, and that the language had at least been deprived of extraneous support, and thus left at liberty to follow its native tendencies. The Goths who took possession of Italy, and the Norman conquerors of the North of France, gave up their own language in exchange for that of the conquered; but contemporaneously with the blending of the races, a new language was evolved, which was received and acknowledged by both people. Such a coincidence of determinations to the same end cannot be supposed to be altogether accidental. The Conquest of England by the Normans undoubtedly produced a great alteration in the political and social condition of the Saxon population, and, consequently, of the language spoken by them. The nobles who accompanied William in his expedition, were rewarded for their services by large grants of lands, which occasioned the degradation of the former Saxon proprietors to a state of vassalage and serfdom to their new lords. The ecclesiastics, who in the middle ages formed the most influential class of society, in consequence of the peculiar relation in which they stood both to the nobility and the peasantry, were appointed exclusively from the conquering race; and, in many instances, Saxon bishops and abbots were forcibly ejected from their benefices for no other reason than that they had not the good fortune to be foreigners. Crowds of retainers also flocked in from Normandy, who were induced by the favour which they and their countryin general received to settle

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down permanently in the country. The whole of the native population were treated with the utmost harshness and cruelty. They were made serfs and bond-servants in those very domains where they and their fathers had lived as masters. Their laws and customs were superseded by the feudal regime and the chivalrous habits of the invaders; and their language gave place, in both literature and fashion, to the more polished, but much less vigorous speech of the Normans. But the latter was never able to obtain a hold over the Saxon population, who, as a nation, resisted with obstinacy and proud disdain everything that savoured of foreign extraction. The persecutions to which the Saxons were systematically subjected, from the time that William felt his power to be firmly established, till the reign of John, endeared them but the more to their native language and customs. The Saxon tongue, like the Saxon himself, lay in slavery and degradation, trampled upon and despised by its courtly antagonist; and while the Norman-French was heard singing its songs in court and hall, the speech at once of the warlike baron, the beauteous dame, and the enraptured bard, it was listened to by none but the peasant, whose clanking fetters, though they dulled the exercise of fancy, and restrained the powers of imagination, only added zest to his obstinacy, and enhanced in his eyes the value of that tongue which his forefathers had spoken, which he had learned from his mother's lips, and which he could not now, without a loss of honour and self-respect, and without the sundering of the tenderest ties, surrender for any other.

In this state of degradation, the Saxon was open to every intrusion upon its forms and structure. It was left without any of the usual restraints which prevent the introduction of changes except by slow degrees and at distant intervals. Failing to receive any direct encouragement from the learned and noble, it sank to be a mere colloquial dialect, and was treated with the vagueness and indefiniteness of a purely popular speech. It lost insensibly its distinguishing beauties; and though once little inferior in stateliness of march and majesty of diction to the boasted languages of Greece and Rome, when it

re-appeared from under the cloud that obscured it, it retained little more than its naked roots. The luxuriance of its grammatical forms, its capabilities of inversion, its self-derived copiousness, and the delicate shades of meaning which it was enabled to express, were nearly all gone, because they were not an essential part of the language, nor much required for the purposes of conversation. Simplicity was the object at which the people aimed, and every artificial rule and inflectional nicety which interfered with this object were discarded; and though the bones and skeleton remained and do remain-for more than five-eighths of the words in use in Anglo-Saxon still exist in the body of our English-yet the muscles and sinews which gave beauty of motion and symmetry of form to the wellconstructed organism of the ancient tongue had perished for ever, and with them much of its strength and vigour.

