Thomas was haunted by a chimera that whatever was obsolete deserved to be revived. This honest spirit of antiquarianism, working on a most undiscerning intellect, seems to have kindled into a literary bigotry in his sateless delight of “the black-letter of our grandfathers’ days.” Hearne set this unhappy example of printing ancient writers with all their obsolete repulsiveness in orthography and type. He was closely followed by Ritson, and by Whitaker in his edition of “Piers Ploughman;” and these editors assuredly have scared away many a neophyte in our vernacular literature. Ritson printed his “Ancient Songs” with the Saxon characters and abbreviations, which render them often unintelligible. This literary antiquary lived to regret this superstitious antiquarianism. He had prepared a new edition entirely cleared of these offences, but which unfortunately he destroyed at the morbid close of his life.
[8] Turner’s “History of England,” v. 217, will furnish the curious reader readily with several of these specimens of the modes of thinking and of acting of the middle ages, when monks only were the preceptors of mankind.
[9] This term of “strange Ingliss” has yet been found so obscure as to occasion some strictures, which, like the Interpreter in the Critic, are the most difficult to comprehend. I must refer to Monsieur Thierry’s very delightful “History of the Conquest of England,” ii. 271, for a very refined speculation on our Robert de Brunne’s unlucky obscurity. Monsieur Thierry imagines that the “strange Ingliss” was the refined English which had flown into Scotland, and there become the cultivated language of the minstrels and the court, and which our hapless Saxons on this side of the Tweed had sunk into a dialect only fitted for serfs. This finer and more elevated English could not be understood by a base commonalty; this was “strange Ingliss” to them. A very interesting event in the history of both nations had transplanted the purer English to the Scottish court:—Malcolm, whom the usurpation of Macbeth had driven from the Scottish throne, was expatriated in England during an interval of near twenty years; the affection of the monarch for the English was such, that he adopted their language, and when the royal family of England was expelled by the Conqueror, the king received them and the emigrant Saxons, and married the English princess. This gave rise to that intercourse with the south of Scotland, of which the result in our literary, if not in our civil, history is remarkable. Certain it is that much broad Scotch is good old English, and the noblest minstrelsy cometh “fra the North Countrie.”
[10] On the leaf appears, in the handwriting of the author, “This Boc is Dan Michelis of Northgate ywrite an Englis of his ozene hand that hatte Ayenbyte of inwyt, and is of the boc-house of Seynt Austyn’s of Cantorberi.” The writer was seventy years of age; and he tells us that he was not—
| “Blind, and dyaf, and alsuo dumb, Of zeventy yer al not rond, Ne ssette by draze to the grond, Uor peny nor mark, ne nor pond.” |
At the end the monk tells us for whom he writes—
| “Nou ich wille that ye ywite hou hitt is ywent Thet this Boc is ywrite mid Engliss of Kent. This Boc is ymade vor lewede men, Vor Vader and vor Moder and vor other Ken, Ham vor to berze uram alle manyere Zen Thet ine have inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen. Huo ase God is his name yzed Thet this Boc made God him yeue that bread Of Angles of Hauene and thereto his red, And underuongè his Zoule, huanne that is dyad.” |
[11] While Tyrwhit was busied on the “Canterbury Tales” his attention was excited by the old cataloguer of the Cottonian manuscripts to a Chaucer exemplar emendate scriptum. On a spare leaf the name of Richard Chawfer had been scrawled, which might have been that of some former possessor. There are two fatalities which hang over the pen of a slumbering cataloguer—ignorance and indolence. Our present one caught an immortal name and never travelled onwards; and, struck by the fairness of the writing, inferred that it was a copy of Chaucer critically accurate. It turned out to be the compositions of an unknown poet who not willingly relinquished his claim on posterity, for he has subscribed his name, Laurence Minot. [The manuscript is marked Galba, E. IX.; specimens were first published from it by Tyrwhit and Warton, and the entire series ultimately by Ritson.]
[12] Ritson’s first edition (1795) of Minot having become very difficult to procure, an elegant re-impression, and apparently a correct one, was published in 1825.
[13] “Philobiblion, sive de Amore Librorum et Institutione Bibliothecæ,” ascribed to Richard of Bury, Bishop of Durham; but Fabricius says it was written by Robert Holcot, a learned friar, at his desire.—Fab. “Bib. Med. Ævi,” vol. i. It is the bishop, however, who was the collector, and always speaks in his own person. It has been recently translated by Mr. Inglis.