Page:John Wycliff, last of the schoolmen and first of the English reformers.djvu/266

 original charge. In them alone we shall find sufficient evidence, apart from external knowledge, that the Wyclif Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate, that the translator had at least some little acquaintance, if only at second hand, with Greek, that his constant aim was to make his version clear and simple for the simplest English folk, that with this aim he added glosses where it occurred to him that the text required them, that his vocabulary was plentifully recruited from the French, though to nothing like the same degree as the language of his contemporary Chaucer, and that so far as Wyclif's English was provincial it had certain characteristic elements of the Northern dialect. There is also a distinct impression of pedantry in Wyclif, beyond what we find in the prose works of Chaucer and Mandeville—though the Tale of Melibeus and the introduction to the Voiage and Travaile are quite pedantic enough to have been written by theologians. Wyclif is extremely literal, and nurses the Latin constructions of the Vulgate, at the cost of occasional vagueness. All these points are illustrated in the following passages—in which the only modernisation of spelling is the use of the later characters g, gh, th, v, and y.

"And Marye seyde, My soule worschipe the Lord, and my spirit joiede in God myn heelpe.

"For he lokide the mekenes of his hondmayden; lo forwhi of that, blisful me schulyen seyn alle generaciouns.

"For he hath do to me grete thingis that mighti is, and his name holy.