Anglo-Saxon studies have been recently renovated, but unexpected difficulties have started up. A language whose syntax has not been regulated, whose dialects can never be discriminated, and whose orthography and orthoepy seem irrecoverable, yields faithless texts when confronted; and treacherous must be the version if the construction be too literal or too loose, or what happens sometimes, ambiguous. Different anglicisers offer more than one construction.[3] It is now ascertained that the Anglo-Saxon manuscripts are found in a most corrupt state.[4] This fatality was occasioned by the inattention or the unskilfulness of the caligrapher, whose task must have required a learned pen. The Anglo-Saxon verse was regulated by a puerile system of alliteration,[5] and the rhythm depended on accentuation. Whenever the strokes, or dots, marking the accent or the pauses are omitted, or misplaced, whole sentences are thrown into confusion; compound words are disjoined, and separate words are jumbled together. "Nouns have been mistaken for verbs, and particles for nouns." These difficulties, arising from unskilful copyists, are infinitely increased by the genius of the Anglo-Saxon poets themselves. The tortuous inversion of their composition often leaves an ambiguous sense: their perpetual periphrasis; their abrupt transitions; their pompous inflations, and their elliptical style; and not less their portentous metaphorical nomenclature where a single object must be recognised by twenty denominations, not always appropriate, and too often clouded by the most remote and dark analogies[6]--all these have perplexed the most skilful judges, who have not only misinterpreted passages, but have even failed to comprehend the very subject of their original. This last circumstance has been remarkably shown in the fate of the heroic tale of BEOWULF. When it first fell to the hard lot of WANLEY, the librarian of the Earl of Oxford, to describe "The Exploits of Beowulf," he imagined, or conjectured, that it contained "the wars which this Dane waged against the reguli, or petty kings of Sweden." He probably decided on the subject by confining his view to the opening page, where a hero descends from his ship--but for a very different purpose from a military expedition. Fortunately Wanley lauded the manuscript as a "tractatus nobilissimus," and an "egregium exemplum" of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. Probably this manuscript remained unopened during a century, when SHARON TURNER detected the error of Wanley, but he himself misconceived the design of these romantic "Exploits." Yet this diligent historian carefully read and analysed this heroic tale. CONYBEARE, who had fallen into the same erroneous conception, at length caught up a clue in this labyrinth; and finally even a safer issue has been found, though possibly not without some desperate efforts, by the version of Mr. KEMBLE.