Amenities of Literature. Disraeli Isaac

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Amenities of Literature - Disraeli Isaac


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youth “first learned the French, and from the French the Latin.” Our youth were sent into France to polish their nasal Norman. This writer flourished about 1330, and thus ascertains, that in the beginning of the reign of Edward III. no English was taught. The “Polychronicon,” a Latin chronicle compiled by the monk Higden, was finished somewhat later, about 1365; and we find the complaint more bitterly renewed. “There is no nation,” wrote this honest monk, “whose children are compelled to leave their own language, as we have since the Normans came into England. A gentleman’s child must speak French from the time that he is rocked in a cradle, or plays with a child’s breche.”

      The Latin Chronicle of Higden, twenty years later, was translated into English by John de Trevisa. On this passage the translator furnishes the important observation, that, since this was written, a revolution had occurred through our grammar-schools: the patriotic efforts of one Sir John Cornewaile, in teaching his pupils to construe their Latin into English, had been generally adopted; “so that now,” proceeds Trevisa, “the yere of our Lorde 1385, in all the grammere scoles of Engelond, children leaveth Frensche and construeth and lerneth in Englische.” The innovation had startled our translator, for, like all innovations, there was loss as well as profit, when, quitting what we are accustomed to, we launch dubiously into a new acquisition. The disuse of the French would detriment their intercourse abroad, and, on great occasions, at home. This was a time when Trevisa himself, in selecting some Scriptural inscriptions for the chapel of Berkley Castle, where he was chaplain, had them painted on boards in Norman-French, and Latin, in alternate lines. They are still visible. English itself was yet too base for the service of God.

      It was still a debateable question, as appears by the prefatory dialogue between Trevisa and his patron, Lord Berkley, whether any translation of the Chronicle were at all necessary, Latin being the general language. It was, however, a noble enterprise, being the first great effort in our vernacular prose. This mighty volume is a universal history, which, in its amplitude and miscellaneous character, seemed to contain all that men could know; and the version long enjoyed the favour of all readers as the first historical collection in the English language. It bears the seal of the monkish taste, being equally pious and fabulous. It not only opens before the days of Adam, but, like the creation, has its seven divisions; it has monsters, however, which are not found in Genesis. The monk is doubtful whether they came of Adam or of Noah. They, indeed, came from the elder Pliny, to whose puerile wonders and hasty compilation we owe the foundation of our natural history.

      If we place by the side of the text of Wickliffe our later versions, we may become familiar with that Saxon-English which our venerable Caxton subsequently considered was “more like to Dutch than English.”

      But the picturesque language of our emotions, the creative diction of poetry, appeared in the courtly style of Chaucer, who nobly designed to render the national language refined and varied, while his great contemporaries, the author of Piers Ploughman lingered in a rude dialect, and Gower was still composing alternately in Latin and in French.


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