J. About half a yeare.”
So the dialogue goes on, and there is a series of them.
III. A second exemplification of the superlative obstacles which persons born out of England have at all periods encountered in the endeavour to comprehend on their own part, and render intelligible to others, our insular speech, is taken from the Italian Grammar of Henry Pleunus, printed at Leghorn at the end of the seventeenth century.
Now, here, in lieu of the alleged width of acceptability, which meets the eye in the traveller’s pocket-dictionary just described, we get a positive assurance that the author was a master of the English tongue; and it may be predicated of him that, compared with the majority of foreigners, he exhibits a proficiency very considerably above the average, though we honestly believe it to be grossly improbable that “every one speaks English at Legorne,” as he says in one of the Anglo-Italian dialogues. There can be no desire to be hypercritical in judging such a production, or to lay stress on occasional slips of spelling and prosody; but the English of Pleunus very often strikes one—nor is it surprising that it should be so—as Italian literally rendered. He probably never attained an idiomatic phraseology; and one would have said less about it, had it not been for that sort of professorial assumption on the title-page.
Going back in order of time, I shall furnish some specimens of the tetraglot History of Aurelio and of Isabel Daughter to the King of Scotland, translated from the Spanish, and printed in 1556 at Antwerp. I propose to quote a passage where two knights in love with Isabel propose to cast lots for her:—“I fynde none occasion that is so iuste, that by the same lof you, or you of me maye complayne vs: inasmuch that euery one of vs by him selfe is ynoughe more bounde vnto the loue, that he beareth to Isabell, then vnto any other bounde of frendshippe. And therfore I see not, that I for respecte of you, nor you also for mine to be ought to withdrawe from the high enterprise alreadie by vs begonne. Nor in likewise might be called a vertuouse worke, that we both together in one place sould displane the louingly sailes [voilles amoureuses in the French column], for that shoulde be to defile, that so great betwene vs and more, then of brother conioyned frendship.”
Here it is not so conspicuously the orthography that is at fault, as the composition and syntax. But up and down this little book, too, there are some drolleries of spelling. The translator from the Spanish of Juan de Flores, whoever he was (a Frenchman probably), understood French and Italian; but surely his conversance with the remaining tongue was on a par with that of the majority of his Continental fellow-dwellers then, before, and since; and doubtless his printer has not failed to contribute to the barbarous unintelligibility of the English text. This is the book to which Collins the poet mistakenly informed Warton that Shakespear had resorted for the story of the Tempest.
But a far stranger monument of orthographical and grammatical heresies exists in The historijke Pvrtreatvres of the woll[4] Bible, printed at Lyons in 1553. It is a series of woodcuts, with a quatrain in English beneath each picture descriptive of its meaning, and is introduced by an elaborate epistle by Peter Derendel and an Address from the printer to the reader. Both, however, probably proceeded from the pen of Derendel, who was doubtless connected with Pierre Erondelle, a well-known preceptor in London at a somewhat later date.
The verses which occur throughout the volume are literal translations, presumably by Erondelle, from the French, and are singular enough, and might have tempted quotation; but, eccentric as they are, they are completely thrown into the background by the prolegomena, and more especially by the preface purporting to come from the printer of the work, which is the common set of blocks relating to Biblical subjects, made in the present case to accompany an English letterpress.
I will transcribe only the commencement of the preface, whoseever it may be:—“The affection mine all waies towarde the hartlie ernest, louing reader, being cōtinuallie commaunded of the dutie of mi profession, mai not but dailie go about to satisfie the in this, withe thow desirest and lookest for in mi vacation, the withe, to mai please the, I wolde it were to mi minde so free and licentiouse streched at large, as it is be the mishappe of the time restrained.”
The discovery of Moses by Pharaoh’s daughter is thus poetically set forth:—