Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/212

differs from all the others that had gone before it in its diction; for it contains a most scanty proportion of those Teutonic words that were soon to drop out of speech, and a most copious proportion of French words. Indeed there are so many foreign words, that we should set the writer fifty years later than his true date, had he not himself written it down. In this book we catch our first glimpse of many a word and idiom, that were afterwards to live for ever in the English Bible and Prayer Book, works still in the womb of Time. Indeed, the new Teu­tonic idioms that took root in our speech after this age were few in number, a mere drop in the bucket, if we com­pare them with the idioms imported between 1120 and 1300. This shows what we owe to Robert Manning; even as the highest praise of our Revolution of 1688 is, that it was our last. The Handlyng Synne is indeed a land­mark worthy of the carefullest study. I shall give long extracts from it, and I shall further add specimens of the English spoken in many other shires between 1300 and 1340. We are lucky in having so many English manuscripts, drawn up at this particular time: the con­trasts are strongly marked. Thus it will be easy to see that the Lincolnshire bard may be called the patriarch of the New English, much as Cadmon was of the Old English six hundred years earlier. We shall also gain some idea of the influence that the Rutland neighbour­hood has had upon our classic tongue. This was re­marked by Fuller in his time; and in our day Latham