up the period between Chaucer and Surrey, in this respect a great going back from Chaucer's English; being all stuck over with long and often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders in this line, as Campbell himself admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth century. "The prevailing fault," he says, "of English diction, in the fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of anglicizing Latin words. In this pedantry and use of aureate terms' the Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south. . . . . . When they meant to be eloquent, they tore up words from the Latin, which never took root in the language; like children making a mock garden with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither."*

.....

To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion given, certainly it was given to none of those, to bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise according to the rules laid down in the following remarkable passage; Dryden is in it declaring the motives that induced him to seek for foreign words, and the considerations by which he was guided in their selection: "If sounding words are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall hinder me to import them from a foreign country? I carry not out the treasure of the nation which is never to return, but what I bring from Italy I spend in England. Here it remains and here it circulates, for, if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to another. I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language. We have enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we will have things of magnificence and splendor, we * Essay on English Poetry, p. 93.

INFLUENCE OF THE REFORMATION.

53

must get them by commerce. Poetry requires adornment, and that is not to be had from our old Teuton monosyllables; therefore, if I find any elegant word in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized by using it myself; and if the public approves of it, the bill passes. But every man can not distinguish betwixt pedantry and poetry: every man, therefore, is not fit to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet must first be certain that the word he would introduce is beautiful in the Latin; and is to consider, in the next place, whether it will agree with the English idiom: after this, he ought to take the opinion of judicious friends, such as are learned in both languages; and lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use this license very sparingly; for if too many foreign words are poured in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives, but to conquer them."*

But this tendency to latinize our speech was likely to receive, and actually did receive, a new impulse from the revival of learning, and the familiar reacquaintance with the great masterpieces of ancient literature which went along with this. Happily there accompanied, or at least followed hard on, this intellectual movement another far deeper, and in England essentially national movement; one which even intellectually stirred the nation to far deeper depths, in that it was also a moral one; I mean of course the Reformation. It was only among the Germanic nations of Europe, as has often been remarked, that the Reformation struck lasting roots; it found its strength therefore in the Teutonic element of the national

* Dedication of the Translation of the Eneid.

character, which also it in its turn further strengthened, purified and called out. And thus, though Latin came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a certain measure also Greek, yet this was not without its counterpoise, in the contemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally popular side of the language. Popular preaching and discussion, the necessity of dealing with the highest matters in a manner intelligible not to scholars only, but to the unlearned, all this served to evoke the native resources of our tongue; and thus the relative proportion between the one part of the language and the other was not dangerously disturbed, the balance was not destroyed; as it would have been, if only the Humanists had been at work, and not the Reformers as well.

The revival of learning, which found place somewhat earlier in Italy, where it had its birth, than with us, extended to England, and was operative here, during the reigns of Henry VIII. and his immediate successors; in other words, if it slightly anticipated in time, it afterward ran exactly parallel with, the period during which our Reformation was working itself out. It was an epoch in all respects of immense mental and moral activity, and such are always times of extensive changes and enlargements in a language. The old garment, which served a people's needs in the time past, is too narrow for it now to wrap itself in any more. "Change in language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not equable, but eminently by fits and starts." When the foundations of the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two cen

DATE OF SOME LATIN WORDS.

55

Thus

turies of calmer or more stagnant existence. the activities and energies which the Reformation set a stirring among us here, and I need not tell you that these reached far beyond the domain of our directly religious life, caused mighty alterations in the English tongue.*

For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact of the revived interest in classical learning, and you will not wonder that a stream of Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our language. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth's reign,† gives a long list of words

*We have a remarkable evidence of the sense which at this time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language was changing under their hands in some lines of Waller. Looking back at what the last hundred years had wrought of alteration in it, and assuming, as was not much to be wondered at, that the next hundred would effect as much, he checked with misgivings such as these his own expectation of immortality:

"Who can hope his lines should long

Last in a daily changing tongue?

While they are new, envy prevails,

And as that dies, our language fails.

"Poets that lasting marble seek,

Must carve in Latin or in Greek:

We write in sand; our language grows,

And like the tide our work o'erflows."

Such were his misgivings as to the future, assuming that the rate of change would continue what it had been. How little they have been fulfilled, every one knows. In actual fact two centuries which have elapsed since he wrote, have hardly antiquated a word or a phrase in his poems. If we care very little for them now, this is to be explained by quite other causes by the absence of all moral earnestness from them.

+ In his Art of English Poesy, London, 1589, republished in Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy, London, 1811, vol. i., pp. 122, 123.

which he states to have been of quite recent introduction into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand. in regard of some of these how the language should have managed to do without them so long; 'method,' 'methodical,'' function,' numerous,' ' penetrate,'' penetrable,' 'indignity,' 'savage,' 'scientific,' 'delineation,' 'dimension'—all which he notes to have recently come up; so too 'idiom,' 'significative,' 'compendious,' 'prolix,' 'figurative,' 'impression,' 'inveigle,' 'metrical.' All these he adduces with praise; others upon which he bestows equal commendation have not held their ground, as ' placation,' numerosity,' 'harmonical.' Of those novelties which he disallowed, in some cases, as in the words, 'facundity,' ' implete,' 'attemptat, ('attentat'), he only anticipated the decision of a later day; while others which he disallowed no less, as 'audacious,' ' compatible,'' egregious,' have maintained their ground. These too have done the same; 'despicable,' 'destruction,' 'homicide,' 'obsequious,' 'ponderous,' ' portentous,' 'prodigious,' all which another writer a little earlier condemns as "inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the Latin."

It is curious to observe the "words of art," as he calls them, which Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny's Natural History.* One can

* London, 1601. Besides this work, Holland translated the whole of Plutarch's Moralia, Livy, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and