abuse of it jars upon the ear of any well-bred man far more than the broadest Scotch or Irish brogue can do. These dialects, as I have shown, often preserve good old English forms that have long been lost to London and Oxford.[1]
There are two things which are supposed to bring fresh ideas before the minds of the middle class — the newspaper on week days, and the sermon on Sundays. We have seen the part played by the former; I now turn to the latter. Many complaints have lately been made on the scarcity of good preachers; one cause of these complaints I take to be, the diction of the usual run of sermons. The lectern and the reading desk speak to the folk, Sunday after Sunday, in the best of English; that is, in old Teutonic words, with a dash of French terms mostly naturalized in the Thirteenth Century. The pulpit, on the other hand, too often deals in an odd jargon of Romance, worked up into long-winded sentences, which shoot high above the heads of the listeners.[2] Swift complained bitterly of this a hundred and fifty years ago; and the evil is rife as ever now. Is it any wonder then that the poor become lost to the Church, or that they go to the meeting-house, where they can hear the way to Heaven set forth in English, a little uncouth it may be,
- ↑ A Scotch farmer's wife once said to me, finding me rather slow in following her talk when she spoke at all fast, ‘I beg your pardon. Sir, for my bad English.’ I answered, ‘It is I that speak the bad English; it is you that speak the true old English.’ It is delightful to hear the peasantry talk of sackless (innocens), and he coft (emit).
- ↑ How charming, in Memorials of a Quiet Life, is the account of the scholarlike Augustus Hare's style of preaching to his Wiltshire shepherds! He had a soul above the Romance hodgepodge.
