Chapter XVI: Part 16

When Elizabeth ascended the throne, there was yet no recognised "public" in the commonwealth; the people were mere fractional and incoherent parts of society. This heroic queen, whose position and whose masculine character bear some affinity to those of the great Catharine of Russia, had to create "a people" subservient to the very design of advancing the regal authority in its ascendancy. The policy of the maiden queen was that of her ancestors; but the same jealousy of the aristocracy turned her genius to a new source of influence, unknown to her progenitors, and which her successors afterwards hardly recognised. In the awful mutations through which society had been passing, some had been silently favourable to the queen's views. The population had considerably risen since the reign of Henry the Seventh.[3] Property had changed hands, and taken new directions; and independent classes in society were rising fast.

The great barons formerly had kept open houses for all comers and goers; five hundred or a thousand "blue coats" in a single family crowded their castles or their mansions; these were "trencher slaves" and "swash-bucklers;" besides those numerous "retainers" of great lords, who, neither menial nor of the household, yet yielded their services on special occasions, for the privilege of shielding their own insolence under the ostentatious silver "badge," or the family arms, which none might strike with impunity, and escape from the hostility of the whole noble family. In the opening scene of _Romeo and Juliet_ our national bard has perpetuated the insolence of the wearers with all the reality of nature and correctness of custom. Such troops of idling partisans were only reflecting among themselves the feuds and the pride of their rival masters; shadows of the late civil wars which still lingered in the land.[4]

The first blow at the independent grandeur of the nobles had been struck by the grandfather of the queen; the second was the consequence of the acts of her father. The new proprietors of the recently-acquired abbey-lands, and other monastic property, were not only courtiers, but their humbler dependents; many of them the commissioners who had undervalued all these manors and lordships, that they might get such "Robin Hood's pennyworths" more easily by the novelty of "begging" for them. These formed a new body of proprietors, who gradually constituted _a new gentry_, standing between the nobles and the commonalty; and from the nature of their property they became land-jobbers, letting and under-letting, raising rents, enhancing the prices of commodities, inclosing the common lands, and swallowing up the small farms by large ones. There arose in consequence a great change in agricultural pursuits, no longer practised to acquire a miserable subsistence; the land was changed into a new mine of wealth; and among the wealthiest classes of English subjects were the graziers, who indeed became the founders of many families.[5]

The nobles found their revenues declining, as an excess of expenditure surprised them; this changeable state only raised their murmurs, for they seemed insensible to the cause. Their ancient opulence was secretly consuming itself; their troops of domestics were thinned in numbers; and a thousand families disappeared, who once seemed to have sprung out of the soil, where whole generations had flourished through the wide domains of the lord. A great change had visibly occurred in the baronial halls. The octogenarians in Elizabeth's later days complained that the country was depopulating fast; and the chimneys of the great mansions which had smoked the year round, now scarcely announced "a merry Christmas."

A transition from one state of society to another will always be looked on suspiciously by those who may deem the results problematical; but it will be eagerly opposed by those who find the innovation unfavourable to themselves. The results of the new direction of landed property, incomprehensible to the nobles, were abhorrent to the feelings of the people. Among "the people," that is, the populace, there still survived tender reminiscences of the warmth of the abbots' kitchens; and many a wayfaring guest could tell how erst by ringing at the monastic gate the wants of life had been alleviated. The monks, too, had been excellent landlords living amid their tenants; and while the husbandmen stood at easy rents, the public markets were regularly maintained by a constant demand. In the breaking up of the monasteries many thousands of persons had been dispersed; and it would seem that among that sturdy community of vagabonds which now rose over the land, some low Latin words in their "pedler's French," as the canting language they devised is called, indicate their origin from the familiar dialect of the ejected poor scholars of the late monastic institutions.

The commotions which rose in all parts of the country during the brief reign of Edward the Sixth were instigated by the ancient owners of these lands, who conceived that they had been disinherited by the spoliators; thus weakly they avenged their irrecoverable losses; nor did such leaders want for popular pretences among a discontented populace, who, as they imagined, were themselves sufferers in the common cause. We are informed, on the indubitable authority of the diary of the youthful Edward, that "_the_ PEOPLE had conceived a wonderful hatred against GENTLEMEN whom they held as _their enemies_." The king seems distinctly to distinguish the gentry from the nobility.

In the decline of the great households a result, however, occurred, which tended greatly to improve the independent condition of "the people." The manual arts had been practised from generation to generation, the son succeeding the father in the wide domains of some noble; but when the great lords were contracting the scale of their establishments, and failed to furnish occupation to these dependents, the mechanics and artificers took refuge in the towns; there localised, they were taught to reap the fruits of their own daily industry; and as their labour became more highly appreciated, and the arts of commerce were more closely pursued, they considerably heightened the cost of those objects of necessity or pleasure which supplied the wants or the luxuries of the noble. In becoming citizens, they ceased to be mere domestics in the great households; a separate independence was raised between the lord and his mechanic; the humble class lost something in leaving the happy carelessness of life for a condition more anxious and precarious; but the influence of the noble was no longer that of the lord paramount, but simply the influence of the customer over the tradesman; "an influence," as Hume shrewdly remarks, "which can never be dangerous to civil government."

We now distinctly perceive new classes in civil society rising out of the decline of the preponderating power of the great barons, and of the new disposition of landed property; the gentry, the flourishing agriculturist, and those mechanics and artificers who carried on their trades, independently of their former lordly patrons; we now, therefore, discern the first elements of popularity.

