ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The term Anglo-Saxon is of quite modern origin, the ruling race in England before the Norman conquest not know ing itself by any other name than ./Englisc or English. Mr. Freeman, prof. Stubbs, and other able scholars of the present day, argue stoutly for a return to the old and true name; and to all appearance the abolition of " Anglo-Saxon" and the restoration of " English" is only a question of time. English is one of the Low German family of Teutonic languages. We do not know it in its earliest form. Some centuries elapse after the invasions of the 5th c. before any literature was produced or recorded. During this time, the dialectic differences of the various Low German tribes who had come into the island were probably diminishing, while separation from their kinsmen on the continent must on the other hand have tended to develop new peculiarities. The result is that the very oldest English is by no means the same as the very oldest dialects of Low German in the coast regions between the Rhine and the Baltic. But it most nearly resembles the old Saxon of Rhenish Prussia and Westphalia, and the old Dutch and the old Frisian of the provinces of Holland, and to the last of these it has the closest affinity. It is not to be supposed, however, that at any time before 1066, Englishmen spoke or even wrote a single dialect. There is evidence of at least. two being used—a northern and a southern—an Anglian by the people of Northumbria, and a Saxon by the people of Wessex. The former is the more primitive, and as Mr. Kington-Oliphant points out (Sources of Standard English, 1873, pp. 2540), has more in common with old Norse and Frisian than its southern sister; e.g., the infinitive ends not in the an of Wessex English, but in a. The histoty of England during the 600 years before the Norman conquest accounts both for the antiquity of the Northumbrian literature and for the subsequent triumph of the Wessex dialect. In the 7th and 8th centuries, North umbria was the strongest, the most civilized, and the most learned of the English states. Christianity had poured its benign influences over it in double measure. Paulinus and Aidan, Rome and Iona, had both striven successfully against paganism, and light flowed over the land. Cadman and Bede and Alcuin were all Northumbrians. That so little of this Northumbrian literature has come down to us is owing to the destruction of the northern monasteries by the Danes. The influence of Alfred, "king of the west Saxons," and the unification of government in the island under his successors, gave the dialect of Wessex an irresistible supremacy; so much so, that even most of the early northern literature only survives in a southern dress—e.g., we can only read Cadmon in a Wessex version of the 10th century. Yet so • strong was the impression left on its neighbor by the Anglian state, that not even the havoc made by the Danes of its literary monuments and its political prosperity could prevent its name from being given to the island, the people, and the tongue.
Wessex English, then—that is, the English Of the court, of books, and probably in great measure of the schools—prevailed in England for more than 150 years before the Norman conquest, and is substantially what we mean when we speak of the "Anglo Saxon" language. There is no reason to suppose that it ever superseded the dialect of the north for ordinary purposes of intercourse. Anglian lived on in the mouths of the people, and in later times has won an immortal fame in literature under the name of lowland Scotch. Cadmon and Burns both used it, though in the unapproachable verse of the Ayrshire bard it has become utterly inorganic, and so remains. English, then, before the conquest, differs from modern English in being an inflected language. Its inflections are not so rich, or various, or euphonious as those of Latin, or Greek, or Mceso-Gothic, that oldest and noblest of the Low German dialects; but they are still suf ficient to give it a distinct character, and to make it strange and almost unintelligible at first sight to one whose reading does not go back beyond Shakespeare. Its nouns can be grouped into declensions, and classified according to gender, and faint traces of the terminations are preserved in the English of the present day. The en in and "oxen" is the old an of the plural in nouns of the first declension; the 8 and es, the old as marking the plural of niasculines of the third. Adjectives have both a definite and indefinite form. The article is as complete as in Greek, though everything has now ished but a fragment of the neuter that (modern the). Some mutilated remains of the pronominal inflections still survive to puzzle school-boys, and delight the lovers of • hoar antiquity." Verbs are divided into "strong" and "weak" conjugations, as is still the case in German. distinction between the indicative and subjective moods, though slight, is real; and we have not only an infinitive in an, but a gerund in enne, while the present participle in mule is not confused with the verbal noun in ling, as is unhappily the case with us who have made ing do duty for both. Of late years the study of the English tongue, particularly in its earliest stage, has become almost pop ular, and grammatical works are now numerous. Besides the fragmentary or discursive contributions to the subject of English grammar by Guest, Madden, Garnet, Grimm, Earle, Morris, Kington-Oliphant, we may specify Hash's Angelsiiksisk Sproglaere(Stockh., 1817, with Thorpe's translation of 1863); Marsh's Lectures on the English Language (1801); Koch's Hislorische Grammatik der Englische Sprache (1863-69); Mlltzner's Englische Grammatik (1863); Latham's English Language (1855); March's Comparative Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Language (1870); and Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader (1877).