Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/83

54 at the Reformation, no land in Europe can show such monuments of national speech for the 400 years after A.D. 680 as England boasts. And nowhere else can we so clearly mark the national speech slowly swinging round from the Old to the New.

Take the opposite case of Italy. In 1190 we find Falcandus holding in scorn the everyday speech of his countrymen, and compiling a work in the Old Italian (that is, Latin), such as would have been easily read by Cæsar or Cicero. Falcandus trod in the path that had been followed by all good Italian writers for 1200 years; but two or three years after his book had been written, we find his countryman, Ciullo d'Alcamo, all of a sudden putting forth the first known poem in the New Italian, a poem that would now be readily understood by an unlettered soldier like Garibaldi.

In Italy, there is a sudden spring from the Old to the New, at least in written literature; but in England the change is most slow. I have already traced the corrup&shy;tion shown in the Northumbrian writings. In the Peterborough Chronicle of 1120, we see an evident effort to keep as near as may be to the old Winchester standard of English. Some of the inflections indeed are gone, but the writer puts eall for the all that came into his everyday speech, and looks back for his pattern to King Alfred's writings. In 1303, we find a poem, written by a man born within fifteen miles of Peterborough: the diction of this Midland bard differs hardly at all from what we speak under Queen Victoria. Nothing in philology can be more interesting than these 180 years, answering roughly to the lives of our first