Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac
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of Elizabeth against such a derogation of the learning and the dignity of the University. This very Vice-Chancellor, who had to protest against all English comedies, had, however, himself been the writer of “Gammer Gurton’s Needle,” which was long considered to be the first attempt at English comedy.6 This conduct of the University offered no encouragement to men of learning and genius to compose in their vernacular idiom.
The genius of Verulam, whose prescient views often anticipated the institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, appears never to have contemplated the future miracles of his maternal tongue. Lord Bacon did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of embalming all that philosophy can discover or poetry can invent; that his country, at length, would possess a national literature, and exult in models of its own. So little did Lord Bacon esteem the language of his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and what he had written in English he was anxious to have preserved, as he expresses himself, in “that universal language which may last as long as books last.” It might have surprised Lord Bacon to have been told that the learned in Europe would one day study English authors to learn to think and write, and prefer his own “Essays,” in their living pith, to the colder transfusions of the Latin versions of his friends. The taste of the philosophical Chancellor was probably inferior to his invention. Our illustrious Camden partook largely of this reigning fatuity when he wrote the reign of Elizabeth—the history of his contemporaries, and the “Britannia”—the history of our country, in the Latin language; as did Buchanan that of Scotland, and De Thou his great history, which includes that of the Reformation in France. All these works, addressed to the deepest sympathies of the people, were not imparted to them.
There was a peculiar absurdity in composing modern history in the ancient language of a people alike foreigners to the feelings as well as to the nature of the transactions. The Latin had neither proper terms to describe modern customs, nor fitting appellatives for titles and for names and places. The fastidious delicacy of the writers of modern latinity could not endure to vitiate their classical purity by the Gothic names of their heroes, and of the barbarous localities where memorable transactions had occurred. These great authors, in their despair, actually preferred to shed an obscurity over their whole history, rather than to disturb the collocation of their numerous diction. Buchanan and De Thou, by a ludicrous play on words, translated the proper names of persons and of places. A Scottish worthy, Wiseheart, was dignified by Buchanan with a Greek denomination, Sophocardus; so that in a history of Scotland the name of a conspicuous hero does not appear, or must be sought for in a Greek lexicon, which, after all, may require a punster for a reader. The history of De Thou is thus frequently unintelligible; and two separate indexes of names and places, and the public stations which his personages held, do not always agree with the copy preserved in the family. The names of the persons are latinised according to their etymology, and all public offices are designated by those Roman ones which bore some fancied affinity. But the modern office was ill indicated by the ancient; the constable of France, a military charge, differed from the magister equitum, and the marshals of France from the tribunus equitum. His equivocal personages are not always recognised in this travesty of their Roman masquerade.
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.
7 We now possess this valued literary history, which none, perhaps, but Anthony à Wood could have so fervently pursued: “The History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford,” in five volumes, quarto. Edited by John Gutch. It is a distinct work from the far-known “Athenæ Oxonienses.” Why did this great work, as well as some others, come forth with a Latin title? This absurdity was a remaining taint of the ancient prejudice. But an English work was not the more classical for bearing a Latin title.
ORIGIN OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Johnson pronounced it impossible to ascertain when our speech ceased to be Saxon and began to be English; and although since