written with pen and ink, as other books are, to the end that every man may have them at once.' Wherein did the Duchess and the Printer differ in their views of English? In this, that the one came of a Northern house, while the other had been born and bred in the South. Owing to the new influence, in Caxton's first work we see the loss of the old Southern inflections of the Verb; and we find Orrmin's their, them, and that (iste) well established, instead of the Southern her, hem, and thilk, beloved of Pecock. Plural Adjectives no longer end in s; for we read strange habitacions' in the first page of the Recuyell. The word yle (insula) in the same page is spelt without the intruding s. Manning's way of writing instead of i is often found; but this we have happily refused to follow. The old form that oon. that othir (in Latin, alter alter) comes once more. In the Game of the Chess, published in 1474, we find ner for the Latin neque, an odd mixture of the Southern ne with the North Western corruption nor. The hard g is seen once more, as in agayn, driving out the usurper y. When we weigh the works of Caxton, who wrote under the eye of the Yorkist Princess, we should bear in mind the English written by her father in 1452.2 The Midland speech was now carrying all before it. The Acts of Parliament passed under the last Plantagenet King were printed by the old servant of the House of York.

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See Knight's Life of Caxton. The Recuyell, and some of Caxton's later works, are exposed to view in a case at the British Museum.

2 See York's long State Paper in Gairdner's Paston Letters, lxxvii. He used the Northern Genitive bother (amborum), a very late instance.—Archæologia, XXIX. 132.

Caxton's press was of great use in fixing our speech. The English spoken at London, brought thither from the Mercian Danelagh, was now established as the Standard; Puttenham, in a well-known passage written a hundred years later, will have nothing to say to any speech but that of London and the neighbouring shires. Strange it is that Caxton, a Kentishman, should have been the writer who sealed the triumph of Midland English as our Standard for the future. One of his best works is Renard the Fox (Percy Society), which he translated from the Dutch; traces of the sister tongue we see in words like moed, saacke, lupaerd, ungheluck, which must be due to Dutch handicraftsmen. Caxton says, 'I have folowed as nyghe as I can my copie, which was in dutche, and translated into this rude and symple Englyssh;' the date of the work is 1481. There are here many old Teutonic words, now obsolete, which we could ill afford to lose, and which Tyndale unhappily did not employ in his great work, though they must have been household words in his childhood. Such are eme, overal, lief, bleeve, wyte, elenge, sybbe, to dere, to bote, and others.1 Caxton's great claim upon us is, that in many words he gave us back the old g, which for the foregoing three hundred years had been softened into y in words like gate, get, again; he even writes galp instead of yelp. It was now settled that we were to employ peyne and not pine. We find brydge and hedche, the spelling showing how they

It is wonderful that the Norse thrive and the French flourish between them drove out the Old English theon; for the expletive so mote I the!' asted down to 1500, and is found in many a ballad.

were pronounced in the late Plantagenet days; bury follows the Southern, gylty the Northern form; there are herke, hearke, and harkene, all three; there are both lawhe and laugh. When we see borugh, we think of a borough of men, but it means only a burrow of conies; our spelling was not yet thoroughly settled. Theft is expressed by roving; we have since given a new meaning to the word. The bear is called both Bruyn and Brownyng. We find the interjection O ho, and also our common pronunciation of me lorde. The z is employed to spell wezel, which had of old been wesel; puf is used where we say pooh.

Caxton had many words and phrases which Tyndale was afterwards to make immortal; such are, skrabbing, ravyn, kyen, adoo, good luck, to you-ward, oftymes, in lyke wyse, chyde with, bewraye, take hede, al be it that, if so be that, how be it. As to Romance words, we find rereward, concubyne, tarye, stuff, straytly, sauf that, secrete chamber, dwellyng place, according to, sporte, abhor, mock, refrayne himself. There is also the portentous compound, disworshipped. Still the home-born mis held its own against the outlandish dis; two hundred years later Bunyan writes mistrust and not distrust.

In 1482, Caxton brought out an old chronicle written by Trevisa a century earlier; the great printer says, ‘I somewhat chaunged the rude and old Englyssh, that is to wete, certayn wordes which in these days be neither usyd ne understanden.' We thus see that the Verbs clepe, fonge, won, welk, steihe, wilne, and behote had become obsolete; buxom, nesche, lesue, and bede now sounded strange in London ears; swipe had to be turned into right, and sprankelep into sperclyth. The letter 3

(standing for y) is clean gone, and p is hardly ever used for th; this p, which had been often employed in the Recuyell, is a sad loss. England was slowly forgetting her old words; and the bad habit would have been carried further, but for Caxton's press and for a great religious change that happened forty years after this time.

Lord Berners' translation of Froissart may be looked on as a new landmark in our tongue. Those who filled up the gap between Caxton and the learned nobleman, men like Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay, have few worshippers now but antiquaries. The Englished Froissart, given to the world in 1523, heads a long roll of noble works, that have followed each other, it may be said, without a break for three hundred and fifty years. Since 1523, there is not an instance of twenty years passing over England, without the appearance of some book, which she has taken to her heart and will not willingly let die. No literature in the world has ever been blessed with so continuous a spell of glory. Two of her great men, whose works are inscribed on the aforesaid roll, would by most foreign critics be reckoned among the five foremost intellects of the world; a large proportion forsooth to be claimed by one nation.

One of the earliest English works that followed Lord Berners' Froissart was the New Testament, published at Worms in 1525, by William Tyndale of Gloucestershire.

Higden's Polychronicon (Master of the Rolls), page 63. The her and hem, rejected by Caxton, still kept their ground in 1482, as we see in the Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, printed by De Machlinia; it is one of Arber's reprints.

Wickliffe had made his translation from the Vulgate, and his work is sadly marred by Latin idioms most strange to English ears; Tyndale, being a ripe Greek and Hebrew scholar, went right to the fountain-head.1 His New Testament has become the Standard of our tongue; the first ten verses of the Fourth Gospel are a good sample of his manly Teutonic pith. It is amusing to think how differently one of our penny-a-liners would handle the passage; he would deem that so lofty a subject could be fairly expressed in none but the finest Romance words to be found in Johnson or Gibbon.2 Most happily, our authorized version of the Scriptures was built upon the translation which Tyndale had almost completed before his martyrdom. When we read our Bibles, we are in truth taken back far beyond the days of Bacon and Andrewes to the time of Wolsey and More.

Tyndale, a man well known alike at Oxford, Cambridge, and London, may be said to have fixed our tongue once for all; a few words were now changing for the worse. He it was who brought in the corrupt Yorkshire those (isti) instead of the old tha or tho, though the latter also may be found now and then in his Testament. He thus established a vicious form, which had been used almost three hundred years earlier in the

' Mr. Demaus has lately written his life. Tyndale in prison wrote a letter, still extant, beseeching his Flemish gaolers to let him have his Hebrew books-the ruling passion strong in death. Of all our great writers, he is the one about whom most mistakes have been made by later enquirers.

2 A scribe in the Daily Telegraph, July 14, 1873, speaks thus, in a leader on the Duke of Edinburgh: 'He ranks next in geniture to the heir of our throne. Hoc fonte derivata clades, &c.

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