LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 359 



waygose, which we shall notice presently. Is it not 

 barely possible that the MS. may have read prayere and 

 in fere ? Prayere occurs two verses further on, and not 

 as a rhyme. 



Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on 

 a question of Old English grammar, telling him super- 

 ciliously that can, with an infinitive, in such phrases as 

 he can go, is used not " to denote u past tense, but an 

 imperfect tense." By past we suppose him to mean per- 

 fect. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past 

 one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in 

 this very collection that can, in the phrases referred 

 to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect 

 tense : 



" And thorow that worde y felle in pryde; 



As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde, 



And with the ty wnkling * of an eye 



God for-dud alle that maystrye 



And so hath he done for my gylte." 



Now the angel here is Lucifer, and can of hevyn glyde 

 means simply fell from /leaven, not was falling. It is in 

 the same tense as for-dud in the next line. The fall of 

 the angels is surely a fait accompli. In the last line, by 

 the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes "my for" to "for my," 

 and wrongly, the my agreeing with maystrye under- 

 stood. In modern English we should use mine in the 

 same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of 

 himself. 



We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt' s impertinence 

 to Eitson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste 

 in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always 

 drew from original sources. We have & foible for Ritson 

 with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his un- 

 consciously depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister 

 Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy's 



The careless Ritson would have printed this ticynkling. 



