yet surviving in the names of separate provinces or kingdoms as Essex, Wessex, and Sussex. While there was only one settlement of Jutes, there were three settlements of Saxons, and four of Angles; and the Angles and the Saxons, from proximity of territory, were soon regarded as one people. Though the compound name is found in some old charters, the people called themselves and their tongue English. This Anglo-Saxon? tongue was therefore our English tongue in its earlier and rougher form; and what Alfred called English has continued to be spoken in our land by successive generations for fourteen hundred years, and still lives in the power, character, and beauty of our modern language—gifts which have come to us by natural inheritance. Perhaps not much more than a fifth of its original vocabulary has fallen out of use, and though many changes have passed over it since the Norman conquest, it is yet read and relished in our present Bibles. In many sections of Scripture only about one word in forty is not AngloSaxon. Thus in Gen. xlii, 21-29, there are, with the exception 1 Turner, History of the AngloSaxons, vol. I, p. 298, Bede speaks of five languages as spoken in the island; but two, if not three, of those referred to are merely dialects. 2 The term, according to Lappenberg, occurs first in Paul Warnefrid (cap. vi, p. 15)-" Ceodaldus rex Anglorum-Saxonum." See History of the Anglo-Saxons, vol. I, p. 97, &c., Thorpe's Translation, and Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. I, p. 529, London. Ine, who began to reign A.D. 700, at the beginning of his laws is called King of the West Saxons, but in the Code itself his subjects are named Englisc, English, as opposed to Wealhas or Welshmen, this term meaning foreigners or the ancient British. Saxon and Norman are not opposed as national epithets, and even at the period of the Conquest the terms are French and English, and sometimes Normans and English. Angli was the common Latin name, though the people did not call themselves Angles, or their tongue Anglian, and even the Latin name is "English" in slight disguise. Anglorum is the epithet used in the title of Bede's History, in the designation of the first Christian king, on the great seals of the Confessor and the Conqueror, while on the Bayeux tapestry Harold is called Dux Anglorum. 3 In the preface to his translation of Gregory's Pastoralis Regula, he uses several times the term Englisc to denote his own language, and says that the name of Gregory's book is in Latin Pastoralis, and in English en Englisc hirde-boc, herdman's book. Alfred's Welsh biographer Asser calls it Saxon, as do still the Kelts both in England and Scotland. INT.] THE SAXON ELEMENT. 7 of the proper names, only seven words which are not native; in the Parable of the Sower, Matt. xiii, 3-9, there are, out of 106 words employed, only three foreign ones; in John i, 1-10, only one Latin verb occurs; and in John xi, 27-46, there are not more than four or five non-English terms, with the same exception of proper names. Some grammatical peculiarities of this Old English may be briefly noted, and many of them yet survive with more or less distinctness, as the names of objects of sense, of domestic relations, and of things of common life. If English word-books proper contain 38,000 words, then about five-eighths are Saxon, and the same average is true of the 10,000 terms in continual literary use. But in the 5,000 words of common living speech the small connective words which occur so frequently are Saxon, and the proportion is therefore greatly more than is to be found in dead dictionaries.1 This ancestral tongue had two forms for the two sounds of th. It spelled its relative with an initial and vocal h. Its monosyllabic particles are immortal-such as its articles, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. It had its seed within itself, and by simple inner changes, sometimes not unlike those of the Semitic dialects, it expressed new and varying shades of meaning, as may be still seen in our so-called defective and irregular verbs.3 Its noun had its 1 Thommerel, Recherches sur la fusion du Franco-Normand et de l'Anglosaxon. Paris, 1841. Thommerel found in Richardson's and Webster's English Dictionaries 42,684 words, only 13,334 of them being of native origin, and 29,354 from a foreign source. But English dictionaries now contain an immense variety of technical terms, relating to trade, science, and art. In such collections, too, compound terms swell the list. Words compounded with the non-English particle "dis-" amount in Webster to 1,334, and the like may be said of words into the composition of which enter re-, com-, con-, inter-, sub-, ex-, &c. The old tongue has lost its power of expansion and self-development, and the new words assumed into it are nearly all of classic birth. In Milton's stock of 8,000 words there are, as might be expected, more than 5,000 of foreign origin, but in an actual and ordinary page of his poetry there are 80 per cent. of Saxon words. 2 As "thin" and "thine." 