WILD SPORT IN BRITTANY. 41 



able fact : for instance, " no English scholar," a philologist 

 might say, "who has not specially given himself up to the 

 study of Anglo-Saxon can interpret the documents in which 

 the chronicles and laws of England were written in the days 

 of King Alfred ; so that we may be sure that none of the 

 English of the nineteenth century could converse with the 

 subjects of that monarch if these last could now be restored 

 to life." Indeed, so rapid has been the change in the English 

 language, that even Spenser's " Faery Queen," written in the 

 year 1590, can scarcely now be enjoyed except by the erudite; 

 while Chaucer and Barbour, poets of the fourteenth century, 

 require a skilled linguist to read and understand the obsolete 

 style of those authors. 



In France " there is a treaty of peace still extant, a thousand 

 years old, between Charles the Bald and King Louis of Germany 

 (dated A.D. 841), in which the German king takes an oath in what 

 was the French tongue of that day, while the French king swears 

 in the German of that era ; and neither of these oaths would now 

 convey a distinct meaning to any but the learned in these two 

 countries." Again, in Italy the Latin of the Augustan age was 

 utterly unknown, even in Rome, by the uneducated people, before 

 the end of the eighth century ; while " the modern Italian cannot 

 be traced back much beyond the time of Dante, or some six 

 centuries before our time." 



Yet, in spite of all these proofs of change in the four languages 

 mentioned, that of Lower Brittany has certainly not suffered in a 

 like degree. A Breton ballad of the sixth century, entitled 

 "Gerent, Mab Erbin," published by the Comte de la Villemarque, 

 and compared by him with the Welsh version, as given in " Le 

 livre rouge de Herghest," a folio volume containing the works of 

 'Llywarc'h Hen and Taliesin,* is quite intelligible to both Bretons 



* This curious old work is to be found in the library of Jesus College, Oxford. 



