Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/258

 never be a fit medium for modern thought and fancy. And yet, where except in Latin could literary expression be found? "The delicacy," says Hallam, "that distinguishes in words the shades of sentiment, the grace that brings them to the soul of the reader with the charm of novelty united to clearness, could not be attainable in a colloquial jargon." Nor could such a jargon possibly attain to distinction and style where (as in our own country) the speech of the people was not the speech of the Court, the talk of the peasant was not the talk of those who owned the soil, the tongue of men who sought for justice was not the tongue of such as had to administer it. Where was genius to find her niche, until the language of everyday life, the language of the nation and not of the governing race, began to show its predilections, to set up its standard, to attract the notice and favour of men whose imaginations were already on fire and craving for utterance?

Whilst the Schoolmen were struggling bravely but lamely for freedom of religious life and thought, the French writers of fabliaux, pastourelles, and love songs, followed by the German minnesingers and meistersingers, broke the silence to which poetic souls had long been condemned, and lightly preluded the nobler strains of Dante and Petrarch. Higher elevation of thought and language it was impossible for poet to attain in those days than the height attained by the two devout Florentines, whose poems, religious and even devotional in their tone, largely secularized the mood and phraseology