Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/562

 558 Draper The subject, therefore, gives double promise of bearing fruit. It remains to set the problem squarely before us, to survey the data in detail, and to draw whatever conclusions seem just. Herford, to be sure, has examined the phonology and grammar of various archaic forms, and shows them of M. E. descent, but widely scattered in dialect. 8 His discussion of the vocalulary, however, antedates most of the volumes of The New English Dictionary and of the English Dialect Dictionary, and so is based upon no very certain criterion. His work, moreover, is far from complete. The words of The Shepheardes Calender can be divided up- on a fairly logical basis. The presence of the glosses give obvious proof that many of the expressions were uncommon or unknown to Spenser's contemporaries. There are, however, a numbers of words quite as strange to us, or quite as curiously contorted, which the glosses do not contain. These, we may infer, were in literary or at least colloquial use in Elizabethan English, and would belong to that general subject rather than to the particular matter of Spenser's individual diction. 9 Rather is the present study interested in the words that Spenser himself either rescued from obsolescence or disuse, or borrowed from an English dialect or a foreign language, or coined outright by his own imprimatur. Beside actual definitions of words, the glosses contain notes, often gratuitous, on allusions in the text, on the interpretation of tropes, on biographical or pseudo- biographical matters related to the author or to the characters in the eclogues. This material has already received fairly extensive (if not always judicious) comment; and it is no direct concern of the present study. The glosses then, purely as lexicographical phenomena, are the field of this investigation The first problem is to trace as definitely as possible the sources of the words defined in the glosses, in the sense a& there defined. Many of Spenser's words are of obvious Middle English origin; and it is generally agreed that Spenser read Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, and other early writers: it seems 8 C. H. Herford, Spenser's Shepherd's Calender, London, 1897, p. liii et seq. make it quite possible to separate these two classes from one another in so far as the Elizabethans themselves drew any such distinction.
 * N.E.D., the Concordance to Shakespeare, and other works of the sort