Cathcart's Literary Reader

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: THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE A N historical account of English literature would have for its outline a description of the best books of all kinds that have been written in the English language. It would therefore necessarily involve some account of the history of the language itself, ? of its...
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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: THE BEGINNINGS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE A N historical account of English literature would have for its outline a description of the best books of all kinds that have been written in the English language. It would therefore necessarily involve some account of the history of the language itself, ? of its beginnings, so far as they can be traced, of its successive modifications, and of the several influences that have affected it. The English language was formed and grew to its maturity in the British Islands. It is now spoken in our own country and in British colonies and dependencies throughout the world, ? in all by more than one hundred millions of people. By the close of the twentieth century it will doubtless be the language of three times that number of men. The speech from which' our present English derives the greater part of its structural characteristics was spoken fourteen hundred years ago in the lowland countries bordering upon the Baltic and North seas. In Schleswig there is a district which still bears the name of Angeln. The speech of the inhabitants of this region was rough and guttural, and consisted at the most of about two thousand words. The language of the lowlanders of to-day is Teutonic, and so was that of their ancestors, the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, of whom we are speaking. It did not in those early times have the name English, but was most probably called Deutsck, or Teutish. About the middleof the fifth century this speech was carried by adventurers and colonists across the North Sea to the shores of Britain. These invaders from the mainland found the island that is now called Great Britain peopled by a race of men who spoke a strange language, and who were poor, half- barbarous, and unable to offer much resistance to the encroachments of the ..