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Scandinavian, and are due to the Norwegian settlements of the tenth century. For lapidary inscriptions, clog almanacs, and other familiar uses, it is difficult to say how long they may have lingered in remote localities. In such lurkingplaces a new kind of importance and of mystery came to be attached to them. They were held in a sort of traditional respect which at length grew into a superstition. They were the heathen way of writing, while the Latin alphabet was a symbol of Christianity. The Danish pirates used Runes at the time when they harried the Christian nations. On a marble lion now in Venice there is a Runic inscription, which records a visit of one of the northern sea-rovers at Athens (where the lion then was) in the tenth century. After a time the Runes came to be regarded as positive tokens of heathendom, and as being fit, only for sorcery and magic.

99. In the eleventh century the fashion of our calligraphy was changed; the old Saxon forms (which were in fact Hibernian) being superseded by the French form of the Roman writing. During the succeeding centuries this new character assumed a variety of guises, but there was one particular form which acquired predominance north of the Alps, the form which is known to us as 'Black Letter,' and which was hardly less rectilinear than the old Runes themselves. This form was maintained in Germany down to our times, but now it seems to be yielding to that character which has become general throughout modern Europe. This character, in its two forms of Roman' and 'Italic,' is of Italian growth, and took its final shape in the fifteenth century, in association with the invention of printing and the Revival of the ancient Classics. The following table exhibits the chief forms under which the Roman alphabet has at different times been used in these islands :

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Of the Vowel Names.

100. We now pass from the forms of the Roman alphabet to note some of the local peculiarities of its use among ourselves. And first, of our vowels, and the remarkable names by which we are wont to designate them. Our names for the vowels are singularly at variance with the continental names for the same characters. Of the five vowels A E I o u, there is but one, viz. o, of which the name is at all like that which it bears in France or Germany. But it is in the names of A and I and U that our insular tendencies have wrought their most pronounced effect. The first we call by an unwriteable name, and one which we cannot more nearly describe than by saying, that it is the sound which drops out of the half-open mouth, with the lowest degree of effort at utterance. It is an obscurely diphthongal sound, and if we must spell it, it is this-Ae. The character I we call Eye or Igh; the U we call Yew.

101. The extreme oddity of our sound of U comes out under a used-up or languid utterance, as when a dilettante is heard to excuse himself from purchasing pictures which are offered to him at a great bargain, on the plea that 'they do ac-cyew-myew-layte [accumulate] so!' In France this letter has the narrow sound which is unknown in English, but which it has in Welsh, and which seems ever ready to degenerate into Y:-in German it has the broad sound of oo.

102. That I was called Eye in Shakspeare's time, seems indicated by that line in A Midsummer Night's Dream, iii. 2. 188:-

Fair Helena; who more engilds the night,
Then all yon fierie oes and eies of light,

Where it seems plain that the stars are called O's and I's.

If this passage left it doubtful whether the letter I were sounded in Shakspeare's time as eye, there is a passage in Romeo and Juliet, iii. 2, which removes the doubt :

Hath Romeo slaine himselfe? say thou but I,
And that bare vowell I shall poyson more
Than the death-darting eye of Cockatrice:
I am not I, if there be such an I:

Or those eyes shut, that makes thee answere I.
If he be slaine say I; or if not, no:

Briefe sounds determine of my weale or wo.

:

Here it is plain that the affirmative which we now write ay, and the noun eye, and the pronoun I, and the vowel I, are regarded as having all the self-same sound.

103. How are we to account for these strange insular names of our vowels? The five vowels are called Ae, Ee, Igh, Oh, Yew; but these names, which are distinctly our own, and among the peculiarities of our language, do not in the case of any single vowel express the prevalent sound of that vowel in practical use.

The chief sound of our A is that which it has in at, bat, cat, dagger, fat, gap, hat, land, man, nap, pan, rat, sat, tan, vat, wag. It has another very distinct sound, especially before the letter L, namely the sound of aw: as, all, ball, call, fall, gall, hall, malt, pall, tall, talk, wall, walk, want, water. But the sound which is expressed in the name Ae is a dull diphthongal sound, which A never bears in a final syllable except when to the a an e is appended, not immediately indeed, but after an intervening consonant: as, ate, bate, cate, date, fate, gape, hate, jape, late, make, nape, pane, rate, state, tale, vale, wane. This final e must be considered as embodied with its a, just as in the German sound ä, which is only a brief way of writing ae. It is difficult to suppose that the name of our first vowel has been dictated by the sound which it bears in the last-recited list of instances.

There is no apparent reason why that class of instances should have drawn to itself any such special attention, to the neglect of the instances which more truly exemplify the power of the vowel. But there is one particular instance of the use of A which is sufficiently frequent and conspicuous to have determined the naming of the letter. I can only suppose that the name which the letter bears has been adopted from the ordinary way in which the indefinite article a is pronounced.

104. The vowel E, when single, does not represent the sound Ee which its name indicates. When it is doubled, it always has this sound, as in bee, creed, deer, feet, greet, heed, jeer, keep, leer, meed, need, peep, queer, reed, seed, teem, weep. But the single e only does so when it is supported by another e after an intervening consonant. Examples:-bere, cere, here, intercede, intervene, mere, scene.

We are therefore driven to look for some familiar and oft-recurring words which have the e exceptionally pronounced as Ee. And such we find in the personal pronouns. The words he, she, me, we, have all the e long, and if they were spelt according to their sound, they would appear as hee, shee, mee, wee. In proof of this may be cited the case of the pronoun thee, which is written with its vowel double, though it has no innate right in this respect over the pronoun me. In the solitary instance of thee, it was a matter of convenience to write the double vowel, that the word might be distinguished at sight from the definite article the. It is by reference then to the function of the letter e in the personal pronouns, that we explain the name of Ee by which that vowel is incorrectly designated.

It is interesting to remember that in Devonshire (unless the schoolmaster has driven the fashion out) the letter E is called eh, like hay without the h, or like the French è ouvert somewhat continued. This may be derived from the period

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