Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/262

 regulars who prided themselves most upon their orthodoxy. If, as is likely enough, he had nursed the idea of his translation from a comparatively early age, it may well have been that his denunciation as a heretic by the Pope, and Courtenay, and the friars, finally nerved him to carry out his half-formed intentions.

It was a bold venture in every way. Wyclif was more the cleric than the man of letters, and, great as were his services in promoting the formal and academic use of his mother tongue, in clearing and widening the sources of what was soon to become a broad and limpid stream, and in cutting as it were the matrix of the type in which the English Bible was to be printed and perpetuated for all time, there is assuredly no necessity to claim for him the laurels of literary excellence.

That which especially connects Wyclif with the course of English literature and the development of the English language is the fact that the moment of his arrival at maturity—maturity as a man, as a religious thinker, as a political seer, and as a social innovator coincided with the definitive triumph of the English tongue. Long despised by the Norman Court and aristocracy, from the French queens and their favourites down to the humblest hanger-on of the ruling classes, and equally despised by the clergy, monks, friars, and lawyers, whose debased Latin was their only current coin of speech, the language of our English forefathers suddenly, almost dramatically, stood forth as the dominant tongue in every department of the national life. The formal