with all sorts of common and idiomatic expressions. The practical test which he is said to have applied to ascertain the intelligibility of an expression was to consult the servant and be guided by her judgment whether to receive or reject it.
These are not the only popular books in English though for obvious reasons we have confined our attention to them. Popular literature is now unlimited. The spread of the standard language and the disappearance of several dialects and the extension of education and the cultivation of English by the foreign nations, not to mention the influence of democratic ideas are all powerfully operating on the literature of the people. The exclusive spirit of the privileged order is disappearing and the middle and the lower orders are rapidly attaining to a higher standard. Literature in England must necessarily be popular. It is to be noted that even before the old order began to give place to the new a good many of the Englishmen of Letters arose from the lower ranks of Society. Bunyan was a tinker; Fox was a cobbler; John Stow was a tailor; Burns was a ploughboy; Thomas Lodge was the son of a grocer; Hugh Miller was a stone mason; Defoe was the son of a butcher; Isaac Barrow, Walton and Southey were some of linen drapers; Tillotson was the son of a clothier; William Cobbett was the son of a farmer. Nor are all the men of Letters, Pandits
