quote a passage from his Obedience of a Christian Man, put forth in 1527; this will show the scholarship of Ille Dei vates sacer, Esdras ille Britannus, Fida manus sacri fidaque mens codicis.1 'Saint Jerom translated the bible into his mother tongue : why may not we also? They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth2 a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English, than into the Latin.' The Reformer lived to English most of the Bible; the little he left undone at his death in 1536 was finished by his friend Rogers, Queen Mary's first victim. This was the Bible set up in every English parish church by Henry VIII., though he had long plotted against the Translator's life. I must glance at another of Tyndale's helpers. William Roy, a runaway Franciscan, was employed by Tyndale in 1525 to compare the texts of the New Testament and to write. The two men had not much in common. So called by Johnston, Professor at St. Andrews in 1593. Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, ii. 486. I wish that the Parker Society had published Tyndale's works in his own spelling. 2 Here we have the old Southern form of the Plural of the Verb; it is not often found after Tyndale's day. When that was ended,' says Tyndale, 'I toke my leve and bode him farewel for oure two lives and, as men saye, a daye longer.' Roy went to Strasburg, and there in 1528 printed his biting rimes against the English clergy. I give an extract from page 71. Alas, mate, all to geder is synne, Is reputed a dedde person To worldly conversacion. Here we see that Religion still keeps its old sense of monkery; but Tyndale was bringing a new sense of the word into vogue among Englishmen.2 Roy talks of wholy S. Fraunces' (sanctus). We have been mercifully spared this corruption of the old English; wholly (integrè) is bad enough, with its useless first letter. He has both Christen and Christian, the old and the new form. His defoyle (page 113) shows how the French defouler became our defile. He still uses ryches as a noun singular; and he has per hapis (forsitan). The translations of the Bible, put forth by Tyndale and Roy, slipped into many an out-of-the-way corner of England. Young Robert Plumpton, who was at the Temple about 1536, sends 'the Newe Testament, which is the trewe Gospell of God,' to his mother in her Yorkshire home. He says that he wishes not to bring her into any heresies. Wherefore, I will never write nothing to you, nor saye nothinge to you, concerninge See Arber's Reprint of Rede me and be nott wrothe. 2 Pecock assigns more than one meaning to Religion in his Repressor. I give the Scriptures, but will dye in the quarrell.' this sentence, as it is one of the last occasions that we find a gentleman of good blood, and eke learned in the law, piling up negatives after the true Old English fashion; a habit that now prevails only among the lower orders. Tyndale had looked askant upon this idiom, of which Caxton was not ashamed. Our tongue was in this respect to leave the old path and to follow the Latin; the land was now athirst for classic learning. The time, when England broke away from the Italian yoke, falls in precisely with the time, when the diction of her bards was greatly changed for the better. Langland, true genius though he might be, was wrong in employing so vast a number of French words in his work; the Passus Decimus-Quartus of his Vision has one French word for two English, counting the nouns, verbs, and adverbs alone. Chaucer penning a hymn to the Virgin is most different from Chaucer laughing over the pranks of naughty lads at the Universities; in the former case he heaps up his French words to a wondrous extent. The same tendency may be seen in Lydgate, Hawes, Dunbar, and their brethren; the worst sinners in this respect being monks and writers of Church legends. To prove my point, I give a stanza from a poem composed by the Abbot of Gloucester in 1524; we may almost call it the last dying strains, somewhat prosaic in truth, of the Old Creed : : 1 1 Plumpton Correspondence, p. 233 (Camden Society). XXI. Where is and shall be eternall Joy, incomparable myrth without heaviness, XXII. This compendious Extract compiled was new, But about the time that Tyndale was giving the English Bible to his countrymen in their own tongue, and that Cromwell was hammering the monks, a new soul seems to have been breathed into English poetry. Surrey and Wyat stand at the head of the new school, and show themselves Teutons of the right breed; they clearly had no silly love for lumbering Latinized stuff. The true path, pointed out by them, was soon to be followed in this Sixteenth Century by Buckhurst, Gascoigne, Sidney, and by two men greater still. Even Southwell, who died in the Pope's behalf, cleaves fast to the new Teutonic diction of his brother bards. The Reformation 'Hearne's Robert of Gloucester, ii. 584. The old spelling has been partly changed. has been called an uprising of Teutonism against Latinism; nowhere does this come out clearer than in English Poetry. But this Sixteenth Century had a widely different effect on our Prose. Latin was the great link between our own Reformers and those of other lands; and the temptation was strong to bring into vogue Latin terms for the new ideas in religion that were taking root in our island. Theology was the great subject of the age; and King Henry VIII. remarked to his Parliament in 1545: 'I am very sorry to know and hear how unreverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every ale house and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same.' Besides this intense thirst after religious discussion, our fathers later on in the Century saw for the first time the authors of Greece and Rome clad in an English dress; and the sailors who bore the English flag round the world were always printing wondrous tales of their wanderings. Plymouth, as well as Oxford, was making her influence felt. Our land, therefore, owned at the end of the Sixteenth Century thousands of new words, which would have seemed strange to Hawes and Roy; a fair store of words was being made ready for Shakespere, whose genius would not bear cramping. The people, for whom he was to write, had a strong taste for theology, for the classics, and for sea roving; each of these tastes brought in shoals of new words. We had long had Latin words in their corrupt French form, such as balm, feat, frail, sure; we now began to write the original Latin of these forms, balsam, fact, fragile, |