borrowed from other scholars; he lent his own collection to be similarly copied by others. Several such collections exist formed far back in Old English times, the composite character of which, partly glossary, partly vocabulary, reveals itself upon even a cursory examination.

As these manuscript lists came to be copied and re-copied, it was seen that their usefulness would be increased by putting the words and phrases into alphabetical order, whereby a particular word could be more readily found than by looking for it in a promiscuous list of some hundreds or thousands of words. The first step was to bring together all the words having the same first letter. The copyist instead of transcribing the glossary right on as it stood, extracted first all the words beginning with A; then he went through it again picking out all the words beginning with B; then a third time for those with C, and so on with D, E, and the rest, till he had transcribed the whole, and his copy was no longer in the fortuitous disorder of the original, but in what we call first-letter order.

A still later scribe making a copy of this vocabulary, or possibly combining two or three lists already in first-letter order, carried the alphabetical arrangement

one stage further; instead of transcribing the A-words as they stood, he went through them, picking out first those that began with Aa-, then those in Ab-, then those in Ac-, and so on, to Az. Then he did the same with the B-words, picking out first all in Ba-, then Be-, Bi-, Bl-, Bo-, Br-, Bu-, By-; and so exhausting the B-words. Thus, at length, in this second recension, the Vocabulary stood, not yet completely alphabetical, but alphabetized as far as the second letter of each word.

All these stages can actually be seen in four of the most ancient glossaries of English origin that have come down to us, known respectively, from the libraries to which they now belong, as the Leiden, the Epinal, the Erfurt, and the Corpus (the last at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge). The Leiden Glossary represents the earliest stage of such a work, being really, in the main, a collection of smaller glossaries, or rather sets of glosses, each set entered under the name of the treatise from which it was extracted, the words in each being left in the order in which they happened to come in the treatise or work, without any further arrangement, alphabetical or other. It appears also to incorporate in a final section some small earlier vocabularies or lists of names of animals and other classes of things. In order to discover whether any particular word occurs in this glossary, the whole work from beginning to end must be looked through. The first advance upon this is seen in the Epinal Glossary, which uses part at least of the materials of the Leiden, incorporating with them many others. This glossary

has advanced to first-letter order: all the A-words come together, followed by all the B-words, and so on to Z, but there is no further arrangement under the individual letters[1]. There are nearly fourteen columns of words beginning with A, containing each about forty entries; the whole of these 550 entries must be looked through to see if a given word occurs in this glossary. The third stage is represented by the Corpus Glossary, which contains the materials of its predecessors, and a great deal more, and in which the alphabetical arrangement has been carried as far as the second letter of each word: thus the first ninety-five words explained begin with Ab-, and the next seventy-eight with Ac-, and so on, but the alphabetization goes no further[2]; the glossary is in second-letter order. In at least one glossary of the tenth century, contained in a MS. of the British Museum (Harl. 3376), the alphabetical arrangement has been carried as far as the third letter, beyond which point it does not appear to have advanced.

The MS. of the Corpus Glossary dates to the early part of the eighth century; the Epinal and Erfurt—although the MS. copies that have come down to

us are not older, or not so old—must from their nature go back as glossaries to a still earlier date, and the Leiden to an earlier still; so that we carry back these beginnings of lexicography in England to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 A.D., and probably to an age not long posterior to the introduction of Christianity in the south of England at the end of the sixth century. Many more vocabularies were compiled between these early dates and the eleventh century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and vocabularies not only became fuller and more orderly as time advanced, but they also became more English. For, as I have already mentioned, the primary purpose of the glosses was to explain difficult Latin words; this was done at first, whenever possible, by easier Latin words; apparently, only when none such were known, was the explanation given in the vernacular, in Old English. In the Epinal Glossary the English words are thus relatively few. In the first page they number thirty out of 117, and in some pages they do not amount to half that number. In the Corpus Glossary they have become proportionally more numerous; and in the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations are more and more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until the vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whether arranged alphabetically or under classified headings, are truly Latin-English: every Latin word given is explained by an English one; and we see clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself; the object was no longer to explain difficult Latin

words, but to give the English equivalents of as many words as possible, and thus practically to provide a Latin Dictionary for the use of Englishmen[3].

Learning and literature, science and art, had attained to fair proportions in England, and in the Old English tongue, when their progress was arrested by the Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest brought to England law and organization, and welded the country into a political unity; but it overthrew Old English learning and literary culture. In literary culture the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece; and it was not till some two generations after the Conquest, that learning and literature regained in England somewhat of the position which they had occupied two centuries earlier. And this new literary culture was naturally confined to the French dialect of the conquerors, which had become the language of court and castle, of church and law, of chivalry and the chase; while the rich and cultured tongue of Alfred and Ælfric was left for generations without literary employment, during which time it lost nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic vocabulary, retaining only the words of common

life and everyday use[4]. And for more than 300 years after the Conquest English lexicography stood still. Between 1066 and 1400, Wright-Wülcker shows only two meagre vocabularies, occupying some twenty-four columns of his volume. One of these, of the twelfth century, is only an echo