LECTURE I. that although Chaucer has been charged with innovation by the introduction of words derived from the French

that although Chaucer has been charged with innovation by the introduction of words derived from the French, yet, as he wrote for the people even more than for the learned and polite, it is probable that he only followed, and did not go beyond the demand of the time and the progress of the language. He is, however, the first writer who has embodied in his imperishable works the exotic words introduced about that period.

Dr. Johnson refers to Sir John Gower as the first of our authors that can properly be said to have written English; Gower describes Chaucer as his disciple, and hence he may be considered the Father of our poetry.

About a century after Chaucer, flourished Sir Thomas More, the learned and amiable, but un­fortunate, Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII. In his time our language was in a great degree formed and settled; and it appears from Ben Johnson that More's works were, in his day, considered as models of pure and elegant style. In his writings, whether prose or verse, it will be found that, while the familiar and colloquial part of the English language had undergone very little change, the number of words borrowed from the Latin had greatly increased, where the subject treated of was less familiar and the style em­ployed less colloquial. This difference, which exists to the present time, appears in a remark­able manner, on a comparison between two bal-

LECTURE I. 9

lads of this author, as given in Dr. Johnson's " Historical Sketch of the English Language." The first is entitled, A merry jest how a serjeant (at law) would learne to playe the freer (friar); and it is almost exclusively in words derived from the Saxon. The second is, A rureful lamen­tation of the deth of Quene Elisabeth, Mother to King Henry the eight; 1503. This monody, being of a more solemn and dignified character, abounds in words of Latin derivation; such as "confidence," ^uprosperity," " concord," " immor­tal," " infinite," "blandishing," " comfort," " for­tunate," and many others, not to be found in the " Merry Jest," but of frequent recurrence in the " Lamentacion."

It has been well observed, by the Professor of English Literature in one of the Queen's Colleges in Ireland, that " out of the practice of borrow­ing words from the French, there grew another of fabricating similar words directly from the Latin, the great source of the French. In this way many words of Latin formation found their way into the English which the French had never possessed, but which were all constructed, never­theless, upon the model of those that had been received through the medium of that language. Thus, for example, every such word formed from a Latin substantive in tio was made to end in tion, and every one formed from a Latin sub­stantive in itas in ity, (after the French ite.)"

LECTURE I.

The same learned author further remarks, that, " although many of the words thus transplanted from the Latin and French never effected a cohe­sion with the soil of the language, and some perhaps never have been used except by the writer who introduced them, many took firm root, and they now constitute a large and indispensable portion of our national speech."*

The introduction, for the most part, of words borrowed from the classical languages, was coeval with the revival of learning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; when not only learned men, but ladies and princesses, read and wrote in Latin with ease and elegance. And it is not a little remarkable, that, with the taste for "the classics" in literature, as the dead languages were called, (probably because they constituted the study of the highest classes in schools,) a disrelish for the Gothic in architecture began to prevail. And as with respect to literature in a subsequent age, a pedantic or aureate style, affecting Latin-derived words to the depreciation of purer Eng­lish, came into vogue,+—so in the fine arts there

• See " Outlines of the History of the English Language." By G. L Craik. Second Edition, p. 100.

+ The pedantic and excessive employment of such terms, by the Scottish versifiers of so early period as the fifteenth century, is objected to by Campbell (in his Essay on English Poetry); the generality of whom, he observes, ^u when they meant to be most eloquent, tore up words from the Latin, which never took root in the language, like

LECTURE I.

arose a desire to adopt the classical in preference to the Gothic; not, however, the pure taste of ancient Greece, but a heavy and fantastic style, incumbered with ornamentation of a debased and incongruous character.

In both cases, I allude only to the abuse, by exaggeration, of the style adverted to. As the severe and chaste Grecian Architecture in its classic simplicity is to be admired, although not to the depreciation of the Gothic, as more especially suited to ecclesiastical edifices, so simple Anglo-Saxon words are to be valued, but not to the rejection of those that have been derived from Latin directly, or secondarily through the French; nor of those which have been borrowed either directly from the Greek, or from that com­prehensive and expressive language through the Latin.

Of late years the revival of Gothic Architec­ture has been contemporaneous with the return by many writers to the simplicity of the Anglo-Saxon in style; and this no doubt has been an improvement. At the same time, as I think that it would be a mistake to adopt the Mediaeval style of architecture, to the entire rejection of the Grecian or Italian, perhaps better suited to domestic and secular as distinguished from eccle-

children making a mock garden with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither."

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