Handbook of Universal Literature, From the Best and Latest Authorities

by Anne C. Lynch Botta

The grammar of the English language, in all points of importance, is a simplification of the grammar of the Anglo-Saxon. In considering the sources of the English vocabulary, we find that from the Anglo-Saxon are derived first, almost all those words which import relations; secondly, not only all the adjectives, but all the other words, nouns, and verbs which grammarians call irregular; thirdly, the Saxon gives us in most instances our only names, and in all instances those which suggest themselves most readily for the objects perceived through the senses; fourthly, all words, with a few exceptions, whose signification is specific, are Anglo-Saxon. For instance, we use a foreign, naturalized term when we speak of color, or motion, in general, but the Saxon in speaking of the particular color or motion, and the style of a writer becomes animated and suggestive in proportion to the frequency with which he uses these specific terms; fifthly, it furnishes a rich fund of expressions for the feelings and affections, for the persons who are the earliest and most natural objects of our attachment, and for those inanimate things whose names are figuratively significant of domestic union; sixthly, the Anglo-Saxon is, for the most part, the language of business; of the counting-house, the shop, the street, the market, the farm. Among an eminently practical people it is eminently the organ of practical action, and it retains this prerogative in defiance alike of the necessary innovations caused by scientific discovery and of the corruptions of ignorance and affectation. Seventhly, a very large proportion of the language of invective, humor, satire, and colloquial pleasantry is Anglo-Saxon. In short, the Teutonic elements of our vocabulary are equally valuable in enabling us to speak and write perspicuously and with animation; and besides dictating the laws which connect our words, and furnishing the cement which binds them together, they yield all our aptest means of describing imagination, feeling, and the every-day facts of life.

From the Latin the English has borrowed more or less for two thousand years, and freely for more than six centuries; but from the time of the Conquest it is difficult to distinguish words of Latin origin from those of French. The Latinisms of the language have arisen chiefly in three epochs. The first was the thirteenth century, which followed an age devoted to classical studies, and its theological writers and poets coined freely in the Roman mint. The second was the Elizabethan age, when, in the enthusiasm of a new revival of admiration for antiquity, the privilege of naturalization was used to an extent which threatened serious danger to the purity and ease of speech. In the third epoch, the latter part of the eighteenth century, Johnson was the dictator of form and style, and the pompous rotundity that then prevailed has been permanently injurious, although our Latin words, on the whole, have done much more good than harm.

The introduction of French words began with the Conquest, when the political condition of the country made it imperative that many words should be understood. The second stage began about a century later, when the few native Englishmen who loved letters entered on the study of French poetry. The third era of English Gallicisms opened in the fourteenth century, when the French tastes of the nobles, and the zeal with which Chaucer and other men of letters studied the poetry of France, greatly contributed to introduce that tide of French diction which flowed on to the close of the Middle Ages. By that time the new words were so numerous and so strongly ingrafted on the native stock that all subsequent additions are unimportant. The dictionaries of modern English are said to contain about 38,000 words, of which about 23,000 or five eighths of the whole number, come from the Anglo-Saxon.

The English language, by its remarkable combination of strength, precision, and copiousness, is worthy of being, as it already is, spoken by many millions, and these the part of the human race that appear likely to control, more than any others, the future destinies of the world.

PERIOD FIRST.

FROM THE DEPARTURE OF THE ROMANS TO THE NORMAN CONQUEST (448-1066).

1. CELTIC LITERATURE.—During this period four languages were used for literary communication in the British Islands; two Celtic tongues spoken by nations of that race, who still occupied large portions of the country; Latin, as elsewhere the organ of the church and of learning; and Anglo- Saxon. The first of the Celtic tongues, the Erse or Gaelic, was common only to the Celts of Ireland and Scotland, where it is still spoken. The second, that of the Cymrians or ancient Britons, has been preserved by the Welsh.

The literary remains of this period in Ireland consist of bardic songs and historical legends, some of which are asserted to be older than the ninth century, the date of the legendary collection called the "Psalter of Cashel," which still survives. There exist, also, valuable prose chronicles which are believed to contain the substance of others of a very early date, and which furnish an authentic contemporary history of the country in the language of the people from the fifth century. No other modern nation of Europe is able to make a similar boast.

All the earliest relics of the Scotch Celts are metrical. The poems which bear the name of Ossian are professedly celebrations by an eye-witness of events which occurred in the third century. They were first presented to the world in 1762 by Macpherson, a Scotch poet, and represented by him to be translations from the ancient Gaelic poetry handed down by tradition through so many centuries and still found among the Highlands. The question of their authenticity excited a fierce literary controversy which still remains unsettled. By some recent English and German critics, however, Ossian's poems are considered genuine. The existence of bards among the Celtic nations is well established, and their songs were preserved with pride. The name of Ossian is mentioned by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, and that of Fingal, the hero of the legends, was so popular that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries many bishops complained that their people were more familiar with Fingal than with the catechism. The Gaelic original of Ossian was published in 1807.

The literature of the Cymric Celts is particularly interesting, as affording those fragments of British poetry and history from which the magnificent legends were built up to immortalize King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. In the bardic songs and elsewhere, frequent allusion is made to this heroic prince, who with his warriors resisted the Saxon enemies of his country, and who, we are told, died by domestic treason, the flower of the British nobles perishing with him. His deeds were magnified among the Welsh Britons, and among those who sought refuge on the banks of the Loire. The chroniclers wove these traditions into a legendary history of Britain. From this compilation Geoffrey of Monmouth, in the twelfth century, constructed a Latin historical work; and the poets of chivalry, allured by the beauty and pathos of the tale, made it for ages the centre of the most animated pictures of romance.