and as the French minstrels had, long since, pre-occupied the fabulous era of every known history, their English successors were reduced to the necessity of translating. In executing this task, under the constraint of finding a constant succession of rhymes, in a language which was hitherto rude and untractable, they might often be led to borrow the words and phrases of the original. At least it was their interest to adopt and give a currency to every new term which had acquired the authority of colloquial usage; so that the compositions of our early writers are become nearly unintelligible to those who are not familiarly acquainted with the Norman vocabulary.

It is very possible that our language may not have received much real improvement from this indiscriminate adoption of foreign idioms; but perhaps it was in some measure indebted to them for its reception at court, where it supplanted the Norman-French, which had exclusively prevailed there from the time of the Conquest. This alteration, which ensured to our national literature all the advantages that patronage can bestow, seems to have taken place in the reign of Edward III., whose policy led him to excite a hatred of France among his subjects, and who proscribed the exclusive use of French in our laws, and in the elements of education. Gower, as we have seen, commenced his literary career by aspiring to the character of a French poet, and only began his English work in his old age, during the reign and by the command of Richard II. The fashionable dialect, therefore, had probably changed during the interval, and it may be presumed that this change also procured us the advantage of Chaucer's talents, which, from the circumstances of his birth and education, would naturally have been employed, had he written a few years sooner, in cultivating a foreign rather than his native language.

During the whole of this period, the Scotish dialect seems to have been nearly identical with that of England; but its history is, unfortunately, still more obscure than

our own. We do not possess a single specimen of the original language spoken in Scotland during the eleventh century; and the only compositions in the Anglo-Norman dialect anterior to the life of Bruce are, the song written about 1285, on the death of Alexander III., which is to be seen in the first volume of this work, and a romance attributed to Thomas of Ercildoun, which, I believe, was first discovered by Mr. Ritson in the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh.

This very curious poem is, apparently, coeval with Adam Davie's romance of Alexander 1, which it resembles in some degree, by the shortness and abruptness of its diction. It is written in a very singular and difficult stanza of eleven lines, which proves the author to have possessed a degree of metrical skill very unusual at that early period; and has, besides, a plausible claim to the still more unusual merit of originality; as it seems to be quoted in a French metrical fragment of Tristram, which represents the narrative of Thomas as of high authority. But it is evident, that, however interesting in itself, or honourable to Scotish poetry, it can give us no assistance in tracing the progress of language in Scotland from any original form into the mixed state in which it is here exhibited.

In this dearth of materials it became necessary to have recourse to conjecture; and two hypotheses have been offered, both of which are recommended by much acute reasoning, and supported by a number of respectable authorities.

Mr. Pinkerton, in a very ingenious and learned essay, prefixed to his extracts from the Maitland MSS., contends that the original language of Scotland was, like the Saxon and Danish, a dialect of the Gothic; that it was

1 I am happy in being able to add that our stock of ancient English literature is likely to be soon enriched with accurate editions of both these very interesting works. The former will be published by Mr. Walter Scott, the latter by Mr. Park.

introduced by the Picts, a Scandinavian tribe who preceded the Scots, a Celtic colony from Ireland: and that the French part of the subsequent mixed language was produced by the frequent intermarriages of the Scotish kings and nobles, during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, with ladies of Anglo-Norman blood, and by the long residence of these princes in the counties of Northumberland and Cumberland, which they held, as feudatories, of the crown of England.

Mr. Ritson, on the contrary, in a no less elaborate essay, prefixed to his selection of Scotish songs, attempts to prove, by a long chain of authorities, that the Picts were, no less than the Scots, a Celtic nation; that the Gaelic language was formerly universal in Scotland; but that having never been employed in works of literature, it was gradually superseded by the English, in consequence of those relations with this country, which resulted from the policy of Malcolm III. and his succes

sors.

It is evidently impossible to reconcile antagonists who have no one opinion in common, and who interpret differently the same authorities, and draw opposite conclusions from the few facts on which they are agreed. I shall therefore content myself with stating, as correctly as I can, the present amount of our information on the subject, and leave the result to the determination of the reader.

It seems to be satisfactorily proved by Mr. Macpherson, in his "Geographical Illustrations of Scotish History," that the kingdom of Northumberland, founded by the Angles in the sixth century, extended from the Humber as far as the southern bank of the Frith of Forth; and, following that shore to the westward, as far as the Graemis-Dyke, included the provinces of Lothian and Galloway; a country, in superficial extent, not far short of one-fourth, and in wealth and population equal,

perhaps, to about a third, of what we now call Scotland. These provinces, though claimed by the kings of England after the union of the Heptarchy, were definitively ceded by Edgar to Kenneth king of the Scots and Picts, on condition that "he should do homage for this part of his dominions to the crown of England, and preserve to the inhabitants their ancient customs and laws, as well as the appellation and language of Englishmen 2."

The whole western region, comprehended between the mountains and the sea, was occupied by the Scots, whose language is universally admitted to have been Gaelic.

Lastly, the eastern coast to the northward of the Forth is to be allotted to the Picts, and when it shall be ascertained who the Picts were, and what was their original dialect, it will only remain to determine when and why they relinquished that dialect, for the purpose of talking English.

Such seems to have been the distribution of the country when Malcolm III. in 1057 mounted the throne of Scotland. We all know, that during the usurpation of Macbeth he had been carried into England, where he spent seventeen years; and that at the end of this time he was reinstated in his dominion, by means of an army raised in Northumberland, the earldom of his uncle Siward.

Hitherto, the usual residence of the kings of Scotland had been at Forteviot, or elsewhere in the neighbourhood of the Tay; but Malcolm was induced, both by motives of taste and policy, to remove his court to the southward, to the castles of Dunfermline and Edinburgh. Having been educated in England, he might naturally prefer a residence in a Saxon province: it was no less

2 Fecitque Kineth Regi Eadgaro homagium, sub cautione multa promittens, quod populo partis illius antiquas consuetudines non negaret, et sub nomine et linguâ Anglicanâ permanerent. Quod usque hodie firmum manet. Wallingford ap. Gale, vol. iii. p. 545.

natural that he should wish to remove from a part of his kingdom where the partisans of his predecessor were perhaps still numerous and, after the conquest of England by the Normans, it became highly necessary that the kings of Scotland should be enabled, by their vicinity to the frontier, to watch over the conduct of an ambitious and powerful neighbour.

To this essential policy Malcolm was by no means inattentive. He supported to the utmost of his power, both by negociation and by force of arms, the Saxon party in England; he married the sister of Edgar Atheling; distributed grants of lands to the companions of her exile; and afforded an asylum in his dominions to the numerous crowds of fugitives who, during the sanguinary expedition of William the Conqueror, in 1070, were expelled from the northern provinces of England. By these means he probably increased very considerably the lation and industry of his country; he certainly added much to its political influence; and we are not surprised that his long and active reign should be considered as the commencement of an important era in the history of Scotland, distinguished by a very considerable change in the manners and language of its inhabitants.

popu

What was the precise nature and extent of this change can now only be conjectured. Perhaps it was merely such as tended to diminish the difference between the English and Scotish dialects of the Saxon, and was occasioned by the numerous emigrations from England. At least it does not seem probable, that Malcolm and Edgar Atheling should have introduced into Scotland the language of their bitterest enemies. Mr. Pinkerton, indeed, contends that the Norman was the universal speech of the English nobles during the reign of Edward the Confessor and it is certain that there existed at his court a strong Norman party; and that he employed a foreign language in preference to his own, and delighted in the

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