Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 1.djvu/477

] a New Testament amongst the books of the Reformers, they declared that it was some new heretical language. But, as knowledge revived, the same men who were the greatest advocates for classical studies and the restoration of the classical writers to public use, were those who began also to write in their vernacular tongues; and this was especially the case with Petrarch in Italy.



Latin was the almost universal language of the learned in art, science, and literature still at this period. The works of the chroniclers were written in Latin for the most part; Bacon wrote all his works in Latin. But for some time, in all the great countries of Europe, eminent authors—and especially the poets—had begun to use their native tongues. Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch in Italy had set the example; Froissart had done it in French; and now our great poets in England did the same.

This was a proof that the English language was now travelling up from the common people, and establishing itself amongst all ranks. It was no longer left to the common people to speak Anglo-Saxon, now fast melting in English. The Norman nobles and gentry found themselves speaking English, and engrafting on it many of their own terms. Metrical romances and songs had long been circulated amongst the people; they now reached the higher classes. Robert of Gloucester versified the chronicle of Robert of Monmouth; Peter Langtoft, a canon of Bridlington, found his chronicle in French verse translated into English by Robert Manning, of Brunne, already mentioned. This was the English of that day:—

But about the middle of the fourteenth century Robert Langlande, a secular priest of Oxford, wrote a famous satirical allegory against persons of all professions, called "The Vision of Pierce Plowman." This is usually considered the first English poem, but it is rather an Anglo-Saxon one, for the author, probably very Saxon in his feelings, has not only imitated the alliterative poetry of the Saxons without rhyme, but he has made the language as antique as possible This is precisely what Spenser did in his "Faery Queen," in the reign of Elizabeth; he went backwards in his diction, so that now it is nearly obsolete, while the language of his contemporary Shakespeare is still sterling English, and likely to continue so. Who could imagine that these lines were written in the same age as those which we shall place beside them by a contemporary:—