Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/341

312 long afterwards followed in the wake of the common folk. Butler was now composing the riming couplets that are oftenest in our mouths. Our prose about this time was undergoing a great change; the stately march of Milton and Clarendon was no longer to be copied; En&shy;glish conjunctions and forms compounded since 1300 were to undergo the pruning knife. For instance, we were no longer to write a certain man for quidam; a man, as in the oldest times, was quite enough. Cowley and Baxter about 1650 were the heralds of a new style, that was soon to be brought to further perfection by Dryden and Temple. About that year, 1650, our spelling was settled much as it is now. In 1661 our Prayer Book was revised; are was substituted for be in forty-three places. This was a great victory of the North over the South.

The earlier half of the Eighteenth Century was far more admirable in its English than the latter half. Defoe, Addison, Swift, and Pope are names worthy of all honour; and I could wish that no Latinized terms had been brought in since their day; at least, without good reason given. Compare Ockley, the lion's pro&shy;vider, with Gibbon. Poetry was thriving; and in his Rape of the Lock, Pope beat the French on their own ground; the English Muse, forty-four years after bring&shy;ing forth the Paradise Lost, showed that she could carve