There was now "a people," who might be worthy of entering into the views of the statesman; but it was a divided people. Among them, the queen knew, lay concealed her domestic enemies; a more novel religion than the new was on the watch to shake her established church; and no inconsiderable portion of her subjects in their papal consciences were traitors. The arts of juncture, or the keeping together parts broken and separated, making hearts compliant which were stubbornly opposed to each other, demanded at once the firmness and the indulgence of the wisest policy; and such was the administration of Elizabeth. A reign of continued struggle, which extended to nearly half a century, was a probationary period for royalty; and a precarious throne, while it naturally approximated the sovereign to the people, also taught the nation its own capacities, by maintaining their monarch's glory amid her external and internal enemies.

The nobility was to feel the weight of the royal prerogative; no noble families were permitted to intermarry, and no peer could leave the kingdom, without the license of the queen. But at the very time she was ruling them with a potent hand, Elizabeth courted the eyes and the hearts of "the people;" she sought every occasion to exhibit her person in processions and progresses, and by her speech and manner shed her graciousness on the humblest of her subjects. Not slow to perceive their wants and wishes, she it was who first gave the people a theatre, as her royal style expressed it, "for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure;" and this at a time when her council were divided in their opinion.

Participating in the inmost feelings of the people, she commanded that the awful tomes of Fox's "Acts and Monuments," a book written, as the author has himself expressed it, for "the simple people," should be chained to the desk of every church and common hall. In this "Book of Martyrs," gathered from all quarters, and chronicling the obscurest individuals, many a reader, kindling over the lengthened page, dwelt on his own domestic tale in the volume of the nation. These massy volumes were placed easy of access for perpetual reference, and doubtless their earnest spirit multiplied Protestants.

No object which concerned the prosperity of the people but the Queen identified herself with it; she saluted Sir Thomas Gresham as her "royal merchant," and opening with her presence his Exchange, she called it Royal. It is a curious evidence of her system to win over the people's loyalty, that she suggested to Sir Thomas Wilson to transfuse the eloquence of Demosthenes into the language of the people, to prepare them by such solemn admonitions against the machinations of her most dreaded enemy. Our translator reveals the design by his title: "The Three Orations of Demosthenes, with those his fower Orations titled expressly and by name against King Philip of Macedonie, most needful to be redde in these dangerous dayes, of all them that love their countrie's libertie." The Queen considered the aptness of their application, and the singular felicity of transferring the inordinate ambition of Philip of Macedon to Philip of Spain. To these famous "philippics" was prefixed the solemn oath that the young men of Greece took to defend their country against the royal invader, "at this time right needful for all Christians, not only for Englishmen, to observe and follow."

It was not until eighteen years after that the Armada sailed from the shores of Spain, and this translation perpetuates an instance of political foresight.

The genius of Elizabeth created her age; surrounding herself by no puny favourites of an hour, in the circle of her royalty were seen the most laborious statesmen our annals record, and a generation of romantic commanders; the secretaries of state were eminently learned; and the queen was all these herself, in her tried prudence, her dauntless intrepidity, and her lettered accomplishments. The energies of the sovereign reached the people, and were responded to; the spirit-stirring events rose with the times: it was a reign of enterprise and emulation, a new era of adventure and glory. The heroes of England won many a day's battle in the Netherlands, in France, in Spain, and in Portugal; and the ships of England unfurled their flags in unknown seas, and left the glory of the maiden queen in new lands.

It would be no slight volume which should contain the illustrious names of a race of romantic adventurers, who lost their sleep to gain new trophies in a campaign, to settle a remote colony, or to give a name to a new continent. All ranks in society felt the impulse of the same electrical stroke, and even the cupidity of the mere trader was elevated into heroism, and gained a patent of heraldry. The spirits of that age seemed busied with day-dreams, of discovering a new people, or founding a new kingdom. Shakespeare alludes to this passion of the times:

Some to the wars, to try their fortune there;
Some to discover islands far away.

If our Drake was considered by the Spaniard as the most terrible of pirates, in England he was admired as another Columbus. The moral feeling may sometimes be more justly regulated by the degree of latitude. The Norrises, the Veres, the Grenvilles, the Cavendishes, the Earl of Cumberland, and the Sidneys, bear a lustre in their characters which romance has not surpassed; and many there were as resolutely ambitious as Sir John Davies, who has left his name to the Straits still bearing it. Sir Henry Sidney, the father of Sir Philip, who became a distinguished statesman, had once designed to raise a new kingdom in America; and his romantic son resumed this design of founding an empire for the Sidneys. The project was secretly planned between our puerile hero and the adventurous Drake, and was only frustrated by the queen's arrest of our hero at Plymouth. Of the same batch of kingdom-founders was Sir Walter Rawleigh; he baptised with the spirit of loyalty his "Virginia." Muscovy, at that stirring period, was a dominion as strange as America and the Indies; during the extraordinary events of this period, when Elizabeth had obtained a monopoly of the trade of that country, the Czar proposed to marry an English lady; a British alliance, both personal and political, he imagined, should his subjects revolt, might secure an asylum in the land of his adoption. The daughter of the Earl of Huntington was actually selected by the queen to be the Czarina; but her ladyship was so terrified at the Muscovite and his icy region, that she lost the honour of being a romantic empress, and the civilizer of all the Russias. Thus, wherever the winds blew, the name of Elizabeth was spread; "the great globe itself" seemed to be our "inheritance," and seemed not too vast a space to busy the imaginations of the people.

