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and compounds included. Of these, we are told, about twentythree thousand come from the Anglo-Saxon, which thus yields a little less than five-eighths of the whole number.

The other test has been applied to the proportions in this way. Passages have been analyzed, from the authorized version of the Scriptures, and from fourteen popular writers, both in prose and verse, of whom the poet Spenser is the earliest, and Samuel Johnson the latest. Of the whole number of words examined, those that are not of Saxon origin make less than one-fifth, leaving more than four-fifths as native. The proportions in the several cases vary widely. The translators of the Bible are by far the purest. An extract from the book of Genesis has, of foreign words, one twenty-sixth; and another from the Gospel of Saint John has one thirty-seventh; the average of the two being one twentyninth. Among the other writers, the extreme places are held by Dean Swift, whose foreign words amount to fewer than one-ninth; and Gibbon the historian, who has considerably more than onethird.*

This somewhat whimsical investigation is not worth prosecuting into our own century. To be really useful, for so much as the groundwork of a general classification of the words in the language, the examples would have to be both copious and many, and the topics treated in the extracts should be very various. As a criterion by which to judge of an author's style, such an analysis is, for many reasons, useless in all cases except such as present extreme peculiarities.

*The particulars may be amusing; though they will perhaps confirm the opinion expressed in the text, that style cannot fairly be tried by such a standard. The whole number of words is 1696, of which the foreign ones are 303. The writers stand thus, in the order of their proportional purity: Translators of Bible, having foreign words, ; Swift, less than; Cowley, less than, Shakspeare, less than; Milton, full; Spenser, Addison, and the poet Thomson, less than; Locke and Young, full; Johnson, full ; Robertson, the historian, less than ; Pope, ; Hume, the historian, full }; Gibbon, much more than -The passages examined will be found in Turner's Anglo-Saxons, vol. ii. (ed. 1836); the words were counted by the Edinburgh Reviewer before cited; and the proportions have now been reckoned in detail.

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INTRODUCTION. 1. Impulses affecting Literature-Checks impeding it-The Reformation-State Affairs Classical Learning. 2. Influence of the Age on the Literature of the Next-Its Social Importance. CLASSICAL LEARNING. 3. Benefits of Printing -Greek and Latin Studies-Eminent Names-THEOLOGY. 4 Translations of the Holy Scriptures-Tyndale's Life and Labours-Coverdale-Rogers-CranmerReigns of Edward the Sixth and Mary-Increase of Printers. 5. Original English Writings in Theology-Their General Character-Ridley-Cranmer-Tyndale's Controversial Treatises-Latimer's Sermons-Character of Latimer's Oratory.

INTRODUCTION TO THE PERIOD.

1. THE great frontier-line, between the Literary History of the Middle Ages and that of the times which we distinguish as Modern, lies, for England at least, in the early years of the sixteenth century. Intellect then began to be stirred by impulses altogether new; while others, which had as yet been held in check, were allowed, one after another, to work freely.

Yet there did not take place any sudden or universal metamorphosis, either in literature, or in those phenomena, social, intellectual, and religious, by which its forms and its spirit were determined. No such suddenness or completeness of change is possible. As well might the traveller, in descending southward from the pine-forests and icy peaks of the Alps, hope to find himself transported at once into the orange-groves of Naples, or to see the alms of Sicily waving above his head.

All the influences by which English Literature was thenceforth to be affected, were of such a nature that their operation could not but be slow; and some of them manifested themselves in a fashion, which caused their immediate effects to be very unlike those that might have been expected to flow from them. Both of these things are true in regard to the Protestant Reformation, the mightiest of the forces which imprinted a new stamp on intellectual activity; and the first of them is true in regard to that new Revival of Classical Learning, which was the second of the predominating literary influences.

The change of faith, a change destined to generate the most beneficial and elevating developments of opinion and sentiment, was yet, through the very earnestness and intensity with which it concentrated the minds of thinking men on theological and ecclesiastical questions, decidedly unfavourable, for a time, to the more imaginative departments of literary exertion. The zeal, again, with which the purest models of Latin literature began anew to be studied, and the enthusiasm, yet keener, which attended the novel studies of our countrymen in the literature of Greece, produced, as it had in Italy not long before, both a dearth of originality and an inattention to the cultivation of the living tongue. Neither Protestant truth and freedom, nor Classical taste and knowledge, could ripen those literary fruits which were their natural offspring, until a process of training had been undergone, for which, in any circumstances, a generation or two would scarcely have been sufficient. But the circumstances which actually occurred, were such as necessarily suspended, for a time yet longer, the salutary operation of the purer and more active of the two influences. The student of history does not require to be reminded, how corruptly prompted, how incomplete and inconsistent in themselves, and how tyrannically and obnoxiously enforced, were the steps by which Henry the Eighth became the instrument of throwing off the yoke of Rome. We all know, likewise, how the short reign of Henry's admirable son was inadequate for enabling him and his advisers to purify thoroughly and found solidly the revolution thus superficial and incomplete; and how it thus be'came possible for Mary to compel, for a while, formal submission to a church in which few of her subjects now trusted, but whose evil nature still fewer of them knew well enough to be willing to sacrifice life as the penalty of dissent.

