The predominance of the Latin language, during many centuries, retarded
the cultivation of the vernacular dialects of Europe. When the barbarous
nations had triumphed over ancient Rome, the language of the Latins
remained unconquered; that language had diffused itself with the
universal dominion, and, living in the minds of men, required neither
legions nor consuls to maintain its predominance.
From accident, and even from necessity, the swarming hordes, some of
whom seem to have spoken a language which had never been written, and
were a roving people at a period prior to historical record, had adopted
that single colloquial idiom which their masters had conveyed to them,
attracted, if not by its beauty, at least by its convenience. This
vulgar Latin was not, indeed, the Latin of the great writers of
antiquity; but in its corrupt state; freed from a complex construction,
and even from grammar, had more easily lent itself to the jargon of the
ruder people. Teutonic terms, or Celtic words with corrupt latinisms,
were called "the scum of ancient eloquence, and the rust of vulgar
barbarisms," by an indignant critic in the middle of the fifth
century.[1] It was amid this confusion of races, of idioms, and of
customs, that from this heterogeneous mass were hewed out those
VERNACULAR DIALECTS of Europe which furnished each people with their own
idiom, and which are now distinguished as the MODERN LANGUAGES.
In this transference and transfusion of languages, Italy retained the
sonorous termination of her paternal soil, and Spain did not forget the
majesty of the Latin accent; lands favoured by more genial skies, and
men blessed with more flexible organs. But the Gothic and the Northern
races barbarously abbreviated or disfigured their Latin words--to sounds
so new to them they gave their own rude inflections; there is but one
organ to regulate the delicacy of orthoepy--a musical and a tutored ear.
The Gaul,[2] in cutting his words down, contracted a nasal sharpness;
and the Northmen, in the shock of their hard, redundant consonants, lost
the vowelly confluence.
This vulgar or corrupt Latin, mingled with this diversity of jargons,
was the vitiated mother of the sister-languages of Europe--sisters still
bearing their family likeness, of the same homely origin, but of various
fortunes, till some attained to the beauty and affluence of their Latin
line. From the first the people themselves had dignified their spurious
generation of language as _Romans_, or _Romance_, or _Romaunt_, still
proud perhaps of its Roman source; but the critical Latins themselves
had distinguished it as _Rustic_, to indicate a base dialect used only
by those who were far removed from the metropolis of the world.
But when these different nations had established their separate
independence, this vernacular idiom was wholly left to the people; it
was the image of their own barbaric condition, unworthy of the studies,
and inadequate to the genius, of any writer. The universal language
maintained its pre-eminence over the particular dialect, and as the
course of human events succeeded in the overwhelming of ancient Rome,
another Rome shadowed the world. Ecclesiastical Rome, whence the novel
faith of Christianity was now to emanate, far more potent than military
Rome, perpetuated the ancient language. The clergy, through the
diversified realms of Europe, were held together in strict conformity,
and by a common bond chained to the throne of the priesthood--one faith,
one discipline, one language!
The Latin tongue, both in verse and prose, was domiciliated among people
of the most opposite interests, customs, and characters. The primitive
fathers, the later schoolmen, the monkish chroniclers, all alike
composed in Latin; all legal instruments, even marriage-contracts, were
drawn in Latin: and even the language of Christian prayer was that of
abolished paganism.
The idiom of their father-land--or as we have affectionately called it,
our "mother-tongue," and as our ancient translator of the
"Polychronicon" energetically terms it, "the birth-tongue"--those first
human accents which their infant ear had caught, and which from their
boyhood were associated with the most tender and joyous recollections,
every nation left to fluctuate on the lips of the populace, rude and
neglected. Whenever a writer, proposing to inform the people on subjects
which more nearly interested them, composed in the national idiom, it
was a strong impulse only which could induce him thus to submit to
degrade his genius. One of the French crusaders, a learned knight, was
anxious that the nation should become acquainted with the great
achievements of the deliverers of Jerusalem; it was the command of his
bishop that induced him to compose the narrative in the vernacular
idiom; but the twelve years which he bestowed on his chronicle were not
considered by him as employed for his glory, for he avows that the
humiliating style which he had used was the mortifying performance of a
religious penance.
