still lie unprinted. We may see the subscribers to the Early English Text Society reckoned, not by hundreds, but by thousands.1 Our German and Scandinavian kinsfolk will then no longer twit us with our carelessness of the hoard so dearly prized abroad; like them, we shall purge our language of needless foreign frippery, and shall reverence the good Teutonic masonry wherewith our forefathers built.

TABLE OF DATES BEARING ON ENGLISH
LITERATURE.

The Saxon settlement in South
Britain.

The establishment of the Anglian
kingdom in North Britain.

The earliest written specimen of
Northern English.

The earliest written specimen of
Southern English.

The great Danish settlement in
the North and East of England.
The Court of the Southern English
Kings becomes the central point
for all the land.

The French Conquest. Loss of the
Old English Court at Winches-
ter, and of Old English poetic
words.
Break-up of the Old English gram-

mar; a variety of dialects pre-
vail for two centuries, with no
fixed standard.

The Secretary of the Society is G. Joachim, Esq., St. Andrew House, Change Alley, London. I wish they would print more works written before 1400, and fewer works written after that year.

CHAPTER VI.

GOOD AND BAD ENGLISH IN 1873.

WE read that in our renowned government of 1757, framed by the greatest of all English War ministers and by the greatest of all English Ducal jobbers, everything that was bright and stainless passed through the one channel, everything that was foul and noisome poured through the other; the Ministry was based upon all the high and all the low parts of our nature. Something of the like kind may be remarked in 1873, as to the men who keep the English printing press at work. Some of these are scholars, or men of strong mother wit, who in prose and poetry employ a sound Teutonic style. Others are men representing the middle class, writers who, for want of education, often use in a wrong sense the long Latinized words wherein the true penny-a-liner revels. The first class are day by day straining the foul matter from our language, and are leading us back to old springs too long unsought; perhaps they may yet keep alive our perishing Subjunctive mood. The other class are day by day pouring more sewage into the well of what can no longer be called English undefiled.' From the one quarter comes all that is lofty and noble

6

in the literature of the day; from the other all that is mean and tawdry.

Our middle class (we beheld something of this kind in the Thirteenth Century) has an amazing love of cumbrous Latin words, which have not long been in vogue. This is seen in their early life. Winchester and Eton may call themselves colleges, Harrow and Rugby may call themselves schools; but the place, where the offspring of our shopkeepers are taught bad French and worse Latin, is an educational establishment or a polite seminary. The books used in our National schools show a lofty disdain for homespun English. As the pupils grow older, they do not care to read about a fair lady, but they are at once drawn to a female possessing considerable personal attractions. A brawl is a word good enough for a scuffle between peasants; but when one half-tipsy alderman mauls another, the brawl becomes a fracas. An émeute is a far genteeler word than a riot. A farmer, when he grows rich, prides himself on being an eminent agriculturist. The corruption is now spreading downward to the lower class; they are beginning to think that an operative is something nobler than a workman.' We may call King David a singer; but a triller of Italian trills must be known as a vocalist. Our fathers talked of healing waters; our new guide-books scorn even the term medicinal; therapeutic is the word beloved by all professors of the high polite style. Pope's well-known divine is being outdone; our ears are now become so polite, that sins must be called by new names, at which Wickliffe and Tyndale would have stared. I 1 May I not ask with Theocritus, τίς δὲ πόθος τῶν ἔκτοθεν ἐργάτα ἀνδρί ;

Y 2

see that a hospital has lately been founded, not for drunkards, but for inebriates, a new-coined substantive of which Bunyan's Mr. Smooth-tongue might have been proud. Shade of Cobbett! we are now forbidden to call a spade a spade; our speech, like Bottom the weaver, is indeed translated.

Let us watch an Englishman of the average type setting to work upon a letter to the Times.1 The worthy fellow, when at his own fireside, seldom in his talk goes beyond plain simple words and short sentences, such as Mr. Trollope puts into the mouths of his heroes. But our friend would feel himself for ever shamed in the eyes of his neighbours, were he to rush into print in this homely guise. He therefore picks out from his dictionary the most high-sounding words he can find, and he works them up into long-winded sentences, wholly forgetting that it is not every man who can bend the bow of Hooker or Clarendon. The upshot is commonly an odd jumble, with much haziness about who, which, and their antecedents. The writer should look askant at words that come from the Latin; they are too often traps for the unwary.2 The Lady of the

1 Here is a gem, which occurs in a letter to the Times of May 5, 1873. The writer sets up to be a critic of the English drama; the blind leads the blind. Such representations are artistically as much beneath contempt as morally suggestive of compassion for the performers, not to speak of some indignation that educated and responsible people should sanction such exhibitions.' He also talks of 'partaking an intellectual pleasure.' Yet the writer of this is most likely no fool in private life.

2 I have seen a begging letter containing the words, I have become so deaf that I cannot articulate what people say to me.' I once heard a showman say of a baboon: The form of his claws enables