very accurate in their kinds'. However he set about it in earnest, and though I think he never perfectly conquered it, yet (under so many inconveniences) it is a greater wonder that he attained so good a knowledge, than that he did not make himself absolute master of it. » Again : « His revival of the old Saxon tongue ought to be reckon'd a good piece of service to the study of antiquities. He had found the excellent use of that language in the whole course of his studies; and much lamented the neglect of it both at home and abroad: which was so general that he did not then know one man in the world, who perfectly understood it. Paulatim (says he) ita exhalavit animam nobile illud majorum nostrorum et pervetustum idioma; ut in universo (quod sciam ) orbe, ne unus hodie

1 Meaning, I presume, Hickes's grammar and Somner's dictionary, which however accurate they may have been in 1727, are very inaccurate now. Accommodated! Shall. It is well said, in faith, Sir; and it is well said indeed too. Better accommodated! It is good : yea indeed it is: good phrases are surely and ever were very commendable. Accommodated! It comes from accommodo, very good, a good phrase. Bard. Pardon me, Sir: I have heard the word. Phrase call you it? By this good day I know not the phrase; but I will maintain the word with my sword, to be a soldierlike word, and a word of good command. Accommodated : that is, when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when 'a man is being whereby he may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent thing...Shall. It is very just. (Hen. IV, part. 11, act 3, s. 2.)

reperiatur, qui hoc scite perfecteve calleat; pauci quidem qui vel exoletas literas usquequaque noverint. Hereupon he settled a Saxon Lecture in the university of Cambridge, allowing 201. per annum to Mr. Abraham Whelock, who tells us that upon his advice and encouragement, he spent the best part of seven years in the study of that language.... This stipend was intended to be made perpetual; but both he and his eldest son dying in the compass of two years, and the civil wars breaking forth, and their estate being also sequestered, the family became incapable of accomplishing that design. Nor indeed was that a time for settlements of this kind, when such a storm threatened the universities, and the revenues which belonged to them 1. » This lectureship was held by Whe

1 Through the kindness of our registrary, the Rev. Jos. Romilly, I am enabled to give the following account of the manner in which this lecture was meant to be established. The Vice-Chancellor and the Master of Trinity were to have presented Mr. A. Whelock to the vicarage, etc. of Middleton, which was to be conveyed to them by Sir H. Spelman in trust for that purpose. This vicarage was always to be in the gift of the two trustees, who upon a vacancy were to present their vicar to sir Henry's descendant, and if he neglected to admit the presentee, within four months, the Bishop. was to do it for him. The vicar was to deliver annually two lectures; one on Saxon learwing, the other on the old church history and creed of England. Sir H. Spelman's letter to Whelock, dated 1640, states that the Bishop of Ely and the Archbishop of Armagh had warmly espoused the scheme. Together with this letter is a draught

:

lock in 1644, when he published his edition of Ælfred's Beda, with fragments of the Chronicle and the Laws afterwards by Somner, whose dictionary, and text of Elfric's grammar were nevertheless published at Oxford in 1659; probably from there not being found at Cambridge type small enough for such a work. Between Foxe and Whelock, I know of no publications, save W. L'lsle's, connected with this subject, except a very imperfect transcript of the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan from Elfred's Orosius, which appeared in Hackluyt, A. D. 1599, and was supposed to be from the pen of Dr. Caius; Sir H. Spelman's Concilia containing most of the English Ecclesiastical Laws, A. D. 1639; and the interlinear Saxon and Latin psalter, by his son Sir John Spelman, A. D. 1940. In 1644, Lambard printed his Archaionomia, or Collection of Laws, etc., of the Anglo-Saxons. Junius had in the mean time been at work, carefully transcribing both at home and abroad whatever seemed to him to give interesting means of carrying on the enquiry

of the conveyance intended. But the whole matter scems to have had no result, for our records say nothing of any grace on the subject and probably the allowance mentioned above by Bishop Gibson, was afterwards made by sir Henry on failure of his original plan. Gibson is likely to have had Spelman's private papers in his hands, when he wrote the account quoted above.

into the nature of all the Teutonic languages, In 1655, appeared at Amsterdam his edition of Cædmon's Paraphrase, which, though very far from accurate, was a learned piece of work for the time, and, as får as I know, the first attempt at the study of Saxon poetry. In 1665, in conjunction with Thomas Mareschal, he published the Anglo-Saxon Gospels at Dordrecht: of which work a second edition appeared at Amsterdam, in 1680; if indeed this be any thing more than the old book with a new title-page : for on the subject of the Dordrecht edition, the following remarks are made by the learned compiler of the Bibliotheca Biblica Serenissimi Ducis Würtembergensis : « Præmittitur huic titulo alius brevior are incisus... Cæterum hæc editio, titulo excepto, eadem est cum Amstelodamensi anni 1684. Vid. Cat. Bibl. Bunavianæ, t. I, p. 23, Le Long's Bibliotheca, p. 372. A. This Dordrecht edition, or more properly Dordrecht title-page, I have never seen; it is therefore probably rare, and no doubt valuable in the eyes of those who study rather the outside than the inside of books, and who measure the worth of an author exactly by the difficulty which they can throw in the way of those who would willingly make themselves masters of the information it may chance to

contain. Returning to England, Junius brought with him a new fount of Saxon and other Northern types, now deposited together with his MSS. in the Bodleian library at Oxford. No other work came from Dr. Mareschal, though it is probable that he meditated publishing the Orosius, which Junius had transcribed; for he was at the pains of collating it with the Lauderdale MS. which is not what Daines Barrington, in his arrogant and ignorant manner calls it, a copy of the Cotton MS. In 1678, Sir John Spelman appended to his Life of Alfred, published at Oxford, the dedicatory preface to Gregory's Cure, a reprint of Ohthere and Wulfstan; and, in 1680, Elfric's preface to the translation of the Pentateuch was reprinted from L'Isle, though not very accurately, by H. Wharton. In the year 1689, Dr. George Hickesgave the world the first AngloSaxon grammar ever compiled: and from him we may in reality date, as it were, the new birth of the study in this country. Called by a friend to this pursuit, that he might thereby be diverted from an unpopular line of politics, he flung himself upon it ardently, and like a philologist, investigated the language grammatically, passed on to the cognate tongues of Germany and Iceland, and produced at last