IN THE NINETEENTH century Germany was the centre of the world of Germanic philology, including Anglo-Saxon philology. Wülker, writing the history of Anglo-Saxon scholarship, very properly divides Old English grammars up to that time into Old Grammars and New Grammars. Effectively, the old grammars begin with Hickes in the late seventeenth century. They end, pathetically, with J.L. Sisson's The Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, 1819; pathetically, because 1819 is the year when the first edition of the first volume of Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik was published. Sisson's Grammar was the feeble last descendant of a line whose founders had not been ignoble; in his ‘Advertisement’ (i.e. preface) Sisson says:

In Grimm's Grammatik linguistic learning was ranged in new, and seemingly perfect, panoply.

It is no great marvel that after the publication of Grimm's Grammatik anyone who aspired to be an Anglo-Saxon scholar had to go to Germany. Among young Englishmen who went to Germany the foremost is John Mitchell Kemble. He acquired there a sound knowledge of philology, his political views, his literary views, and his wife, of which acquisitions all but the first were unfortunate in some respects. As a link between Germany and England he is of the greatest importance in the history of Anglo-Saxon studies in the nineteenth century.