Fairefax, Godfrey of Bulloigne, xviii. 20., 1600.
I doubt if there are any earlier instances among the poets. I have had no opportunity of examining the prose writers of the sixteenth century, but think they must have employed its earlier than the poets. As we may see in the version of the Bible, and other works of the time, the English, like the Anglo-Saxon, long continued to use the genitive his for neuters as well as for masculines; and thereof for our present of it, its.
Its leads me to reflect how ignorant people were of the old languages in the last century. If ever there was a palpable forgery, it is the Poems of Rowley: yet, if my memory does not deceive me,
Tyrwhitt regarded them as genuine; and Malone authoritatively affirmed that "no one except the nicest judges of English poetry, from Chaucer to Pope, was competent to test their genuineness." Why, this little word its might have tested it. You see we have not been able to trace it in poetry higher up than the end of the sixteenth century; and I am quite sure that it is not to be found in either Chaucer or Spenser: and yet, in the very first page of Rowley, we meet with the following instances of it:
"The whyche in yttes felle use doe make moke dere."
"The thynge yttes (ytte is?) moste bee yttes owne defense."
But there is a still surer test. We can hardly read a line of Chaucer, Gower, or any other poet of the time, without meeting with what the French term the feminine e, and which must be pronounced as a syllable to make the metre. From one end to the other of the Poems of Rowley, there is not a single instance of it!
Thos. Keightley.