human
--but only in the sense that the mighty magic of his imagination had conjured out of it its uttermost secret of power or pathos. When I say that Shakespeare used the current language of his day, I mean only that he habitually employed such language as was universally comprehensible,--that he was not run away with by the hobby of any theory as to the fitness of this or that component of English for expressing certain thoughts or feelings. That the artistic value of a choice and noble diction was quite as well understood in his day as in ours is evident from the praises bestowed by his contemporaries on Drayton, and by the epithet
gpt
applied to Daniel, whose poetic style is as modern as that of Tennyson; but the endless absurdities about the comparative merits of Saxon and Norman-French, vented by persons incapable of distinguishing one tongue from the other, were as yet unheard of. Hasty generalizers are apt to overlook the fact, that the Saxon was never, to any great extent, a literary language. Accordingly, it held its own very well in the names of common things, but failed to answer the demands of complex ideas, derived from them. The author of
human
Piers Ploughman wrote for the people,--Chaucer for the court. We open at random and count the Latin[122] words in ten verses of the
gpt
Vision and ten of the
human
Romaunt of the Rose,
gpt
Intimations of Immortality, into
human
Hints of Deathlessness,
gpt
Age cannot wither her, Nor custom stale her infinite variety,
human
The multitudinous sea incarnadine,