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By Root 18623 0

and, which is far better, the learned portion of it had got thoroughly diffused and domesticated in the popular mind: for centuries the Saxon and Latin elements had been in process of blending and fusing together, so as to work smoothly and even lovingly side by side in the same thought; common people using both with the same easy and unstudied naturalness. Therewithal the language was then in just its freshest state of maturity; flexible to all the turns of philosophical and poetical discourse; full of vital sap and flavour; its cheeks plump and rosy, its step light and graceful, with health: pedants and grammarians had not starched and ironed it into self-conscious dignity and primness: it had not learnt the vice of putting on literary airs, and of practising before a looking-glass. Our translation of the Bible is enough of itself to prove all this, even if we had no other monuments of the fact. And the Elizabethan English was a right joyous and jolly tongue also, as became the heart of brave, honest, merry old England; yet it was earnest and candid withal, and had in no sort caught the French disease of vanity and persiflage: it was all alive, too, with virgin sensibility and imaginative delicacy; to say nothing of how Spenser found or made it as melodious and musical as Apollo's lute.

Shakespeare has many passages, some of them running to considerable length, made up almost wholly of Saxon words. Again, he has not a few wherein the Latin largely shares. Yet I can hardly see that in either case any thing of vigour and spirit is lost. On the other hand, I can often see a decided increase of strength and grasp resulting in part from a judicious mixing and placing of the two elements. I cite a few passages in illustration; the first two being from King Lear, the third from Antony and Cleopatra:

"Mine enemy's dog, Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire; and wast thou fain, poor father, To hovel thee with swine, and rogues forlorn, In short and musty straw?"

"We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down, And ask of thee forgivness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of Court news; and we'll talk with them too,— Who loses and who wins, who's in, who's out;— And take upon 's the mystery of things, As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out, In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones, That ebb and flow by th' Moon."

"Henceforth The white hand of a lady fever thee, Shake thou to look on't. Get thee back to Cæsar, Tell him thy entertainment: look thou say He makes me angry with him; for he seems Proud and disdainful, harping on what I am, Not what he knew I was: he makes me angry; And at this time most easy 'tis to do't, When my good stars, that were my former guides, Have empty left their orbs, and shot their fires Into th' abysm of Hell."

With these collate the following from Troilus and Cressida and King Lear, where, for aught I can see, the interweaving of Saxon and Latin words proceeds with just as much ease and happiness as the almost pure Saxon of the foregoing:

"How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogenity and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree, stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe: Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead: Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong— Between whose endless jar justice resides— Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then every thing includes itself in power Power into will, will into appetite; And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power, Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself."

"Tremble,