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ligible. We meet with good Latin poetry throughout the 12th century; the writings of Laurence of Durham, Henry of Huntingdon, John of Salisbury, John de Hautville, Nigellus Wirreker, Alexander Neckam and others, contain passages of great beauty, and almost classic elegance; whilst a new style of Latin versification, in which rhymes took the place of the ancient metres, beginning with Hilarius, and brought to perfection in the satirical poems attributed to Walter Mapes, possesses a certain energy and sprightliness which are not without considerable attraction. This class of poetry became extremely popular, and continued to exist in its original vigour, long after the style of the most serious Latin writers became hopelessly debased. Indeed the period at which it appears to have flourished most, is the middle of the 13th century, under the troubled reign of Henry III. Very little Latin prose that is tolerable, was written after the middle of the 13th century. Norman and English had then, to a certain extent, driven the Latin out of the field, or at least had thrown it into the hands of a school of heavy theologians. A new era of Anglo-Norman literature opens with the reign of Richard I. The lion-hearted king prided himself on his poetic talents; and he was the patron of jongleurs and trouvères, whose works, as far as we are now acquainted with them, became more numerous at this period. These writers were not properly minstrels; they did not recite their own works, but committed them to writing, which is the cause of their being preserved in early manuscripts. They were monks; and some of them appear to have embraced the monastic life after having been professed poets, and to have made atonement for the profane * productions of their earlier years, by dedicating their talents to sacred subjects." WRIGHT'S Biographia, Introduction, passim.

Even so late as the early part of the 14th century, an immense distance continued to exist between the Normans and the English people. A Poitevin who was prime minister in the time of Henry III., being asked to observe the great charter and the laws of the land, answered" I am no Englishman that I should know these charters and these laws." Robert Grosse-tête, bishop of Lincoln, principal chaplain to the army of the barons, then reckoned only two languages in England, Latin for men of letters, and French for the uneducated, in which language he himself, in his old age, wrote pious books for the use of the laity, making no account of the English language or of those who spoke it. This neglect of the mass of the people, of the villains in town and country, pervades all the literature of the Anglo-Norman period. Concerning them and their social condition, preachers and poets seem to have been alike silent. The poets, even those of English birth, composed all their verses in French, whenever they wished to derive from them either profit or honour. There was indeed a class of ballad-makers and

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writers of extravagant romances, who employed either pure Saxon which was now revived or a dialect mixed up of Saxon and French, which served for the habitual communication between the higher and lower classes. This was the origin of our present language, which arose out of the necessities of society. In order to be understood by the people, the Normans Saxonized their speech as well as they could; and, on the other hand, in order to be understood by the upper classes, the people Normanized theirs. This intermediate idiom first became current the cities, where the population of the two races had become more intermingled, and where the inequality of conditions was less marked than in the rural districts. There it insensibly took the place of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, which was left to the rudest and poorest of the people, while the more cultivated, and those who pretended to gentility, studied by refining and Gallicizing their speech, to imitate the nobles, and draw nearer to them in the relations of society. About the middle of the 14th century, a great many poetical and imaginative works appeared in this new language; sometimes the two tongues, out of which it grew, were used in every alternate couplet, or in every second line. At length, owing to the powerful social causes to which we have already adverted, the French language was entirely laid aside, not only in the courts of justice, but also in the high court of Parliament, as well as by all the writers who addressed themselves to the middle classes and the town populations. We still, indeed, retain a venerable relic of the old Norman, in the custom, equally absurd and harmless, of giving the royal assent in that language: the formula is Le Roy le veultle Roy advisera, not even, we believe, modernizing the orthography. On the domestic manners and morals of the Anglo-Normans, the work before us does not throw as much light as we could I wish, though highly valuable to the students of literary history and philology, on account of the great learning and research which it displays, and for which the fact, that it is published under the auspices of the Royal Society of Literature, is a sufficient guarantee. Had it, however, been made to convey livelier pictures of society, and had the Norman French and Mediaeval Latin been translated, the labours of the accomplished author would have been much more acceptable to the general reader. But the volume of Letters illustrating the Anglo-Norman period, promised, in the same series, by Dr. Giles, is likely to supply this deficiency.

In such a state of society, it was to be expected that the mananers of those ages would be very corrupt. Something must be ballowed for the exaggerations and poetical license of satirists.

But when we find their works maintaining a great and long-continued popularity, we must admit the general veri-similitude of their pictures of life. Those pictures are not flattering. The Anglo-Normans were great lovers of pleasure, in the pursuit of which they allowed themselves unbounded license. They were fond of the chase, and of all sorts of manly sports. In their convivial meetings they keenly discussed the merits of the viands, which they consumed with admirable goût. "The wines were the subject of no less anxious discussion than the meats, and were the cause of still greater excesses, in which the natives of our island are more especially accused of indulging." The schools were filled with pride and vanity. The rich squandered their money on base jonglours and minstrels, instead of applying it to the encouragement of true learning and merit. The ambition and cupidity of barons and prelates filled the land with strife and confusion. Such is the representation given by John de Hautville, whose poem had a great circulation in the 13th and 14th centuries, and was so highly esteemed that it was made the subject of learned commentaries."-(Biographia, i., 250.)

