g, he proceeds: "You have here a specimen of Chaucer's
language, which is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be
understood". Nor was it merely thus with respect of Chaucer. These wits
and poets of the Court of Charles the Second were conscious of a greater
gulf between themselves and the Elizabethan era, separated from them by
little more than fifty years, than any of which _we_ are aware,
separated from it by nearly two centuries more. I do not mean merely
that they felt themselves more removed from its tone and spirit; their
altered circumstances might explain this; but I am convinced that they
found a greater difficulty and strangeness in the language of Spenser
and Shakespeare than we find now; that it sounded in many ways more
uncouth, more old-fashioned, more abounding in obsolete terms than it
does in our ears at the present. Only in this way can I explain the
tone in which they are accustomed to speak of these worthies of the near
past. I must again cite Dryden, the truest representative of literary
England in its good and in its evil during the last half of the
seventeenth century. Of Spenser, whose death was separated from his own
birth by little more than thirty years, he speaks as of one belonging to
quite a different epoch, counting it much to say, "Notwithstanding his
obsolete language, he is still intelligible"{90}. Nay, hear what his
judgment is of Shakespeare himself, so far as language is concerned: "It
must be allowed to the present age that the tongue in general is so much
refined since Shakespeare's time, that many of his words and more of his
phrases are scarce intelligible. And of those which we understand, some
are ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is so pestered
with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it is
obscure"{91}.

{Sidenote: _Nugget_, _Ingot_}

Sometimes a word will emerge anew from the undercurrent of society, not
indeed new, but yet to most seeming as new, its very existence having
been altogether forgotten by the larger number of those speaking the
language; although it must have somewhere lived on upon the lips of men.
Thus, for instance, since the Californian and Australian discoveries of
gold we hear often of a 'nugget' of gold; being a lump of the pure
metal; and there has been some discussion whether the word has been born
for the present necessity, or whether it be a recent malformation of
'ingot', I am inclined to think that it is neither on