on which they were written and their constant employment in tuition, it becomes a source of agreeable surprise that so many specimens remain to throw light on the mode in which elementary learning was acquired in England in the infancy of a taste for letters and knowledge.

In the small volumes on Cookery and Gardening by the present writer, he has, as a matter of course, called into requisition these early philological relics to illustrate both those subjects; and this fact testifies to the multiplicity of purposes for which such relics can be rendered serviceable. There is hardly, indeed, any aspect or line of mediæval life which these productions do not assist very powerfully in making more luminous and familiar. But their original design and destination were obviously educational. They were rude and imperfect vehicles, contrived by men of narrow culture and limited experience for the instruction of the young; and they were advisedly thrown, as far as possible, into an interlocutory form—the form most apt to impress circumstances and names on the memories of pupils. Some of these, which I shall presently describe a little more at large, were constructed on the interlinear principle, not, as among ourselves, for the edification of the learner, but, as Mr. Wright points out, for the preceptor’s guidance in days when the latter was often a person of very mediocre attainments, and was incapable of dispensing with occasional assistance to his recollection. In other words, the majority of schoolmasters and ushers were merely the mechanical medium for conveying to the boys the lessons which they found set down in treatises prepared by persons of superior skill and erudition.

These primitive schoolbooks are, as a rule, easily susceptible of classification under the heads of Vocabularies, Dictionaries, Colloquies, and Narrative or descriptive texts, of which the two latter divisions are usually interlinear, either in part or throughout. Some of these terms, again, were formerly understood in acceptations different from our own; for a Vocabulary was what we should rather call a Dictionary, and a Dictionary was what we should rather call a Phrase-Book.

II. The most ancient item in the collection before me belongs to that century of which King Alfred just lived to witness the opening, the Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric, in Anglo-Saxon and Latin, and known only from an enlarged copy or transcript made by the writer’s disciple and namesake. The original is supposed to have been compiled while Alfric was a monk at Winchester. He succeeded to the archbishopric in 995, and his pupil and editor died about the middle of the following century. The professed object of the undertaking was the acquisition of the Latin language by the Anglo-Saxon youth in the intervals of leisure from other pursuits or duties; and the process of instruction is conducted on the plan of a dialogue in Latin between a master and boys, with an interlinear Saxon gloss. It is significant of the harsh discipline which prevailed in those days that one of the foremost points of inquiry is in relation to flogging. The teacher asks if the boys choose to be flogged at their lessons, and the answer is that they would rather be flogged and taught than be ignorant, but that they rely on his clemency and unwillingness to punish them, unless he is obliged. The entire work deals with the matters which were most familiar to the student and came nearest home to their everyday life and sympathies; and this feature constitutes for us its special value and beauty. The Latin itself is indifferent enough, and bespeaks the acquisition of the tongue by Alfric and his follower from the earlier monkish authors, rather than from classical models. Many curious points might be elicited from the present composition and others of an allied character printed with it,—I mean such passages as those where the shepherd speaks of the danger from wolves, and the herdsman of the depredations of cattle-lifters. There was probably no occupation of the period which is not brought before us, and its particular specialities bilingually set out.

The Vocabulary, of approximately the same date, is in reality a Latin and Anglo-Saxon word-book. Like the Colloquy, it received subsequent additions—perhaps by the same hand; but they are in the form of a separate Appendix. Each section has its independent alphabet, and the articles which fall under it do not observe any apparent order. The same is to be said of all the works of this class belonging to the mediæval era.

The Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Neckam De Utensilibus (twelfth century) is differently constructed from the Alfric Vocabulary, not as regards the text itself, which is also in Latin, but in having an interlinear gloss in Old French, and in following a descriptive form. It takes the various parts of a dwelling seriatim, the several occupations and callings of men, the mode of laying out a garden, and of building a castle.

Perhaps the book by Neckam and the Dictionary of Johannes de Garlandia constitute together the most comprehensive and remarkable body of information in our literature respecting the life and habits of the Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans.

Johannes de Garlandia, whose work is common in MS. and who is also known as the author of other productions of a philological cast, commences his Dictionary by defining what a dictionary is. “Dictionarius,” says he, “dicitur libellus iste a dictionibus magis necessariis, quas tenetur quilibet scolaris, non tantum in scrinio de linguis facto, sed in cordis armariolo firmiter retinere, ut ad faciliorem oracionis constructionem perveniat. Primo igitur sciat vulgaria nominare. Placet igitur a membris humani corporis incoare....”

This phrase or word book, which was probably composed about 1220, enters into the most minute particulars under all the heads which it comprises, and is unquestionably of the highest value and interest as taking us back so far into the life of the past, and making us in a manner the contemporary of an Englishman who flourished six or seven centuries ago, and domiciled himself in France, chiefly at Paris, where he gives us an account of his house and garden, with all their appointments and incidence.

There is a very curious passage in one of the glosses, where Johannes explains the derivation of Pes, which he traces from the Greek pos [sic], adding that thence the dwellers of the other world or hemisphere, if it be true that there are any, are termed Antipodes. As this was written nearly 300 years before Columbus, it might have supplied a note and a point to Mr. Beamish in his volume on the Discovery of America by the Northmen in the Tenth Century, 1841.

The old dictionary-maker brings us so near to him by his pleasant colloquial method and familiar way of putting everything, and expects us to become acquainted into the bargain with his friends and neighbours, who resided at Paris under Philip Augustus, as if one might go there and find some of them still living. In other words, there was belonging to this man a natural simplicity of style and a communicativeness which together have rendered his treatise a work of art and a cyclopædia of information. He even leaves his house to go into the market with you and shew what his neighbour William has on sale there! How unspeakably more luminous and understandable the gone ages might have been if we had had more such!

III. Passing from him, his pleasant book, and its pleasant associations with cordial regret, I just notice the other and latter-day word-books, which are really, in the main, of