Grievous faults there are in our present social system; but no one who has read history, and possesses a grain of sober reason or candour, can deny that it is incomparably purer and better than it was in the Middle Ages. None but the most diseased enthusiast can wish the institutions of those ages to return. The spirit of those institutions has been inveterately inimical to the best interests of man. Against that spirit the progress of the nation in freedom, intelligence, and wealth, has been a deadly contest; and to the laws and habits established by the Anglo-Norman Conquest may be distinctly traced everything in our civil polity which militates against the peace and prosperity of British society at the present time.

ART. VI.-1. Correspondence of the late JAMES WATT on his Discovery of the theory of the Composition of Water, with a Letter from his SON. Edited, with Introductory Remarks and an Appendix, by JAMES PATRICK MUIRHEAD, Esq., F.R.S.E. London, 1846.

2. Historical Eloge of JAMES WATT. By M. ARAGO, Perpetual Secretary to the Academy of Sciences. Translated from the French, with Additional Notes and an Appendix, by JAMES PATRICK MUIRHEAD, Esq., M.A. of Balliol College, Oxford, Advocate. London, 1839.

3. Address to the Meeting of the British Association held at Bir mingham August 26, 1839. By the Rev. W. VERNON HARCOURT. London, 1840.

4. Lives of Men of Letters and Science who flourished in the time of George III. By HENRY LORD BROUGHAM, F.R.S., Member of the National Institute of France, and of the Royal Academy of Naples. Life of WATT, Vol. i. p. 352. Life of CAVENDISH, Vol. i. p. 429, and Note to their Lives. Vol. ii. P. 507. London, 1846.

5. Letter to HENRY LORD BROUGHAM, F.R.S., containing remarks on certain statements in his Lives of BLACK, WATT, and CAVENDISH. By the Rev. WILLIAM VERNON HARCOURT, F.R.S., &c. London, 1846.

THE controversy respecting the discovery of the composition of water, which has been for some years agitating the philosophical world, is, perhaps, when viewed in all its aspects, the most remarkable which has occurred in the history of science. The two illustrious men whose claims have thus come into collision, have been immortalised in separate fields of discovery, and whatever verdict may be pronounced by the tribunals of science in reference to their disputed rights, it can neither dim their reputation nor sully their name. When, in the struggles of fame, the laurel wreath which is to deck the victor, must be previously torn from another's brow, and when he who is to wear it acquires no fresh honour, and he who is to lose it loses all that he has acquired, the strife becomes one of personal and national feeling in which our deepest sympathies are engaged, and an element of bitterness is thus introduced into the contest, which seldom fails to disturb the serenity of argument, and stain the purity of truth. In the present controversy, however, no such feeling should find

a place. Wealth, and honour, and fame fell to the lot both of Watt and Cavendish. They lived on friendly terms as members of the same scientific body, and placing upon record their opinions and their deductions, they left it to posterity to decide the questions which had placed them in antagonism. to atmos!

It is one of the painful results of controversy of every kind, but especially of that variety of it in which the claims to great inventions and discoveries are agitated, that questions at first simple and of easy solution, become complicated in their details and personal in their allusions when they are handled by subordinate agents and by partial friends. The arbiter, whose name is to be coupled with his verdict, and whose fame that verdict might impeach, will tread with caution the sacred arena on which immortality is to be dispensed; while the obscure or anonymous usurper of the judicial functions will ply his dialectics in utter disregard of truth and science, and scatter his insinuations and his paralogisms, heedless of the interests he may damage, or of the feelings he may wound. But though the special pleader disturbs the forum of science as well as that of law and justice, the rules of evidence are the same in all, and when the principles of adjudication are based on reason and equity, and not on statute, we might expect from that enlightened jury which time will sooner or later empannel for the assize of knowledge, a verdict from which there will be no appeal. Priority of invention and priority of Spublication may be established with the same certainty as other disputed facts, and unless the competing inventions and discoveries vary greatly in their character and amount, rival claims may be adjusted even to the satisfaction of the contending parties. To assign to each competitor the degree of merit which belongs to him is a question often of feeling more than of fact, and we may expect in the future, as we have found in the past, that the halo which adorns the hero or the sage will vary in its hue and in its lustre with the eye that sees it, and the aspect in which it is .. US

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seen.

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In the controversy which it is one of the objects of this article to discuss, the grand truth that water is not one of the elements, as it was always believed to be, but a compound body consisting in certain proportions of two gases oxygen and hydrogen, into which it can be decomposed, and out of which it can be formed, might have been developed in successive steps by a number of different individuals, each of whom exhibited different degrees of sagacity and talent. To conjecture even the very improbable fact that water is formed of two different kinds of air, was a bold and an original idea; and if it led others to establish that conjecture or hypothesis by experiment, it then became entitled