If

but still well understood of the common folk? A preacher has been known to translate, we cannot always stand upright,' into 'we cannot always maintain an erect position.' Who can make anything out of the rubbish that follows, 'a system thus hypothetically elaborated is after all but an inexplicable concatenation of hyperbolical incongruity ?' 2 This reads like Dr. Johnson run mad; no wonder that Dissent has become rife in the land. we wish to know the cause of the bad style employed in preaching by too many of the Anglican clergy, we must ask how they have been taught at our Schools and Universities. Much heed is there bestowed on Latin and Greek, but none on English.3 What a change might be wrought in our pulpits if lads at public schools were given some knowledge of our great writers from Chaucer and Wickliffe downwards, instead of wasting so much time on Latin verses, that do no good in after life to three-fourths of the students! A lad of average wit only needs sound English models to be set before him, and he will teach himself much. What good service might

1 Barnes, Early England, p. 106. Such a preacher would miss the point of that wittiest of all proverbs, ‘An empty sack cannot stand upright.'

2 Mr. Cox, who treats us to this stuff (Recollections of Oxford, p. 223), says, such sentences, delivered in a regular cadence, formed too often our Sunday fare, in days happily gone by.'

3 I for some years of my life always thought that our English long was derived from the Latin longus. Every grammar and dictionary, used in schools, should have a short sketch of Comparative Philology prefixed. I know that I was fourteen, before the great truths of that science were set before me by Bishop Abraham's little book, used in the Lower Fifth form at Eton. In those days what we now call Aryan was termed Indo-Germanic.

Oxford do if she were to establish yet another School, which would enforce a thorough knowledge of English, and would, moreover, teach her bantlings a new use of the Latin and Greek already learnt! The works of March, Morris, Max Müller, and others would soon become Oxford text-books in one of the most charming of all branches of learning. Surely every good son of the Church will be of my mind, that the knowledge of English is a point well worth commending to those who are to fill our pulpits. Our clergy, if well grounded in their own tongue, would preach in a style less like Blair's and more like Bunyan's. Others may call for sweetness and light; I am all for clearness and pith. But we are getting into the right path at last. Articles have lately appeared in the Times, calling for more attention to the study of English at our Grammar Schools.

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While we are on the subject of schools, it may be pointed out that Greek has done much in the last three centuries to keep before us the fact, that English will lend itself readily to high-sounding compounds. Old Chapman long ago set us on the right tack; Milton followed; and our boys at school talk glibly of wide-swaying Agamemnon and swift-footed Achilles; thus the power of compounding has never altogether left us. Would that we could also fasten any one of our prepositions to our verbs at will! I believe it is mainly owing to the study

1 There is an old Oxford story, that a preacher of the mawkish school, holding forth before the University, spoke of a well-known beast as 'an animal which decency forbids me to name.' The beast turned out to be the one nearest of kin to the preacher himself; Balaam's reprover, to wit.

Why

not say "ass;

yourself?

of Latin, that forsooth and wont have been kept alive, by schoolboys construing scilicet and soleo in the timehonoured way. It is pleasant to find one bough of the great Aryan tree lending healthy sap to another offshoot.1 Some of the best English verse of our time may be read in the pages of Punch, whenever great Englishmen die. Moreover, that shrewd wight is always ready to nail up vermin on the barn door; as lately in the case of the word elasticity, employed by three Bishops. Upon this he remarked (June 7, 1873): ‘An upstart expression foisted into the Text would be like a patch of new cloth, and that shoddy, sewn into an old garment of honest English make. That web is of a woof too precious to be pieced with stuff of no more worth than a penny a line.' But sound English criticism too often calls forth a growl of annoyance from vulgar vanity. If any one in our day sets himself to breast the muddy tide of fine writing, an outcry is at once raised that he is panting to drive away from England all words that are not thoroughly Teutonic. The answer is: no man that knows the history of the English tongue, can ever be guilty of such unwisdom. Our heedless forefathers in the Thirteenth Century allowed thousands of our good old words to slip; our language must be copious, at any cost; we therefore by slow degrees made good the loss

1 One of the good deeds of our boys is that they have kept alive the old substantive let (a hindrance) used in the game of fives. In a letter of Horace Walpole's, written about 1737 from the Christopher at Eton, we see some of the venerable slang of that College; the words are still fresh as ever. Mr. Kinglake, in his account of Colonel Yea at the Alma, has almost made rooge classical; none who have played football in the Eton way can forget this verb.

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with thousands of French terms. Like the Lycian, whom Zeus bereft of wit, we took brass for gold. Thanks to this process, Chaucer had most likely as great a wealth of words at his beck as Orrmin had, two hundred years earlier. But, though we long ago repaired with brick the gaps made in our ruined old stone hall, it does not follow that we should daub stucco over the brick and the stone alike. What a scholar mourns, is that our daws prank themselves in peacocks' feathers: that our lower press and our clergy revel in Romance words, brought in most needlessly after Swift and Addison were in their graves. What, for instance, do we want with the word exacerbate instead of the old embitter? The former is one of the penny-a-liner's choicest jewels. Is not the sentence, workmen want more pay, at least as expressive as the tawdry operatives desiderate additional remuneration? At the same time, no man of sense can object to foreign words coming into English of late years, if they unmistakeably fill up a gap. Our hard-working fathers had no need of the word ennui; our wealth, ever waxing, has brought the state of mind; so France has given us the name for it. The importer, who first bestowed upon us the French prestige, is worthy of all honour, for this word supplied a real want. Our ships sail over all seas; English is the chosen language of commerce; we borrow, and rightly so, from the uttermost shores of the earth; from the Australians we took kangaroo; and the great Burke uses taboo, which came to him from Otaheite. What our ladies, priests, sol

1 Burke (the friend of Hare, not the friend of Fox) has given us a new word for suppress. Another famous Galway house has given

diers, lawyers, doctors, huntsmen, architects, and cooks owe to France, has been fairly acknowledged. Italy has given us the words ever in the mouths of our painters, sculptors, and musicians. The Portuguese traders, three hundred years ago, helped us to many terms well known to our merchants. Germany, the parent of long-winded sentences, has sent us very few words; and these remind us of the Thirty Years' War, when English and Scotch soldiers were fighting on the right side. To make amends for all this borrowing, England supplies foreigners (too long enslaved) with her own staplenamely, the diction of free political life.2 In this she has had many hundred years' start of almost every nation but the Hungarians; she has, it is true, no home-born word for coup d'état; but she may well take pride in being the mother of Parliaments, even as old Rome was the source of civil law.3

us a name for irregular justice executed murderers.

upon thieves and

1 The word plunder is due to this war. The Indian Mutiny gave

us loot, and the American Civil War created the bummer, called of old marauder.

2 I take the following from D'Azeglio's Letters to his wife, page 244 (published in 1871): 'Abbiamo avuto qui Cobden, il famoso dell' Anti-Corn-Laws-League. Ho dovuto far l'inglese puro sangue, più che si potesse, coi speeches e i toast, che sono stati i seguenti : "a S.M. Carlo Alberto-alla Queen Victoria-a Cobden." The great patriot, as we see, makes rather a hash of his English. We also supply foreigners with sportsmanlike terms; le groom anglais est pour le cheval français.

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3 Coup d'état reminds me of one effect of Napoleonism. The greatest of French Reviews says in an article on Manzoni (July 15, 1873): quantité de termes, qui n'étaient permis qu'aux halles, ont passé dans le langage de la cour.' Paris is here meant.

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