philologer

Tyrwhit, a scholar as well as an antiquary, was an expert philologer; his extensive reading in the lore of our vernacular literature and our national antiquities promptly supplied what could not have entered into his more classical studies; and his sagacity seems to have decided on the various readings of all the manuscripts, by piercing into the core of the poet’s thoughts.8 It is remarkable that some of the most lively productions of several great writers have been the work of their maturest 176 age.

Our philologer has dignified a small volume ostensibly composed for “the training of children,”5 by the elevated view he opened of far distant times from his own of our vernacular literature—and he had the glory of having made this noble discovery when our literature was yet in its infancy.

Let us not, however, be diverted from our object,—the sober investigation of a sober subject, alike deeply interesting to the philologer, the student of history, and the inquirer into the sacred truths connected with divine revelation.

Neology, or the novelty of words and phrases, is an innovation, which, with the opulence of our present language, the English philologer is most jealous to allow; but we have puritans or precisians of English, superstitiously nice!

But Borrow, though an extraordinary linguist, was a somewhat unchastened philologer, and the results of his life-long philological studies appear to much better advantage from the literary than from the scientific point of view.