An Essay on English Poetry Author:Thomas Campbell 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: SCOTTISH POETKY. The origin of the Lowland Scottish language has been a fruitful subject of controversy. Like the English it is of Gothic materials, and, at a... more » certain distance of time from the Norman Conquest, is found to contain, as well as its sister dialect of the south, a considerable mixture of French. According to one theory, those Gothic elements of Scotch existed in the Lowlands anterior to the Anglo-Saxon settlements in England, among the Picts, a Scandinavian race: the subsequent mixture of French words arose from the French connexions of Scotland, and the settlement of Normans among her people; and thus by the Pictish and Saxon dialects meeting, and an infusion of French being afterwards superadded, the Scottish language arose, independent of modern English, though necessarily similar, from the similarity of its materials. According to another theory the Picts were not Goths, but Cambro-British, a Celtic race, like the Western Scots who subdued and blended with the Picts under Kenneth MacAlpine. Of the same Celtic race were also the Britons of Strathclyde, and the ancient people of Galloway. In Galloway, though the Saxons overran that peninsula, they are affirmed to have left but little of their blood and little of their language. In the ninth century Galloway was new peopled by the Irish Cruithne, and at the end of the eleventh century was universally inhabited by a Gaelic people. At this latter period the common language of all Scotland, with the exception of Lothian and a corner of Caithness, was the Gaelic, and in the twelfth century commenced the progress of the English language into Scotland Proper ; so that Scotch is only migrated English. Lothian, now containing the Scottish metropolis, was, after several fluctuations of possession, annexed to the territo...« less