an imperfect work: but that, far from being dis couraged by this unlucky robbery, he had redoubled his zeal for collecting materials, and had finally perfected his work in 1177. He farther assures us, that he had more than once, publicly read his poem at the tomb of the Archbishop; a proof (says M. de la Rue) that the Romance tongue was, at this time, very generally understood in England: perhaps, however, there never was a period when the town of Canterbury would not have furnished a sufficient audience for such an exhibition. This work of Guernes is written in stanzas of five Alexandrines, all ending with the same rhyme; a mode of composition which may possibly have been adopted for the purpose of being easily chanted. It is in the British Mus. MSS. Harl. No. 270; and M. de la Rue suspects that the stolen copy exists in the MSS. Cotton. Domitian, A. xi.

Such is the short and meagre abstract of the information which M. de la Rue has communicated to the public, in his two very curious dissertations. He is since returned to France, after pledging himself to resume and continue the subject, and it certainly is to be wished that he may be enabled to accomplish a task for which he is so well qualified. But it is not sufficient that the mines of literature contained in our public libraries, should

be distinctly pointed out, unless some steps are taken to render them generally useful. All the information that can be obtained from the professed historians of the middle ages, has been collected by the successive labour of our antiquaries, whose activity, acuteness, and perseverance, do them the highest honour: and their ingenuity has often been successful in detecting, and extorting by comparative criticism, many particulars respecting the state of society, and the progress of arts and manners, the direct communication of which would have been considered by the monkish analists as degrading to the dignity of their narrative. But these details, which are neglected by the historian, form the principal materials of the poet. His business is minute and particular description; he must sieze on every thing that passes before his eyes; and the dress, the customs, the occupations, the amusements, as well as the arts and learning of the day, are necessary, either to the embellishment or the illustration of his subject. A printed copy of the works of the Norman poets, or at least of a copious and well selected extract from them, would be a most valuable present to the public; and, indeed it is only in this shape that they can be very generally useful: because the difficulty of the old manuscript characters is a permanent tax on

the ingenuity of each successive student; it is in every case a delay to the gratification of his curiosity; and the talent of decyphering obsolete characters is not necessarily attached to the power of profiting by the information which is concealed under them. Besides, a scarce and valuable manuscript cannot possibly be put into general circulation; and many learned men are necessarily debarred, either by distance, or by infirmity, or by the pressure and variety of their occupations, from spending much time in those public repositories of learning, to which the access has indeed been rendered easy, but could not be made convenient, by the liberality of their founders.

CHAPTER III.

State of our Language and Poetry in the Reign of Henry II. and Richard I. exemplified by an Extract from Layamon's Translation of Wace.-Conjectures concerning the Period at which the Anglo-Norman, or English Language began to be formed.-Early Specimen of English Poetry, from Hickes's Thesaurus.

WHILE Norman literature was making a rapid progress in this country, under the fostering influence of royal patronage; and the Latin compositions of John of Salisbury, Peter of Blois, Joseph of Exeter, and others, bore testimony to the no less. powerful encouragement of the church; the Saxon language, however degraded, still continued to maintain its ground; was generally spoken, and even employed in works of information and amusement, for at least a century after the Norman conquest. This is incontestably proved, not only by the Saxon Chronicle, which, as it relates the death of King Stephen, must have been written after that

event, but by a much more curious composition, a poetical translation of Wace's Brut, written by one Layamon, "a priest of Ernleye upon Severn," (as he calls himself,) a copy of which is preserved in the British Museum, MSS. Cot. Calig. A. ix.

As this very curious work never was, and probably never will be printed, it appeared necessary to depart, in this instance, from the practice usually adopted in the present sketch, and to give the following extract in the spelling of the original MSS. This minute accuracy was requisite for the satisfaction of such readers as may choose to collate the transcript with the original, and for the purpose of enabling every reader to correct such mistakes as may have been committed in the glossarial notes. Perhaps, too, it may not be amiss to exhibit a single specimen of the strange orthography adopted in our early MSS. as a proof that the degree of obscurity attributed to this cause has not been over-rated.