l his saints on-behalf-of the
[households] that have pleased the Lord God from the beginning of
the world; then will He hear thee because-of their intercession.
Bow-down then, at the fourth time, thy face thrice to the earth
before all God's church, and sing these verses: The Lord is my
salvation, save Thy people, O Lord: show forth Thy mercy. Sing then
a pater-noster. Pray then for all believing men in the world. Then
shalt thou be, on that day, a partaker, by God's grace, of all the
good things that any man doth for His name, and all true-men will
intercede for thee in heaven and in earth. Amen.

Another discovery was the assignment of a correct description to the
glosses found in a document known as the _Vespasian Psalter_; so
called because it is an early Latin Psalter, or book of Psalms,
contained in a Cotton MS. in the British Museum, marked with the
class-mark "Vespasian, A. 1." This Psalter is accompanied throughout
with glosses which were at first mistakenly thought to be in a
Northumbrian dialect, and were published as such by the Surtees
Society in 1843. They were next, in 1875, wrongly supposed to be
Kentish; but since they were printed by Sweet in 1885 it has been
shown that they are really Mercian. This set of glosses is very
important for the study of Old Mercian, because they are rather
extensive; they occupy 213 pages of the _Oldest English Texts_, and
are followed by 20 more pages of similar glosses to certain Latin
canticles and hymns that occur in the same MS.

There are also a few Charters extant in the Mercian dialect, but the
earliest contain little else than old forms of the names of persons
and places. There are, however, some later Charters, from 836 to 1058
in the Mercian dialect, which contain some boundaries of lands and
afford other information. Most of these relate to Worcestershire.

But the most interesting Mercian glosses are those to be found in
the Rushworth MS., which has already been mentioned as containing
Northumbrian glosses of the Latin Gospels of St Mark, St Luke, and St
John. For the Gospel of St Matthew was glossed by the scribe Farman,
who was a priest of Harewood, situate on the river Wharfe, in the West
Riding of Yorkshire; whose language, accordingly, was Mercian. In my
_Principles of English Etymology, First Series_ (second edition,
1892), p. 44, I gave a list of words selected from these glosses, in
order to show how much nearer they stand, as a rul