Knox was soundly rated by the other side for Anglicizing, not only in religion and politics, but also in his speech. Soon after 1600, Aytoun and Drummond wrote in the London dialect; Scotland, as she would have said herself, had to ‘dree her weird.’ The false Southron was fast getting the upper hand by a new kind of warfare; the Lowland peasantry, among whom schools began to thrive, read the truths of religion enshrined in a dialect that would have jarred on the ears of John Bellenden or Gawain Douglas. To this day the Scotch minister in his sermons keeps as near as he can to the speech of Westminster and Oxford; though his flock, when in the field or at the hearth, cleave fast to their good old Northern tongue.[1]
Thus the New Standard English, convoyed by the Reformation, made its way to the far North, and also into the Protestant settlements in Ireland; it soon afterwards crossed the Atlantic in the Pilgrim Fathers' ship. Tyndale's great work, beloved by all forms alike of English Protestantism, will for ever be a bond of fellowship between the seventy millions of the Angel cyn, whether they live on the Thames, the Potomac, the Kuruman, or the Murrumbidgee. Our tongue is like the Turk, who will bear no brothers near his throne; Irish and Welsh are dying out, as Cornish did long ago.
The great prose writers of the Sixteenth Century did much for the cause of sound English. Cheke, though writing some years after Tyndale's death, had a hankering after Fifteenth Century words, and strove to keep
- ↑ In like manner, Luther's speech is used in the pulpit among the Low Germans of the Baltic.
