Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/576

 572 Draper apparently, was picking up dialect from any source that came to hand; and, significantly enough, the origin of almost all of it, is the North of England. 54 The modern distribution of these Northern dialect-words, as it appears in Wright's Dictionary, is a little puzzling. Those that are found in Midland or in Scotch dialects, as well as in the North, are a matter of some difficulty; but there are a considerable number that seem to be localized in one county or section of the North. If these were all the same section, the matter would be easy; but they are rather scattered. Behight, and busket, for instance, seem to be Yorks.; borrowe, North Yorks.; greete and heame, Yorks.; and hent and inly, the same; levin seems to be characteristically Scotch dialect; meynt is from Cumberland; mister, from West Yorkshire; sam and sneb from York and Lancaster; welkin, Cumberland and Lancaster; and wracke comes down to us to-day, used only in Scotland and the South. These results, although they show the dialect to have been largely North- ern, do not support Grosart in being at all characteristically Lancastrine. If one dare draw any inference, it would seem that Yorkshire were the region where Spenser courted the fair Rosalind. If Cambridge University were the source of this diction, why did Spenser take it only from his Northern as- sociates; and, above all, why did he slight East Anglia which lay right at hand, and Kent, where a large part of his poem is supposed to be located? In short, Spenser was probably in the North at the time of writing; and whether Rosalind actually lived in a Yorkshire glen, or was a figment of the poet's own fertile imagination as were the heroines of so many sonnet-sequences of the day the fact of Spenser's Northern English, and the fact that E. K. knew it for "North- erly" and so mentions it in the glosses, are, I think fairly indisputable. One or two further points are worth bringing out in connec- tion with this investigation. Spenser's knowledge of Middle English seems to have been considerably wider and more accurate than many scholars, I think, have allowed. His 54 On the other hand, it must be admitted that the archaists of the period had rather a predelection for Northern dialect, and considered it especially poetical.