bridge, 1644, accompanied by the old vernacular translation attributed to King Alfred, then also for the first time given to the world through the press; this was followed by the Jesuit Chiflet's edition, 4to. Paris, 1681; then came Dr. Smith's greatly improved edition both of the original Latin and of Alfred's translation, folio, Cambridge, 1722; and this remained the standard edition till the appearance of that of Mr. Stevenson (containing also the Minor Historical Works), under the auspices of the English Historical Society, in 2 vols. 8vo. 1838-41, and of that of Mr. Petrie, in the Monumenta, folio, 1848. There are three continental editions of the entire works of Bede, each in eight volumes folio, the latest of which was published at Cologne in 1688. Some additional pieces were published at London in a quarto volume, by Henry Wharton, in 1693; and an edition of the complete works of Bede in the original Latin, accompanied with a translation, was produced by Dr. Giles, in 12 vols. 8vo. London, 1843-44. It appears, from an interesting account of Bede's last hours by his pupil St. Cuthbert, that he was engaged at the time of his death in translating St. John's Gospel into his native tongue. Among his last utterances to his affectionate disciples watching around his bed were some recitations in the English language: "For," says the account, "he was very learned in our songs; and, putting his thoughts into English verse, he spoke it with compunction."

Beside King Alfred's version in the earlier form of the language, there are translations of Bede's Ecclesiastical History into modern English by Thomas Stapleton (1565), by John Stevens (1723), and by W. Hurst (1814). Stevens's translation, altered and corrected, was reproduced by Dr. Giles in 1840, and again in 1842; and it is given also both in his edition of the complete works of Bede, and, along with his translation of the Chronicle, in one of the volumes of Bohn's Antiquarian Library, 1849. Finally, a new translation of all Bede's Historical Works by the Rev. Joseph Stevenson forms the second part of volume first of the collection entitled The Church Historians of England, London, 1853-54.

Another celebrated English churchman of this age was St. Boniface, originally named Winfrith, who was born in Devonshire about the year 680. Boniface is acknowledged as the Apostle of Germany, in which country he founded various monasteries, and was greatly instrumental in the diffusion both

of Christianity and of civilization. He eventually became archbishop of Mentz, and was killed in East Friesland by a band of heathens in 755. Many of his letters to the popes, to the English bishops, to the kings of France, and to the kings of the various states of his native country, still remain, and are printed in the collections entitled Bibliothecæ Patrum. We may here also mention another contemporary of Bede's, Eddius, surnamed Stephanus, the author of a Latin life of Bishop Wilfrid. Bede mentions him as the first person who taught singing in the churches of Northumberland.

THE CELTIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES.

No other branch of what is called the Indo-European family of languages is of higher interest in certain points of view than the Celtic. The various known forms of the Celtic are now regarded as coming under two great divisions, the Gaelic and the Cymric; Ireland being the head seat of the Gaelic (which may therefore also be called Irish), Wales being the head seat of the Cymric (which accordingly is by the English commonly called Welsh). Subordinate varieties of the Irish are the Gaelic of Scotland (often called Erse, or Ersh, that is, Irish), and the Manks, or Isle of Man tongue (now fast dying out): other Cymric dialects are the Cornish (now extinct as a spoken language), and the Armorican, or that still spoken in some parts of Bretagne.

The probability is, that the various. races inhabiting the British islands when they first became known to the civilized world were mostly, if not all, of Celtic speech. Even in the parts of the country that were occupied by the Caledonians, the Picts, and the Belgian colonists, the oldest topographical names, the surest evidence that we have in all cases, and in this case almost our only evidence, are all, so far as can be ascertained, Celtic, either of the Cymric or of the Gaelic form. And then there are the great standing facts of the existence to this day of a large Cymric population in South Britain, and of a still larger Gaelicspeaking population in North Britain and in Ireland. No other account of these Celtic populations, or at least of the Welsh, has been attempted to be given, than that, as their own traditions and records are unanimous in asserting, they are the remnants of the races by which the two islands were occupied when they

first attracted the attention of the Romans about half a century before the commencement of the Christian era.

And both the Welsh and the Irish possess a large mass of literature in their native tongues, much of which has been printed, in great part no doubt of comparatively modern production, but claiming some of it, in its substance if not exactly in the very form in which it now presents itself, an antiquity transcending any other native literature of which the country can boast.

