"Each following day Became the next day's master, till the last Made former wonders _its_." _Henry VIII._, Act I. Sc. 1.
"On the green banks which that fair stream in-bound, Flowers and odours sweetly smiled and smell'd, Which, reaching out _its_ stretched arms around, All the large desert in _its_ bosom held." Fairefax, _Godfrey of Bulloigne_, xviii. 20., 1600.
I doubt if there are any earlier instances among the poets. I have had no opportunity of examining the prose writers of the sixteenth century, but think they must have employed _its_ earlier than the poets. As we may see in the version of the Bible, and other works of the time, the English, like the Anglo-Saxon, long continued to use the genitive _his_ for neuters as well as for masculines; and _thereof_ for our present _of it_, _its_.
_Its_ leads me to reflect how ignorant people were of the old languages in the last century. If ever there was a palpable forgery, it is the Poems of Rowley: yet, if my memory does not deceive me, { 161} Tyrwhitt regarded them as genuine; and Malone authoritatively affirmed that "no one except the nicest judges of English poetry, from Chaucer to Pope, was competent to test their genuineness." Why, this little word _its_ might have tested it. You see we have not been able to trace it in poetry higher up than the end of the sixteenth century; and I am quite sure that it is not to be found in either Chaucer or Spenser: and yet, in the very first page of Rowley, we meet with the following instances of it:
"The whyche in _yttes_ felle use doe make moke dere."
"The thynge _yttes_ (_ytte is?_) moste bee _yttes_ owne defense."
But there is a still surer test. We can hardly read a line of Chaucer, Gower, or any other poet of the time, without meeting with what the French term the feminine _e_, and which must be pronounced as a syllable to make the metre. From one end to the other of the Poems of Rowley, there is not a single instance of it!
It may be of service to the inquirer as to the commencement of the year, to call his attention to the note appended to the "Table of moveable Feasts" in editions prior to 1752. As given by Keeling, from the editions antecedent and subsequent to the last review, in 1662, they are as follows: