Clyde. It was not till a much later period that the name "Scotland" came to be applied to any part of the territory south of the Forth. That was a part of the Northumbrian kingdom which stretched from the Humber to the Forth and was inhabited, not by a Celtic race, but by an Angle or English people, in no way akin to the Scots of the north. In fact there is abundance of evidence to prove that the Lothians were not considered a part of Scotland at this time. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, under the year 1091, we read that Malcolm, the King of the Scots, marched "Out of Scotland into Lothian in England." This statement comes from an English source; but we need not go beyond the Acts of the Scots Parliament themselves to find it amply confirmed. In these, Stirling is spoken of as a border town, the territory south of the Forth being treated as beyond the limits of Scotland.

It was the Danish invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries which, more than anything else, led to the expansion of the dominion of the Scots King towards the south. It is difficult to trace the course of events in this period, for the Scots seem at one time to have sided with the Danes, and at another with the Saxons of the south. The ultimate result, however, was that, about the close of the tenth century, that part of Cumbria lying between the Firth of Solway and the Firth of Clyde, and that part of Northumbria lying between the Cheviots and the Firth of Forth, were ceded to the King of the Scots. Whether he held them in trust simply as a fief of the English Crown, or whether he acquired them in absolute dominion need not concern us. The acquisition of these territories became one of the most important factors in the development of the Scottish nationality, and is of the first importance to the student of the Scots vernacular.

During this period we see a struggle going on between two dynasties, representing distinct races, languages, and sympathies. In Macbeth we have the Celtic king who, after the death of Duncan, ruled over what was then known as Scotland, while in Malcolm Canmore, the son of Duncan, we have the representative

of the Angle or English sympathies. Partly of Saxon descent Malcolm was wholly Saxon in tastes, and when he overthrew Macbeth, although he came to win the ancient Scots throne of his fathers, he came rather as a Lothian king to conquer a foreign country. In him we have the turning point at which the ruling family ceased to be Celtic and became Anglo-Saxon. From his reign onward the centre of influence is gradually transferred from the north to the Lothians in the south. The restoration of the ancient Celtic dynasty in Malcolm's person was really a Saxon movement effected by Saxon aid, and from his reign onward the southern civilisation, as it existed in Lothian and Tweedale, became dominant in Scotland. As Dr Murray says in his treatise on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland: "The sovereign ruled as the hereditary descendant of Fergus the son of Erc and the fabulous Gathelus; he reigned because he represented the feelings and sympathies and was identified with the interests and national spirit of his Anglo-Saxon subjects." Still the term "Scotland" continued to be applied exclusively to the land north of the Forth, and the word "Scot" to indicate a man of the Northern Celtic race. King David, whose charters are, with the exception of one of the reign of Malcolm, the oldest we have, describes himself in these charters as King of the Scots, but he addresses them to his subjects in Scotland, Lothian, and Galloway. A change in the application of the term "Scotland" was, however, in progress, and the War of Independence at last extended it to the whole territory now designated by that name, although the word "Scot" continued for nearly two centuries longer to mean a Celt.

It is with the language of the southern element, which, although its headquarters were in the Scottish lowlands, had penetrated far north beyond the Forth, and which represented in an ever-increasing degree the dominant element in the kingdom, that we have to deal, for it is from this source that the Scots vernacular arose. How this language came to be universal all over Scotland, except in the extensive but remoter and thinly populated regions where the Celtic survived, is one of those philo

logical puzzles which has never been satisfactorily answered. The influence of Malcolm's Court could only have reached a small circle of his subjects, and the influx of Saxons from the south could never have materially affected the speech of the people, for the great body of the people will always be disposed to retain the speech they have derived from their parents. After the Norman Conquest, for example, when French became the language of the Court and the law in England, and when Norman Barons were planted in every corner of England, French was unable to supersede the English language. Many French words, it is true, were ingrafted on the English, but the language remained essentially Anglo-Saxon. Why the language of the Picts was not able to withstand the Anglo-Saxon infusion, as the English had withstood the French, is possibly explained by the theory that the Picts were a Scandinavian race speaking a language closely akin to the Saxon and easily assimilated with it.

Early English comprised three distinct dialects, each with well-marked characteristics-the northern, the midland, and the southern. Of these the midland gradually gained an ascendancy over and absorbed the other two. Southern English died out or survived only as a local patois on the shores of the English Channel. Northern English, at least as a literary language, was also supplanted in Northumbria south of the Cheviots, but it lived on as the vernacular of Scotland, and, with certain modifications, became the written language of the golden days of Scots literature. In fact "Early Scots," if we take the expression as signifying the language written up to the end of the fourteenth century in the southern counties of Scotland, is identical with the examples of northern English which we find in the writings of those who wrote at York or on the banks of the Humber. Thus it is that the language of Barbour in The Bruce and Wyntoun in his Rhyming Chronicle, both early Scots poets, is identical with the northern English of such a writer as Richard Rolle of Doncaster. Dr Murray tells us that he has frequently been amused on reading passages from Richard Rolle to men of education, both English and Scots, and finding that they pronounce them to be old Scots,

and that their surprise has been great to be told that the author lived in the extreme south of Yorkshire, within a few miles from a locality so thoroughly English as Sherwood Forest, with its memories of Robin Hood.

During the century preceding and the century following Bannockburn, there were a number of causes in operation which, although they did not alter the essentially Anglo-Saxon character of the language, led to a divergence of the Scots vernacular from the literary English of the time, and made it a distinct language with special characteristics of its own. But it was not till the close of the fifteenth century that the language assumed those features which it retained during the brilliant period of Scottish literature, the period of Dunbar, Douglas, and Lindesay.

Among these causes the first to be noted is that many of the peculiar features of the northern English, as distinguished from the literary English of the time, survived in the Scots vernacular. This is found in the vocabulary and also in grammatical form and construction, and is one of the important sources of that part of the language which we regard as peculiarly Scots. Every Englishman who reads Burns meets with many words which are to him unintelligible, and grammatical forms with which he is not familiar. These words and forms of expression, although only on a very small percentage of the vocabulary of even the most distinctively Scots poems of Burns, form really, apart from the mere matter of pronunciation, the characteristic elements of the Scots vernacular. They are almost entirely of Teutonic origin, from the same source as the English. Although not now found in literary English, they remained in the northern English dialect, and survive to this day in the dialects of Scotland. They are Anglo-Saxon words and have their counterpart in other Teutonic languages of our own time. Anyone who reads the translations of Burns's poetry into German, and they are very numerous, must be struck with the number of Scots words which have their exact counterpart in the German. Thus we have the word "wale," to choose, which is the German "wählen"; the word "lift," the air, which is the German "Luft"; the word "blate," bashful, which

is the German "blöde"; and many others. But besides such words as these of Teutonic origin, which do not appear to have been used in English, we have many words which were in common use in the time of Chaucer and other early English writers, and which have long ago died out of the English language but remain alive in the Scots. A glossary of the words in Chaucer which require to be explained to a modern Englishman contains about six thousand words, of which as many as two thousand do not require any explanation to a Scotsman familiar with the vernacular of his own country. For example, Burns uses the word "ferlie," meaning "to wonder." "To ferlie at the folks in

Lun'on." Chaucer uses it as an adjective, meaning "strange." It occurs in Piers Ploughman as a noun meaning "a wonder." The word is still common in the Buchan dialect, in which the "sights" of a town are called its " ferlies," which is the same meaning as the word has in the proverb given in Allan Ramsay's Scots Proverbs: "The longer we live the more ferlies we see.” Again, we have the word "tine," meaning to "lose," with its past participle "tint." The word is an old English one, used by Chaucer and the author of Piers Ploughman, but has not been used in English for centuries. As a last example we may take the word "kythe," meaning "to show," "to prove." It is often found in the Scots Makars. Gavin Douglas speaks of the sun "kything no sygn of heyt in his wisage." In early English it was in common use, and we find it as late as the metrical version of the Psalms appended to our Bible, where, in the 18th Psalm, "Unto the froward Thou showest Thyself froward," is rendered "Froward Thou kyth'st unto the froward wight." I am not aware of any later example of its use in English, and probably it was already archaic when Francis Rouse wrote his metrical ver. sion of the Psalms. The word, however, like the others just mentioned, survives in Scotland and is used by Burns in Hallowe'en, where we find,

"Their faces blythe, fu' sweetly kythe,

Hearts leal, and true and kin'."

While many old Anglo-Saxon words were retained in Scot