the Scottish regular chroniclers, also flourished in the fourteenth century. His Scotichronicon brings down the history of Scotland to the year 1385.

Latin was also, throughout a great part of this period, the usual language of the law, at least in writing. All the charters of liberties are in Latin. So is every statute down to the year 1275. The first that is in French is the Statute of Westminster the First, passed in that year, the 3rd of Edward I. Throughout the remainder of the reign of Edward they are sometimes in Latin, sometimes in French, but more frequently in the former language. The French becomes more frequent in the time of Edward II., and is almost exclusively used in that of Edward III. and Richard II. Still there are statutes in Latin in the sixth and eighth years of the last-mentioned king. It is not improbable that, from the accession of Edward I., the practice may have been to draw up every statute in both languages. Of the law treatises, Bracton and Fleta are in Latin; Britton and the Miroir des Justices, in French.

Latin was the language in which not only all the scholastic divines and philosophers wrote, but which was also employed by all writers on geometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and the other branches of mathematical and natural science. All the works of Roger Bacon, for example, are in Latin; and it is worth noting that, although by no means a writer of classical purity, this distinguished cultivator of science is still one of the most correct writers of his time. He was indeed not a less zealous student of literature than of science, nor less anxious for the improvement of the one than of the other: accustomed himself to read the works of Aristotle in the original Greek, he denounces as mischievous impositions the wretched Latin translations by which alone they were known to the generality of his contemporaries: he warmly recommends the study of grammar and the ancient languages generally; and deplores the little attention paid to the Oriental tongues in particular, of which he says there were not in his time more than three or four persons in western Europe who knew anything. It is remarkable that the most strenuous effort made within the present period to revive the study of this last-mentioned learning proceeded from another eminent cultivator of natural science, the famous Raymond Lully, half philosopher, half quack, as it has been the fashion to regard him. It was at his instigation that Clement V., in 1311, with the approbation of the Council of Vienne, published a constitution, ordering that professors of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Chaldaic should be established in the universities of Paris, Oxford, Bologna, and Salamanca. He had, more than twenty years before, urged the same measure upon Honorius IV., and its adoption then was only prevented by the death of that pope. After all, it is doubtful if the papal ordinance was ever carried into effect. There were, however, professors of strange, or foreign, languages at Paris a few years after this time, as appears from an

epistle of Pope John XXII. to his legate there in 1325, in which the latter is enjoined to keep watch over the said professors, lest they should introduce any dogmas as strange as the languages they taught.*

French, which had been the language of the court and of the nobility in England from the Conquest, and in some measure, indeed, from the accession of the Confessor, was now also extensively employed in literary compositions. There were at this time two great dialects of the French tongue, which were familiarly distinguished as the Langue d'oc and the Langue d'oyl, from the two words for yes, which were oc in the one, and oyl, afterwards oy or oui, in the other. The Langue d'oc was the popular speech of the southern; the Langue d'oyl, of the northern provinces; Thoulouse being accounted the capital of the former, Paris of the latter; and the river Loire forming (though by no means with strict accuracy) the general line of division.† The French which was brought over to England by the Norman conquerors was, of course, a dialect of the Langue d'oyl; and such accordingly our law French always continued to be. But the annexation to the English crown of Poitou and Aquitaine, on the accession of Henry II., immediately established as intimate a connexion between this country and that of the Langue d'oc, as had existed for a century before with that of the Langue d'oyl. The former had already for some time received a literary cultivation, and had been made to flow in song in the compositions of the troubadours, or professors of the gay science, as the Provençal poets called themselves. Duke William IX. of Aquitaine, the father of Henry's Queen Eleanor, had himself been one of the most distinguished of these sires of the minstrelsy of modern Europe, from whom sprung alike Dante and his successors, the cultivators of the Lingua volgare of Italy, and the trouveurs, or first metrical writers in the dialect of northern France. It appears, at least, to be most probable (although some eminent authorities have maintained a different opinion) that the latter dialect was not made use of for poetical composition till a considerable time after that of the south had begun to be so employed; but it is certain that long poems were already written in it before the close of the twelfth century;

⚫ Crevier, Hist. de l'Univ. de Paris, ii. 112 and 227.

