Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/288

Rh before the Danes, and as Alfred had been the great light of the Western Saxon that had fallen before the Frenchmen. Throughout the Fourteenth Century the speech of the shires near Rutland was spreading in all directions; it at length took possession of Oxford and London, and more or less influenced such men as Wick&shy;liffe and Chaucer. Gower, when a youth, had written in Latin and French; when old, he wrote in English little differing from that of Manning. This dialect more&shy;over made its way into the North: let any one compare the York Mysteries of 1350 with the version of them made forty years later, and he will see the influence of the Midland tongue. The Western shires bordering on North Wales had long employed a medley of Southern and Northern forms; these were now settling down into something very like Manning's speech, as may be seen in the romance of William and the Werwolf. Kent, Gloucestershire, and Lancashire were not so ready to welcome the dialect compounded in or near Rutland; their resistance seems to have lasted throughout the Fourteenth Century; and Langland, who wrote Piers Ploughman's Vision after the year 1362, holds to the speech of his own Western shire. He was the greatest genius that had as yet employed English, though he was soon to be outdone, perhaps in his own lifetime. Chaucer has given us a most spirited sketch of the