g of MSS. began in Celtic and
Teutonic, rather than in Romanic lands. In the latter, the old Latin
was not yet so dead, nor the vulgar idioms that were growing out of
it, as yet so distinct from it, as to render the glossing of the one
by the other needful. The relation of Latin to, say, the Romanic of
Provence, was like that of literary English to Lancashire or Somerset
dialect; no one thinks of glossing a literary English book by
Somersetshire word-forms; for, if he can read at all, it is the
literary English that he does read. So if the monk of Burgundy or
Provence could read at all, it was the Book-Latin that he could and
did read. But, to the Teuton or the Celt, Latin was an entirely
foreign tongue, the meaning of whose words he could not guess by any
likeness to his own; by him Latin had been acquired by slow and
painful labour, and to him the gloss was an important aid. To the
modern philologist, Teutonic or Celtic, these glosses are very
precious; they have preserved for us a large number of Old English,
Old Irish, Old German words that occur nowhere else, and which, but
for the work of the old glossators, would have been lost for ever. No
inconsiderable portion of the oldest English vocabulary has been
recovered entirely from these interlinear glosses; and we may
anticipate important additions to that vocabulary when Professor
Napier gives us the volume in which he has been gathering up all the
unpublished glosses that yet remain in MSS.

In process of time it occurred to some industrious reader that it
would be a useful exercise of his industry, to collect out of all the
manuscripts to which he had access, all the glosses that they
contained, and combine them in a list. In this compact form they could
be learned by heart, thus extending the vocabulary at his command, and
making him independent of the interlinear glosses, and they could also
be used in the school-teaching of pupils and neophytes, so as sensibly
to enlarge their stock of Latin words and phrases. A collection of
glosses, thus copied out and thrown together into a single list,
constituted a _Glossarium_ or _Glossary_; it was the remote precursor
of the seventeenth-century 'Table Alphabetical,' or 'Expositor of Hard
Words.'

Such was one of the fountain-heads of English lexicography; the other
is to be found in the fact that in those distant days, as in our own,
the learning of Latin was the acquisition of a foreign tongue which
involved the lea