in the history of our language. He stood
between two schools of translation, that of French affectation and English
pedantry. It was a moment when the character of our literary tongue was
being settled, and it is curious to see in his own words the struggle over
it which was going on in Caxton's time. "Some honest and great clerks have
been with me and desired me to write the most curious terms that I could
find"; on the other hand, "some gentlemen of late blamed me, saying that
in my translations I had over many curious terms which could not be
understood of common people, and desired me to use old and homely terms in
my translations." "Fain would I please every man," comments the
good-humoured printer, but his sturdy sense saved him alike from the
temptations of the court and the schools. His own taste pointed to
English, but "to the common terms that be daily used" rather than to the
English of his antiquarian advisers. "I took an old book and read therein,
and certainly the English was so rude and broad I could not well
understand it," while the Old-English charters which the Abbot of
Westminster lent as models from the archives of his house seemed "more
like to Dutch than to English." To adopt current phraseology however was
by no means easy at a time when even the speech of common talk was in a
state of rapid flux. "Our language now used varieth far from that which
was used and spoken when I was born." Not only so, but the tongue of each
shire was still peculiar to itself and hardly intelligible to men of
another county. "Common English that is spoken in one shire varieth from
another so much, that in my days happened that certain merchants were in a
ship in Thames for to have sailed over the sea into Zealand, and for lack
of wind they tarried at Foreland and went on land for to refresh them. And
one of them, named Sheffield, a mercer, came into a house and asked for
meat, and especially he asked them after eggs. And the good wife answered
that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also
could speak no French, but would have eggs, but she understood him not.
And then at last another said he would have eyren, then the good wife said
she understood him well. Lo! what should a man in these days now write,"
adds the puzzled printer, "eggs or eyren? certainly it is hard to please
every man by cause of diversity and change of language." His own
mother-tongue too was that of "Kent in the Weald, where