2. When, in a word, we reflect on the public events which marked the reigns of those three sovereigns; when we consider, also, that every new kind of knowledge requires to suffer a process of digestion, before it can nourish the mind to healthy strength

and inspire it with original energy; and when we remember how gradually and slowly the art of printing itself, the great instrument of modern enlightenment, diffused its blessings in the earliest times of its operation; we shall not be surprised to discover that, throughout a great part of the sixteenth century, English literature did not assume a character separating it decisively from that of the ages which had gone before. It did not really take its station as the worthy organ of a new epoch in the history of civilisation, until the reign of Elizabeth was within thirty years of its close.

We see, then, that our Literature, like our Language, has had its era of transition. This character belongs emphatically to the period whose phenomena we are about to study, and whose bounds might not unfitly be extended a little beyond the point at which, for the sake of convenience, it is here marked as ending. The scene is dimly lighted; and the figures that move in it are less august than those that will next appear. But the parts they play are, in a strict and proper sense, introductory to the great drama which is offered to us in the literary history of modern times. Among the brilliant works of the Elizabethan age, there is probably none, of which we may not detect germs in some of the efforts which were made within the half-century that preceded. The great prose writers, the masters of the drama, the students in the Italian school of poetry, all profited by what had then been done. The literary poverty of the Age of the Reformation was the poverty which the settler in an unpeopled country has to endure, while he fells the woods that overshadowed him, and sows his half-tilled fields. It was a poverty in the bosom of which lay rich abundance.

Accordingly this epoch, so unspeakably momentous in the social history of Christendom, requires, even from the student of literature, an amount of attention far beyond that which might seem due to its literary efforts, if these were judged merely as they are in themselves. The relations, likewise, which subsisted between the intellectual and the religious changes, present themselves to us with a frequency which is exceedingly instructive, and through which a light is thrown, by each of the two paths of progress, on the events that were occurring in the other. It is very curious to remark in how many odd ways we see the literature of the day, and the ecclesiastical and theological reforms, mixed up together and exercising a mutual action.

Nor do we linger reluctantly over the history of an era, in which, for the sake of goodness and of truth, so much, so very much, was earnestly thought, and bravely done, and patiently

suffered. Alike in the acts, and in the intellectual efforts, of the men who, in the face of danger and of death, guided the opinions and the deeds of that agitated generation, we acknowledge, amidst all weaknesses and faults and sins, a mighty course of events, governed by the hand of Him who has willed that man should know the truth and through the truth be free. On us, the inheritors of the blessings which our forefathers won, devolves the duty of understanding rightly the lessons which their history teaches, and of applying those lessons to our lives and sentiments, in the spirit of enlightened knowledge and of Christian love.

CLASSICAL LEARNING.

3. The Classical Learning of the age claims our notice first. Its cultivation stood in a twofold relation to the changes in the church. It was, antecedently, one of the causes of deviation from received opinions; and it became, afterwards, one of the instruments most actively used in ecclesiastical controversy, both for attack and for defence.

This was the department of knowledge, and its students were the class of readers, that profited, in the first instance, more than any others, by the diffusion of the art of printing. The early press was employed in the multiplication of ancient books, much more frequently than in producing works in any of the living tongues. Of the ten thousand editions of books, large and small, which are said to have been printed before the close of the fifteenth century, more than half appeared in Italy; and a very large proportion of these consisted of classical works. Our English press, producing in all, before that date, no more than about a hundred and forty, contributed nothing in this department; but the increased facilities of communication between different countries put quickly at the disposal of our scholars both the knowledge and the publications of the continent. And students were now placed in a position of incalculable advantage, by the reduced price of books. They cost, it is said, one-fifth only of the sums which had been paid for manuscripts.

Foreign men of letters, also, visited England; and a strong impulse was given, especially, by the presence of the accomplished Erasmus. This celebrated scholar, writing about the middle of our period, pronounces England to have then been more exactly learned than any continental nation, excepting Italy alone. Classical studies were prosecuted, with remarkable ardour, in both of the directions in which the improvements of the continent had already begun. Greek was studied accurately for the first time;

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