DRYDEN. 289 



says that &quot; the perfect knowledge of a tongue was never 

 attained by any single person. The Court, the College, and 

 the Town must all be joined in it. And as our English is a 

 composition of the dead and living tongues, there is required 

 a perfect knowledge, not only of the Greek and Latin, but 

 of the Old German, French, and Italian, and to help all 

 these, a conversation with those authors of our own who 

 have written with the fewest faults in prose and verse. But 

 how barbarously we yet write and speak your Lordship 

 knows, and I am sufficiently sensible in my own English.* 

 For I am often put to a stand in considering whether what I 

 write be the idiom of the tongue, or false grammar and 

 nonsense couched beneath that specious name of Anglicism, 

 and have no other way to clear my doubts but by translat 

 ing my English into Latin, and thereby trying what sense 

 the words will bear in a more stable language.&quot; Tantce 

 molls erat. Five years later : &quot; The proprieties and 

 delicacies of the English are known to few ; it is impossible 

 even for a good wit to understand and practice them with 

 out the help of a liberal education, long reading and 

 digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, 

 vhe knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes 

 and conversation with the best company of both sexes, and, in 

 short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted 

 while he was laying in a stock of learning.&quot; In the pas 

 sage I have italicised, it will be seen that Dryden lays some 

 stress upon the influence of women in refining language. 

 Swift, also, in his plan for an Academy, says : &quot; Now, 

 though I would by no means give the ladies the trouble of 

 advising us in the reformation of our language, yet I cannot 

 help thinking that, since they have been left out of all 

 meetings except parties at play, or where worse designs are 



* More than half a century later, Orrery, in his &quot;Remarks&quot; on Swift, 

 says : &quot; We speak and we write at random ; and if a man s common 

 conversation were committed to paper, he would be startled for 

 to find himself guilty in so few sentences of so many solecisms and 

 such false English.&quot; I do not remember for to anywhere in Dryden a 

 prose. So few has long been denizened ; no wonder, since it is nothing 

 more than si peu Anglicised. 



