or Harley and the Tory ministry, but his scornful reference to
antiquarians as "laborious men of low genius," his failure to
recognize that his manifest ignorance of the origins of the language
was any bar to his pronouncing on it or legislating for it, and his
repetition of some of the traditional criticisms of the Teutonic
elements in the language, in particular the monosyllables and
consonants. Her sense of injury was personal as well as academic.
Her brother William and her revered master Dr. Hickes were among the
antiquarians whom Swift had casually insulted, and she herself had
published an elaborate edition of _An English-Saxon Homily on the
Birthday of St. Gregory_ (1709) and was at work on an Anglo-Saxon
homilarium. Moreover she had a particular affection for her field
of study, because it had enabled her to surmount the obstacles to
learning which had been put in her path as a girl, and which had
prevented her, then, from acquiring a classical education. Her
_Rudiments_, the first Anglo-Saxon grammar written in English, was
specifically designed to encourage ladies suffering from similar
educational disabilities to find an intellectual pursuit. Her personal
indignation is shown in her sharp answer to Swift's insulting phrase,
and in her retaliatory classification of the Dean among the "light and
fluttering wits."

As a linguistic historian she has no difficulty in exposing Swift's
ignorance, and in establishing her claim that if there is any refining
or ascertaining of the English language to be done, the antiquarian
scholars must be consulted. But it is when she writes as a literary
critic, defending the English language, with its monosyllables and
consonants, as a literary medium, that she is most interesting.

There was nothing new in what Swift had said of the character of the