A remarkable instance of the gross impropriety of composing an English history in Latin, and of the obstinate prejudice of the learned, who imagined that the ancient idiom conferred dignity on a theme wholly vernacular, appeared when the delegates of Oxford purchased Anthony Wood’s elaborate work on “The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford.” Our honest antiquary, with a true vernacular feeling, had written the history of an English university, during an uninterrupted labour of ten years, in his artless but natural idiom. The learned delegates opined that it was humiliating the Oxford press, to have its history pass through it in the language of the country; and Dr. Fell, with others, was chosen to dignify it into Latin. What was the result of this pompous and inane labour? The author was sorely hurt at the sight of his fair offspring disguised in its foreign and fantastic dress. What was clear in English, was obscure in the circumlocution of rotund periods and affected phraseologies; the circumstantial narrative and the local descriptions, so interesting to an English reader, were not only superfluous, but repulsive to the foreigner. Anthony Wood indignantly re-transcribed the whole of his English copy, and left the fair volumes to the care of the university itself, not without the hope which has been realized, that his work should be delivered to posterity stamped by its author’s native genius.[7]
Such was the crisis, and such the difficulties and the obstructions of that native literature in whose prosperous state every European people now exults. Homogeneous with their habitual associations, moulded by their customs and manners, and everywhere stamped by the peculiar organization of each distinct race, we see the vernacular literature ever imbued with the qualities of the soil whence it springs, diversified, yet ever true to nature. Had the native genius of the great luminaries of literature not found a vein which could reach to the humblest of their compatriots, they who are now the creators of our vernacular literature had remained but pompous plagiarists or frigid babblers, and the moderns might still have been pacing in the trammels of a mimetic antiquity.
[1] Sidonius Apollinaris.
[2] An ingenious literary antiquary has given us a copious vocabulary, as complete evidence of Latin words merely abbreviated by omitting their terminations, whence originated those numerous monosyllables which impoverish the French language. In the following instances the Gauls only used the first syllable for the entire word, damnum—damn; aureum—or; malum—mal; nudum—nud; amicus—ami: vinum—vin; homo—hom, as anciently written; curtus—court; sonus—son; bonus—bon: and thus made many others.
The nasal sound of our neighbours still prevails; thus Gracchus sinks into Gracque; Titus Livius is but Tite Live; and the historian of Alexander the Great, the dignified Quintus Curtius, is the ludicrous Quinte Curce!—Auguis, “Du Génie de la Langue Françoise.”
[3] Turner’s “History of England.”
[4] See “Curiosities of Literature,” article Recovery of Manuscripts.
[5] Erasmus composed a satirical dialogue between two vindictive Ciceronians; it is said that a duel has been occasioned by the intrepidity of maintaining the purity of a writer’s latinity. The pedantry of mixing Greek and Latin terms in the vernacular language is ridiculed by Rabelais in his encounter with the Limousin student, whom he terrified till the youngster ended in delivering himself in plain French, and left off “Pindarising” all the rest of his days.—“Pantagruel,” lib. ii. c. 6.
[6] Collier’s “History of Dramatic Poetry,” ii. 463.