THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 67 



Chaucer's writings did so much to establish, were important 

 enough to mark a new era in EngHsh Hteraturc. AlHterative 

 poetry was discarded for poetry which rhymed after the French 

 method. Langland's Piers the Ploughman, written in Chau- 

 cer's lifetime, was the last alliterative poem preserved. A 

 number of native words were replaced by words of French 

 origin ; and many Saxon adjectives were supplemented and 

 reinforced by P'rench forms. That practice was long followed ; 

 the Troy Book, by Caxton, abounds in two sets of adjectives — 

 one of Saxon, the other of French derivation, and both mean- 

 ing the same thing. There also came in vogue important 

 permutations of vowel and consonant sounds, and considerable 

 change took place in inflected words. But structural changes, 

 though important, were likely least noticed at the time, because 

 of their slow growth. Of old English nouns, which had at 

 first six cases, only the s of the possessive case is now left. 

 Originally the dative ending was e for the singular, and z/m 

 for the plural ; in the XIII century only e was used for 

 both singular and plural ; and in the XIV century the e was 

 also lost, and the dative, as it has since remained, became the 

 same as the nominati\e. The English language, by four cen- 

 turies of contact with Norman French, took a richer vocabulary 

 and many changes ; but its structural features remained essen- 

 tially Saxon. As an old writer remarks : " The Normans 

 " conquered the land but could not conc|uer the language, 

 " though they did mingle with it much of the French." Its 

 words for number, and its particles, prepositions and conjunc- 

 tions, the characteristic traits of a language, kept the German 

 forms. And such forms continue; the strong verbs of the 

 lano-uao-e still take ablaut or changfe of the root vowel to denote 

 past time ; and traces are left of that weakening mutation of 

 vowel sound by a following vowel called umlaut, which is a 

 marked feature of German speech. 



Also since Chaucer's time English speech has further 

 changed in many particulars, though its structure remains still 

 the same. Increment of its vocabulary now makes the list of 

 an English dictionary include more than three hundred thou- 