This was the time of first beginnings in the art of guiding public opinion. Ample volumes, like those of Fox, powerful organs of the feelings of the people, were given to them. The Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed opened for them the glory of the love of their father-land. It was the genius of this active age of exploits which inspired RICHARD HAKLUYT to form one of the most remarkable collections in any language, yet it was solely to be furnished from our own records, and the mighty actors in the face of the universe were solely to be Englishmen. Now appeared the three tomes of "The Principal Navigations, Voyages, and Discoveries, made by the English Nation;" northward, southward, and westward, and at last "the new-found world of America;" a world, with both Indies, discovered within their own century!--these amazed and delighted all classes of society. The legendary voyages of the monkish chroniclers, their maritime expeditions, opening with the fabulous Arthur, hardly exceeded the simplicity of our first discoverers. Many a hero had led on the adventurers; but their secretaries and historians were often themselves too astonished at what they witnessed, and stayed too short a time, to recover their better judgment in new places, and among new races of men. Sanctioned by many noble and genuine adventures, not less authentic appeared their terrors and their wonder; in polar icebergs, or before that island which no ship could approach, wherein devils dwelt; or among the sunny isles of Greece, and the burning regions of Ormus and Malacca, and the far realms of Cambaya and Cathay; in Ethiopia and in Muscovy, in Persia and in Peru; on the dark coast of Guinea, and beyond in Africa; and in Virginia, with her feathered chiefs; with many a tale of Tripoli and Algiers, where Britons were found in chains, till the sovereign of England demanded their restitution, and of the Holy Land, where the peaceful crusaders now only knelt in pilgrimage. All this convinced them that the world was everywhere inhabited; and that all was veracious, as Sebastian Cabot, the true rival of Columbus, and perhaps our countryman, had marked in his laborious maps, which he had engraved, and which were often wondered at, as they hung in the Privy Gallery at Westminster. Alas! for the readers of modern travels, who can no longer participate in the wild and awful sensations of the all-believing faith of "the home-bred wit" of the Elizabethan era--the first readers of HAKLUYT'S immense collection.

The advancement of general society out of its first exclusive circle became apparent when "the public" themselves were gradually forming a component part of the empire.

"The new learning," as the free discussions of opinions and the popular literature of the day were distinguished, widely spread. Society was no longer scattered in distant insulations. Their observation was more extended, their thought was more grave; tastes multiplied, and finer sympathies awakened. "The theatre" and "the ordinary" first rose in this early stage of our civilization; and the ceaseless publications of the day, in the current form of pamphlets, were snatched up, even in the intervening pauses of theatrical representation, or were commented upon by some caustic oracle at the ordinary, or in Powles' walk. We were now at the crisis of that great moral revolution in the intellectual history of a people, when the people become readers, and the people become writers. In the closer intercourse with their neighbours, their insulated homeliness was giving way to more exotic manners; they seemed to imitate every nation while they were incurring the raillery or the causticity of our satirists, who are not usually the profoundest philosophers. The satirists are the earliest recorders of manners, but, fugitive historians of fugitive objects, they only sport on the surface of things. The progressive expansion of social life, through its homeliest transitions, are more clearly discerned in the perspective view; for those who are occupied by opening their narrow ways, and by lengthening their streets, do not contemplate on the architectural city which is reserved for posterity.

It was popular to ridicule the finical "Monsieur Traveller," who was somewhat insolent by having "swum in a gondola;" or to raise a laugh at him who had "bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, and his bonnet in Germany." It did not occur to our immortal satirist that the taste which had borrowed the doublet and the bonnet, had also introduced to his happier notice the tales of Bandello and the Giuletta of Luigi Porto. The dandy of Bishop Hall almost resembles the fantastic picture of Horace, in illustrating a combination of absurdities. Hall paints with vigour:

A French head join'd to neck Italian;
His thighs from Germany, his breast from Spain;
An Englishman in none, a fool in all.

But if this egregious man of fashion borrowed the wordiness of Italian compliment, or the formality of the Spanish courtesy, he had been also taught the sonnet and the stanza, and those musical studies which now entered into the system of education, and probably gave delicacy to our emotions, and euphony to our language. The first attempts in the refinements of manners are unavoidably vitiated by too close a copy; and it is long before that becomes graceful which began in affectation. When the people experienced a ceaseless irritability, a marvelling curiosity to learn foreign adventures and to inspect strange objects, and "laid out ten doits to see a dead Indian," these were the nascent propensities which made Europe for them a common country, and indicated that insular genius which at a distant day was to add new dominions to the British empire.

This public opinion which this sovereign was creating she watched with solicitude, not only at home, but even abroad. No book was put forth against her government, but we find her ministers selecting immediately the most learned heads or the most able writers to furnish the replies. Burghley, we are told, had his emissaries to inform him of the ballads sung in the streets; and a curious anecdote at the close of the reign of Elizabeth informs us how anxiously she pondered on the manifestations of her people's feelings. The party of Lord Essex, on the afternoon before their insurrection, ordered the play of the tragical abdication of Richard the Second. It is one of the charges in their trial; and we learn, from a more secret quarter than the public trial, that the queen deeply felt the acting of this play at that moment as the watchword of the rebels, expressive of their designs. The queen's fears transformed her into Richard the Second; and a single step seemed to divide her throne from her grave. The recollection of this circumstance long haunted her spirits; for, a year and a half afterwards, in a literary conversation with the antiquary Lambarde, the subject of a portrait of Richard the Second occurring, the queen exclaimed, "I am Richard the Second, know ye not that?" The antiquary, at once wary and ingenuous, replied, well knowing that the virgin queen would shrink were her well-beloved Essex to be cast among ordinary rebels, "Such a wicked imagination was attempted by a most unkind gentleman, the most adorned creature that ever your majesty made." The queen replied, "He that will forget God will also forget his benefactors." So long afterwards was the royal Elizabeth still brooding over the gloomy recollection.

