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tion in round numbers of 210,000 inhabitants, of whom not 30,000 can read, and not 15,000 can afford to buy the luxury of a paper, is a monstrous waste of literary labour, of type, paper, pens and ink, and paragraph and leading-article material. It follows that able political writers are not encouraged, for they cannot be paid, and hence the indifferent writing of the journals. A great many contributions are sent in gratis by political men who desire to spread their political opinions, or to serve their party. The writers by profession are badly paid, and they make up in turgidity what they want in thought. Men will not take the trouble of thinking on and well weighing a subject, when they are not adequately paid for their pains. Declamation is so easy, and the Spanish language so gracefully and sonorously lends itself to flowing and fine sounding phrases, that column after column is spun out, full of sound, but signifying nothing. If Spanish newspaper establishments were prepared to pay as proprietors and editors pay their writers in England and France, we do not say they would get such writing as can be procured in London and Paris, but we do say they might find sensible and instructed men, like Condé, the author of the Historia de la Dominacion de los Arabes en España; like Llorente, the author of the celebrated History of the Inquisition, written during his exile, and published in Paris in 1818; like Quintana, author of Vidas de Españoles Celebres; like de Larra, author of España des de Fernando VII. hasta Mendizabal ; like Cabellero; like old Burgos, the ex-minister and translator of Horace; or like old Martinez de la Rosa, who, though somewhat too faded and flowery, ruined and broken down, is yet as the vase of Moore

'You may break, you may ruin the vase if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.'

But no; there is an indolence and a stagnation among proprietors and editors which are extraordinary. All the feuilletons are translated at secondhand from the French, and some of them indifferently translated. Occasionally, in many of the papers, there are humorous articles and pasquinades. This is a species of cleverness in which Spaniards have never been deficient. So much, indeed, does this talent abound, that there have been two or three journals devoted to such trifles, among which the Fray Gerundio and the Tarantula may be named. But the humour is often very savage and truculent, for a Spaniard

Burns with one love, with one resentment glows.'

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If he is not violently for you, he is desperately and to the death against you, and will wage guerra al culhillo.' Sometimes, too, for the taste of the nation is not very refined, the humour is coarse and obscene, with filthy and disgusting allusions. To witty refinement, the Spaniards are for the most part strangers, but some of the Andalusians are pleasant banterers, and write what Brantome calls readable Rodomontades Espagnolles.

The stenographer's art is tolerably well known at Madrid, and is brought to play an important part in the Spanish journals during the sitting of the Congress and Senate. The reporters of the Spanish press are a very hilarious, hirsute, filthylooking race, smelling rancidly of garlic, tobacco, and bad aquardiente. You may see a dozen of them in the reporters' box, laughing, chattering, and playing at horse-play and prac tical tricks before and during the debates. A low-lived, boozy, debauched, jolly set of dogs are these Spanish stenographers, somewhat resembling the British penny-a-liners.

In size and arrangement of matter, the Spanish press resem bles the French very exactly. But in outward form and collocation of matter lies all the likeness; for the soul as well as the substance of the French press, are wanting.

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ART. III. (1.) "Lazamon's Brut, or Chronicle of Britain;" a Poetical Semi-Saxon Paraphrase of the Brût of Wace. Now first published from the Cottonian Manuscripts in the British Museum; accompanied by a literal translation, Notes, and a Grammatical Glossary. By Sir FREDERICK MADDEN. 3 vols. (Society of Antiquaries, 1847.)

(2.) "Early English Metrical Romances." 1845. (Camden Society.) (3.) " Reliquiæ Antiqua." Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts, illustrating chiefly our early English Literature. Edited by WRIGHT and HALLIWELL. 1841-44.

(4.) "History of English Rhymes." By EDWIN GUEST. 2 vols. 1838.

(5.) Haveloke the Dane. Edited by SIR F. MADDEN. (Roxburgh Club.)

(6.) The Metrical Romances of Ellis, Ritson, and Weber.

(7.) Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle. Edited by HEARNE.

