ection, will
be the Anglo-Saxon".

These words which I have just quoted are De Quincey's--whom I must needs
esteem the greatest living master of our English tongue. And on the same
matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed himself thus: "Upon the
languages of Teutonic origin the Latin has exercised great influence,
but most energetically on our own. The very early admixture of the
_Langue d'Oil_, the never interrupted employment of the French as the
language of education, and the nomenclature created by the scientific
and literary cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have
Romanized our speech; the warp may be Anglo-Saxon, but the woof is Roman
as well as the embroidery, and these foreign materials have so entered
into the texture, that were they plucked out, the web would be torn to
rags, unravelled and destroyed"{32}.

{Sidenote: _The English Bible_}

I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation
of the golden mean in this matter than in our Authorized Version of the
Bible. One of the chief among the minor and secondary blessings which
that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual
life from it,--a blessing not small in itself, but only small by
comparison with the infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the
vehicle to them,--is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which
its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to
ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one
side, and on the other any burdening of their Version with such a
multitude of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its
homely character, and shut up large portions of it from the
understanding of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable
confession to this effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them
from above, to the providence that overruled their work, an honourable
acknowledgement of the immense superiority in this respect of our
English Version over the Romish, made by one now, unhappily, familiar
with the latter, as once he was with our own. Among those who have
recently abandoned the communion of the English Church one has exprest
himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all, which in
renouncing our translation, he feels himself to have forgone and lost.
These are his words: "Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and
marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great
strongholds of he