The Anglo-Saxon nouns in e belong to various genders and declensions. A great number of them are feminines and neuters belonging to the first declension. Among the feminine nouns are sunne the sun, heorte the heart, rose the rose; eare the ear, is neuter. There are also masculine and neuter nouns in e, which belong to other declensions. Fresher than the May with flowres newe For with the rose colour strof | hire hewe. : Chau. The Knightes Tale. He smote me ones with his fist, For that I rent out of his book a lefe, That of the stroke: myn erle wex | al defe. Chau. The Wif of Bathes Prol. Nouns in u were generally feminine, as scolu school, lufu love, sceamu shame, lagu law; but there were also some masculines belonging to another declension, as sunu a son, wudu a wood, &c. Full soth is sayde]: that love ne | lordship Wol nat, his thankes, have no felawship. : Chau. The Knightes Tale. Chau. The Second Nunnes Tale. It is a shame that the pe|ple shal| With empty womb of fasting many a day Chau. The Sompnoures Tale. No maister sire quod he, but servitour, Though I have had | in scholle : that | honour. Chau. The Sompnoures Tale. Before hire stood: hire son e Cupido Upon his shoulders winges hadde he two. Chau. The Knightes Tale. We also have the Anglo-Saxon ending the, a distinct syllable. And wel I wot withouten help or grace Of thee, ne may | my streng the not availle. Chau. The Knightes Tale. I preise wel thy wit, Quod the Frank elein: considering | thy you the Chau. The Frankeleines Prol. Such of these endings as survived till the sixteenth century changed the e for y, and were gradually confounded with the adjectives of that termination. There can be little doubt that the helly and woody of the following extracts were the Anglo-Saxon helle and wudu. Free Helicon and franke Parnassus hylls Are helly haunts and ranke | pernicious ylls. The sat yrs scorn | their woodly kind|, And henceforth nothing fair but her on earth they find. Fairy Queen. There were a few Anglo-Saxon adjectives, which ended in e, as ge-trewe true, newe new. A trewle swinkler: and a good | was hel, Chau. Prologue. Chau. The Knightes Tale. And swore his oth]: as | he was trewle knight]. She was wel more blissful on to see Than is the newle: perljenetle tree. Chau. The Milleres Tale. An adverb was also formed from the adjective by the addition of an e; a formation which flourished in the time of Chaucer, and cannot be considered even now as obsolete. The e has indeed vanished, and the word, thus robbed of a syllable, is considered merely as the adjective used adverbially. It is, however, the legitimate though corrupt descendant of the present adverb, and such root has it taken in the language, that not all the efforts of our grammarians have been able to weed it out. And in a cloth | of gold: that brigh|te shone, Upon hire hed, they into hall hire broughte. Chau. The Clerkes Tale. Command eth him and faste blewe | the fire. Chau. Chanones Yemannes Tale. Wel coude he sit te on hors] and fayre ride. Chau. The Prologue. There is, however, one caution to be given. The superlative of the adjective ends in ste, that of the adverb in st. A knight ther was, and that | a worthy man, That fro the time: that he firste | began To riden out, he loved chivalrie. Chau. Prologue. THE е OF INFLEXION. In the history of literature there are few things more remarkable than the position which is now occupied by Chaucer. For the last three centuries he has been read and praised and criticised, yet neither reader, eulogist, or critic, have thought fit to investigate his language. When does he inflect his substantive? when his adjective? These are questions, which obtrude themselves in the study of every language, yet who has ventured to answer for our early English? One of the difficulties in the way of this enquiry, is the number of dialects, which prevailed in the country from the eleventh to the fifteenth century. There is a wide distinction between the language of Layamon and of Chaucer, yet it is by no means easy to say whether this marks a difference of dialect, or is merely the change which our language underwent in the course of two centuries. I shall therefore confine myself to the dialect of our earliest classic, and notice the language of other writers, only as they serve for the purposes of illustration. In the time of Layamon the dative singular in e still survived, and it seems to have been occasionally used as the accusative singular, just as the datives of the personal pronouns invaded the province of their accusatives I suspect this dative had become obsolete before the time of Chaucer; yet there are lines which it is difficult to account for without its assistance. Thus, in the couplet which opens the poem, Whanne that April with his shoures sote The drought of March had perced to the rote there is little doubt that rote is a dissyllable, for it rhymes with sote, which seems clearly to be the plural adjective agreeing with shoures. Now the common form of this substantive is a monosyllable rot, and unless rote be its dative we must conclude there is another substantive rote of two syllables-a conclusion which, though I would not contradict it, seems improbable. If however Chaucer used the dative, it must have been so rarely as much to lessen the value of this discussion. There seems to be no doubt that Chaucer used the old genitive plural in a, the final vowel being represented, as in other cases, by e. We find in old English menne, horse, othe, answering to the Anglo-Saxon manna, horsa, atha, the respective genitives plural of man, hors, and ath. Tueye feren he hadde That he with him ladde And alle suythe feyre gomes. Geste of King Horn. For ye aren men of this molde, that most wide walken And knowen countries and courtes, and menye kinne places, Both princes paleis : and poure men ne cotes. Piers Plowman. Gower. Confessio Amantis. That is, "and I am only their horses' groom."-in AngloSaxon, heora horsa knabe. We now come to a verse which both Urry and Tyrwhitt have done their best to spoil. Chaucer begins his exquisite portrait of the Prioress with these lines; Ther was also a nonne a Prioresse, That of hire smiling was ful simple and coy, Hire gret est othe: n'as | but by | seint Loy. Where othe is the genitive plural after the superlative, "her greatest of oaths." The flow of the verse is as soft as the gentle being the poet is describing. But its beauty was lost on the Editors. They seem to have shrunk from making othe a dissyllable (a reluctance that would be perfectly right if that word were in the nominative), and so, without the authority of a single manuscript, they introduced this jerking substitute; Hire gret est othe|: n'as | but by Seint | Eloy| a change which not only mars the rhythm of one of the sweetest passages that Chaucer ever wrote, but also brings us acquainted with a new saint. "Sweet Saint Loy" was well known, but I never met with St. Eloy in English verse.* The plural adjective takes e for its inflexion, as the Anglo-Saxon endings would lead us to expect. In illustrating this and the following rules, I shall, as much as possible, select examples which contain the adjective both * When the English guns swept off the famished Frenchman as he was gathering his muscles, Churchyard tells us Some dearly bought their muscles evry week, Siege of Leith, 7. Lindsay, indeed, in one of his poems, has written the word at full length Eloy, but, I have little doubt, elided the e in pronunciation. 142 |