PROBLEMS IN STUDY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE 231 



admittedly written in an artificial literary dialect, maintained with 

 an effort long after it had ceased to accord with the speech of common 

 life. 



For the period of fully established Middle English, in particular 

 the fourteenth century, we must a priori admit a great deal of 

 French influence on our syntax. Here, however, the amount of work 

 to be done is so great that it may well stagger the most sanguine. 

 We must give steady heed to the great dialects, for what is true of one 

 is not necessarily true of another. The poets of the so-called Chaucer- 

 ian School say from 1350 to 1450 will require and repay most 

 careful scrutiny, since they are in the direct line which leads down to 

 the standard syntax of our own day. 



Next come the dark ages dark, that is to say, to the philologist 

 because scandalously neglected, with two or three brilliant excep- 

 tions. It is not in the matter of syntax alone that the long stretch 

 from 1450 to 1550 is a No Man's Land. In almost every respect 

 this vastly important lapse of time has been ignored by the lin- 

 guistic scholar. The ordinary outfit of the Anglicist may be de- 

 scribed as consisting of a knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, of the language 

 of Chaucer, of Elizabethan English, and of the speech of the present 

 day; and too often, especially in the case of foreigners, the last two 

 items are omitted from the account. We take a leap from Chaucer 

 to Queen Elizabeth. Yet the dark period from 1450 to 1550 is full 

 of instruction. Many a phrase or idiom that one thinks of as Middle 

 English turns up in the obscure writers of the sixteenth century, and 

 we have also, in this period, the privilege of inspecting the beginnings 

 of that great outburst of linguistic splendor which characterizes the 

 Elizabethan Age. And the middle period presents phenomena of its 

 own. We see the French influence giving way to a tendency to that 

 excessive Latinization which crowded the vocabulary of England 

 with barbarous sesquipedalian words, not destined to maintain 

 themselves. The neatness and simplicity of Chaucerian diction dis- 

 appear, and the gorgeous licenses of Elizabethanism do not yet exist. 

 In some writers, too, there is a good fund of colloquialisms, of 

 incalculable value to the investigator of our modern syntax. A for- 

 bidding period this to the sesthetician, but full of lessons for the 

 historical student of letters, as well as for the philologist. For the 

 syntactician it abounds in prizes; some day he may awake to their 

 whereabouts; at present, he seems hardly aware that they exist at all. 

 Let it be added that a knowledge of Middle English by no means 

 fits a man to read the works of this period intelligently. There is, 

 unfortunately, a prevalent misconception on this point. 



Of Elizabethan syntax the next article in our programme 

 something has already been said by anticipation. We need not 

 dwell upon it; for everybody knows the significance of the period. 