All who looked towards advancement in worldly affairs, and were of the
higher orders in society, cultivated the language of Rome. It is owing
to this circumstance, observes a learned historian of our country, that
"the Latin language and the classical writers were preserved by the
Christian clergy from that destruction which has entirely swept from us
the language and the writings of Phoenicia, Carthage, Babylon, and
Egypt."[3] We must also recollect that the influence of the Latin
language became far more permanent when the great master-works of
antiquity were gradually unburied from their concealments. In this
resurrection of taste and genius, they derived their immortality from
the imperishable soul of their composition. All Europe was condemned to
be copiers, or in despair to be plagiarists.
It is well known how the admirable literatures of Greece and Rome struck
a fresh impulse into literary pursuits at that period which has been
distinguished as the restoration of letters. The emigration of the
fugitive Greeks conveyed the lost treasures of their more ancient
literature to the friendly shores of Italy. Italy had then to learn a
new language, and to borrow inspiration from another genius.
The occupation of disinterring manuscripts which had long been buried in
dungeon-darkness, was carried on with an enthusiasm of which perhaps it
would be difficult for us at this day to form an adequate conception.
Many exhausted their fortunes in remote journeys, or in importations
from the East; and the possession of a manuscript was considered not to
have been too dearly purchased by the transfer of an estate, since only
for the loan of one the pledge was nothing less.[4] The discovery of an
author, perhaps heard of for the first time, was tantamount to the
acquisition of a province; and when a complete copy of "Quintilian" was
discovered, the news circulated throughout Europe. The rapture of
collation, the restoration of a corrupt text, or the perpetual
commentary, became the ambition of a life, even after the era of
printing.
This was the useful age of critical erudition. It furnished the studious
with honours and avocations; but they were reserved only for themselves:
it withdrew them from the cultivation of all vernacular literature. They
courted not the popular voice when a professorial chair or a dignified
secretaryship offered the only profit or honour the literary man
contemplated. Accustomed to the finished compositions of the ancients,
the scholar turned away from the rudeness of the maternal language.
There was no other public opinion than what was gathered from the
writings of the Few who wrote to the Few who read; they transcribed as
sacred what authority had long established; their arguments were
scholastic and metaphysical, for they held little other communication
with the world, or among themselves, but through the restricted medium
of their writings. This state was a heritage of ideas and of opinions,
transmitted from age to age with little addition or diminution.
Authority and quotation closed all argument, and filled vast volumes.
University responded to university, and men of genius were following
each other in the sheep-tracks of antiquity. Even to so late a period as
the days of Erasmus, every Latin word was culled with a classical
superstition; and a week of agony was exhausted on a page finely inlaid
with a mosaic of phrases.[5] While this verbal generation flourished,
some eminent scholars were but ridiculous apes of Cicero, and, in a
cento of verses, empty echoes of Virgil. All native vigour died away in
the coldness of imitation; and a similarity of thinking and of style
deprived the writers of that raciness which the nations of Europe
subsequently displayed when they cultivated their vernacular literature.
It is remarkable of those writers who had already distinguished
themselves by their Latin works, that when they began to compose in
their native language, those classical effusions on which they had
confidently rested their future celebrity sank into oblivion; and the
writers themselves ceased to be subjects either of critical inquiry or
of popular curiosity, except in that language in which they had opened a
vein of original thought, in a manner and diction the creation of their
own feelings. Here their natural power and their freed faculties placed
them at a secure interval from their imitators. Modern writers in Latin
were doomed to find too many academical equals; but those who were
inimitable in their vernacular idiom could dread no rival, and
discovered how the productions of the heart, rather than those of the
lexicon, were echoed to their authors in the voice of their
contemporaries.
The people indeed were removed far out of the influence of literature.
The people could neither become intelligent with the knowledge, nor
sympathise with the emotions, concealed in an idiom which had long
ceased to be spoken, and which exacted all the labour and the leisure of
the cloistered student.
This state of affairs had not occurred among the Greeks, and hardly
among the Romans, who had only composed their immortal works in their
maternal tongue. Their arts, their sciences, and their literature were
to be acquired by the single language which they used. It was the
infelicity of their successors in dominion, to weary out the tenderness
of youth in the repulsive labours of acquiring the languages of the two
great nations whose empire had for ever closed, but whose finer genius
had triumphed over their conquerors.