MANY have been the pilgrimages of late to the pure well of English undefiled,' for the way is right pleasant, nor have the pilgrims thither found their labour unrequited, although the well itself, like the romance-famed fountain of Brecheliant, has often appeared temptingly near, and then again quite eluded the eye. Indeed, the very existence of this well, from whose fancied source Spenser so fondly dreamed that the morning star of our poetical horizon, Chaucer, first drank, is now disbelieved; but the pilgrims, if disappointed in the ultimate object of their search, have gathered on their way many a garland of wild flowers, as they traced the upward course of that stream of English poetry which has flowed now unceasingly through full six centuries. The poetic spirit was indeed awakened from the very period that the English spirit was aroused; and long before Langland gave forth his marvellously life-like allegory, or Gower recited his graceful tales, or Chaucer hymned the glories and beauties of nature, as though high priest of her temple, many a poet, with faltering and unequal voice indeed, but with true poet feeling,-had already sung many a pleasant lay, and many a right wondrous story to an eager and imaginative people. In a former article (No. IX., p. 159,) we directed the attention of our readers to those veritable 'poet fathers of England,' the trouvéres of the twelfth century; in the present we shall in

troduce the earliest poets who made use of the English tongue; a class, which even were they less deserving of notice than we think they will be found to be, are important, inasmuch as they form the connecting link between the trouvéres and those poets of the fourteenth century who have long been viewed as the fathers of English poesy. The resuscitation of the various works indicated at the head of this article, (for these were almost as completely buried for centuries as the writings of the trouvéres) is due to the laborious researches of those philolo gical antiquaries, who early in the last century sought to trace the progress of our language from Saxon into English. Little did the Hearnes and the Hickes of that period care about the rude, but often spirited verse, still less for the wild tales of adventure, and chronicles full filled with marvels, which these mouldering remains contained; but it was reserved for Thomas Warton, to whose fine imagination Dugdale's Monasticon itself appeared witching as some gorgeously illuminated missal, and who sung with such truth

"Nor rough nor barren are the winding ways

Of hoar antiquity, but strewed with flowers"

to ransack these stores, and bring them forth to the world in his history of English poetry. From that time to the present, a spirit of inquiry has been growing up, and the changes which our language has undergone, the characteristics of our early literature, the remains of our early writers, have more and more occupied the attention of our literary antiquaries. Libraries have been explored, copies collated, societies formed for the express purpose of rescuing our early literature from oblivion, nor could we possibly point to a more signal proof of the increasing interest felt in these studies, than that the Society of Antiqua ries, after so long a period of slumber, should have aroused itself to print, at its own cost, that most bulky, but, in a philological point of view, most important work, Lazamon's Semi-Saxon Chronicle of Britain.'

The transition of the Saxon tongue into English is closely connected with the history of our early poetry, and that the one exercised an important influence over the other, is, we think, evident from the number and variety of works which we meet with in the very earliest stage of what may be really called English. Sir Frederic Madden, the able editor of the first work on our list, suggests that the successive stages of development of our language may be indicated with tolerable correctness in the subjoined table:

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It is with the two first stages that we are now to be engaged; but in passing, we cannot but remark, although with much deference to a writer who stands in the very first rank of English philologists, that the last division seems to us very arbitrary. Surely Heywood and Shakespere, Skelton and Marlowe, cannot be considered as using the same form of the English tongue; and yet these all flourished between 1500 and 1600. Our prose writers, too; how thoroughly old English is Lord Berner's Froissart, compared with the early writings of Bacon--the sermons of Latimer, too, with the curt and sententious style of Hall; surely, for the rise of the later English, the date 1550 might be better assigned.

The Saxon language, after having continued, with few variations, for some centuries, began to give indications of change soon after the beginning of the eleventh century. This, as the reader will remember, was an era of much confusion. The Saxon dynasty had been expelled, and that energetic barbarian, Canute, had seized the throne. On the death of his sons, the sceptre had indeed returned into the hand of a monarch of Saxon race, but the feeble Confessor was ill qualified to keep in check nobles, whose lands vied in extent with his domains, and whose coffers, from the predatory habits in which they gloried, were often better filled than his own. From contemporary writers, we learn that these nobles were divided into what may be called the Danish party, and the Norman party, and, from the partiality evinced by the latter to the NormanFrench, Ingulphus traces the decline of the pure Saxon. The story that William the Conqueror actually put down the birthtongue of the people scarcely finds a place, in the present day, even in popular histories of England; for we know that he gave his charters in Saxon, and we have the testimony of his chaplain that he actually made an attempt to learn it. But although Saxon was not proscribed by law, or by popular usage, it was scorned by the nobles, and neglected, probably scorned also, by the scholars, who gave a fresh impulse to the national mind. Under these circumstances, without a standard to which to refer, no wonder that the native language became subjected to changes which involved a certain degree of assimilation to that spoken by the educated and the noble. Sir Frederic Madden, we perceive, places the rise of the semi-Saxon about the year

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