It may possibly be asked, were not the forms here attributed to our Northern dialect introduced by the Danes I Are they not, in fact, the peculiar features of the " Dano-Saxon I" We will not affect to treat these questions as altogether without difficulty ; but there are some considerations which may be laid concisely before the reader, and which, if they appear to him as forcible as they appear to us, may lead him to answer these questions in the negative.
In the first place, It must be remembered, that if no Dane had ever set foot on the island, the very results which hare taken place might have been expected. It is also an argument of weight, that we find all the great features of our Northern dialect in places where there never was a Danish settlement, and vainly search for them, or at best only faintly trace them, in counties where we have historical evidence that the Northinen were numerous. But the strongest argument may be drawn from the pagers of our Northern manuscripts. We have two of very ancient date—the Gloss of the Durham Bible, written by a priest named Aldred, and the Durham Ritual, published by the Suttees Society. The first of these was written, according to Wanley, in the age of Alfred, and the second has been assigned by Its editor to the early part of the flth century. If we can rely on the judgment of either of these antiquaries, the question seems to be answered ; for there was no Danish settlement in the north of England till a later period; and we have the Northern conjugation and other peculiarities of the Northern dialect in every page of the Glos., and in many parts of the Ritnal. The name too of Aldred is thoroughly English; and we can hardly suppose that the monks of Durham would have per mitted a rude and unlettered foreigner to interpolate their most precious manuscript—a volume which we know they regarded with even superstitious veneration. The language used by Aldred was pro bably a mixture of the written language of the day and the spoken dialect of his shire, such as might be used by a provincial writer of the present day, and such as was avowedly used by Gawin Douglas in the 15th century, and fit a later period by Burns.
This mixture of the written and the spoken language in our manu scripts, and the total extinction in many comities of our local dialects, render it extremely difficult to point out the limits within which our two great dialects were spoken. Layamon, whose language seems
clearly to belong to the Southern dialect, is described In all the histories of our poetry as a native of South Gloucestershire ; but tho I theeTht that the rhythm was too vague and loose, but in practice it is generally found eufliciently definite; and there are some of its rules which certainly give it a more scientific character than belongs to the eysti m that has superseded it, For example, no sentence, nor 'any important member of a sentence, could end otherwise than at the close of a section. In our dean peetawe often find a sentence ending in the midst of a section, or evt n immediately Lefot u the last syllable of the verse :— " Ills peers Have found I him Fell J ty—of high-trea I son. Mach— Ito spoke and learnedly for life," So. ; but such a verse would not have been tolerated in an Anglo-Saxon poem. We may indeed find scores of such verses in the printed editions of these poems; but not one single example, and we speak advisedly, in any Anglo-Saxon manuscript, The ' Gleeman's Song' is the oldest specimen extant of Anglo-Saxon literature. It is found in what is called the Exeter manuscript, one of the books left by Bishop Leofric to his cathedral, about the middle of the 11th century. Of the Cleeman himself we know nothing, save what can be learned from the poem ; but from certain passages in it we may gather that ho was born among the Ilirgings, a tribe which dwelt on the marches that separated the Engle from the Swede in the 4th century. In early youth he attended a Mirging princess named Ealhild to the court of liormanric, the celebrated king of the East-Gotsip, and who figures so often in Roman history under the name of Ermen ricus. (' Amin. Marc.' xxxi. 3, &c.) His professional skill appears to have gained him the favour of this monarch, and of the great lords who frequented the court, and whom he visited in their respective governments. He afterwards accompanied a Mirging prince into Italy, probably during the inroad of Alaric, A.D. 401 ; and as Gothic leaders were now rapidly gaining a footing in the empire, he seems to have seized the opportunity of wandering through its provinces. On his return, ho must have been an eye-witness of the wars waged between sEtla. (Attila) and the East-Goten ; and as .Etla's accession dates only in 433, and Eormanric died in 375, he must have been more than seventy when ho wrote the poem.