With the ancients, instruction did not commence until their seventh
year; and till they had reached that period Nature was not disturbed in
her mysterious workings: the virgin intellect was not doomed to suffer
the violence of our first barren studies--that torture of learning a
language which has ceased to be spoken by the medium of another equally
unknown. Perhaps it was owing to this favourable circumstance that,
among the inferior classes of society in the two ancient nations, their
numerous slaves displayed such an aptitude for literature, eminent as
skilful scribes, and even as original writers.
One of the earliest prose writers in our language when style was
beginning to be cultivated, has aptly described, by a domestic but
ingenious image, the effect of our youth gathering the burdens of
grammatical faggots in the Sylva of antiquity. It is Sir THOMAS ELYOT
who speaks, in "The Boke of the Governor," printed in 1531: "By that
time the learner cometh to the most sweet and pleasant rendering of old
authors, the sparks of fervent desire are extinct with the burthen of
grammar, like as a little fire is even quenched with a great heap of
small sticks, so that it can never come to the principal logs, where it
should burn in a great pleasant fire."
It was Italy, the Mother and the Nurse of Literature (as the filial zeal
of her sons has hailed her), which first opened to the nations of Europe
the possibility of each creating a vernacular literature, reflecting
the image not of the Greeks and of the Romans, but of themselves.
Three memorable men, of the finest and most contrasted genius, appeared
in one country and at one period. With that contempt for the language of
the people in which the learned participated, busied as they were at the
restoration of letters by their new studies and their progressive
discoveries, PETRARCH contemned his own Italian "Rime," and was even
insensible to the inspiration of a mightier genius than his own,--that
genius who, with a parental affection, had adopted the orphan idiom of
his father-land; an orphan idiom, which had not yet found even a name;
for it was then uncertain what was the true language of Italy. DANTE had
at first proposed to write in Latin; but with all his adoration of his
master Virgil, he rejected the verse of Virgil, and anticipated the
wants of future ages. A peculiar difficulty, however, occurred to the
first former of the vernacular literature of Italy. In the state of this
unsettled language--composed of fragments of the latinity of a former
populace, with the corruptions and novelties introduced by its new
masters--deformed by a great variety of dialects--submitted, in the
mouths of the people, to their caprices, and unstamped by the hand of a
master--it seemed hopeless to fix on any idiom which, by its inherent
nobleness, should claim the distinguished honour of being deemed
Italian. DANTE denied this envied grace to any of the rival
principalities of his country. The poet, however, mysteriously asserted
that the true Italian "volgare" might be discovered in every Italian
city; but being common to all, it could not be appropriated by any
single one. Dante dignified the "volgare illustre" which he had
conceived in his mind, by magnificent titles;--it was "illustrious," it
was "cardinal," it was "aulic," it was "courtly," it was the language of
the most learned who had composed in the vulgar idiom, whether in
Sicily, in Tuscany, in Puglia, even in Lombardy, or in the marshes of
Ancona! This fanciful description of the Italian language appeared
enigmatical to the methodical investigations of the cold and cautious
TIRABOSCHI. That grave critic submitted the interior feeling of the poet
to the test of facts and dates. With more erudition than taste, he
marked the mechanical gradations--the stages of every language, from
rudeness to refinement. The mere historical investigator could conceive
no other style than what his chronology had furnished. But the spirit of
DANTE had penetrated beyond the palpable substances of the explorer of
facts, and the arranger of dates. DANTE, in his musings, had thrown a
mystical veil over the Italian language; but the poet presciently
contemplated, amid the distraction of so many dialects, that an Italian
style would arise which at some distant day would be deemed classical.
DANTE wrote, and DANTE was the classic of his country.
The third great master of the vernacular literature of Italy was
BOCCACCIO, who threw out the fertility of his genius in the _volgare_ of
nature herself. This Shakspeare of a hundred tales transformed himself
into all the conditions of society; he touched all the passions of human
beings, and penetrated into the thoughts of men ere he delineated their
manners. Even two learned Greeks acknowledged that the tale-teller of
Certaldo, in his variegated pages, had displayed such force and
diversity in his genius, that no Greek writer could be compared with his
"volgare eloquenza."
