ribed by him to a
monk Rowlie, who should have lived in the fifteenth century, no one
appealed to such lines as the following,

"Life and all _its_ goods I scorn",

as at once deciding that the poems were not of the age which they
pretended. Warton, who denied, though with some hesitation, the
antiquity of the poems, giving many and sufficient reasons for this
denial, failed to take note of this little word; while yet there needed
no more than to point it out, for the disposing of the whole question;
the forgery at once was betrayed.

{Sidenote: _American English_}

What has been here affirmed concerning our provincial English, namely
that it is often _old_ English rather than _bad_ English, may be
affirmed with equal right of many so-called Americanisms. There are
parts of America where 'het' is used, or was used a few years since, as
the perfect of 'to heat'; 'holp' as the perfect of 'to help'; 'stricken'
as the participle of 'to strike'. Again there are the words which have
become obsolete during the last two hundred years, which have not become
obsolete there, although many of them probably retain only a provincial
existence. Thus 'slick', which indeed is only another form of 'sleek',
was employed by our good writers of the seventeenth century{148}. Other
words again, which have remained current on both sides of the Atlantic,
have yet on our side receded from their original use, while they have
remained true to it on the other. 'Plunder' is a word in point{149}.

In the contemplation of facts like these it has been sometimes asked,
whether a day will ever arrive when the language spoken on this side of
the Atlantic and on the other, will divide into two languages, an old
English and a new. We may confidently answer, No. Doubtless, if those
who went out from us to people and subdue a new continent, had left our
shores two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language
was very much farther removed from that ideal after which it was
unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in great
measure acquiesced; if they had not carried with them to their distant
homes their English Bible, and what else of worth had been already
uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us, the intercourse
between Old and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare
and partial; there would then have unfolded themselves differences
between the language spoken here and there, which in tra