, and stood to the main body of the
language not as the Romance element of it does now to the Gothic, one
power over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic
words in it now stand to the whole present body of the language--and
could not be affirmed to affect it more.

So soon however as French words were imported largely, as I have just
observed, into the language, and were found to coalesce kindly with the
native growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it alone
rendered possible, the going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly
from it; and thus in the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large
amount of Latin found its way, if not into our speech, yet at all events
into our books--words which were not brought _through_ the French, for
they are not, and have not at any time been, French, but yet words which
would never have been introduced into English, if their way had not been
prepared, if the French already domesticated among us had not bridged
over, as it were, the gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide
between them and the Saxon vocables of our tongue.

In this period, a period of great depression of the national spirit, we
may trace the attempt at a pedantic latinization of English quite as
clearly at work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival of
learning. It was now that a crop of such words as 'facundious',
'tenebrous', 'solacious', 'pulcritude', 'consuetude' (all these occur in
Hawes), with many more, long since rejected by the language, sprung up;
while other words, good in themselves, and which have been since
allowed, were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion with the
Saxon vocables with which they were mingled, and which they altogether
overtopped and shadowed. Chaucer's hearty English feeling, his thorough
sympathy with the people, the fact that, scholar as he was, he was yet
the poet not of books but of life, and drew his best inspiration from
life, all this had kept him, in the main, clear of this fault. But in
others it is very manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of Lydgate,
Hawes, and the other versifiers who filled up the period between Chaucer
and Surrey, immensely inferior to Chaucer's; being all stuck over with
long and often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders in this
line, as Campbell himself admits, were the Scotch poets of the fifteenth
century. "The prevailing fault", he says, "of English diction, in the
fifteenth cent