The Langue d'oc is also often called the Provencal tongue; and to the Langue d'oyl exclusively it has been usual to apply the names of the old French and the Romance, though the latter, at least, really belongs as rightfully to the Langue d'oc, meaning, as it does, nothing more than the Roman or Latin dialect, as the provincial Latin of Gaul was denominated, in contradistinction to the original Celtic language of the people. Both the Langue d'oyl and the Langue d'or, therefore, were, properly speaking, Romance. They were also equally French in every respect except one, namely, that it is from the Langue d'oyl, certainly, that the modern French has been principally formed. In the proper sense of this term, however, it is applicable to neither; the French, or Franks, were a Teutonic people, speaking a purely Teutonic tongue, resembling the German, or more nearly the Flemish; and this tongue they continued to speak for several centuries after their conquest of Gaul. This old Teutonic French is denominated by philologists the Frankish or Francie, and it is alto gether of a different family from the modern French, which has come to be so called only from the accident of the country in which it was spoken having been conquered by the French or Franks,-the conquerors, as in other cases, in course of time adopting the language of the conquered, and bestowing upon it their own name.

disturbances, is established by this undeniable fact that every branch of the Low German stock, from whence the Anglo-Saxon sprang, displays the same simplification of its grammar. In all these languages there has been a constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinctions, and detect, as it were, a royal road to the interchange of opinion.*

The change here described may be considered as having been the first step in the passage of the Anglo-Saxon into the modern English; the next was the change made in the vocabulary of the language by the introduction of numerous terms borrowed from the French. Of this latter innovation, however, we find little trace till long after the completion of the former. For nearly two centuries after the Conquest the Saxon seems to have been spoken and written with scarcely any intermixture of Norman. It only, in fact, began to receive such intermixture after it came to be adopted as the speech of that part of the nation which had previously spoken French. And this adoption was plainly the cause, and the sole cause, of the intermixture. So long as it remained the language only of those who had been accustomed to speak it from their infancy, and who had never known any other, it might have gradually undergone some change in its internal organization, but it could scarcely acquire any additions from a foreign source. What should have tempted the Saxon peasant to substitute a Norman term, upon any occasion, for the word of the same meaning with which the language of his ancestors supplied him? As for things and occasions for which new names were necessary, they must have come comparatively little in his way; and, when they did, the capabilities of his native tongue were abundantly sufficient to furnish him with appropriate forms of expression from its own resources. The corruption of the Saxon by the intermixture of French vocables must have proceeded from those whose original language was French, and who were in habits of constant intercourse with French customs, French literature, and every thing else that was French, at the same time that they spoke Saxon. And this supposition is in perfect accordance with the historical fact. So long as the Saxon was the language of only a part of the nation (though that was always infinitely the most considerable part in respect of numbers), and the French, as it were, struggled with it for mastery, it remained unadulterated;when it became the speech of the whole people, of the higher classes as well as of the lower, then it lost its old Teutonic purity (though only in its vocabulary, not in its forms or its genius), and received a large alien admixture from the alien lips through which it passed. Whether this was a fortunate circumstance, or the reverse, is another question. It may, however, be observed, that the Saxon, as has just been intimated, had already lost • Preface, by Price, to Warton's Hist. of Eng. Poetry, p. 110.

some of the chief of its original characteristics, and that, if left to its own spontaneous and unassisted development, it would probably have assumed a character resembling rather that of the Dutch or the Flemish than that of the German of the present day.