The Italian literature thus burst into birth and into maturity; while it
is remarkable of the other languages of Europe, that after their first
efforts they fell into decrepitude. Our Saxon rudeness seems to have
required more hewing and polishing to be modelled into elegance, and
more volubility to flow into harmony, than even the genius of its
earliest writers could afford. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio were the
contemporaries of Gower, of Chaucer, and of "the Ploughman;" they
delight their nation after the lapse of many centuries; while the
critics of the reign of Elizabeth complained that Piers Ploughman,
Chaucer, and Gower then required glossaries; and so, at a later period,
did Ronsard, Baif, and Marot in France. In prose we had no single author
till the close of the sixteenth century who had yet constructed a style;
and in France Rabelais and Montaigne had contracted the rust and the
rudeness of antiquity, as it seemed to the refinement of the following
generation.
It cannot be thought that the genius of the Italians always excelled
that of other countries, but the material which those artists handled
yielded more kindly to their touch. The shell they struck gave a more
melodious sound than the rough and scrannel pipe cut from the northern
forests.
Custom and prejudice, however, predominated over the feelings of the
learned even in Italy. Their epistolary correspondence was still carried
on in Latin, and their first dramas were in the language of ancient
Rome. ANGELO POLITIAN appears to have been the earliest who composed a
dramatic piece, his "Orfeo," in "stilo volgare," and for which he
assigns a reason which might have occurred to many of his
predecessors--"perche degli spettatori fusse meglio intesa," that he
might be better understood by the audience!
The vernacular idiom in Italy was still so little in repute, while the
prejudice in favour of the Latin was so firmly rooted, that their youths
were prohibited from reading Italian books. A curious anecdote of the
times which its author has sent down to us, however, shows that their
native productions operated with a secret charm on their sympathies; for
VARCHI has told the singular circumstance that his father once sent him
to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his
inveterate passion for reading works in the vernacular tongue.
The struggle for the establishment of a vernacular literature was
apparent about the same period in different countries of Europe; a
simultaneous movement to vindicate the honour and to display the merits
of their national idiom.
JOACHIM DE BELLAY, of an illustrious literary family, resided three
years with his relative the Cardinal at Rome; the glory of the great
vernacular authors of Italy inflamed his ardour; and in one of his poems
he developes the beauty of "composing in our native language," by the
deeper emotions it excites in our countrymen. Subsequently he published
his "Defense et Illustration de la Langue Francoise," in 1549, where
eloquently and learnedly he would persuade his nation to write in their
own language. FERREIRA, the Portuguese poet, about the same time, with
all the feelings of patriotism, resolved to give birth to a national
literature; exhorting his countrymen to cultivate their vernacular
idiom, which he purified and enriched. He has thus feelingly expressed
this glorious sentiment--
Eu desta gloria so' fico contente
Que a minha terra amei, e a minha gente.
In Scotland we find Sir DAVID LYNDSAY, in 1553, writing his great work
on "The Monarchie," in his vernacular idiom, although he thought it
necessary to apologise, by alleging the example of Moses, Aristotle,
Plato, Virgil, and Cicero, who had all composed their works in their own
language.
In our own country Lord BERNERS had anticipated this general movement.
In 1525, when he ventured on the toil of his voluminous and spirited
Froissart, he described it as "translated out of Frenshe into our
_maternal English tongue_;" an expression which indicates those filial
yearnings of literary patriotism which were now to give us a native
literature.
The predominant prejudice of writing in Latin was first checked in
Germany, France, and England by the leaders of that great Revolution
which opposed the dynasty of the tiara. It was one of the great results
of the Reformation, that it taught the learned to address the people.
The versions of the Scriptures seemed to consecrate the vernacular idiom
of every nation in Europe. Peter Waldo began to use the vernacular
language in his version, however coarse, of the Bible for the Vaudois,
those earliest Reformers of the Church; and though the volume was
suppressed and prohibited, a modern French literary historian deduces
the taste for writing in the maternal tongue to this rude but great
attempt to attract the attention of the people. The same incident
occurred in our own annals; and it was the English Bible of Edward the
Sixth which opened the sealed treasures of our native language to the
multitude. Calvin wrote his great work. "The Institute of the Christian
Religion," at the same time in the Latin language and in the French; and
thus it happens that both these works are alike original. Calvin deemed
that to render the people intelligent their instructor should be
intelligible; and that if books are written for a great purpose, they
are only excellent in the degree that they are multiplied. Calvin
addressed not a few erudite recluses, but a whole nation.
