It is more than sixty years since Professor Conybeare in his ‘Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry (1826)’ gave us metrical versions of certain specimens of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and such versions have been from time to time increased, until now a very considerable portion of this poetry has been clothed in a modern English dress, either in prose or in verse. The form that the translation should take has varied with the taste of the translator. Thorpe, in his editions of the’ Codex Exoniensis’ (1842) and of ‘Béowulf’ (1855), contented himself with an English prose version by half-lines in parallel columns with the text. Kemble, however, had previously published his prose translation of ‘Béowulf’ (1837) in a separate volume from the text. Wackerbarth published in 1849 the first complete English verse translation of ‘Béowulf,’ using verses of three and four accents, riming irregularly, sometimes stanza-fashion, as in the opening lines:

Lo! We have learned in lofty Lays
The Gár-Danes Deeds in antient Days
And Ages past away,
The Glories of the Theod-Kings,
And how the valiant Aethelings
Bare them in Battle's Day.

The value of such an investigation as this depends upon the reliability of the methods employed; these I wish to sketch briefly.

Harrison and Sharp's ‘Béowulf,’ after careful collation with Zupitza's ‘Autotypes,’ with additional correction for quantity, has furnished the text of the poem. Every word of this text, every variation of stem, has been, by independent investigation, reduced to the West-Germanic form. The data for this step were furnished by the vocabularies and lexicons cited below, and the processes involved were pursued under the guidance of the grammars also cited in the subjoined list. The lists of words thus obtained were classified, and checked against the lists of Cook, Cosijn, Fischer, and Leioing, and all important disagreements noted. Where further investigation seemed to justify former conclusions, a reference to the author in question has been entered in the work.

The Russians proper who constitute three fourths of the whole population of European Russia are divided into the Great Russians, the Little Russians and the White Russians, numbering about forty-five, twenty and five millions respectively. The Great Russians occupy the central provinces around Moscow and the greater part of the North and the East, the Little Russians extend from the river Don to Eastern Galicia, the White Russians live in the territory between Poland and the central provinces. Each of these three divisions of the Russian people possesses a rich treasure of folklore much of which has been published during the last thirty years. The animal tales have not been gathered separately, but form part of the various collections of folk tales, or Skazkas, among which that of Afanasiev is by far the largest and most important. It comprises eight volumes, draws its material from all sections of the country, and presents the principal animal tales in the three dialects, in the edition of 1860-63 running through several volumes, in that of 1873 united in the beginning of the first The work of Afanasiev has been supplemented by others. To mention only the leading collections Romanov has edited White-Russian folk tales; Rud¸nko, Cubinskij and Dragomanov Little-Russian; Chudjakov, Cudinskij and Sadovnikov Great-Russian. To the public and the students of foreign countries, the Russian tales have been introduced by the collections of Ralston, Leger, Dietrich, Vogl and others; through the notes on tales of other countries; through numerous publications and discussions in magazines and periodicals, and by de Gubernatis ‘Zoological Mythology.’ As the collections contain but a few animal tales, and as the stray publications are only accessible to specialists, de Gubernatis' work, which has been published in English. Italian, French and German, is comparatively the most useful. Unfortunately, however, the Italian scholar does not give his summaries of Great-Russian animal tales connectedly and for their own sake, but interspersed with tales from other peoples and in support of a theory which resolves them into myths of the sun, the moon or the atmosphere.

Two such authorities as the ‘Encyclopædia Britannica ‘and the’ Dictionary of National Biography’ are arrayed against each other with respect to the derivation of our ancient poet's name. In the ‘Encyclopaedia’ we read:

“Sir Francis Palgravé, despairing of finding a native derivation, suggested (Archæologia, vol. xxiv.) that the poet might have been so called from the Chaldaic name for the book of Genesis, which is ‘b’ Cadmin,‘in the beginning, or’ Cadmon,‘beginning, from the opening words of the first chapter of Genesis. He thought that he might even have been an’ Eastern visitor,’ who had arrived in Britain from the East, mastered the language, and come out as a vernacular poet. A hypothesis so fanciful as this last may be at once rejected…. On the whole, Sir Francis Palgrave's first suggestion seems to involve the least difficulty. ‘Cadmon’ means ‘beginning’ in the Targum of Onkelos, the Chaldee version of the Scriptures, which was in popular use among the Jews from the 1st century B. C. downwards, and some learned ecclesiastic at Whitby who had visited the Holy Land may have given to the poet the name Cadmon (which in Anglo-Saxon mouths became Cædmon), because he was to sing of the ‘beginning’ of things.”

I will introduce the texts with a few remarks on the geographical location of the provinces where they are found. Kola is a peninsula on the White Sea and part of the government of Archangel which extends along the Artic Sea from Finland to Siberia. Vologda lies south of Archangel, and Perm southeast of Vologda, both on the Siberian frontier. The three governments of Niži-Novgorod (Nižegorod), Vladimir and Tver follow each other (from the city that gives its name to the first) to a point between Moscow and Petersburg. The provinces of Kaluga, Tula, Tambov, Saratov and Astrachan extend from a point a little towards the south west of Moscow to the Northern extremity of the Caspian Sea; Voronež lies south of Tambov.

That teacher of literature who has not comprehended the significance of a work of Art, has never been endued with the spirit and power of his high calling. He stands unwittingly in the place of an apostle of “that external quality of bodies which may be shown to be in some sort typical of the Divine attributes.”