With the exception of several songs and other short poetical pieces-one of the most remarkable of which is a ballad in celebration of Simon de Montfort's victory at Lewes in 1264-a few metrical chronicles and romances, for the most part translated from the French, constitute the only compositions now remaining that can be said to be written in the English, as distinguished from the Anglo-Saxon language, before the end of the reign of Edward I.* The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, being a history of England from the landing of Brutus to the accession of Edward I., is a metrical, but anything rather than a poetical, version of the Latin History of Geoffrey of Monmouth. It is supposed to have been written about the year 1280. The similar performance of Robert Mannyng, often called Robert de Brunne (from his monastery of Brunne, or Bourn, in Lincolnshire), which was produced about twenty years later, is scarcely of any higher order of merit. It is translated from two French chronicles, one itself a translation from Geoffrey of Monmouth (and the same that Layamon had already translated into Saxon), by Wace of Jersey, who flourished in the middle of the twelfth century, the other written by Peter Langtoft, a monk of Bridlington in Yorkshire, who lived not long before Mannyng himself. The language appears in these works in almost the rudest possible state, though Mannyng's style is somewhat less harsh and confused than that of his predecessor. Some improvement, however, is discernible in the next reign in the devotional poems, dull as they are, of Adam Davy, and still more in the romance entitled The Life of Alexander,' which has been improperly attributed to that writer. But of all the writers before Chaucer, the one in whose hands the language seems to have made the most remarkable advance in flexibility and correctness, was Laurence Minot, who flourished in the earlier part of the reign of Edward III., and wrote a series of poetical pieces on the warlike achievements of that king, which have gained for him, from an eloquent modern critic, the title of the Tyrtæus of his age."

Towards the close of the reign of Edward III.

The celebrated romance of the Geste of King Horne, generally quoted as the earliest English romance, must be considered (whether it be translated or original) as rather a Saxon than an English poem, even in the form in which we now possess it. Its language appears to be of the same date with that of the Saxon translation of Wace's Le Brut, by Layamon, or the paraphrase of the Gospel histories, entitled 'Ormulum,' both of which are assigned to the reign of Henry II. The romance of Sir Tristrem, again, which has been supposed to be the production of the Scottish poet Thomas of Ercildown, or the Rymer, who lived in the thirteenth century, is now generally considered not to be, in its present form, of that antiquity. Hearne published Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle in 2 vols. 8vo. Oxford, 1724; and the second part of Mannyng's, under the title of Peter Langtoft's Chronicle,' 2 vols., 8vo., Oxford, 1725. nyng accordingly is usually quoted under the name of Langtoft. The first part of Mannyng's Chronicle has never been printed.

Man

Essay prefixed to Specimens of the British Foets, by T. Campbell, Esq.

Robert (or, as he ought more probably to be called, William) Langland wrote his singular poem entitled The Visions of (that is, concerning) Pierce Plowman,' in a diction and fashion of versification both of which seem to have been intended as imitations of a Saxon model. The lines here are con

structed upon the principle, not of rhyme, but of alliteration; and instead of the introduction of any new words or forms of expression, the aim of the author evidently is to revive as many as possible of those that had become obsolete. In vigour, animation, and general poetical merit, however, Langland far excels any of the writers that have yet been named.

