Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/317

288 (standing for y) is clean gone, and þ is hardly ever used for th; this þ, which had been often employed in the Recuyell, is a sad loss. England was slowly forgetting her old words; and the bad habit would have been carried further, but for Caxton's press and for a great religious change that happened forty years after this time.

Lord Berners' translation of Froissart may be looked on as a new landmark in our tongue. Those who filled up the gap between Caxton and the learned noble&shy;man, men like Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay, have few worshippers now but antiquaries. The Englished Froissart, given to the world in 1523, heads a long roll of noble works, that have followed each other, it may be said, without a break for three hundred and fifty years. Since 1523, there is not an instance of twenty years passing over England, without the appearance of some book, which she has taken to her heart and will not willingly let die. No literature in the world has ever been blessed with so continuous a spell of glory. Two of her great men, whose works are inscribed on the aforesaid roll, would by most foreign critics be reckoned among the five foremost intellects of the world; a large proportion forsooth to be claimed by one nation.

One of the earliest English works that followed Lord Berners' Froissart was the New Testament, published at Worms in 1525, by William Tyndale of Gloucestershire.