Neither the Welsh nor the Irish language and literature, however, can with any propriety be included in a history of English literature and of the English language. The relationship of English to any Celtic tongue is more remote than its relationship not only to German or Icelandic or French or Italian or Latin, but even to Russian or Polish, or to Persian or Sanscrit. Irish and Welsh are opposed in their entire genius and structure to English. It has indeed been sometimes asserted that the Welsh is one of the fountains of the English. One school of last-century philologists maintained that full a third of our existing English was Welsh. No doubt, in the course of the fourteen centuries that the two languages have been spoken alongside of each other in the same country, a considerable number of vocables can hardly fail to have been borrowed by each from the other; the same thing would have happened if it had been a dialect of Chinese that had maintained itself all that time among the Welsh mountains. If, too, as is probable, a portion of the previous Celtic population chose or were suffered to remain even upon that part of the soil which came to be generally occupied after the departure of the Romans by the Angles, Saxons, and other Teutonic or Gothic tribes, the importers of the English language and founders of the English nation, something of Celtic may in that way have intermingled and grown up with the new national speech. But the English language cannot therefore be regarded as of Celtic parentage. The Celtic words, or words of Celtic extraction, that are found in it, be they some hundreds in number, or be they one or two thousands, are still only something foreign. They are products of another seed that have shot up here and there with the proper crop from the imperfectly cleared soil; or they are fragments of another mass which have chanced to come in contact with the body of the language, pressed upon by its weight, or blown upon

it by the wind, and so have adhered to it or become imbedded in it. It would perhaps be going farther than known facts warrant us if we were to say that a Gothic tongue and a Celtic tongue are incapable of a true amalgamation. But undoubtedly it would require no common pressure to overcome so strong an opposition of nature and genius. The Gothic tongues, and the Latin or Romance tongues also, indeed, belong to distinct branches of what is called the Indo-European family; but the Celtic branch, though admitted to be of the same tree, has much more of a character of its own than any of the others. Probably any other two languages of the entire multitude held to be of this general stock would unite more readily than two of which only one was Celtic. It would be nearly the same case with that of the intermixture of an Indo-European with a Semitic language. It has been suggested that the Celtic branch must in all probability have diverged from the common stem at a much earlier date than any of the others. At any rate, in point of fact the English can at most be said to have been powdered or sprinkled with a little Celtic. Whatever may be the number of words which it has adopted, whether from the ancient Britons or from their descendants the Welsh, they are only single scattered words. No considerable department of the English dictionary is Welsh. No stream of words has flowed into the language from that source. The two languages have in no sense met and become one. They have not mingled as two rivers do when they join and fall into the same channel. There has been no chemical combination between the Gothic and the Celtic elements, but only more or less of a mechanical intermixture.

We shall limit ourselves to the briefest notice of the remains of the ancient vernacular literature of Ireland and of Wales. The earliest literature of which any remains still exist in any of the native languages of the British Islands must be held to be the Irish. The Irish were probably possessed of the knowledge of letters from a very remote antiquity. Although the forms of their present alphabetical characters are Roman, and are supposed to have been introduced by St. Patrick in the fifth century, it is very remarkable that the alphabet, in the number and powers of its elements, exactly corresponds with that which Cadmus is recorded to have brought to Greece from Phoenicia. If we may believe the national traditions, and the most ancient existing chronicles, the Irish also possessed a succession of bards

from their first settlement in the country, and the names of some of those that are said to have flourished so early as in the first century of our era are still remembered; but the oldest bardic compositions that have been preserved claim to be of the fifth century. Some fragments of metrical productions to which this date is attributed are found in the old annalists, and more abundant specimens occur in the same records under each of the succeeding centuries. The oldest existing Irish manuscript, however, is believed to be the Psalter of Cashel, a collection of bardic legends, compiled about the end of the ninth century, by Cormac MacCulinan, bishop of Cashel and king of Munster. But the most valuable remains of ancient Irish literature that have come down to us are the various historical records in prose, called the Annals of Tigernach, of the Four Masters, of Ulster, and others. Portions of these were first published in the original, accompanied with Latin translations, in Dr. O'Conor's Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres, 4 vols. 4to., Buckingham, 1814-1826; a splendid monument of the munificence of his Grace the late Duke of Buckingham, at whose expense the work was prepared and printed, and from the treasures of whose library its contents were principally derived. Tigernach, the various of these Irish annalists, lived in the latter part of the eleventh century; but both his and the other annals profess, and are believed, to have been compiled from authentic records of much greater antiquity. They form undoubtedly a collection of materials in the highest degree precious for the information they supply with regard to the history both of Ireland and of the various early British kingdoms. These Annals differ wholly in character from the metrical legends of Irish history found in the Book of Cashel and in the other later compositions of the bards. They consist of accounts of events related for the most part both with sobriety and precision, and with the careful notation of dates that might be expected from a contemporary and official recorder. They are in all probability, indeed, copies of, or compilations from, public records. A much more satisfactory edition in all respects of the Annals of the Four Masters, which were compiled in the seventeenth century, and of which only the portion ending with the year 1171 is in Dr. O'Conor's work, has since been produced under the auspices of the British Archæological Society, by Dr. O'Donovan, Professor of the Celtic Languages in Queen's College, Belfast. This edition