şecure; keeping all the words, original and corrupt, alike. English was becoming most copious.

It is to the ripe and mellow wisdom of Cranmer that we owe the English Prayer Book almost as it now stands. It is his best monument; he had no vulgar wish to sweep away what was old, unless the sacrifice were called for by the cause of Truth. We have seen that some of the Book's formularies date from Wickliffe's day; others, such as the Bidding prayer, betoken a wish to yoke together the Teutonic and the Romance in pairs, like acknowledge and confess, humble and lowly, goodness and mercy, assemble and meet, pray and beseech.1 Even so

of

the Law talks of yielding and paying. In the Collects, the proportion of French to English is much the same as in Chaucer's prose earlier, and as Addison was to write later. Lord Macaulay long ago contrasted our English prayers, compiled when our language was full sap and vigour, with the older Latin forms translated by Cranmer, the work of an age of third-rate Latinity. Yet the Archbishop's work was held cheap by some of his flock. The stalwart peasantry of our Western shires, the men who rose against his system, called this new Prayer Book nothing but a Christmas game.'

It is well known how great an influence Luther and Calvin have had upon their respective tongues; in like manner, one effect of the Reformation was to keep England steady to her old speech. As we have always had the voices of Tyndale and Cranmer ringing in our ears

1 Compare the prayers of Cranmer's compilation with those now and then put forth by authority in our own time. The art of compiling prayers seems to be lost.

week after week for the last three Centuries, we have lost but few words since the time of these worthies; the most remarkable of our losses are bolled, daysman, to ear, silverling, and meteyard, found in parts of Scripture not much read. Hearne, writing 170 years later, mourned over the substitution of modern words for rede (consilium) and behight (promisit), both used by Sternhold in his version of the Psalms, made in the days of Edward VI. 6 Strange alterations,' says the Antiquary, 'all for the worse.' On the other hand, we could have gladly spared out of the Bible such needless foreign words as affinity, artificer, champaign, choler,1 concupiscence, immutable, intelligence, magnifical, mollify, prognosticate, sccondarily, similitude, terrestrial, though they happily come but seldom.2 They stand in striking contrast to words like thank-worthy, stiff-necked, ringstraked, loving-kindness, yoke-fellow, undersetters, waterflood, well-spring, good-man, slaughter-weapon. We even find the old sith (quoniam), and steads (loca). The Old English grin (laqueus) was a word still common enough to be used in the Version of 1611, but already the Norse gin (first used in the Ormulum) was encroaching on it; and the French engyne conveyed a kindred meaning. Shamefastness was printed in the right way; and this our writers and printers of

1 We English abound in terms for this passion. Wrath and ire came over with Hengist; the Danes brought anger; the French gave us rage and fury; the Latin supplied indignation; the Greek choler. We further conferred this sense on passion.

2 Habergeon and brigandine are relics of Sixteenth Century warfare. By the bye, what would the old bowmen, who decided so many fields between Hastings and Pinkie, have said to our monstrous word toxophilite?

1873 ought to restore forthwith. The English privative un comes often where we now use the Latin in. We find such old words as anon, chapman, halt, knap, let, list, neesing, trow, ward, wax, wot, still struggling for life. What fine old idioms we have preserved to us in well is thee, woe is me, woe worth the day, the gate opened of his own accord, the more part of them,1 do you to wit, to have an evil will at Zion, I was shapen, whether (uter) of the two, set them at one again! The phrase would God! which we owe to Manning in 1303, is a thoroughly English idiom, and is not sanctioned by the Hebrew.2 The Douay Bible has had a lot widely different from that of Tyndale's Version; already in 1583 Fulke was railing against the foreign work and its authors; he branded affected novelties of terms, such as neither English nor Christian ears ever heard in the English tongue scandal, prepuce, neophyte, depositum, gratis, parasceve, paraclete, exinanite, repropitiate, and a hundred such like ink horn terms.'3 Fulke further on protests against azymes, schisms, zelators: these and such other be wonders of words that wise men can give no good reason why they should be used.' Why not talk of gazophilace and the encones? Fulke's book, reprinted by the Parker Society, should be in the hands of all philologers; it is to be wished that he could come to life

This sense of more (major) lingers in our 'more's the pity.' 2 I have been guided here by Eastwood and Wright. May the Revisors of 1873 hold fast to the Teutonic element in our Version, whatever else they do!

3 Fancy such words as exinanite and repropitiate being read out in our parish churches! Dî meliora piis erroremque hostibus ilum!

and be clothed with full power over the English press in our own day. Many a penny-a-lining quack would he yoke to the cart's tail.

It is well known that those who revised the English Bible in 1611 were bidden to keep as near as they could to the old versions, such as Tyndale's: this behest is one of the few good things that we owe to our Northern Solomon, the great inventor of kingcraft. The diction of the Bible seemed most archaic in the mouths of the Puritans in 1642, as their foes tell us; this could hardly have been the case had the version been a work of Bacon's time. The Book's influence upon all English-speaking men has been most astounding; the Koran alone can boast an equal share of reverence, spread far and wide. Of the English Bible's 6,000 words, only 250 are not in common use now; and almost all of these last are readily understood. Every good English writer has drawn freely upon the great Version: we know the skill with which Lord Macaulay and others interweave its homely, pithy diction with their prose. Even men who have left the English Church acknowledge that Rome herself cannot conjure away the old spell laid upon their minds by Tyndale's Bible. This book it is that affords the first lessons lisped by the English child at its mother's knee; this book it is that prompts the last words faltered by the English grey-beard on his death-bed. In this book we have found our strongest breakwater against the tides of silly novelties, ever

I take from Marsh my statistics as to the words of the Bible. The French have no need to go so far back as the Constable Bourbon's time for the standard of their tongue.

threatening to swamp our speech. Tyndale stands in a far nearer relation to us than Dante stands to the Italians.

Among the East Midlanders who helped on the Reformation were Cranmer, Latimer, and Foxe; Hall and Bunyan were to come later.1 English literature is so closely intertwined with English history and English religion that we are driven to ask, what would have been the future of our tongue, had the Reformation, the great event of this Sixteenth Century, been trampled down in our island?

Our national character is nearer akin to that of Spain than to that of France; I fear, therefore, that had Rome won the day in England, our religion would have smacked more of Philip II. than of Cardinal Richelieu, more of grim bloody Ultramontanism than of the other and milder form of Romanism. We know how Cervantes felt himself shackled by the awful, overbearing Inquisition: English writers would have fared no better, but would have dragged on their lives in everlasting fear of spies, gaolers, racks, and stakes. Could Shakespere have breathed in such an air? Hardly So. Could Milton? Most assuredly not. Our mother tongue, thought unworthy to become the handmaid of religion, would have sunk (exinanited) into a Romance jargon, with few Teutonic words in it but pronouns, conjunctions, and such like.

Many Orders of the Roman Church have brought their influence to bear upon our speech. In the Seventh Century, the Benedictines gave us our first batch of Latin ware, the technical words employed by Western

1 Dryden came from the same district.