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 them for being ignorant of their "mother tongue!" he says.

Even Spencer bungled most ridiculously, owing to his ignorance of that old dialect, when he attempted to season his diction with Chaucerisms so much so that Ben Jonson remarks. "In affecting the ancients he wrote no language." He borrowed not only words but also grammar from Chaucer, wantonly and promiscuously; so that he became a difficult author, "not so much because his words had only an obsolete existence as because they had never had any existence at all; they were largely spurious and were foredoomed to failure …… They made his writings difﬁcult to read and therefore, comparatively little read." This is a digression, but our object in refering to Spencer's famous poem which was admired by Queen Elizabeth and her courtier and has always been regarded by English poets with Veneration is to show why it was never a popular poem with all its poetic merits.

The language of Wycliffe like that of Chaucer soon became obsolete. Though the people did not