influence. Moore, when arranging his Celtic gems in a new setting, worked in the best Teutonic style. In our own day, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in his Legends of St. Patrick, has shown an equally pure taste. Thanks to the poetry of Burns and to the prose of Scott, the fine gentlemen of London and Oxford began to see what pith and harmony were lurking in the good old English of the North: would that every one of our shires likewise had its laureate![1] But Scott's romances, the wholesomest of all food for the mind, have, borne fruit; we have in our own day seen many attempts, like those of Mr. Barnes in Dorset, to bring the various dialects of England (they are more akin to Middle English than to New English) before the reading public. How many good old words, dropped by our literature since 1500, might be recovered from these sources! If our English Makers set themselves earnestly to the task (they have already made a beginning), there is good hope that our grandchildren may freely use scores of Chaucer's words that we ourselves are driven to call obsolete. Lockhart, Macaulay, Davis, and Browning have done yeoman's service, in reviving the old English ballad.
Prose has followed in Poetry's wake. No good authors of our time, writing on a subject that is not highly scientific, would dream of abusing language as Gibbon
- ↑ Dr. M'Crie, in an early page of his attack on Scott's Old Mortality, says of Guy Mannering: ‘We are persuaded not one word in three is understood by the generality of (English) readers.’ The Quarterly Review, vol. xv. p. 139, was so astoundingly ignorant as to call that novel, ‘a dark dialect of Anglified Erse.’ Surely there must be a great difference between readers in 1815 and in 1873.
