when English knights have been winning their spurs abroad; and this remark is as true of Wellington's time as of the days of the Black Prince or Raleigh. Nine or ten English writers, who are likely to live for ever, were at work soon after 1800. Scott rose aloft above his brethren; but he was dethroned in his own lifetime (never had such a thing been known in our literature) by a greater bard than himself. Byron had the good taste to tread in the path followed by his Northern rival; both of them in their diction set the simplicity of the early part of the Fourteenth Century above all the gewgaws of certain later ages. Now it was that such words as losel and leech awoke after a long sleep. Bishop Percy, though Dr. Johnson laughed, had already led the English back to old wells, streams purer than any known to Pope. Burns had written in his own dialect verses that were prized by the high and the low alike. Coleridge's great ballad betokened that the public taste was veering round; he also turned the eyes of England to the vast intellectual wealth that was now being poured into the lap of Germany. All the different nations of Europe had come to know each other better. Voltaire had many years earlier told his countrymen that an old Warwickshire barbarian had lived, whose works contained grains of gold overlaid with much rubbish; something might have been made of the man, had he lived at Paris at the right time and formed himself upon Racine, or better still, upon Monsieur Arouet. Somewhat later, Schiller and Manzoni alike felt the English spell.

Ireland as well as her sister came under the new

influence. Moore, when arranging his Celtic gems in a new setting, worked in the best Teutonic style. In our own day, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in his Legends of St. Patrick, has shown an equally pure taste. Thanks to the poetry of Burns and to the prose of Scott, the fine gentlemen of London and Oxford began to see what pith and harmony were lurking in the good old English of the North: would that every one of our shires likewise had its laureate! But Scott's romances, the wholesomest of all food for the mind, have borne fruit; we have in our own day seen many attempts, like those of Mr. Barnes in Dorset, to bring the various dialects of England (they are more akin to Middle English than to New English) before the reading public. How many good old words, dropped by our literature since 1500, might be recovered from these sources! If our English Makers set themselves earnestly to the task (they have already made a beginning), there is good hope that our grandchildren may freely use scores of Chaucer's words that we ourselves are driven to call obsolete. Lockhart, Macaulay, Davis, and Browning have done yeoman's service, in reviving the old English ballad.

Prose has followed in Poetry's wake. No good authors of our time, writing on a subject that is not highly scientific, would dream of abusing language as Gibbon

1 Dr. M'Crie, in an early page of his attack on Scott's Old Mortality, says of Guy Mannering; 'We are persuaded not one word in three is understood by the generality of (English) readers.' The Quarterly Review, vol. xv. p. 139, was so astoundingly ignorant as to call that novel, a dark dialect of Anglified Erse.' Surely there must be a great difference between readers in 1815 and in 1873.

2

did, when he cleverly in many passages elbowed out almost all Teutonic words, except such as his, to, of, and the like. Cobbett roused us from foreign pedantry; and if we do not always reach Tyndale's bountiful proportion of Teutonic words in his political tracts, we at least do not fall below the proportion employed by Addison. In proof of this, let any one contrast the diction of our modern English writers on Charles V.. with the Latinized style wherein Dr. Robertson revels when handling the same subject. That fine passage, in which Mr. Froude sets before us the Armada leaving the Spanish shore, would have been altogether beyond Hume a hundred years ago. Mr. Carlyle has had many disciples, whose awkward efforts to conjure with his wand are most laughable; but one good result at least has followed-the stern rugged Teutonism of the teacher is copied by those who ape him.

It is amusing to look back upon what was thought sound English criticism barely forty years ago. In a sharp attack on Dr. Monk's Life of Bentley, the Edinburgh Reviewer of July, 1830, lifts up his voice against such vulgar forms as hereby, wherein, hereupon, caught up, his bolt was shot, fling away his credit, a batch of fragments, it lay a bleeding. I know not whether Dr. Monk could have explained the a in the last phrase; but it seems pretty certain that he was one of the pioneers who brought us back to a homelier style of English. Most men in our time would allow, that a

2

1 See my Tables at page

256.

2 I grieve to say that he is guilty of' on the tapis;' a vulgarism more suited to a schoolgirl than to a scholar.

writer of prose may go so far back as Tyndale, a writer of poetry so far back as Chaucer, in employing old words; this rule would have jarred upon the mawkish Reviewer's feelings. I once saw it laid down in an oldfashioned book of good manners, that it was vulgar to say, 'I would as lieve do it.' For all that, let each of our English writers, who has a well-grounded hope that he will be read a hundred years hence, set himself heart and soul to revive at least one long-neglected English word. It may be readily allowed that an imitation of the French Academy on our shores would never come to any good; still a combination of our crack writers to effect much-needed reforms in spelling and wordbuilding would lend fresh lustre to Queen Victoria's reign. More ought to be done by men who have some idea of the Old English grammar, than was done by Gibbon and Robertson.

The change from Latinism back to Teutonism may be seen in speaking as well as in writing. Whatever we may think of Mr. Gladstone's Irish University Bill in 1873, none can gainsay that the last few sentences of his great speech, uttered the moment before his defeat, were a masterpiece of wholesome English. But of all our Parliament men, none in our day has employed a racier diction than Mr. Bright. He has clearly borrowed much from the great Sixteenth Century; he sometimes seems to be kindled with the fire of one of those Hebrew prophets, whom Tyndale and his friends loved to translate into the soundest of English. Pitt the elder, as we hear, knew nothing well but the Faery Queen; Pitt the younger took for his pattern the great

speeches in the First Book of Paradise Lost: Mr. Bright has gone still further back in search of a model. There is nothing pleasanter in our literature than the fond reverence with which each man, who is worth aught, looks back to the great spirits that went before.

Mr. Tennyson, a countryman of Robert Manning's and a careful student of old Mallory, has done much for the revival of pure English among us; not the least happy of his efforts has been the death-bed musings of his Northern Farmer. Further strides in the right direction have been made by Mr. Morris.1 The Earthly Paradise, more than any poem of late years that I know, takes us back to 1290 or thereabouts, and shows us how copious, in skilful hands, an almost purely Teutonic diction may be. It is hopeless to attempt the recovery of the English swept away in the Thirteenth Century; but Mr. Morris, in many places, cuts down his proportion of French words to the scale which Chaucer's grandfather would have used, had that worthy, when young, essayed to make his mark in literature. It may be said of Mr. Morris as of Spenser, 'he hath labored to restore as to their rightful heritage such good and naturall English words as have been long time out of use, and almost cleane disherited.' So swiftly are we speeding along the right path, that ere many years we may even come to take a hearty general interest in our old title-deeds that

Our modern poets may take for their watchword the sentence wherein Dante (De vulgari Eloquio) praises the Italian poets who went before him: The illustrious heroes, Frederick Cæsar and his noble son Manfred, followed after elegance and scorned what was mean.'