Page:King Alfred's West-Saxon Version of Gregory's Pastoral Care (2).djvu/527

x ideas would this sentence suggest to a ninth century Englishman, unacquainted with the original? and to frame my translation accordingly. In many obscure passages, however, I have been obliged to consider what meaning the translators themselves intended to convey, and only as a last resource have I occasionally translated direct from the Latin. I have also endeavoured to translate into the received language of the present day, and have carefully avoided that heterogeneous mixture of Chaucer, Dickens, and Broad Scotch, which is affected by so many translators from the Northern languages.

The publication of the Latin text, promised on the title-page, must be postponed for an indefinite period. Critical readers will, however, have no difficulty in procuring one of the numerous texts of the work published on the continent.

The Notes are necessarily brief, and chiefly confined to remarks on erasures, interpolations, &c. Wherever a remarkable form occurs in the text I have repeated it in the Notes, to guard against the suspicion of an editorial slip. To many of the readings of Cotton I, I have added v. l. = 'varia lectio,' signifying that Junius quotes a different reading from one of the two other MSS., thus guaranteeing, to a certain extent, at least, the accuracy of his own form.

The two Appendices need no special comment. I may, however, call the attention of Aryan philologists in general, as well as specially Teutonic scholars, to the theory of the lautverschiebung advanced in Appendix I, which I believe will be found to offer a satisfactory solution of its difficulties. The only point about which I do not feel satisfied is the distinction between wearð, worden &c. Its causes have never yet been explained, and, until this is done, it is impossible to say whether it was developed independently in each language, or belonged to the groundspeech. The latter supposition can hardly be reconciled with the evidence of the oldest English documents, which seems to indicate a period in which medial and final ð &c. had not yet