correspondence of a private nature. The language, however, remained far from assuming a definite character, and its dialects varied so much in the different provinces as to render Chaucer apprehensive of not being generally understood.

The end of the fourteenth century, however, is generally considered as the time when the English language was substantially formed. By that time the Normans had been for about three centuries and a half the rulers of the country-a period, be it observed, almost equal to that from the discovery of America to the present day. They could, therefore, no longer be called foreigners, nor was their language any longer a foreign tongue among the English people; indeed, if the general understanding of an idiom be taken as a test, it was much less foreign than the various dialects that were written and spoken in England before the conquest, every one of which would have been as unintelligible to an Englishman of the fifteenth century as they are to us at present. French, on the contrary, was familiar to every ear, and understood by all who laid any claim to refined culture. Still, although for a long time after, it remained the family language of the men of Norman blood, though it continued to be the language of the court and the administration, it rapidly lost its importance after the close of the Hundred Years' War, which, terminating all English interests on the Continent, confined them exclusively to the British Isles. Thus, shortly afterward, speeches in Parliament began to be made in English, and occasionally even ministers of the crown addressed the House in the new national language. In 1485 statutes ceased to be drawn up in French, though in the House of Lords French continued to be used to a much later date. Official letters, wills, and law reports we find written in it up to the end of the sixteenth century; but as a colloquial language, French remained cultivated among the higher classes only, and all that remains of it now, as an official language in England, are some law terms and the few formulæ for giving royal assent to bills of Parliament.

CHAPTER X.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND ITS VOCABULARY.

"HAD the Plantagenets," observes Macaulay, "as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under their government, it is probable that England would never have had an independent existence. The noble language of Milton and Burke would have remained a rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed orthography, and would have been contemptuously abandoned to the boors. No man of English extraction would have risen to eminence except by becoming, in speech and habits, a Frenchman."

It was always thus that the loss of territory by consolidating the English nation, reacted favorably on the growth and improvement of the national language. Henceforth it became the common speech of Englishmen of all ranks, and the use of French no longer marked a national, but merely a social or professional distinction. In the attainment of this result, and in its comparative permanence, the introduction of the printing prèss, A. D. 1474, had an important share. By its exclusive patronage of the Midland speech, it raised it still higher above the sister dialects, and secured its abiding victory. As books were multiplied, and found their way into every corner of the land, and the art of reading became a more common acquirement, men of all parts of the country had forced upon their attention the book-English, in which alone they were printed. This became, in turn, the model for their own writings, and by and by, if they had any pretention to education, of their own speech. The writ ten form of the language also tended to a greater uniformity. The book addressed the mind directly through the eye instead of circuitously through the eye and ear, and thus there was a continual tendency of written words and parts of words to be reduced to a single form, and that the most usual and the most generally known.

Great names in literature have always stood as landmarks in the history of a language, and to them we must

turn to observe the progress and position of the new national speech. It is sometimes convenient to call an age by the name of its great men; and as Chaucer stands preeminent in the fourteenth century, the period during which he lived and wrote is called "the Age of Chaucer." His influence, indeed, on the English language was important and enduring; he showed what the new language was capable of; and succeeding poets took him as their model. The fifteenth century, however, was not favorable to the cultivation of literature; the people were too much engaged in war, and during a great part of the century in civil war, to be able to devote time to letters. Lydgate, a poet and prose-writer, may represent the language of this century, about the middle of which he flourished. The language of his poetry is evidently imitated from Chaucer, but his prose makes a nearer approach to the modern form of English than that of any preceding writer of the century. Lydgate uses a great number of words which no longer retain their place; but in what are called the Paxton letters, written about 1459, and in the works of Fortescue, the great lawyer, a reader of the present day finds scarcely any difficulty. In Scotland, at the close of the fourteenth and during the fifteenth century, poetry was cultivated to a considerable extent. Chaucer found a worthy follower in Barbour, the author of "The Bruce"; and Wynton and James I were poets of greater eminence than any of their English contemporaries.