“Those qualities, or types,” according to Ruskin, “on whose combination is dependent the power of mere material loveliness” are:

“Infinity, or the type of Divine Incomprehensibility; Unity, or the type of the Divine Comprehensibility; Repose, or the type of the Divine Permanence; Symmetry, or the type of the Divine Justice; Purity, or the type of the Divine Energy; Moderation, or the type of Government by Law.”

An exhaustive study of the riming system of Alexander Pope was suggested by the results of a partial investigation given in the introduction to Professsor Edwin Abbott's ‘Concordance’ to the works of that poet. I first based my study of the rimes upon this ‘Concordance,’ but, finding it to be neither reliable nor exhaustive, I was obliged to dispense with this aid and examine the rimes themselves at first hand. This investigation includes all of the poems, with the exception of a short unfinished piece, called “1740,” and a stanza of five lines written on “Beaufort House Gate at Chiswick,” omitted because of incomplete rimes. The examination of the rimes follows the lines of the study of Rose's ‘Orlando Furioso’ made by Professor Albert S. Cook in Modern Language Notes for November, 1883.

In studying the language or pronunciation of any section of the country, it is necessary first of all to trace back the history of the people inhabiting it to the earliest beginnings in order to explain understandingly the dialectical peculiarities of its grammar or pronunciation. I shall, therefore, preface my remarks on the linguistic peculiarities of this region with a brief sketch of its earliest settlements and later development.

The earlier history of Western Virginia, now known as West Virginia, begins a century later than that of Eastern Virginia, or Virginia proper. In 1710 Alexander Spotswood, a Scotchman, was the deputy governor of the Colony of Virginia.

The trend of the Modern Language Association has been, thus far, almost exclusively in the direction of grammatical criticism and philological exegesis. The literary side of language has been subordinated or retired until it is almost faded out of memory, in the confusion of tongues and the strife of phonetics. Nearly all of the illustrating power, the æsthetic brilliance of literary culture, is lost upon the philological devotee. As an attempt to counteract this tendency, I purpose a special investigation of some points suggested by the study of one of the noblest works through which the spiritual genius and the artistic sense of our age has expressed itself—I mean Tennyson's “In Memoriam.” As is well known to students of our literature, “In Memoriam “appeared in 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death and of Tennyson's succession to the office of Laureate. It is one of the five or six supreme elegiac poems of our language, “Lycidas “standing first in point of time (1637), then Dryden's “Ode on Mrs. Killigrew” (1686), then Shelley's “Adonais “(1822), suggested by the death of Keats and “In Memoriam “which was occasioned by the death of Arthur Hallam at Vienna in September, 1833—in 1850. Matthew Arnold's “Thyrsis,” evoked by the death of his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, in point of grace and tenderness is entitled to most honorable recognition, but as it is subsequent by several years to the appearance of “In Memoriam,”

The subject of this paper as announced some time ago in the programme of this convention, is not exactly the one which it should bear. In a former paper, published in the Modern Language Notes, I tried to trace back a number of our peculiar words and speech usages to an earlier period of the language, using Shakespeare as a basis. In the present paper this method of procedure has been attempted only incidentally. In other words, I invite your attention to a study of a few of the peculiarities of the language as found in Tennessee, regardless of their origin and history. It is not to be supposed, however, that the forms pointed out are limited to one particular state or to a small territory. On the other hand, most of them are found throughout the larger portion of the South, and many of them are common over the whole country. Nothing like a complete survey of the field, or a strict classification of the material gathered, has been attempted, and many of the words treated have been discussed by others. A few cases of bad pronunciation have been noticed, rather as an index of characteristic custom than as showing anything new.

Literary Variants.—–‘Ren.,’ iii, i ff.; vi. 750 ff.; xiv, 540 ff.=Méon. 749 ff., 14462 ff., 3919 ff. (?); Rothe, pp. 123 f., 192, 136; Carnoy, pp. 51 and 58: The fox feigns death and eats the fish : ‘Ren.,’ vi. 761 ff.; xiv. 586 ff. = Méon, 14473 ff., 4178 ff.; Rothe, pp. 192, 137; Camoy, p. 58: The wolf feigns death and is beaten : Rein.,’ 208 ff. and ‘Reinke’ 165 ff. : The fox feigns death and the wolf eats the fish. Berachjah ha-Nakdan 99 (Gr., ‘R. F.‘ p. cclxxxiii); Waldis, iv, 73 : The fox feigns death to obtain some bacon and gets it; the wolf tries the same trick, but is beaten.

I come before you this morning to represent the unornamental, prosaic side of our work—the under-current, so to speak. Pedagogical papers have been read and discussed before this Association till it would seem that little could be left to say in this department; yet I feel encouraged to present another, for the very reason that the discussion of these papers has been more active and universal than that of any other class of papers whatever. And I regard this as a most wholesome sign of our professional spirit. For no teacher ought ever to forget, however attractive he finds the search for the principle of the Germanic accentuation, or the meaning of the second part of ‘Faust,’ that he is not by profession in the first place a philologist or a man of letters, but a teacher, whose first duty is toward his pupils, and whose work is to apply whatever he can find in philology or literature to the task of supplying, to the best of his power, these bright young minds which come to him for instruction, with that which will most help them to fill their future place in the world. And so I ask you to listen to another chapter of prose, in confidence that, however much we may be interested,—as I am sure we all are,—in the “Stressed Vowels in Beowulf,” or the “Spanish Pastoral Romances,” every one who is worthy to be a member of this Association is eager for any new idea which will help him to do this important work in a better manner; and if I can present any such ideas, or start a discussion which shall bring them, I shall feel that the under-current has not come to the surface in vain.