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
painful labour, and to him the gloss was an important aid. To the
modern philologist, Teutonic or Celtic, these glosses are very
precious; they have preserved for us a large number of Old English,
Old Irish, Old German words that occur nowhere else, and which, but
for the work of the old glossators, would have been lost for ever. No
inconsiderable portion of the oldest English vocabulary has been
recovered entirely from these interlinear glosses; and we may
anticipate important additions to that vocabulary when Professor
Napier gives us the volume in which he has been gathering up all the
unpublished glosses that yet remain in MSS.
In process of time it occurred to some industrious reader that it
would be a useful exercise of his industry, to collect out of all the
manuscripts to which he had access, all the glosses that they
contained, and combine them in a list. In this compact form they could
be learned by heart, thus extending the vocabulary at his command, and
making him independent of the interlinear glosses, and they could also
be used in the school-teaching of pupils and neophytes, so as sensibly
to enlarge their stock of Latin words and phrases.
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