In the art of government a new principle seemed to have arisen, that of adopting and guiding public opinion, which, in the mutations of civil and political society, had emerged as from a chaos. A vacillating and impetuous monarch could not dare it; it was the work of a thoughtful sovereign, whose sex inspired a reign of love. Elizabeth not only lived in the hearts of her people, but survived in their memories; when she was no more, her birthday was long observed as a festival day; and so prompt was the remembrance of her deeds and her words, that when Charles the First once published his royal speech, an insidious patriot sent forth "The Speech of Queen Elizabeth," which being innocently printed by the king's printer, brought him into trouble. Our philosophic politician, Harrington, has a remarkable observation on the administration of Elizabeth, which, laying aside his peculiar views on monarchy, and his theoretical balances in the State, we may partly adopt. He says, "If the government of Elizabeth be rightly weighed, it seems rather the exercise of a principality in a commonwealth than a sovereign power in a monarchy. Certain it is that she ruled wholly with an art she had to high perfection, by humouring and blessing her people."

Did Harrington imagine that political resembles physical science? In the revelations of the Verulamian philosophy, it was a favourite axiom with its founder, that we subdue Nature by yielding to her.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Spelman's "History of Sacrilege."

[2] 34 Henry VIII.

[3] Hallam's "Constitution of England," i. 8, 4to.

[4] The remains of this feudal pomp and power were visible even at a
later period in the succeeding reign, when we find the Earl of
Nottingham, in his embassy to Spain, accompanied by a retinue of five
hundred persons, and the Earl of Hertford, at Brussels, carried three
hundred gentlemen.

[5] "The graziers have assured me of their credit, and some of them
may be trusted for a hundred thousand pounds."--Sir J. Harrington's
Prologue to _The Metamorphosis of Ajax_.

ORTHOGRAPHY AND ORTHOEPY.

Some of the first scholars of our country stepped out of the circle of their classical studies with the patriotic design of inculcating the possibility of creating a literary language. This was a generous effort in those who had already secured their supremacy by their skill and dexterity in the two languages consecrated by scholars. Many of the learned engaged in the ambitious reform of our _orthography_, then regulated by no certain laws; but while each indulged in some scheme different from his predecessors, the language seemed only to be the more disguised amid such difficult improvements and fantastic inventions.

A curious instance of the monstrous anomalies of our orthography in the infancy of our literature, when a spelling-book was yet a precious thing which had no existence, appears in this letter of the Duchess of Norfolk to Cromwell, Earl of Essex.

"_My ffary gode lord--her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a
glasse hoff Setyl set in Sellfer gyld I pra you take hit (in) wort An
hy wer habel het showlde be bater I woll hit war wort a m crone._"

These lines were written by one of the most accomplished ladies of the sixteenth century, "the friend of scholars and the patron of literature." Dr. Nott, who has supplied this literary curiosity, has modernized the passage word by word; and though the idiom of the times is preserved, it no longer wears any appearance of vulgarity or of illiteracy.

"My very good lord,--Here I send you, in token of the New Year, a glass of setyll set in silver gilt; I pray you take it (in) worth. An I were able, it should be better. I would it were worth a thousand crowns."

The domestic correspondence, as appears in letters of the times, seems to indicate that the writers imagined that, by conferring larger dimensions on their words by the duplication of redundant consonants, they were augmenting the force, even of a monosyllable![1]

In such disorder lay our orthography, that writers, however peculiar in their mode of spelling, did not even write the same words uniformly. Elizabeth herself wrote one word, which assuredly she had constantly in her mind, seven different ways, for thus has this queen written the word _sovereign_. The royal mistress of eight languages seemed at a loss which to choose for her command. The orthography of others eminent for their learning was as remarkable, and sometimes more eruditely whimsical, either in the attempt to retrace the etymology, or to modify exotic words to a native origin; or, finally, to suit the popular pronunciation. What system or method could be hoped for at a time when there prevailed a strange discrepancy in the very names of persons, so variously written not only by their friends but by their owners? Lord Burleigh, when Secretary of State, daily signing despatches with the favourite _Leicester_, yet spelt his name _Lecester_; and Leicester himself has subscribed his own name eight different ways.[2]

At that period down to a much later, every one seems to have been at a loss to write their own names. The name of _Villers_ is spelt fourteen different ways in the deeds of that family. The simple dissyllabic but illustrious name of _Percy_, the bishop found in family documents, they had contrived to write in fifteen different ways.

