The change which gradually produced the Midland dialect most pro bably first showed itself in the counties of Northampton, Warwick, and Leicester. It seems to have been brought about not so much by adopting the peculiarities of Southern speech, as by giving greater prominence to such parts of the native dialect as were common to the South. The Southern conjugations must at all times have been familiar, at least in dignified composition ; but other conjugations were popularly used, and in the gradual disuse of these and other forms peculiar to the North the change consisted. We have many manu scripts written in the Midland counties, fu which all trace of the Northern dialect seems to have been studiously avoided ; yet in very many of them may be found some verbal inflexion in es, or some other popular form, quite sufficient to betray the writer.
The Northern dialect was still broadly spoken, within the last three centuries, in the counties of Lincoln, Rutland, Derby, and Stafford ; but it has been gradually giving way before a language so much more widely understood, till it is now to be found only iu scattered localities amid the mountains of the north of England, or in the lowlands of Scotland. The Southern dialect began to yield at a later period. It was certainly spoken at the beginning of the 17th century in all the counties round London. For specimens of the Middlesex dialect see Ben Jonson's Tale of a Tub ; ' Lear,' iv. 6, furnishes us with an example of the Kentish dialect ; and nearly one half of ' Gammer Gurton's Needle' is written in the same dialect of Essex. Milton, when he issued forth " To breathe Among the pleasant villages and farms," must have heard a dialect around him in all essential particulars the same as the Sornersetshire.
We will now take a rapid survey of the literature which belongs to the language whose history and peculiarities we have been endeavour ing to trace. As in the case with the literaturo of most nations, we find that all its earlier specimens are metrical. We will therefore first call the reader's attention to our Anglo-Saxon poems ; and to define more clearly the ran ;c of our present inquiry, we will briefly notice the properties which, at that early period, distinguished verse from prose.
An Anglo-Saxon verse is made up of two sections, which together may contain four, five, six, or even more accented syllables. These sections are bound together (by the law of alliteration, or, in other words, each verse must have at least two accented syllables (ono in each section) beginning with the same consonant or with vowels.
Sometimes, and particularly in the longer verses, there are two such alliterative syllables in the first section, as iu the verse met I od for I thy man I e—seni I unite tram I It is very incorrect to call this alliteration the " essence" or the "groundwork" of Anglo-Saxon verse. It is certainly an important part, but still a mere adjunct. The purposes it served were similar to those which are provided for by the final rhyme of our modern versi fication. Tho essence of Anglo-Saxon verse consisted in its system of rhythm. As the accents generally varied from four to six, it may be The inflexions in a are generally used in the Northern languages with a passive meaning ; and there are some traces of their having been used in our Northern dialect for the same purpose.
Another peculiarity of our Northern dialect is the frequent use of the substantival ending er (in which it again resembles the languages of Northern Europe), as leulfer, a wolf; hunker, a haunch; learner, a team; heather, heath ; *tate, a fleteh, Zee.
In this dialect we have also a less frequent use of the articles, con junctions, and personal pronouns. 1'his is one of its most striking features. Every person who has been in the North of England must have heard such phrases as "come out o' house," "gang into field," " puen in poke," &es All these peculiarities of our Northern dialect may be traced to the Anglo-Saxon period; and there is little doubt that the most striking feature of the Southern dialect, namely, its preference of the vocal to the whisper letters, as 1 for a, and v for f, is equally ancient, It always prevailed in the Netherlandish dialects, and may be traced in the orthography of our Southern manuscripts to the beginning of the 13th century ; but, as the Anglo-Saxons had neither a r nor a z, it is only by analogy we infer the existence of the corresponding sounds in their language. The argument however from analogy is so strong, that wo may safely conclude either that the Anglo-Saxon f, a, were pronounced in our southern counties as r, z, or that, like the modern a, they represented both a whisper and a vocal sound ; in other words, were pronounced sometimes as f, a, and sometimes as r, z.