3 As in float, fleet; stud, steed; sop, sup; sing, song; wake, woke. 2 regular case-endings, which differed according to the gender of the word, and as the nominative ended in a vowel or a consonant;1 and plurals were formed by the addition of -as, -is, -s, -n, -er, or by an internal vowel change. Nouns often ended in syllables now represented by -hood, -head, -ship, -dom; diminutives in -ing, -kin -ock, -let; and gender was often marked by a different termination, as the feminine ending -ster or -in.3 Verbs were usually conjugated by strong preterites, which have an expressive force not found in the more recent and effeminate suffix of -ed; and they had both a common and a gerundial infinitive. The third person singular indicative and the plural indicative also ended in -th, &c. Numerous adverbs were formed from adjectives by the addition of "lic (-ly)," some were taken from verbs and nouns, and many are original monosyllables. Adjectives often ended in -ful, -less, -er. Many nouns were also used as adjectives, often with the addition of a syllable; and many verbs are also nouns, sometimes unaltered, and sometimes with the added syllable -an, or -ian. The AngloSaxon verb had no future form, and we now use the auxiliaries "shall" and "will"-" shall" being originally an expression of duty, and "will" of desire or purpose. In this way an AngloSaxon sentence was as firmly knitted together by the gender and cases of nouns and adjectives, and by the tenses and moods of verbs, as one in modern German. Compound words are the phrases, "apt to teach,” “I need money for to go." The genitive in -s is still preserved in the 's of our possessive case, and in such words as twice, thrice, whose, towards; that in -an r-n in mine, thine; and the dative plural in -om lives in seldom, whom, &c. ? One form is found in the common English plural, and the others in such words as oxen, hosen, kine, child-er-en, geese, feet. 3 Darling, lambkin, hillock, hamlet, spinster, foster (foodster), vixen, carlin. ✦ Ending in -enne or -anne, being a dative with "to" prefixed, as in 5 Another verbal plural in -en is often found in Shakespeare, especially in the folio. Of this old form, which had begun to disappear after the time of Wycliffe, Ben Jonson says, "I am persuaded that the lack thereof will be found a great blemish to our tongue." Some of these are very significant-Rhetoric being flyt-cræft, the art of flyting; Grammar, stæfcræft, the art of letters; Music, son-cræft, the art of sound; Arithmetic, rim-craft, the art of numbers, INT.] CEDMON. 9 numerous, expressive, and self-evident in meaning, and usually they are not hybrids. More especially in the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, we have Godspel, good news, the gospel; reste-dæg, day of rest, or Sabbath; domes-dæg, domesday; big-spel, parable; tungel-witegan, star knowers, the magi; stoop-cild, step-child, or orphan (John xiv, 18); sunder-halgan, separate holy, the Pharisees; bocere, bookman, or scribe; leorningcnicht, a disciple; wæter-seocman, one having dropsy; hundredes ealdor-man, a centurion; geriht-wisian, to justify; manfulle and synfulle, publicans and sinners. As was to be expected, Latin terms found their way from the Vulgate into the Anglo-Saxon New Testament, as sacerd, biscop, calic, martyr, &c. FIRST PERIOD. The earliest specimen of an effort to unseal the sacred volume is not a translation, but a paraphrastic poem, and it shows at least a willingness to present to the unlearned the truths and facts of Scripture. The poet did not feel that the sacred narrative suffered any degradation from being told in the familiar syllables of the hearth and the field. Towards the close of the seventh century, and in the time of St. Hilda, Cædmon,1 originally a cow-herd, and afterwards a monk of Streaneshalch, composed a metrical history of the Creation and the Exodus, the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Saviour, the gift of the Spirit, and the solemn realities folk-land being public land, and boc-land, land in private possession. Agen-bite is remorse, as "Agenbite of Inwit," remorse of conscience, the name of Dan Michel's well known poem in the southern or Kentish dialect. Hunger-bitten survives in the Authorized Version (Job xviii, 12), as also do hand-breadth, hand-weapon, hand-writing, handywork, a form found in Milton's "star ypointing pyramid"; child-bearing; words compounded with fellow, as, citizen, -prisoners, servant, -soldier; and words compounded with sheep-sheep-master, sheepcote, &c. 1 Edited by Junius (Francis Duyon), 1655; Thorpe, 1832; Grein, Göttingen, 1857; and Bouterwek, Elberfeld, 1849. 2 Now known by its Danish name of Whitby. If not a cowherd, he had occasional charge of jumenta during night. of Eternity. Some sentences are rendered with considerable accuracy, and the poem shows the force and style of the current tongue of the period-a tongue somewhat rude but robust, like a wall built of rugged, unhewn stones, fresh from the quarry. As Cadmon could not himself translate, he only versified, with occasional felicity and glow, what others interpreted for him. Bede1 speaks of his songs as composed with much sweetness and humility, and affirms that he was divinely helped, so that, having received the gift of poetry in a dream, he could never afterwards tune his cithard to any secular mirth. The brethren taught him sacred history which, after meditation, he put into verses sometimes of Miltonic grandeur, and in turn made his teachers his hearers. Though Cadmon's poems are loose in their structure as being the rhythmic paraphrase of an oral version, and though they, in the course of transmission, have been altered and injured both in alliteration and sense, they are to be commended in their purpose, for they sprang from an earnest desire to impart sacred knowledge in a popular and memorable form. About the same time a version of the Psalms is supposed to have been made by Guthlac, the earliest Saxon anchoret at Croyland. This version, or a similar one, is preserved between the lines of a very old Roman psalter, the MS. itself apparently written in Italy, and being as some suppose one of the books which Gregory sent to Augustine, Archbishop of Canterbury. This opinion is so far confirmed by the fact that while the Gallican psalter was used in the other parts of the island, the Roman psalter was read and sung in the Primate's own Cathedral. Aldhelm, allied to the royal blood, born in |