On English Prceterites. 381 or a little earlier : at the time when as we know from Stow, ^' the whole land began under the king [Edward the Con- fessor] and other Normans brought in, to leave off the English rites, and in many things to imitate the manners of the French. All the noble men tooke it to be a great point of gentrie in their courts to speake the French tongue, to make their charters and deeds after the manner of the French, and to be ashamed of their own custom and use, as w®ll in this as in many other things.'* Nearly following upon this is a MS. in our University Library (I. i. 1. 18) containing lives of Saints^ prose and verse, four and twenty chapters of ^Ifric'^s Genesis, and sermons ; the last of which being for the most part modernized copies of JElfric, of whose homilies a pure Saxon copy is found amongst many others in the same library (G. g. 8. 28) are capable of a useful com- parison ; while the Genesis may be collated with the copy printed by Thwaites from an Oxford MS., and the lives of Saints and many of the homilies usefully compared with a multitude of such remains in our various libraries, and par- ticularly in the Bodleian, and Cotton collections, in the last of which, a copy, (Jul. E. vij) not differing importantly in date^ language or contents, from our own, is to be found. ^Elfric'^s Grammar is found in many libraries, more or less complete ; the Cotton collection possesses two copies differing materially in point of date : so also the library of Trinity College, from the earlier of which (R- 9- 17) written shortly after the Norman usurpation, a very large number of Saxon and French interlinear glosses may be gained. But passing over these and other authorities in the Cotton, King's, and the several University collections, we come to a document of most unmeasured importance; I mean Lajamon's Chro- nicle of which there are two copies in the Cotton collection'^ 2 We learn from a prospectus lately issued, that this noble record of Old England is about to be edited under the auspices of the Antiquarian Society. With all gratitude to the Society for this boon, for such it is, conferred upon English scholars, I cannot but regret that some Saxon scholar was not to be found among them, to whom the task of giving it to us, might have been committed. For Mr Madden, whose name appears as the intended editor, though as far as I know, a laborious and praiseworthy enquirer into the middle period of our language, is unfortunately a stranger to Anglo-Saxon ; and the language of Lajamon must be descended upon, not risen to. An evidence of the difficulty that necessarily presses upon a person, coming unprepared with Saxon to