Meanwhile the language kept fluctuating, and as it differed in various districts, so it varied from one generation to another. At the end of the fifteenth century, Caxton declared that, taking up an old book, he found the English so rude and broad that he could hardly understand it; and in his time the dialectic difference was still so great as to cause people from another shire to be mistaken for foreigners. Indeed, until the sixteenth century the English language, though perfectly suited to all the purposes of ordinary life and the lighter forms of literature, remained unfit for the treatment of questions such

1 The Polychronicon, which was the fourth work which Caxton published, bears for title: The Polychronycon, conteyning the Berynges and Dedes of many Times in eight Bokes. Imprinted by Wyllyam Caxton, after having somewhat changed the rude and olde Englysshe, that is to wete certayn Wordes which in thyse Dayes be neyther used ne vnderstonden. Ended the second Day of Juyll at Westmestre, the xxij yere of the Regne of Kynge Edward the Fourth, and of the Incarnacyon of oure Lord a Thousand four Hundred four Score and Tweyne.

as now everywhere occupied the public mind. Its vocabulary was still poor, and its form very much unsettled. Thus far the language of theology, law, politics, and erudition had been Latin; and so exclusively was the study of all these subjects confined to that language, that up to the middle of the sixteenth century scarcely a single word of Latin origin had come into general use, except such as had come through the Norman French. The old practice, however, of borrowing from the latter idiom whatever words were needed to supply existing deficiencies, and the favor with which the new words of the Renaissance and the Reformation were received by English scholars and translators, paved the way for the admission of an additional number of French terms, for which there were no equivalents in the existing language. On the other hand, the revival of the study of the classical writers of Greece and Rome, and the translations of their works into the vernacular, led to the introduction of a large number of new words directly derived from these languages, either to express new ideas and objects, or to indicate new distinctions or groupings of old ideas. Often, also, it seemed as if scholars were so pervaded with the form as well as with the spirit of the Old, that it was more natural for them to express themselves in words borrowed from the old than in their native tongue, and thus many words of Latin origin were introduced when English possessed perfectly good equivalents. Moreover, as the formation of new words from Latin was constantly going on in French as well as in English,' it was not always easy, in the absence of a standard dictionary, to distinguish whether a word was already accepted and natu ralized, or used for the first time; whether it was borrowed from contemporary French, or had been in the language since the Norman period. French words, whether of early or recent formation, presented themselves all alike as Latin in an altered form, and when used as English they supplied precedents and models whereby other Latin words could be converted into English whenever required, and it is after these models that many Latin words, during and since the sixteenth century, have been fashioned into English. While every writer was thus introducing new words, according to his idea of their being needed, it naturally happened that a large number were never ac

1 See pages 505-509.

cepted by contemporaries or posterity. Indeed, a portentous list might be made of Latin words thus introduced, which never had any existence outside of the works of those who used them.

This wholesale importation of Latin words and phrases, which none but the learned could understand, ceased by the middle of the seventeenth century. As in French so in English, Latin words that were necessary and useful were retained; all others were rejected and forgotten. Still the fondness for new and foreign terms, which has been a characteristic of the English language ever since the Norman period, was by no means checked by the reaction. New words from other sources continued to be introduced, often very needlessly, most of which have disappeared; others again, for which there was a real necessity, have become a permanent part of the vocabulary.

"Until the end of the fifteenth century," says Marsh, "it was only in the theological and moral departments that Latin had much direct influence upon English, most of the Latin roots introduced into it up to that time having been borrowed from the French; but as soon as the profane literature of Greece and Rome became known to English scholars through the press, a considerable influx of words drawn directly from the classics took place. The introduction of this element produced a sort of fermentation in the English language, a strife between the new and old, and both vocabulary and structure continued in a very unstable state until the end of the sixteenth century, when English became settled in nearly its present form. In the productions of Caxton's press, and, indeed, in the literature of the period, down to and including the time of Lord Berners, whose translation of Froissart, perhaps the best English prose that had yet been written, and certainly the most delightful narrative work in the language, first appeared in 1523, it is scarcely possible to find a single word of Latin origin belonging to the general vocabulary of English whose form does not render it most probable that we received it through the French. A hundred years later, on the contrary, we meet in every printed page words, either taken directly from the Latin, or, what is a very important point, if before existing in our literature, reformed in orthography, so as to suggest their classical origin.1

1 G. P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, p. 434.