This unsettled state of our _orthography_, and what it often depended on, our _orthoepy_, was an inconvenience detected even at a very early period. The learned Sir JOHN CHEKE, the most accomplished Greek scholar of the age, descended from correcting the Greek pronunciation to invent a system of English orthography. Cheke was no formal pedant; with an enlarged notion of the vernacular language, he aimed to restore the English of his day to what then he deemed to be its purity. He would allow of no words but such as were true English, or of Saxon original; admitting of no adoption of any foreign word into the English language, which at this early period our scholar deemed sufficiently copious. He objected to the English translation of the Bible, for its introduction of many foreign words; and to prove them unnecessary he retranslated the Gospel of St. Matthew, written on his own system of a new orthography. His ear was nice, and his Attic taste had the singular merit of giving concision to the perplexed periods of our early style. But his orthography deterred the eyes of his readers; however the learned Cheke was right in his abstract principle, it operated wrong when put in practice, for every newly-spelt word seemed to require a peculiar vocabulary.

When Secretaries of State were also men of literature, the learned Sir THOMAS SMITH, under Elizabeth, composed his treatise on "The English Commonwealth," both in Latin and in English--the worthy companion of the great work of Fortescue. Not deterred by the fate of his friend, the learned Cheke, he projected even a bolder system, to correct the writing of English words. He designed to relieve the ear from the clash of supernumerary consonants, and to liquify by a vowelly confluence. But though the scholar exposed the absurdity of the general practice, where in certain words the redundant letters became mutes, or do not comprehend the sounds which are expressed, while in other words we have no letters which can express the sounds by which they are spoken, he had only ascertained the disease, for he was not equally fortunate in the prevention. An enlargement of the alphabet, ten vowels instead of five, and a fantastical mixture of the Roman, the Greek, and the Saxon characters, required an Englishman to be a very learned man to read and write his maternal language. This project was only substituting for one difficulty another more strange.

Were we to course the wide fields which these early "rackers of orthography" have run over, we should start, at every turn, some strange "winged words;" but they would be fantastic monsters, neither birds with wings nor hares with feet. Shakspeare sarcastically describes this numerous race: "Now he is turned ORTHOGRAPHER his words are a very fantastical banquet; just so many strange dishes." Some may amuse. One affords a quaint definition of the combination of _orthoepy_ with _orthography_, for he would teach "how to write or _paint the image of man's voice_ like to the life or nature."[3] The most popular amender of our defective orthography was probably BULLOKAR, for his work at least was republished. He proposed a bold confusion, to fix the fugitive sounds by recasting the whole alphabet, and enlarging its number from twenty-four to more letters, giving two sounds to one letter, to some three; at present no mark or difference shows how the sounded letters should be sounded, while our speech (or orthography) so widely differed; but the fault, says old Bullokar, is in the _picture_, that is, the letters, not the speech. His scheme would have turned the language into a sort of music-book, where the notes would have taught the tones.[4] I extract from his address to his country a curious passage. "In true orthographie, both the _eye_, the _voice_, and the _eare_ must consent perfectly without any let, doubt, or maze. Which want of concord in the eye, voice, and ear I did perceive almost thirtie yeares past by the very voice of children, who, guided by the eye with the letter, and giving voice according to the name thereof, as they were taught to name letters, yielded the eare of the hearer a degree contrary sound to the word looked for; hereby grewe quarrels in the teacher, and lothsomeness in the learner, and great payne to both, and the conclusion was that both teacher and learner must go by rote, or no rule could be followed, when of 37 parts 31 kept no square, nor true joint."

All these reformers, with many subsequent ones, only continued to disclose the uneasy state of the minds of the learned in respect to our inveterate orthography; so difficult was it, and so long did it take to teach the nation how to spell, an art in which we have never perfectly succeeded. Even the learned Mulcaster, in his zealous labour to "the right writing of the English tongue," failed, though his principle seems one of the most obvious in simplicity. This scholar, a master of St. Paul's school, freed from collegiate prejudices, maintained that "words should be written as they were spoken." But where were we to seek for the standard of our orthoepy? Who was to furnish the model of our speech, in a land where the pronunciation varied from the court, the capital, or the county, and as mutable from age to age? The same effort was made among our neighbours. In 1570 the learned Joubert attempted to introduce a new orthography, without, however, the aid of strange characters. His rule was only to give those letters which yield the proper pronunciation; thus he wrote, _oeuvres_, uvres; _francoise_, fransaise; _temps_, tems.

Among the early reformers of our vernacular idiom, the name of RICHARD MULCASTER has hardly reached posterity. Our philologer has dignified a small volume ostensibly composed for "the training of children,"[5] by the elevated view he opened of far distant times from his own of our vernacular literature--and he had the glory of having made this noble discovery when our literature was yet in its infancy.

This learned master of St. Paul's school developes the historical progress of language, on the great philosophical principle that no impediment existed to prevent the modern from rivalling the more perfect ancient languages. In opposition to the many who contended that no subject can be philosophically treated in the maternal English, he maintained that no one language, naturally, is more refined than another, but is made so by the industry of "eloquent speech" in the writers themselves, and by the excellence of the matter; a native soil becomes more genial in emulating a foreign. I preserve the pleasing illustration of his argument in the purity of his own prose, and because he was the prophet of our literature.

"The people of Athens thus beautified their speech and enriched their tongue with all kinds of knowledge, both bred within Greece and borrowed from without. The people of Rome having plotted (planned) their government much like the Athenians, became enamoured of their eloquence, and translated their learning wherewith they were in love. The Roman authority first planted the Latin among us here, by force of their conquest; the use thereof for matters of learning doth cause it continue, though the conquest be expired. And, therefore, the learned tongues, so termed of their store, may thank their own people both for their fining (refinement) at home and their favour abroad. But did not these tongues use even the same means to brave (adorn) themselves, ere they proved so beautiful?

