Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/339

310 1611 did much to fix our spelling; since that time little change has been made, except that we have got rid of the e tacked on to many a word in former days: this e was seldom pronounced after Spenser's time. A new set of words had cropped up about the time he began to write; we had turned the noun cross into a verb. The only de&shy;rivative of this in the Bible is crossway, which comes but once. Aloof appears about the same time, a word due to the Norsemen. An uglier phrase was now coming on the stage; I mean, what is now the national oath of England. It is found twice or thrice in Shakespere, but had become common thirty years after his death.

Our tongue sometimes spins out of her own resources in a wonderful way: would that she did this oftener! The preposition þurh had long before given birth to the adjective thorough and the adverb thoroughly; a bold bad man was now to make immortal a noun substantive, borrowed from the adjective. Whatever philologers may say, the true Englishman will, in this case at least, be drawn to Langton's Charter, French word though it be, rather than to Strafford's Thorough, in spite of the new noun's Teutonic birth. So closely intertwined are English philology, politics, and religion, that it is hardly possible to keep them asunder. A subject of Strafford's in Ireland, Bishop Bedell, who came from East Anglia, was one of the last that wrote the good old sith for quo&shy;niam, about the year 1630.

Among Strafford's stoutest foes stood the man, who was long afterwards to measure himself with Dante, and to match the Protestant Muse against the noblest creation of Roman Catholicism. Often has the