conducted in the native tongue. Yet when Chaucer wrote his
"Canterbury Tales," it seems still to have continued the pedantic
affectation of a profession for its members, like Chaucer's "Man of
Law," to introduce French law-terms into common conversation; so that
it is natural enough to find the "Summoner" following suit, and
interlarding his "Tale" with the Latin scraps picked up by him from the
decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts. Meanwhile, manifold
difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion between the two
races, before the victory of the English language showed this fusion to
have been in substance accomplished. One of these difficulties, which
has been sometimes regarded as fundamental, has doubtless been
exaggerated by national feeling on either side; but that it existed is
not to be denied. Already in those ages the national character and
temperament of French and English differed largely from one another;
though the reasons why they so differed, remain a matter of argument.
In a dialogue, dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the
French interlocutor attributes this difference to the respective
national beverages: "WE are nourished with the pure juice of the grape,
while naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take
anything for liquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely
greater politeness by a living French critic of high repute, according
to whom the English, still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were
drunken gluttons, agitated at intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the
Normans, on the other hand, lightened by their transplantation, and by
the admixture of a variety of elements, already found the claims of
esprit developing themselves within them. This is an explanation which
explains nothing--least of all, the problem: why the lively strangers
should have required the contact with insular phlegm in order to
receive the creative impulse--why, in other words, Norman-French
literature should have derived so enormous an advantage from the
transplantation of Normans to English ground. But the evil days when
the literary labours of Englishmen had been little better than
bond-service to the tastes of their foreign masters had passed away,
since the Norman barons had, from whatever motive, invited the commons
of England to take a share with them in the national councils. After
this, the question of the relations between the two languages, and the