the body of Chaucer was entombed in that corner of Westminster Abbey where, in after generations, the perishable remains of other of England's great poets were to be gathered round his. Four centuries pass not over the writings of any mortal without defacing and obliterating. Language is liable to undergo perpetual changes; any person may observe, in even a short space of years, new forms of expression coming into use, old ones growing obsolete. Time brings along with it new modes of life, of thought, and action. Opinions and feelings often grow old-fashioned-fall behind the times, as the phrase is; and, as these are things that enter so largely into the composition of books, it needs must be that they, too, grow old-fashioned, obsolete, obscure. Chiefly will this happen when it has fallen to an author's lot to write in an unformed language, when the speech of men is made up of various and unsettled dialects, and, therefore, most quickly perishes for want of that consistency which alone perpetuates it. Time is busy in the work of change with all that is upon the earth: the brow is furrowed, the voice is broken, and the sight fails; temple and tower moulder with its touch; empires and dynasties are varying and wasting; but the strangest work of mutability is that which is at work with language. The most wondrous mortality the world witnesses is the dying of language. It almost baffles human conception to speculate either upon the birth or the death of the multitude, or rather the family of words that make up a nation's speech; to think how thousands of mankind come to utter their thoughts and feelings in the same words and the same combinations of words; and then, that, in the course of time, as if the earth and all earthly

things should be as changeful as the moon which lights it, such utterance is changed, and at length wholly lost from the living tongue. Its sound becomes an uncertain and disputed thing, for it is only seen on the pages of books, or it may be only in dim and dubious inscriptions on the broken column, the ruined arch, or the empty monument. I know of nothing which so teaches the transitoriness of things as that phrase of mournful significance, "a dead language." How does it startle us in our pride, the bare apprehension of our English speech changing into a lifeless and mouldy record-something dark for scholars and antiquaries vainly to attempt to enlighten—something of a degenerate dialect, in which might be faintly traced the shadows of a mighty language. The curse of the confusion of tongues is an unending curse, like the sentence of labour, on rebellious man. From the time when the ambition of men brought down this penalty, and the whole earth ceased to be" of one language and one speech," nations have been scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth, no longer understanding one another's speech-one generation, too, becoming unintelligible to another. So must it ever be as long as a cloud of divine displeasure travels onward with the earth, casting down upon it a dark shadow; and hence no language, no matter how lofty its literature may be, can boast a privilege from decay:

Learned and wise, hath perished utterly,

Nor leaves her speech one word to aid the sigh

That would lament her."

The Pyramids, mysterious in their unnumbered centu

ries, are standing almost as imperishable as the Nile, and

yet not one word survives that was spoken by the tens of thousands who toiled in building them :

"Egyptian Thebes,

Tyre by the margin of the sounding waves,

Palmyra, central in the desert, fell;"

and all their dialects are silent as the desert sands. That noble language, too, of antiquity, with which Athens sent forth her philosophy and poetry to the islands of the Egean and the shores of Asia, and "fulmined over Greece with her resistless eloquence"-the language that Corinth, from her famous isthmus, spake over the eastern and western waves, has, for many ages, known no other existence than that which it holds on the pages of books. The speech of the Roman—the language of empire and of law, spread by consul and emperor till it was stayed by the ocean and the barbarian-how has it ceased to hold companionship with the voice, and learned men of modern times can only conjecture respecting its accent!

If I have been thus led into a digression on the changes which are the destiny of all languages, let me say, in excuse, that I could scarce check the train of thought, being forced to realize most feelingly the perishable nature of speech by the reflection that it is that cause which has dimmed the glory of the earliest and one. of the greatest of England's poets.

The student of early English literature must not omit that miscellaneous poetry, obscure in its origin, and indefinite in its period—the ancient Minstrelsy. It is poetry of native growth, and having the savour of the soil. Existing for a long time in a traditional state, it has suffered the waste which mere oral tradition is never safe from; and it is only within the last fifty years that pains have

been taken to gather the rude strains of those half-civilized ages, and to place them on record at this long distance of time after they existed as a living poetry. This has been done chiefly in Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, and in Sir Walter Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. It was a fine trait in Scott's literary career, the affectionate earnestness with which he laboured for the recovery of the ancient lays of his native land, and the preservation of them in some safer form than what they had in the memory of aged persons, in times when every year, perhaps, was casting them more into neglect. When Scott travelled over the country, highland and lowland, seeking in its secluded glens for such remains of the poetry of the olden times as might not yet be lost out of the recollections of an illiterate peasantry-snatches of song remembered by the aged, as having been chaunted by the old folks of an earlier generation-he was not only gathering materials to illustrate the literature of his country, but he was storing his own mind with those large resources which his genius afterward poured forth with a copiousness which was the world's wonder. When the authorship of Waverley was a secret vexing public curiosity, Professor Wilson exclaimed, "I wonder what all these people are perplexing themselves with: have they forgotten the prose of the Minstrelsy?"*

Of the minstrel poetry now extant, much belongs to a period later than the age of Chaucer; but there is also reason to believe that it had a traditional connection with a still earlier and ruder minstrelsy that has perished. A more distant influence is to be traced back to the hymns

and spiritual songs of the Church which accompanied Christianity, as it made its spiritual inroads on the fierce idolatries of the races of the North. For, although the

sacred services chaunted by the early Christians and those grand hymns of the Middle Ages were in the Latin language, still they accustomed the popular ear to metrical sounds, and opened the hearts of the people to the uses of poetry. While the ancient classical poetry was sleeping its long sleep, to waken in later ages, the sacred songs of the early Christians were never silenced, even in years of persecution; and it is to them, that the poetry of Christendom owes its first impulse.

At a remote age of Britain's history, religious houses. were built there, and as the holy men who dwelt in them, amid aboriginal ferocities and the turmoil of successive invasions-the Saxon and the Dane-uttered their songs of adoration, those harmonies went forth over river and plain, soothing the fierce elements they touched, and charming the evil spirit of war which vexed the hearts of barbaric kings. The music of a good man's chaunted devotions could not float on the air, turbid and tumultuous though it be with wicked passions, without awakening some pure and gentle emotions. A single stanza of ancient Saxon song survives as a memorial of such influence. When that remarkable personage, the Danish King Canute, had overthrown the Saxon dynasty in England, and was making a progress through his newly-conquered realm, as with his queen and knights he approached by water the Abbey of Ely, there arose upon the air the voices of the monks, chaunting their stated services; and when the music fell upon the conqueror's ear with such a sweet solemnity, chiming both with the river's flow and his own placid