Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/328

Rh has been called an uprising of Teutonism against Latin&shy;ism; nowhere does this come out clearer than in En&shy;glish Poetry.

But this Sixteenth Century had a widely different effect on our Prose. Latin was the great link between our own Reformers and those of other lands; and the temptation was strong to bring into vogue Latin terms for the new ideas in religion that were taking root in our island. Theology was the great subject of the age; and King Henry VIII. remarked to his Parliament in 1545: ‘I am very sorry to know and hear how un&shy;reverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every ale house and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same.’ Besides this intense thirst after religious discussion, our fathers later on in the Century saw for the first time the authors of Greece and Rome clad in an English dress; and the sailors who bore the English flag round the world were always printing wondrous tales of their wanderings. Plymouth, as well as Oxford, was making her influence felt. Our land, therefore, owned at the end of the Sixteenth Century thousands of new words, which would have seemed strange to Hawes and Roy; a fair store of words was being made ready for Shakespere, whose genius would not bear cramping. The people, for whom he was to write, had a strong taste for theology, for the classics, and for sea roving; each of these tastes brought in shoals of new words. We had long had Latin words in their corrupt French form, such as balm, feat, frail, sure; we now began to write the original Latin of these forms, balsam, fact, fragile,