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 'I 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 a 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 glvde, 



And with the tywnkling* 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 heaven, 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 Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste 

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

 drew from original sources. We have a 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 tioynkling. 



