"Let foreign nations of their language boast What fine variety each tongue affords, I like our language as our men and coast, Who cannot dress it well want wit not words."
"Great, verily," says Camden, "was the glory of our tongue before the Norman conquest, in this, that the old English could express most aptly all the conceptions of the mind in their own speech without borrowing from any."
We still draw from the same wells of meaning as did Chaucer and Camden; the language, by additions from foreign sources, as by native growth, having now become the most composite of any; it is the one we speak, and affect to teach. If we have few masters, it is because we yet cultivate other tongues at its cost. Scholars praise the exceeding richness and beauty of the best writers of the age of Elizabeth, but fail to inform us by what happy chances, whether by force of genius altogether, or more natural methods of study, the language and literature came to its prime in that period. Meanwhile it were not amiss for us to listen to the great authors and teachers of those golden days when our tongue had the sweep and splendor, the force, depth, accuracy, the grace and flexibility proper to its genius and idiom, if we may learn from these authorities by what method they attained to their proficiency in its use; instructors of Princes, as they were, and inspirers of those who made the literature.
Roger Ascham—Queen Elizabeth's school-master—proposed after teaching the common rudiments of grammar to begin a course of double translation, first from Latin into English, and shortly after from English into Latin, correcting the mistakes of the student and leading to the formation of a classical style, by pointing out the differences between the re-translation and the original, and explaining their reasons. "His whole system is built upon the principle of dispensing as much as possible with the details of grammar, and he supports his theory by a triumphant reference to its practical effects, especially as displayed in the case of Queen Elizabeth, whose well known proficiency in Latin, he declares to have been obtained without grammatical rules, after the very simplest had been mastered."
Sir Philip Sidney, whose opinions are of the highest importance in these matters, speaking in his "Defence of Poesie," says:
"Another will say that English wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wants not grammar; for grammar it might have, but needs not, being so easie in itselfe and so void of those cumbersome differencies of cases, genders, moods and tenses, which I think was a piece of the tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learn his mother tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde which is the end of speech, that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world."[[D]]
Milton, to whom, next to Shakespeare our tongue owes most, and who spent much time in compiling an English Dictionary, writes in one of his Italian Letters:
"Whoever in a state, knows how to form wisely the manners and men and to rule them at home and in war, by excellent institutions, him in the first place above all others I should esteem worthy of honor. But next to him, the man who strives in maxims and rules the method and habit of speaking and writing derived from a good age of the nation, and as it were to fortify the same round with a kind of wall, the daring to overleap which a law only short of that of Romulus should be used to prevent. Should we choose to compare the two in respect to utility, it is the former alone that can make the social existence of the citizens just and holy, but it is the latter that makes it splendid and beautiful, which is the next thing to be desired. The one, as I believe, supplies a noble courage and intrepid counsels against an enemy invading the territory; the other takes to himself the task of extirpating and defeating by means of a learned detective police of ears, and a light-infantry of good authors, that barbarism which makes large inroads upon the minds of men and is a destructive intestine enemy to genius. Nor is it to be considered of small importance what language, pure or corrupt, a people has, or what is their customary degree of propriety in speaking it—a matter which oftener than once was the salvation of Athens. Nay, as it is Plato's opinion, that, by a change in the manner and habit of dress, serious commotions and mutations are portended in a commonwealth, I, for my part, would rather believe that the fall of that city, and low and obscure condition, followed on the general vitiation of its usage in the matter of speech. For let the words of a country be in part unhandsome and offensive in themselves, in part debased by wear, and wrongly uttered, and what do they declare but by no light indication, that the inhabitants of that country are an indolent, idly-yawning race, with minds already prepared for any amount of servility? On the other hand, we have never heard that any empire, any state, did not flourish in at least a middling degree as long as its liking and care for its language lasted."
Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression. If we consult our experience we shall find that we owe much to the home dialect, the school, the books we read, the letters we write; to our fellowships, the practice of such living speakers and writers as chance threw in our way, our habits of thinking, observations of life and things, the cultivation of the sensibilities, imagination, the common sense, more than all else besides. A man's speech is the measure of his culture; a graceful utterance the first born of the arts.