That the artistic value of a choice and
noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours is
evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on Drayton, and
by the epithet "well-languaged" applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is
as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless absurdities about the
comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by persons
incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other, were as yet
unheard of. Hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that the
Saxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly,
it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed to
answer the demands of complex ideas, derived from them. The author of
"Piers Ploughman" wrote for the people,--Chaucer for the court. We open
at random and count the Latin[122] words in ten verses of the "Vision"
and ten of the "Romaunt of the Rose," (a translation from the French,)
and find the proportion to be seven in the former and five in the latter.
The organs of the Saxon have always been unwilling and stiff in learning
languages. He acquired only about as many British words as we have Indian
ones, and I believe that more French and Latin was introduced through the
pen and the eye than through the tongue and the ear.
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