The American biblical repository Author:Bela Bates Edwards Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ARTICLE IX. Anglo-saxon Literature. The Saxon part of the English language has, as yet, attracted but little attention in the United States. The causes of ... more »this neglect are obvious. The importance of studying the language, as a whole, or any part of it, has not been deeply felt. Our institutions of learning have been tardy in making provision for the radical study of the vernacular speech. Professors of the English language have not, in general, formed a part of the corps of instruction in a college. If the subject has received any degree of attention, it has been indirect and ineffectual. The history of the language, its structure, its various dialects have been considered as falling into the province of the antiquarian, rather than as being a matter of intense interest, and of great practical value to the general student. In our seminaries, the subject has been conjoined with, or appended to the department of oratory or belles-lettres, as if unworthy to stand on independent ground. Again, the influence of certain writers has been unfavorable to the development of the original elements of the language. They have bowed down before Latin or French idols. In their zeal for high-sounding periods, or the polysyllabic march of a sentence, they have overlooked that which imparts to the language its masculine energy, its iron strength, its wedge-like force. Writers, like Dr. Johnson and Gibbon, have exerted a pernicious influence. Their peculiarities are precisely such as attract the admiration of the young, at the period when the style is in a process of formation. It is singular that a man of so much acumen as the great lexicographer, who, in his conversation, showed such powers of irony and sarcasm, who, in other words, possessed qualities of mind which naturally seek The ...« less