It is unquestionable that the Reformation began to diminish the
veneration for the Latin language. Whether from the love of novelty, or
rather by that transition to a new system of human affairs, the pedantry
of ancient standing was giving way to the cultivation of a national
tongue. A great revolution was fast approaching, which would give a new
direction to the studies of the scholastic gentry, and introduce a new
mode of addressing the people. It was a revolution alarming those who
would have walled in public opinion by circumscribing all knowledge to a
privileged class. A remarkable evidence of this disposition appears in
an incident which occurred to Sir THOMAS WILSON, the author of two
English treatises on the arts of Logic and of Rhetoric. An emigrant in
the days of the Papistic Mary, he was arraigned at Rome before the
Inquisition, on the general charge of heresy, but especially for having
written his "Arts of Logic" and "of Rhetoric" in a language which, at
least we may presume, the whole conclave could not have criticised. The
torture was not only shown to him, but he tells us that "he had felt
some smart of it." The dark inquisitors taught our critic a new canon in
his own favourite arts; and our English Aristarchus soon discovered how
far those perfidious arts of reasoning and of eloquence may betray the
hapless orator, when his words are listened to by malicious judges,
equally skilled in mutilating sentences, or catching at loose words.
"They brought down my great heart by telling me plainly that my
_defence_ had put me into further peril." Our baffled rhetorician saw
that his only safety was to abstain from using the great instrument of
his art, which was now locked up in silence. He was left, as he
expresses himself, "without all help and without all hope, not only of
liberty, but also of life." He escaped by a strange incident. It would
seem that in an insurrection of the populace they set fire to the
prison, and in a burst of popular freedom, forgetful of their bigotry,
or from the spirit of vengeance on their hateful masters, they suffered
the heretics to creep out of their cells; an ebullition of public spirit
in "the worthy Romans," which the luckless English expounder of logic
and rhetoric might well account as "an enterprise never before
attempted." On Wilson's return to England be was solicited to revise his
admirable "Art of Rhetoric," but he strenuously refused to "meddle with
it, either hot or cold." Still smarting from the torture which his
innocent progeny had occasioned, he seems to have alleviated his
martyrdom with the quaint humour of a querulous prologue.
In these awful transitions from one state of society to another, even
the most sagacious are predisposed to discover what they secretly wish.
Erasmus foresaw that a great change was approaching; but although he has
delivered a prediction, it seems doubtful whether he had discerned the
object aright. "I see," he writes, "a certain golden age ready to arise,
which perhaps will not be my lot to partake of, yet I congratulate the
world, and the younger sort I congratulate, in whose minds, however,
Erasmus shall live and remain, by the remembrance of good offices he
hath done." These "good offices" were restricted to his ardent labours
in classical literature; but did Erasmus foresee in the change the
subversion of the papal system by which Luther had often terrified the
timid quietness of our gentle recluse, or the rise of the vernacular
literature which had yet no existence? Erasmus, indeed, was so little
sensible of this approaching change, that his amusing Colloquies, and
his Panegyric on Folly, whose satirical humour had been so happily
adapted to open the minds of men, he confined to the lettered circles;
as Sir Thomas More did his "Utopia," which, had it been intelligible to
the people, might have impressed them with some principles of political
government. The Sage of Rotterdam imagined that the great movement of
the age was to restore the classical pursuits of antiquity, and never
dreamed of that which, in opposition to the ancient, soon obtained the
distinction of "the New Learning," as it is expressed by Roger
Ascham--the knowledge which was adapted to the wants and condition of
the people. Erasmus would have been startled at the truth, that the
language of antiquity would even be neglected by the generality of
writers; that every European nation would have classics of their own;
and that the finest geniuses would make their appeals to the people in
the language of the people.
