writer of prose may go so far back as Tyndale, a writer of poetry so far back as Chaucer, in employing old words; this rule would have jarred upon the mawkish Reviewer's feelings. I once saw it laid down in an old-fashioned book of good manners, that it was vulgar to say, ‘I would as lieve do it.’ For all that, let each of our English writers, who has a well-grounded hope that he will be read a hundred years hence, set himself heart and soul to revive at least one long-neglected English word. It may be readily allowed that an imitation of the French Academy on our shores would never come to any good; still a combination of our crack writers to effect much-needed reforms in spelling and word-building would lend fresh lustre to Queen Victoria's reign. More ought to be done by men who have some idea of the Old English grammar, than was done by Gibbon and Robertson.
The change from Latinism back to Teutonism may be seen in speaking as well as in writing. Whatever we may think of Mr. Gladstone's Irish University Bill in 1873, none can gainsay that the last few sentences of his great speech, uttered the moment before his defeat, were a masterpiece of wholesome English. But of all our Parliament men, none in our day has employed a racier diction than Mr. Bright. He has clearly borrowed much from the great Sixteenth Century; he sometimes seems to be kindled with the fire of one of those Hebrew prophets, whom Tyndale and his friends loved to translate into the soundest of English. Pitt the elder, as we hear, knew nothing well but the Faery Queen; Pitt the younger took for his pattern the great