"There be two special considerations which keep the Latin and other learned tongues, though chiefly the Latin, in great countenance among us; the one is the knowledge which is registered in them; the other is the conference which the learned of Europe do commonly use by them, both in speaking and writing. We seek them for profit, and keep them for that conference; but whatever else may be done in our tongue, either to serve private use, or the beautifying our speech, I do not see but it may well be admitted, _even though in the end it displaced the Latin_, as the Latin did others, and furnished itself by the Latin learning. For is it not indeed a marvellous bondage to become servants to one tongue for learning sake, the most of our time, with loss of most time, whereas we may have the very same treasure in our own tongue, with the gain of most time? Our own, bearing the joyful title of our liberty and freedom; the Latin tongue remembering us of our thraldom. I honour the Latin, but I worship the English. I wish all were in ours which they had from others; and by their own precedent, do let us understand how boldly we may venture, notwithstanding the opinion of some of our people, as desire rather to please themselves with a foreign tongue wherewith they are acquainted, than to profit their country in her natural language, where their acquaintance should be. The tongues which we study were not the first getters, though by learned travel (labour) they prove good keepers; but they are ready to return and discharge their trust when it shall be demanded, in such a sort, as it was committed for term of years, and not for inheritance."

"But it is objected," our learned Mulcaster proceeds, with his engaging simplicity, that "the English tongue is of small reach, stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all. What tho' (then)? It reigneth there, though it go not beyond sea. And be not English folk finish (refined) as well as the foreign, I pray you? And why not our tongue for speaking, and our pen for writing, as well as our bodies for apparel, and our tastes for diet? But you say that we have no cunning (knowledge) proper to our soil to cause foreigners to study it, as a treasure of such store. What tho' (then)? Why raise not the English wits, if they will bend their wills either, for matter or for method, in their own tongue, TO BE IN TIME AS WELL SOUGHT TO BY FOREIGN STUDENTS FOR INCREASE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE, AS OUR SOIL IS SOUGHT TO AT THIS TIME BY FOREIGN MERCHANTS FOR INCREASE OF THEIR WEALTH?"[6]

We, who have lived to verify the prediction, should not less esteem the prophet; the pedagogue, MULCASTER, is a philosopher addressing men--a genius who awakens a nation. His indeed was that "prophetic eye," which, amid the rudeness of its own days, in its clear vision contemplated on the futurity of the English language; and the day has arrived, when "_in the end it displaced the Latin_," and "FOREIGN STUDENTS" learn our language "FOR INCREASE OF THEIR KNOWLEDGE."

The design of Mulcaster to regulate orthography by orthoepy was revived so late as in 1701, in a curious work, under the title of "Practical Phonography," by John Jones, M.D. He proposed to write words as they are "fashionably" sounded. He notices "the constant complaints which were then rife in consequence of an unsettled orthography." He proclaims war against "the visible letters," which, not sounded, occasion a faulty pronunciation. I suspect we had not any spelling-books in 1701. I have seen Dyche's of 1710, but I do not recollect whether this was the first edition; this sage of practical orthography was compelled to submit to custom, and taught his scholars to read by the _ear_, and not by the _eye_. "Yet custom," he adds, "is not the truest way of speaking and writing, from not regarding the originals whence words are derived; hence, abundance of errors have crept both into the pronunciation and writing, and English is grown a medley in both these respects." Such was the lamentation of an honest pedagogue in 1710.

The "Phonography" of Dr. Jones was probably well received; for three years after, in 1704, he returned to his "spelling," which, he observed, "however mean, concerned the benefit of millions of persons." He had a notion to "invent a universal language to excel all others, if he thought that people would be induced to use it."[7]

Even the learned of our own times have indulged some of these philological reveries. One would hardly have suspected that Dr. FRANKLIN, whose genius was so wholly practical, contemplated to revolutionise the English alphabet: words were to be spelt by the sounds of their letters, which were to be regulated by six new characters, and certain changes in the vowels. He seems to have revived old Bullokar. PINKERTON has left us a ludicrous scheme of what he calls "an improved language." Our vowel terminations amount but to one-fourth of the language; all substantives closing in hard consonants were to have a final vowel, and the consonant was to be omitted after the vowel. We were to acquire the Italian euphony by this presumed melody for our harsh terminations. In this disfigurement of the language, a _quack_ would be a _quaco_, and _that_ would be _tha_. Plurals were to terminate in _a_: _pens_ would be _pena_; papers, _papera_. He has very innocently printed the entire "Vision of Mirza" from the "Spectator," on his own system; the ludicrous jargon at once annihilates itself. Not many years ago, JAMES ELPHINSTONE, a scholar, and a very injudicious one, performed an extraordinary experiment. He ventured to publish some volumes of a literary correspondence, on the plan of writing the words as they are pronounced. But this editor, being a Scotchman, had two sorts of Scotticisms to encounter--in idiom and in sound. Notwithstanding the agreeable subjects of a literary correspondence, it is not probable that any one ever conquered a single perusal of pages, which tortured the eye, if they did not the understanding.

