Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/366

Rh of Latin, that forsooth and wont have been kept alive, by schoolboys construing scilicet and soleo in the time-honoured way. It is pleasant to find one bough of the great Aryan tree lending healthy sap to another offshoot.

Some of the best English verse of our time may be read in the pages of Punch, whenever great English&shy;men die. Moreover, that shrewd wight is always ready to nail up vermin on the barn door; as lately in the case of the word elasticity, employed by three Bishops. Upon this he remarked (June 7, 1873): ‘An up&shy;start expression foisted into the Text would be like a patch of new cloth, and that shoddy, sewn into an old garment of honest English make. That web is of a woof too precious to be pieced with stuff of no more worth than a penny a line.’ But sound English criticism too often calls forth a growl of annoyance from vulgar vanity. If any one in our day sets himself to breast the muddy tide of fine writing, an outcry is at once raised that he is panting to drive away from England all words that are not thoroughly Teutonic. The answer is: no man that knows the history of the English tongue, can ever be guilty of such unwisdom. Our heedless forefathers in the Thirteenth Century allowed thousands of our good old words to slip; out language must be copious, at any cost; we therefore by slow degrees made good the loss