But if the view which we have taken be correct, we are not to regard English as a broken-down dialect, but rather as the legitimate descendant of the mother-tongue, which had grown and flourished under her protection and fostering care; and when the mother, according to the law of nature, had become infirm and antiquated, her daughter stepped in gently to supply her place, without in the least interfering with her maternal rights, or being under the necessity of expelling her from the place she had once occupied with honour and credit. Exactly the same thing happened with the Latin in its transformation into the Romance languages of Western Europe. The ancient tongue continued long to be the sole depository of learning and literature, while a number of oral dialects were beginning to develop themselves by its side. These at length became so moulded and perfected as to be capable of giving adequate expression to the burning thoughts of genius in a more natural and more universally understood form than in the rapidly-decaying tongue of the ancient Roman people; and as use gradually developed their latent capabilities, they began to be employed for all sorts of compositions, and to take their place as separate and co-ordinate languages. Thus the Latin, as a living speech, totally disappeared, leaving an undisputed inheritance to

her numerous family of daughters. Thus, too, the Greek of the last centuries of the Empire retained in its literary compositions the same inflectional variety, the same structure and grammatical form, as the Attic of Thucydides and Euripides; though it is established by undoubted evidence that it had long before ceased to be spoken in anything like its ancient purity by the great mass of the community. Nor did the ancient tongue cease to be employed by the educated and fashionable classes until an event, much like the Conquest of England by the Normans-the taking of Constantinople by the Turks-introduced another nation with a different language as the dominant party in the State, and the dispersion of the learned left the people to deal with and further corrupt their language as nature and taste might dictate. The taking of Constantinople by the Turks was not the originating cause of the Romaic as different from the ancient Greek. It only succeeded in bringing more clearly to light those changes which had silently and imperceptibly been working their way in spite of the exertions of the Purists; and, by freeing the language from all adventitious props, it continued and hastened on the process of decay and transformation.

This appears to be identical with the history of the changes in the grammatical and syntactical structure of the Anglo-Saxon. Its dissolution had begun while it continued to be cultivated with assiduity by the natives. The Norman Conquest intervened; the Saxon language was degraded, and a foreign tongue was permitted to occupy the seat of honour and to be the vehicle of poetic and chivalrous sentiments. The native speech for some time resisted encroachments upon its forms and structure to any considerable extent; but after about a century the number of changes rapidly accumulated; its inflections one by one disappeared; and it retained but a few of its former characteristics until, about the middle of the twelfth century, it comes forth an altered being with its name changeda shrunk and shrivelled skeleton, without the expression and symmetrical proportions of the living body.

During this period of fermentation and change, it is not to be expected that there should exist any considerable

literary remains; for, to use the words of M. Raynouard, when speaking of the Provençal dialects, there never had "been composed any work of consider"able size, in any language, until it has "acquired determinate forms of expres"sing the modifications of ideas accord"ing to time, number, and person." Accordingly, the only works which remain of this period are of no worth whatever considered as purely literary or intellectual productions, though they are highly important in a philological and historical point of view.

That portion of the Saxon Chronicles which concludes with the year 1079 is, in the opinion of Rusk, in pretty good Anglo-Saxon; but the succeeding pages, down to its discontinuance in 1154, show that the grammatical structure of the language was sensibly shaken, and that many of its characteristic inflections were rapidly disappearing. "We find," says Mr. Hallam, "evidence of a "greater change in Layamon, a trans"lator of Ware's Romance of Brut, "from the French. Layamon's age is "uncertain; it must have been after "1155, when the original poem was

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completed, and can hardly be placed "below 1200. His language is ac"counted rather Anglo-Saxon than English; it retains most of the dis"tinguishing inflections of the mothertongue, yet evidently differs from that "older than the Conquest, by the in"troduction, or, at least, more frequent employment of some new auxiliary "forms, and displays very little of the "poetry, its periphrases, its ellipses, and "its inversions." According to his own account, Layamon was a native of Ernlege, a village on the Severn, that is, of Areley-Regis, near Stourport, in Worcestershire; and, in that distant part of the country, terminations and inflections which had elsewhere become obsolete may have lingered; and he may thus unconsciously have given to his translation a more antique garb than it would have possessed had it been composed among the more polished and flexible inhabitants of the capital. His style has been called semi-Saxon, as if it were a medium between the Anglo-Saxon and its substitute the early English. This work of Layaman is the last remains of any importance which can be properly said to represent that language which had