Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/372

Rh wittily handled a long list of fine girlish names, and avowed at the end,

One of the signs of the times is, the marked fondness for the name Ethel; we cannot say whether the heroine of Mr. Thackeray or the heroine of Miss Yonge is the pattern most present to the parental mind. I know of a child christened Frideswide, though her parents have nothing to do with Christchurch, Oxford. This is one of the straws that shows which way the wind is blowing. With all our shortcomings, we may fairly make the Homeric boast that in some things we are far better than our fathers. A hundred years ago Hume and Wyatt were making a ruthless onslaught upon the England of the Thirteenth Century: the one mauled her greatest men; the other (irreparable is the loss) mauled her fairest churches. We live in better times; we see clearly enough the misdeeds of Hume and Wyatt: ought not our eyes to be equally open to the sins of Johnson and Gibbon? For these last writers, the store that had served their betters was not enough; disliking the words in vogue at the beginning of their Century, they gave us a most unbecoming proportion of tawdry Latinisms, which are to this day the joy of penny-a-liners. But already improve&shy;ment is abroad in the land; Cobbett first taught us a better way; we have begun to see that the Eighteenth Century (at least in its latter half) was as wrong in its diction as in its History or its Architecture. We are scraping the stucco off the old stone and brick, as the Germans and Danes have done. Ere long, it is to be