Repentance of Reason's Hearers Piers Ploughman's Creed: - Description of Piers Alliterative Hymn to the Virgin: - Commencing Stanza Chaucer: :- - Romaunt of the Rose; Dream. House of Fame; Eagle's Address to Chaucer Canterbury Tales; The Prioress (from the Prologue) 807 Difference, etc.; French King and People Malory:- Morte Arthur; Death of Lancelot Gammer Gurton's Needle:- Speech of Diccon the Bedlam Spenser:- Shepherd's Calendar; Tale of the Oak and the Briar The Poet a World to himself Epistle to Countess of Cumberland Nymphidia; Queen of the Fairies Sylvester :- Divine Weeks and Works; Part of Dedication HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE. In tracing, as it is our purpose to do in the present work, the history of English Literature and of the English Language together, we shall be obliged to look at the language principally, or almost exclusively, as we find it employed in the service of the literature. But in its proper nature language is independent of writing. Writing is only a visible representation of language, which in itself consists, not of strokes drawn by the pen, or marks made in any other way, but of sounds uttered by the voice and the organs of articulation. It addresses itself not to the eye but to the ear. There are many languages that have never been written, or visibly represented in any form. Every language that has come to be written has also existed in an unwritten state. No language has been born a written language, any more than it was ever heard tell of that a boy had been born with breeches on. It has been common to talk of language, which is really thought itself, as the dress of thought; with much more truth might writing be called the dress of language. It is an artificial or nonnatural addition which language assumes as it grows up and gets civilized, something that perhaps would not have been needed or thought of in a state of innocence. As matters stand, this contrivance may be necessary for the perfect training of language, for turning it to its full use and developing all its capabilities; but still it is in some sort what his trappings are to the war-horse,—a sign and seal of its conquest and bondage. Letters are the fetters of language, even if they are its golden fetters. It would be convenient if we had distinctive names for language spoken and language written. In the want of such, perhaps the |