We now find for the first time ye (vos) used instead French influence must have been at work of thou. here. 'Fader, no wretthe the nought, Some new substantives are found. In page 25 a castle is called a hold. In page 32 the old bonda (colonus) is turned into husbondman. The poet elsewhere has a new sense for bond, which of old meant nothing more than a tiller of the ground: it now gets the sense of servus, as at page 184: 'Tho folwed bond and fre.' Tristrem faught as a knight, His scheld he clef bituene Tristrem, withouten wene, Nas never are so wo. Eft Urgan smot with main, And of that strok he miste; And thurch his body he threste; Urgan lepe unfain, Over the bregge he deste: That al the cuntre wist The king tho Tristrem kist, And Wales tho yeld him tille. 1 Husbonde of old meant only paterfamilias. The confusion of the derivative of bua with the derivative of bindan sometimes puzzles the modern reader. It is strange that this change should be for the first time found in the Norse part of England. We shall soon see a new word with a French ending formed from this bond. Already, in the Northern Psalter, bunden (vinctus) had been changed into bonden. To dash (intransitive) may be found in the lines quoted at page 160 of my work. In Layamon the word. was transitive. Ich aught (debeo), a word which was always undergoing change, is first found at page 44. A new sense of the word smart, used in the Northern Psalter, is seen in page 171: 'The levedi lough ful smare.' That is, 'quickly, briskly.' Americans well know what they mean by 'a smart man.' In page 17, we find the use of the phrase 'fair and free,' so common in English ballads down to the latest times : 'Thai fair folk and thi fre.' 1 such as busk Some Scandinavian words appear; (parare), from the Norse bua sig, to betake himself; stilt, from the Swedish stylta, a support. To hobble, which is here found, is akin to a Dutch word meaning 'to jog up and down.' The Northern men seem to have clipped the prefixes of French words as well as of their own. We find the beginning vowel gone in the verbs scape and stable. 1 It even comes in Billy Taylor, 'to a maiden fair and free.' M Corona now first stands for the top of the head, as in page 51: 'Crounes thai gun crake.' THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT. (About A.D. 1280.) King Edward was now fastening his yoke upon Wales. The first Mercian poem of this time that I shall notice is the piece called The Harrowing of Hell, the earliest specimen of anything like an English dramatic work. It may have been written at Northampton or Bedford. The text has been settled (why did no Englishman take it in hand, and go the right way to work?) by Dr. Mall of Breslau. With true German insight into philology, he has compared three different English transcripts: a Warwickshire (?) one of 1290; a Herefordshire one of 1313; and a Northern one of 1330.1 Again we see the Midland tokens; the Present Plural in en, the almost invariable disuse of the prefix to the Past Participle, the substitution of noht for ne, have I for habbe ich. The author wrote kin and man, not the Southern kun and mon, since the words are made to rime with him and Abraham. The old a is sometimes, but not always, replaced by o; the poet's rimes prove him to have written strong, not strang; he had both ygan and ygon, riming respectively with Sathan and martirdom. The plural form honden, 1 The Latin donec is rendered in the Herefordshire manuscript by o þat, a relic of the old Southern English form; in the other two manuscripts it is the Danish til þat. found in all the three manuscripts, and the absence of are (sunt), point to the Southern border of the Danelagh; at the same time, the Northern wip (cum) has driven out the Southern mid. Thei (illi) sometimes replaces hi; both Ich and I are found. The Midland form prist (sitis) has been altered by all the three transcribers; the two Southern ones use purst, something like our sound of the word: Dr. Mall, by the help of the rime, has here restored the true reading. Ch had replaced c, for michel, not mikel, is found in the Northern manuscript. The dialogue is most curious; Satan swears, par ma fei, like the soundest of Christians; and our Lord uses a metaphor taken from a game of hazard. The comic business, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, falls to a warder. The oath God wot comes once more; and also the Danish word gate (via), which never made its way into the South.1 A sad corruption, which fir t appeared in the Bestiary, is now once more seen: it is one of the few things that has escaped Dr. Mall's eye. The second person of 1 I give a specimen from page 33 of Dr. Mall's work. Abraham speaks :- Louerd, Crist, ich it am, pou art be child, þou art be man, Do nou þat þou bihete me, Bring me to hevene up wib be. The New English, as we see, is all but formed. the Perfect of the Strong verb is brought down to the level of the more modern Weak verb. In line 77, we see in the transcript of 1290, Sunne ne foundest pou never non. In line 189, the transcriber of 1313 writes, Do nou pat pou byhihtest me. It was many years before this corruption could take root; it is seldom found in Wickliffe, who tries to avoid translating dedisti by either the old gave or the new gavest, and commonly writes didest give. In the transcript of 1290, lording is seen instead of loverding, and this is found in Kent and Lincolnshire much about the same time. In the lines of page 28, I shal go fro man to man the last two words give us the same phrase found in the Yorkshire poems already quoted. At page 32, we find a line thus written in the transcript of 1290, 'we pi comaundement forleten ;' in the transcript of 1313, this is 'we pin heste dude forleten.' If this latter represent the original of 1280 best, it is the first instance of a revived auxiliary verb, of which I shall give instances in the next Chapter. Much ink has lately been spent upon Byron's expression, there let him lay' (jaceat). The bard might have appealed to the transcript of 1313: Sathanas, y bynde pe, her shalt pou lay |