The history of the Anglo-Saxons as a people is without a parallel in the annals of a nation. Their story during five centuries of dominion in this land may be said to have been unknown to generations of Englishmen; the monuments of their history, the veritable records of their customs and manners, their polity, their laws, their institutions, their literature, whatever reveals the genius of a people, lie entombed in their own contemporary manuscripts, and in another source which we long neglected--in those ancient volumes of their northern brothers, who had not been idle observers of the transactions of England, which seems often to have been to them "the land of promise." The Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, those authentic testimonies of the existence of the nation, were long dispersed, neglected, even unintelligible, disfigured by strange characters, and obscured by perplexing forms of diction. The language as well as the writing had passed away; all had fallen into desuetude; and no one suspected that the history of a whole people so utterly cast into forgetfulness could ever be written.
But the lost language and the forgotten characters antiquity and religion seemed to have consecrated in the eyes of the learned Archbishop MATTHEW PARKER, who was the first to attempt their restitution by an innocent stratagem. To his edition of Thomas Walsingham's History in 1574, his Grace added the Life of Alfred by this king's secretary, Asser, _printed in the Saxon character_; we are told, as "an invitation to English readers to draw them in unawares to an acquaintance with the _handwriting of their ancestors_."[1] "The invitation" was somewhat awful, and whether the guests were delighted or dismayed, let some Saxonist tell! SPELMAN, the great legal archæologist, was among the earliest who ventured to search amid the Anglo-Saxon duskiness, at a time when he knew not one who could even interpret the writing. This great lawyer had been perplexed by many barbarous names and terms which had become obsolete; they were Saxon. He was driven to the study; and his "Glossary" is too humble a title for that treasure of law and antiquity, of history and of disquisition, which astonished the learned world at home and abroad--while the unsold copies during the life of the author checked the continuation; so few was the number of students, and few they must still be; yet the devotion of its votary was not the less, for he had prepared the foundation of a Saxon professorship. Spelman was the father; but he who enlarged the inheritance of these Anglo-Saxon studies, appeared in the learned SOMNER; and though he lived through distracted times which loved not antiquity, the cell of the antiquary was hallowed by the restituted lore. HICKES, in his elaborate "Thesaurus," displayed a literature which had never been read, and which he himself had not yet learned to read. These were giants; their successors were dwarfs who could not add to their stores, and little heeded their possessions. Few rarely succeeded in reading the Saxon; and at that day, about the year 1700, no printer could cast the types, which were deemed barbarous, or, as the antiquary Rowe Mores expresses it, "unsightly to politer eyes." A lady--and she is not the only one who has found pleasure in studying this ancient language of our country--Mrs. ELSTOB, the niece of Hickes, patronised by a celebrated Duchess of Portland, furnished several versions; but the Saxon Homilies she had begun to print, for some unknown cause, were suspended: the unpublished but printed sheets are preserved at our National Library. These pursuits having long languished, seemed wholly to disappear from our literature.