saddler, miller or tanner. He lent or borrowed, trusted his neighbour, and with skill and care throve and grew wealthy. Later, when he longed once more for freedom, his warriors took their weapons, their axes, swords, and spears, or their dreaded bow and arrow. They leaped without stirrup into the saddle, and killed with dart and gavelock. At other times they launched their boats and ships, which were still pure Anglo-Saxon from keel to deck and from the helm or the rudder to the top of the mast, afloat and ashore, with sail or with oar. As his fathers had done before him in the land of his birth, the Saxon would not merely eat, drink, and sleep, or spend his time in playing the harp and the fiddle, but by walking, riding, fishing, and hunting, he kept young and healthy; while his lady with her children were busy teaching or learning how to read and to write, to sing and to draw. Even needlework was not forgotten, as their writers say that "by this they shone most in the world." The wisdom of later ages was not known then, but they had their homespun sayings, which by all mankind are yet looked upon as true wisdom, as: God helps them that help themselves; lost time is never found again; when sorrow is asleep, wake it not!

Thus the two languages, now contending and then mingling with each other, continued for nearly four hundred years side by side in the British kingdom; the Norman-French, an exotic plant, deprived of its native soil and heat, flourishing for a time, but gradually withering and fading away; the language of the subject, like an indigenous tree, trimmed by the rough storm, grafted in many a branch by an unskilful hand, but still giving shade with its wide-spreading foliage, and bearing flowers and fruit in abundance. The Normans had conquered the land and the race, but they struggled in vain against the language that conquered them in its turn, and, by its spirit, converted them into Englishmen. In vain did they haughtily refuse to learn a word of that despised tongue, and asked, in the words of the minister of Henry III., indignantly, "Am I an Englishman, that I should know these (Saxon) charters and these laws?" In vain it was that William and his successors filled bishopric and abbey with the

most learned and best educated men of France, and deposed Saxon dignitaries, like Wulstan, Bishop of Worcester, because he was an "idiot who did not know the French tongue, and could not aid in the king's council." Neither sufferings nor death itself could, apparently, teach these haughty Normans the necessity of learning the language of their new home. When in the year 1080 some Northumbrians presented to Vaulcher (Walchere), Bishop and Lord of Durham (Dunholme), an humble and submissive request, the proud prelate required, in answer to their request, that they should pay four hundred pounds of silver. Their astonished but determined spokesman asked for leave to consult with his associates, but, knowing the bishop's entire ignorance of Saxon, he said to his friends: "Short red (speech), god red, slee (slay) ye se bisceop!" and immediately they fell upon the bishop, and slew him and one hundred men of French and Flemish blood!

It is well known how Robert of Gloucester and some of his followers, who befriended the Princess Matilda in her difficulties with Stephen, were taken prisoners at the siege of Winchester, and had to pay with their lives for their ignorance of Saxon, which alone betrayed them, when they fled, in excellent disguise, through the country. The manner in which Henry II., on his return from Ireland, resented the imagined insult of some Pembrokeshire peasants, who greeted him as their "goode olde cynge!" has passed from Brompton into most historical records. Much later, even, when Longchamp, Bishop of Ely, was Chancellor to Richard I., he knew nothing of the language of the people whose interests were intrusted to his care. Hoveden tells, with great simplicity, in his letter of Pugh, Bishop of Coventry, how the great Chancellor became a defaulter and escaped to Canterbury, carrying with him the keys of the King's castle! Thence he made his way to the sea-shore, disguised as a female linen-merchant, and, seated upon a stone near the water's edge, waited for the vessel that was to carry him across the Channel. Some countrywomen approached, and asked the price of his ware. He could not answer a word! Others came; curiosity was excited; and when the unlucky bishop laughed at his own predicament, they resented the provocation by

lifting his veil. They discovered the newly-shaven beard of the sulky woman! Workmen happened to come up, joined in the chorus of indignant women, knocked the Chancellor down, and dragged him through sand and mire to a neighbouring town, where he was kept prisoner in a dark cellar until some Norman soldiers came up and saved him from further disgrace. . .

Thus we see that conquests cannot exterminate a language, nor drive it from its native soil. The Normans, with all their power and strength, lords of the land, masters of the people, and with every advantage on their side, could not destroy a highly cultivated, ancient, and national tongue, like the Saxon. It rose against them and conquered them in its turn. . . .

....

The Normans could, as conquerors, seat their Norman-French upon the throne and the judge's bench, at the dais of the noble and in the refectory of the monk, but they found the door of manor and cottage jealously guarded. Their numbers, moreover, were too small to allow them to spread all over the kingdom. Their soldiers were stationed in a few garrisons and citadels, to secure the towns and overawe the country, where their great skill in fortification, of which the Saxons knew nothing, was an ample compensation for their small numbers. The few Norman soldiers and their families, thus immured in castles, and too haughty to associate with the despised Saxons, anxiously preserved their connection with France, where many still possessed estates, and held no intercourse but with their own countrymen. . . .

The Norman-French was, therefore, neither carried to all parts of the great kingdom, because of the comparatively small number of invaders, nor supported by the aid of intellectual superiority. The Anglo-Saxon, on the other hand, had been carefully guarded and preserved by the people; it had never lost its hold upon their affections; persecution and the necessity of concealment had made it but all the dearer to the suffering race. It now made its way,

slowly and almost imperceptibly, but with unerring and unceasing perseverance, from rank to rank, until it finally reached the very court from which it had been so ignominiously driven, and seated itself once more upon the throne of England! DE VERE.

THE LADY OF THE LAKE.

The scene of this Poem is laid in the vicinity of Loch Katrine, in the
Western Highlands of Scotland.

James IV. of Scotland (known throughout the poem as Fitz-James, or the Knight of Snowdoun), in a stag-lunt is separated from his attendants-He loses his gallant horse, and wanders alone on foot in the pass of the Trosachs-Description of the Trosachs and Loch Katrine.