they consisted, in large part at least, of _glosses_. They were Latin,
because at the time to which we refer, the seventh and eighth
centuries of our era, Latin was in Western Europe the only language of
books, the learning of Latin the portal to all learning. And they were
_glosses_ in this wise: the possessor of a Latin book, or the member
of a religious community which were the fortunate possessors of
half-a-dozen books, in his ordinary reading of this literature, here
and there came across a difficult word which lay outside the familiar
Latin vocabulary. When he had ascertained the meaning of this, he
often, as a help to his own memory, and a friendly service to those
who might handle the book after him, wrote the meaning over the word
in the original text, in a smaller hand, sometimes in easier Latin,
sometimes, if he knew no Latin equivalent, in a word of his own
vernacular. Such an explanatory word written over a word of the text
is a _gloss_. Nearly all the Latin MSS. of religious or practical
treatises, that have come down to us from the Middle Ages, contain
examples of such glosses, sometimes few, sometimes many. It may
naturally be supposed that this glossing of MSS. began in Celtic and
Teutonic, rather than in Romanic lands. In the latter, the old Latin
was not yet so dead, nor the vulgar idioms that were growing out of
it, as yet so distinct from it, as to render the glossing of the one
by the other needful. The relation of Latin to, say, the Romanic of
Provence, was like that of literary English to Lancashire or Somerset
dialect; no one thinks of glossing a literary English book by
Somersetshire word-forms; for, if he can read at all, it is the
literary English that he does read. So if the monk of Burgundy or
Provence could read at all, it was the Book-Latin that he could and
did read. But, to the Teuton or the Celt, Latin was an entirely
foreign tongue, the meaning of whose words he could not guess by any
likeness to his own; by him Latin had been acquired by slow and