We may smile at these repeated attempts of the learned English, in their inventions of alphabets, to establish the correspondence of pronunciation with orthography, and at their vowelly conceits to melodise our orthoepy. All these, however, demonstrate that our language has never been written as it ought to have been. All our writers have experienced this inconvenience. Considerable changes in spelling were introduced at various periods, by way of experiment; this liberty was used by the Elizabethan writers, for an improvement on the orthography of Gower and Chaucer. Since the days of Anne we have further deviated, yet after all our efforts we are constrained to read words not as they are written, and to write different words with the same letters, which leaves them ambiguous. And now, no reform shall ever happen, short of one by "the omnipotence of parliament," which the great luminary of law is pleased to affirm, "can do anything except making a man a woman." Customary errors are more tolerable than the perplexing innovations of the most perverse ingenuity.[8] The eye bewildered in such uncouth pages as are here recorded, found the most capricious orthography in popular use always less perplexing than the attempt to write words according to their pronunciation, which every one regulated by the sounds familiar to his own ear, and usually to his own county. Even the dismemberment of words, omitting or changing letters, distracts attention;[9] and modern readers have often been deterred from the study of our early writers by their unsettled orthography. Our later literary antiquaries have, therefore, with equal taste and sagacity, modernised their text, by printing the words as the writers, were they now living, would have transcribed them.

Such have been the impracticable efforts to paint the voice to the eye, or to chain by syllables airy sounds. The imperfections for which such reforms were designed in great part still perplex us. Our written language still remains to the utter confusion of the eye and the ear of the baffled foreigner, who often discovers that what is written is not spoken, and what is spoken is not written. The orthography of some words leads to their false pronunciation. Hence originated that peculiar invention of our own, that odd-looking monster in philology, "a pronouncing dictionary," which offends our eyes by this unhappy attempt to write down sounds. They whose eyes have run over Sheridan, Walker, and other orthoepists, must often have smiled at their arbitrary disfigurements of the English language. These ludicrous attempts are after all inefficient, while they compel us to recollect, if the thing indeed be possible, a polysyllabic combination as barbarous as the language of the Cherokees.[10]

We may sympathise with the disconcerted foreigner who is a learner of the English language. All words ending in _ugh_ must confound him: for instance, _though_, _through_, and _enough_, alike written, are each differently pronounced; and should he give us _bough_ rightly, he may be forgiven should he blunder at _cough_; if he escape in safety from _though_, the same wind will blow him out of _thought_. What can the foreigner hope when he discovers that good judges of their language pronounce words differently? A mere English scholar who holds little intercourse with society, however familiar in his closet be his acquaintance with the words, and even their derivations, might fail in a material point, when using them in conversation or in a public speech. A list of names of places and of persons might be given, in which not a single syllable is pronounced of those that stand written.

That a language should be written as it is spoken we see has been considered desirable by the most intelligent scholars. Some have laudably persevered in writing the past tense _red_, as a distinction from the present _read_, and anciently I have found it printed _redde_. Lord Byron has even retained the ancient mode in his Diary. By not distinguishing the tenses, an audible reader has often unwarily contused the times. _G_ before _I_ ungrammatical orthoepists declare is sounded hard, but so numerous are the exceptions, that the exceptions might equally be adopted for the rule. It is true that the pedantry of scholarship has put its sovereign veto against the practice of writing words as they are spoken, even could the orthoepy ever have been settled by an unquestioned standard. When it was proposed to omit the mute _b_ in _doubt_ and _debt_, it was objected that by this castration of a superfluous letter in the pronunciation, we should lose sight of their Latin original. The same circumstance occurred in the reform of the French orthography: it was objected to the innovators, that when they wrote _tems_, rejecting the _p_ in _temps_, they wholly lost sight of the Latin original, _tempus_. Milton seems to have laid down certain principles of orthography, anxiously observed in his own editions printed when the poet was blind. An orthography which would be more natural to an unlearned reader is rejected by the etymologist, whose pride and pomp exult in tracing the legitimacy of words to their primitives, and delight to write them as near as may be according to the analogy of languages.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See "The Paston Letters," edited by Sir JOHN FENN; and LODGE'S
authentic and valuable Collection.

[2] George Chalmers' "Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare
Papers," 94.--See on this subject in "Curiosities of Literature,"
art. "Orthography of Proper Names." [Also a note on the orthography
of Shakspeare's name, in an Essay on that Poet, in a future page of
the present volume.]

[3] "An Orthographie, composed by J(ohn) H(art), Chester Herald,"
1569. A book of extreme rarity. A copy at Horne Tooke's sale was sold
for 6_l._ 6_s._ It is in the British Museum.

[4] "Bullokar's Booke at large for the Amendment of Orthographie for
English Speech," &c. &c., 1580, 4to; republished in 1586.

[5] "The first part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chieflie of
the _right writing of our English Tong_," 1582, 12mo.

[6] In this copious extract from Mulcaster's little volume, we have a
specimen of the unadulterated simplicity of the English language. I
have only modernised the orthography for the convenience of the
reader, but I have not altered a single word.

[7] The second work of our Phonographer is entitled "The New Art of
Spelling, designed chiefly for Persons of Maturity, teaching them to
Spell and Write Words by the Sound thereof, and to Sound and Read
Words by the Sight thereof,--rightly, neatly, and fashionably, &c.,"
by J. Jones, M.D., 1704.

I give a specimen of his words as they are written and as they are
pronounced--

VISIBLE LETTERS. CUSTOMARY AND FASHIONABLY.
Mayor Mair.
Worcester Wooster
Dictionary Dixnary
Bought Baut.

