[20] “Edinburgh Review,” Oct., 1839.
[21] See “Quarterly Rev.,” lix. 34.—The critic is deeply imbued with his delight of Saxon-English. “The first bursts in our literature (probably the noblest are meant) are in almost pure Saxon.” The critic particularly appeals to Milton for two instances; yet surely the Greekised, the Latinised, and even the Italianised Milton will not serve to assert the pre-eminence of our venerable dialect. “A country congregation” is its more certain test; where the language of the people is the only language required. Cobbett’s writings throughout are Saxon-English. Coleridge considered Asgill and De Foe the most idiomatic writers.
VICISSITUDES OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
The vicissitudes of the English language are more evident than its origin. In the history of a language we are perpetually reminded, by the remonstrances of the critics, of the corruptions of its purity, the perils of innovation, and the obtrusion of neologisms, while we find these same critics fastidiously rejecting what they deem the antiquated and the obsolete; many causes are constantly operating these changes of language. The style of one age ceases to be that of another; new modifications of thought create new modes of expression; and as knowledge enlarges its sphere, and society changes its manners, novel objects imperiously demand adequate terms.
Our language has been subjected to those dominant events in the history of our country which have so powerfully influenced our genius and our destiny; and, our insular position occasioning a general intercourse with all the Continental nations, our national idiom has been mottled by foreign neologisms.
For more than five centuries was the Saxon language the language of England; the awful revolution of 1066 produced novelties of all kinds, but none greater than the entire change in our Saxon language, which, however, our Norman masters could never eradicate from among the people. During three centuries most of our English writers composed in French. When Greek was first studied in the reign of Henry the Seventh, it planted many a hellenism in our English; the translation of the Scriptures in that of Edward the Sixth, while it transmitted many latinisms, at the same time revived the simplicity of the Saxon-English, which seemed to bear a sort of evidence that a primitive language was most suitable for primitive Christianity in contrast with the pompous corruptions of Rome.
Under Elizabeth favourite phrases were insinuated into the dialect by over-refined travellers, who spoke “minionlike,” while the revolution of the Netherlands incorporated among us many a rough but vigorous inmate. In the days of James and Charles, the long residence of the Spanish Gondomar at our court, and the romantic pilgrimage of love to Madrid, and the political ties which bound the two nations, framed the style of courtesy, as well as set the fashions.
The puritanic commonwealth under Cromwell sunk down the language to its basest uses. Stripped to nakedness, the jargon of the market and the shop hid itself under the gibberish of its cant. Writers then abounded equally illiterate and fanatical. Perhaps we owe to these mean scribblers the scorn and pride with which Milton constructed on the Latin model of inversions and involutions of sentences his artificial and learned prose, unlike the style of his contemporaries, and which was never to be that of his successors; it was a machinery too costly for its price, and too unwieldy for the handling of an ordinary workman. Under the second Charles we see the nation and the language equally gallicised, and so it remained to the days of Anne. Suppose for a moment that when the first Georges were appointed to the English throne, the Germany of that day had been the Germany of the present. What would have been the result? Instead of two torpid Germans, destitute of every sensibility to literature and art, we might have seen an accomplished Duke of Weimar at St. James’s, and a Wieland, a Schiller, and a Goethe at our court; our authors had been impressed by the German genius, in our emulation and delight. Such is the simple history of the English language as it has been, or might have been, subjected to our national events.