brought face to face within narrower compass. We see the old Article with its three genders, se, si, þet (in Sanscrit sa, sâ, tat), still lingering on in Kent, though these forms had been dropped everywhere else. On the other hand, we find about seventy French words, many of which, as verray, defenden, signefiance, orgeilus, commencement, were not needed at all. When reading the short sentence, ‘this is si signefiance of the miracle,’ our thoughts are at one time borne back to the abode of our earliest forefathers on the Oxus; at another time we see the fine language of the Victorian penny-a-liner most clearly foreshadowed. After 1290, we hardly ever find a passage in which the English words, now obsolete, are more than one-seventeenth of the whole;[1] the only exception is in the case of some Alliterative poem. This fact gives us some idea of the havock wrought in the Thirteenth Century.
But the friars of old did not confine themselves to preaching; all the lore of the day was lodged in their hands. Roger Bacon's life sets before us the bold way in which some of them pried into the secrets of Nature. One of the means by which they drew to themselves the love of the common folk was the practice of leechcraft; in the friars the leper found his only friends. The best scientific English treatise of the time of Edward the First is ‘the Pit of Hell,’ printed by Mr. Wright: this also deals with the shaping of the human frame.[2] There are in it about 400 long lines, containing forty French