"All words", he observes, "were originally written as sounded, and
all which have since altered their sounds did it for ease and
pleasure's sake from

the harder to the easier \
the harsher to the pleasanter > sound."
the longer to the shorter /

[8] The Grammar prefixed to Johnson's Dictionary, curiously
illustrated by the notes and researches of modern editors, will
furnish specimens of many of these abortive attempts.

[9] When we began to drop the letter K in such words as _physic_,
_music_, _public_, a literary antiquary, who wrote about 1790,
observed on this new fashion, that "forty years ago no schoolboy had
dared to have done this with impunity." These words in older English
had even another superfluous letter, being _physicke_, _musicke_,
_publicke_. The modern mode, notwithstanding its prevalence, must be
considered anomalous; for other words ending with the consonants _ck_
have not been shorn of their final _k_. We do not write _attac_,
_ransac_, _bedec_, nor _bulloc_, nor _duc_, nor good _luc_.

The appearance of words deprived of their final letter, though
identically the same in point of sound, produces a painful effect on
the reader. Pegge furnishes a ludicrous instance. It consists of
monosyllables in which the final and redundant _k_ is not
written,--"_Dic_ gave _Jac_ a _kic_ when _Jac_ gave _Dic_ a _knoc_ on
the _bac_ with a _thic stic_." If even such familiar words and simple
monosyllables can distract our attention, though they have only lost
a single and mute letter, how greatly more in words compounded,
disguised by the mutilation of several letters.

[10] A most serious attempt was made a few years ago to establish
English spelling by sound. A journal called the _Fonetic Nuz_ (_sic_
to give the idea of the pronunciation of the word _News_) was
published, and Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" printed with a type
expressly cast for the novel forms. The ruin of the projector closed
the experiment.--ED.

THE ANCIENT METRES IN MODERN VERSE.

A strong predilection to reproduce the ancient metres in their vernacular poetry was prevalent among the scholars of Europe; but, what is not less remarkable, the attempt everywhere terminated in the same utter rejection by the popular ear. What occasioned this general propensity of the learned, and this general antipathy in the unlearned?

These repeated attempts to restore the metrical system of the Greeks and the Romans would not only afford a classical ear, long exercised in the nice artifices of the ancient prosody, a gratification entirely denied to the uninitiated; but at bottom there was a deeper design--that of elevating an art which the scholar held to be degraded by the native but unlettered versifiers; and, as one of them honestly confessed, the true intent was to render the poetic art more difficult and less common. Had this metrical system been adopted, it would have established a privileged class. The thing was practicable; and, even in our own days, iambics and spondees, dactyls and tribrachs, charm a few classical ears by their torturous arrangement of words without rhythm and cadence.[1] Fortunately for all vernacular poetry, it was attempted too late among the people of modern Europe ever to be substituted for their native melody, their rhythm, the variety of their cadences, or the consonance of rhyme.

With us the design of appropriating the ancient metres to our native verse was unquestionably borrowed from Italy, so long the model of our fashions and our literature. There it had early begun, but was neither admired nor imitated.[2] The nearly forgotten fantasy was again taken up by Claudio Tolommei, an eminent scholar, who composed an Italian poem with the Roman metres. More fortunate and profound than his neglected predecessors, Tolommei, in 1539, published his _Versi e Regole della_ POESIA NUOVA--the very term afterwards adopted by the English critics--and promised hereafter to establish their propriety on principles deduced from philosophy and music. But before this code of "new poetry" appeared the practice had prevailed, for Tolommei illustrates "the rules" not only by his own verses, but by those of other writers, already seduced by this obsolete novelty. But what followed? Poets who hitherto had delighted by their euphony and their rhyme, were now ridiculed for the dissonance which they had so laboriously struck out. A literary war ensued! The champions for "the new poetry" were remarkable for their stoical indifference amid the loud outcries which they had raised; something of contempt entered into their bravery, and it was some time before these obdurate poets capitulated.

In France the same attempt encountered the same fate. A few scholars, Jodelle, Passerat, and others, had the intrepidity to versify in French with the ancient metres; and, what is perhaps not generally known, later, D'Urfe, Blaise de Vigneres, and others, adopted _blank verse_, for Balzac congratulates Chapelain in 1639 that "Les vers sans rime sont morts pour jamais." French poetry, which at that period could hardly sustain itself with rhyme, denuded of this slight dress must have betrayed the squalidness of bare poverty. The "new poetry" in France, however, seems to have perplexed a learned critic; for with the learned his prejudices leaned in its favour, but as a faithful historian the truth flashed on his eyes. The French antiquary, Pasquier, stood in this awkward position, and on this subject has delivered his opinions with great curiosity and honest naivete. "Since only these two nations, the Greeks and the Romans, have given currency to these measures without rhymes, and that on the contrary there is no nation in this universe which poetises, who do not in their vulgar tongue use rhymes, which sounds have naturally insinuated themselves into the ear of every people for more than seven or eight centuries, even in Italy itself, I can readily believe that the ear is more delighted by our mode of poetry than with that of the Greeks and the Romans."[3]

The candour of the avowal exceeds the philosophy. Our venerable antiquary had greater reason in what he said than he was himself aware of; for rhyme was of a far more ancient date than his eight centuries.

It was in the Elizabethan period of our literature that, in the wantonness of learned curiosity, our critics attempted these experiments on our prosody; and, on the pretence of "reformed verse," were for revolutionising the whole of our metrical system.