[9] This term of "strange Ingliss" has yet been found so obscure as to occasion some strictures, which, like the Interpreter in the Critic, are the most difficult to comprehend. I must refer to Monsieur Thierry's very delightful "History of the Conquest of England," ii. 271, for a very refined speculation on our Robert de Brunne's unlucky obscurity. Monsieur Thierry imagines that the "strange Ingliss" was the refined English which had flown into Scotland, and there become the cultivated language of the minstrels and the court, and which our hapless Saxons on _this side of the Tweed_ had sunk into a dialect only fitted for serfs. This finer and more elevated English could not be understood by a base commonalty; this was "strange Ingliss" to them. A very interesting event in the history of both nations had transplanted the purer English to the Scottish court:--Malcolm, whom the usurpation of Macbeth had driven from the Scottish throne, was expatriated in England during an interval of near twenty years; the affection of the monarch for the English was such, that he adopted their language, and when the royal family of England was expelled by the Conqueror, the king received them and the emigrant Saxons, and married the English princess. This gave rise to that intercourse with the south of Scotland, of which the result in our literary, if not in our civil, history is remarkable. Certain it is that much broad Scotch is good old English, and the noblest minstrelsy cometh "fra the North Countrie." [10] On the leaf appears, in the handwriting of the author, "This Boc is Dan Michelis of Northgate ywrite an Englis of his ozene hand that hatte _Ayenbyte of inwyt_, and is of the boc-house of Seynt Austyn's of Cantorberi." The writer was seventy years of age; and he tells us that he was not-- "Blind, and dyaf, and alsuo dumb, Of zeventy yer al not rond, Ne ssette by draze to the grond, Uor peny nor mark, ne nor pond." At the end the monk tells us for whom he writes-- "Nou ich wille that ye ywite hou hitt is ywent Thet this Boc is ywrite mid Engliss of Kent. This Boc is ymade vor lewede men, Vor Vader and vor Moder and vor other Ken, Ham vor to berze uram alle manyere Zen Thet ine have inwytte ne bleue no uoul wen. Huo ase God is his name yzed Thet this Boc made God him yeue that bread Of Angles of Hauene and thereto his red, And underuongè his Zoule, huanne that is dyad."