the Scriptures, but will dye in the quarrell.’[1] I give this sentence, as it is one of the last occasions that we find a gentleman of good blood, and eke learned in the law, piling up negatives after the true Old English fashion; a habit that now prevails only among the lower orders. Tyndale had looked askant upon this idiom, of which Caxton was not ashamed. Our tongue was in this respect to leave the old path and to follow the Latin; the land was now athirst for classic learning.
The time, when England broke away from the Italian yoke, falls in precisely with the time, when the diction of her bards was greatly changed for the better. Langland, true genius though he might be, was wrong in employing so vast a number of French words in his work; the Passus Decimus-Quartus of his Vision has one French word for two English, counting the nouns, verbs, and adverbs alone. Chaucer penning a hymn to the Virgin is most different from Chaucer laughing over the pranks of naughty lads at the Universities; in the former case he heaps up his French words to a wondrous extent. The same tendency may be seen in Lydgate, Hawes, Dunbar, and their brethren; the worst sinners in this respect being monks and writers of Church legends. To prove my point, I give a stanza from a poem composed by the Abbot of Gloucester in 1524; we may almost call it the last dying strains, somewhat prosaic in truth, of the Old Creed: —
- ↑ Plumpton Correspondence, p. 233 (Camden Society).
