LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 359 



waygose, which we shall notice presently. Is it not 

 barely possible that the MS. may have read prayere and 

 ill fere 1 Prayere occxirs 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 2^*^^^^ 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 j^hrases referred 

 to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect 

 tense : — 



"And thorow that worde y felle in pryde; 

 As the auiigelle can of hevyn glyde. 

 And with the tywnkling* of an eye 

 God for-dud alio that maystrye 

 And so hath he done for my gylte." 



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

 means simply /e// from heaven, not ivas 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. Mi'. Hazlitt changes "my for" to "for my," 

 and wrongly, the my agreeing with m.aystrye 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 ?i foible for Ritson 

 %ith 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 twynkling. 