But he does not distance his predecessors nearly so far as he is himself distanced by his immortal contemporary, Geoffrey Chaucer, the true father of our English literature. Compared with the productions of this great writer, all that precedes is barbarism. It is curious that at the very time when the author of the Visions of Pierce Plowman' was labouring to reinvigorate the language by the restoration of its lost forms, another mind should have entered upon the work of its renovation by the opposite process, of moulding it to a spirit and manner of expression different, in various respects, from what it had ever before known. Yet it was no doubt the same feeling of dissatisfaction with its existing state that prompted the endeavours of both. The mightier genius, however, undoubtedly chose the wiser course. To Chaucer our language principally owes the foundations of its still enduring constitution, as well as the whole body of our poetry much of its peculiar and characteristic spirit. He is the father of our literature in a much higher and truer sense than in that of merely standing formally and by accident at its head. It has been made in great part what it is through the example which he set to his successors, and the influence and inspiration of the works which he bequeathed to them. But for two hundred years Chaucer had no successor; in that early morn of his language he produced compositions which the most gifted of his countrymen were scarcely able to appreciate, far less to rival, till after the commencement of altogether a new era of civilization. Nor has there even yet arisen among us any poet, Shakspeare alone excepted, surpassing, in the entire assemblage of his various qualities, this wonderful minstrel of the fourteenth century. Spencer's is a more aërial, Milton's a loftier song; but the poetry of neither of these displays anything of the rich combination of contrasted excellencies that gives so much life and splendour to that of Chaucer-the sportive fancy, painting and gilding everything, with the keen, observant, matter-of-fact spirit that looks through whatever it glances at,the soaring and creative imagination, with the homely sagacity, and healthy relish for all the realities of things,-the unrivalled tenderness and pathos, with the subtlest humour and the most exuberant merriment,-the wisdom at once and the wit, the all that is best, in short, both in poetry

and in prose, at the same time. The comprehensiveness and manifold character of Chaucer's genius is evidenced by the very diversity of the springs of inspiration to which he resorted. The Provençal troubadours, the Norman romancers, the bright array of the stars of the young poetry of Italy, were all sought out by him, and made to yield light to his "golden urn." His works comprise translations or imitations of his predecessors or contemporaries, the restorers of poetry, in all these languages, and in all the various kinds of composition which they had made famous. No writer has taken a wider range in respect of subject and manner, or has evinced a more triumphant mastery over the whole compass of the lyre. 'Canterbury Tales' alone, indeed, include nearly every variety of gay and serious poetry in this crowning work his matured genius revels in the luxuriance of its strength, and seems to rejoice in multiplying proofs of its command over all the resources of its art.

His

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This is also the age of the birth of Scottish poetry. Two remarkable works in that dialect, the Bruce, by John Barbour, Archdeacon of Aberdeen, and the Cronykil' of Andrew Wynton, Prior of Lochleven, remain, both of which are productions of the latter part of the fourteenth century. Barbour displays occasionally considerable poetical spirit. This writer, it may be remarked, calls his language English, as in truth it was; for the Lowland Scottish is undoubtedly nothing else than a dialect of the Saxon.

Of the English prose literature of the fourteenth

In the Troilus and Creseide.'

century that has survived, the most remarkable specimens are Trevisa's translation of Higden, mentioned above, and Wycliffe's translation Scriptures. The Bible is said to have been also translated by Trevisa. An indenture, dated in 1343, has been referred to as the earliest known legal instrument in English. Although Edward III. ordered the pleadings in courts to be carried on in English in 1362, the earliest instance that occurs of the use of the language in parliamentary proceedings is in 1388.

Gothic architecture, which prevailed throughout the greater part of Europe from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, presents itself to our inquiries in a constant state of progression. One change is only a transition to another. It is also variously modified by the several countries which adopted it, and considerable differences occur even in the manner of its original transition from the Romanesque. The thirteenth century is the period of its nearest approach to general uniformity. It then diverges into different national characteristics, which are nowhere more strongly or distinctively

marked than in England; and, finally, when a classical style of building is revived, as if by common consent among nations, each arrives at its object by a different path.

In no country has Gothic architecture produced more numerous or remarkable results than in Great Britain; for although our later style may want something of the grace and luxuriance of the Norman Gothic, and our religious and other public edifices may not equal the vastness of some of the German cathedrals, yet we possess structures displaying architectural combinations peculiarly our own, and pre-eminent in decorative effect and boldness of execution.

Gothic must not be considered merely as differing from classical architecture. It is diametrically opposed to it upon principles no less fixed and consistent than its own. In the two preceding Books we have traced the gradual disappearance of every distinguishing feature of regular architecture as it became applied to new purposes, and its parts formed into new combinations; and in this state architecture remained, destitute of any real principle, until the forms necessarily resulting from the