Æthelstan king, of earls the Lord, Of barons the beigh-giver, and his brother eke Edmund the etheling, elders a long train Slew in battle. Brunanburgh War-Song. There is another idiom, or, to speak more accurately, a rule of syntax, which has hitherto been most strangely overlooked. A substantive singular, when taken in a collective sense, may always be joined to a verb plural. Almost every page of Anglo-Saxon poetry will furnish us with examples. Magth sithedon Fæmnan and wuduwan: freondum beslegene U't mid æhtum: abrahames mæg The maidens departed Damsels and widows, shorn of their friends; Wuldor spedum welig: wíde stódan Cæd. 94. Cæd. 160. version. In the first place, I am not satisfied, that tir (glory) is masculine. In the second place, the meaning given to the word slean may be doubted. Slean, to strike, to slay, has two sets of derivative meanings; to fix (as it were by striking), to establish-as geteld slean, to fix a tent, eorldom slean, to establish an earldom; and to gain (as it were by striking) in which sense we might even now use the primitive verb, as sige slean, to strike a victory, huthe slean, to strike a prey. But I think we should be pushing this analogy too far, if we talked of striking a glory; at least, I would not so translate, without a clearer authority than the passage before us. Lastly, the promise of merely life-long glory, for such a victory, would be much too meagre flattery. On their hinder path, Rich with glories, their seats stood widely Handum brugdon Haleth of scathum: hring-mæled sweord With their hands the heroes Cad. 5. Drew from the sheaths the ring-colour'd sword. Cad. 93. Eodon tha sterced ferththe hæleth Went the stern-hearted heroes. Wigend cruncon: wundum werige The warriors quailed, with wounds dispirited. Judith. Death of Byrthnott. An adjective, connected with the noun, may be put in the singular number, as in the third example; or in the plural, as in the last. It is curious to observe how this idiom has been rendered in our translations. Sometimes, when the meaning was obvious, it has been rightly construed, and the "false concord" passed over in silence. In other cases, it has led to very bad translation, and more than once to very unsound criticism. It has been held for instance, that the masculine nouns of the second declension sometimes reject their plural ending as; so that hettend, wigend, and hæleth may stand for hettendas, wigendas, and hælethas. But this hypothesis is much too narrow for its object. In the examples above quoted, magth is feminine, and has magtha in the plural; setl is neuter, and has setlu; and sunu, though masculine, forms its plural in a, suna. There is yet another rule, which is no less important than the last, and appears to have been equally overlooked. The passive participle may be considered as declinable, or not, at the pleasure of the writer. * See Glossary to the Analecta, under the heads Gar. and Hæleth; and Cædmon, p. 278, note b. Her was his maga sceard Freonda gefylled: on folc-stede Forslegen æt sace; and his sunu forlet Here was loss of kin Of friends hewn down-on crowded field On the carnage-place, with wounds laid low, Ne wearth wæl máre On thys eglande · æfre gyta Folces afylled Ever yet within this island, Brunanburgh War-Song. Was no greater carnage, Of men hewn down Brunanburgh War-Song. Adjectives also, when they partake of the character of participles, are sometimes used without declension. E't thisses ofetes: thonne wurthath thín eagan swa leoht Cæd. 27. It would be easy to multiply examples; but our limits. are narrow, and will oblige us to pass over some peculiarities of Anglo-Saxon grammar, which I would fain have noticed. We will proceed at once to the main subject of our inquiry. Cædmon, of whom we have heard so much, was one of those gifted men, who have stamped deeply and lastingly upon the literature of their country, the impress of their own mind and feelings. He was the first Englishman— it may be, the first individual of Gothic race-who exchanged the gorgeous images of the old mythology for the chaster beauties of Christian poetry. From the sixth to the twelfth century, he appears to have been the great model, whom all imitated, and few could equal. For upwards of five centuries, he was the father of English poetry; and when his body was discovered in the reign of John, it seems to have excited no less reverence than those of the kings and saints by which it was surrounded. Nothing shows more clearly the influence which this * Mr. Thorpe has rightly translated this passage, but douots the correctness of his translation, for, "to justify it, we ought to have wanne in the original." extraordinary man exerted upon our national modes of thought and expression, than a comparison between the Anglo-Saxon and early Icelandic literatures. So striking is the contrast, both as to style and subject, that Rask has even ventured to maintain they were radically distinct. A better knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon would have shown him his mistake. But though it might easily be proved, that our fathers had poems on almost all the subjects which were once thought peculiar to the Eddas, yet the remains of them are so scanty, or the allusions to them so ambiguous, as rather to baffle criticism, than to enlighten it. The revolution effected by Cædmon appears to have been complete. The manuscript, which is supposed to contain the poems of Cadmon, was a gift from Archbishop Usher to the celebrated Junius, and by him was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library. From the style of the writing, it must have been written about the end of the tenth, or the beginning of the eleventh century; and as about that time there was an Abbott Elfwine at Winchester, at whose expense certain manuscripts (which are still extant) were written and illuminated, much in the same way as the Cadmon manuscript, and as a head occurs among the illuminations with the name of Elfwine written over it, it has been surmised, that he was the patron to whom we owe the preservation of the poems. Junius, who published this manuscript at Amsterdam in 1665, and who was an Anglo-Saxon scholar of the first class, put the name of Cædmon upon his title-page without hesitation. The style of the poems, so strongly resembling that of the fragment preserved by Bede—the absolute identity of the subjects with those on which we know that Cædmon wrote-and the marks of antiquity so abundantly scattered throughout, were to his mind proofs, amply sufficient to warrant him in so doing. Hickes did not agree in this opinion; but the notions which he held upon the subject of Anglo-Saxon dialect, and upon which |