The predilection for composing in the Roman language long continued
among the most illustrious writers both at home and abroad. A judicious
critic in the reign of James I., Edmund Bolton, in his "Nero Caesar,"
recommends that the history of England should be composed in Latin by
the classical pen of the learned Sir Henry Saville, the editor of
"Chrysostom." It is indeed a curious circumstance that when an English
play was performed at the University of Cambridge before Queen
Elizabeth, the Vice-Chancellor was called on to remonstrate with the
ministers of Elizabeth against such a derogation of the learning and the
dignity of the University. This very Vice-Chancellor, who had to protest
against all English comedies, had, however, himself been the writer of
"Gammer Gurton's Needle," which was long considered to be the first
attempt at English comedy.[6] This conduct of the University offered no
encouragement to men of learning and genius to compose in their
vernacular idiom.
The genius of VERULAM, whose prescient views often anticipated the
institutions and the discoveries of succeeding times, appears never to
have contemplated the future miracles of his maternal tongue. Lord BACON
did not foresee that the English language would one day be capable of
embalming all that philosophy can discover or poetry can invent; that
his country, at length, would possess a national literature, and exult
in models of its own. So little did Lord Bacon esteem the language of
his country, that his favourite works are composed in Latin; and what he
had written in English he was anxious to have preserved, as he expresses
himself, in "that universal language which may last as long as books
last." It might have surprised Lord Bacon to have been told that the
learned in Europe would one day study English authors to learn to think
and write, and prefer his own "Essays," in their living pith, to the
colder transfusions of the Latin versions of his friends. The taste of
the philosophical Chancellor was probably inferior to his invention. Our
illustrious CAMDEN partook largely of this reigning fatuity when he
wrote the reign of Elizabeth--the history of his contemporaries, and the
"Britannia"--the history of our country, in the Latin language; as did
BUCHANAN that of Scotland, and DE THOU his great history, which includes
that of the Reformation in France. All these works, addressed to the
deepest sympathies of the people, were not imparted to them.
There was a peculiar absurdity in composing modern history in the
ancient language of a people alike foreigners to the feelings as well as
to the nature of the transactions. The Latin had neither proper terms to
describe modern customs, nor fitting appellatives for titles and for
names and places. The fastidious delicacy of the writers of modern
latinity could not endure to vitiate their classical purity by the
Gothic names of their heroes, and of the barbarous localities where
memorable transactions had occurred. These great authors, in their
despair, actually preferred to shed an obscurity over their whole
history, rather than to disturb the collocation of their numerous
diction. Buchanan and De Thou, by a ludicrous play on words, translated
the proper names of persons and of places. A Scottish worthy,
_Wiseheart_, was dignified by Buchanan with a Greek denomination,
_Sophocardus_; so that in a history of Scotland the name of a
conspicuous hero does not appear, or must be sought for in a Greek
lexicon, which, after all, may require a punster for a reader. The
history of De Thou is thus frequently unintelligible; and two separate
indexes of names and places, and the public stations which his
personages held, do not always agree with the copy preserved in the
family. The names of the persons are latinised according to their
etymology, and all public offices are designated by those Roman ones
which bore some fancied affinity. But the modern office was ill
indicated by the ancient; the constable of France, a military charge,
differed from the _magister equitum_, and the marshals of France from
the _tribunus equitum_. His equivocal personages are not always
recognised in this travesty of their Roman masquerade.
A remarkable instance of the gross impropriety of composing an English
history in Latin, and of the obstinate prejudice of the learned, who
imagined that the ancient idiom conferred dignity on a theme wholly
vernacular, appeared when the delegates of Oxford purchased ANTHONY
WOOD'S elaborate work on "The History and Antiquities of the University
of Oxford." Our honest antiquary, with a true vernacular feeling, had
written the history of an English university, during an uninterrupted
labour of ten years, in his artless but natural idiom. The learned
delegates opined that it was humiliating the Oxford press, to have its
history pass through it in the language of the country; and Dr. Fell,
with others, was chosen to dignify it into Latin. What was the result of
this pompous and inane labour? The author was sorely hurt at the sight
of his fair offspring disguised in its foreign and fantastic dress. What
was clear in English, was obscure in the circumlocution of rotund
periods and affected phraseologies; the circumstantial narrative and the
local descriptions, so interesting to an English reader, were not only
superfluous, but repulsive to the foreigner. ANTHONY WOOD indignantly
re-transcribed the whole of his English copy, and left the fair volumes
to the care of the university itself, not without the hope which has
been realized, that his work should be delivered to posterity stamped by
its author's native genius.[7]
Such was the crisis, and such the difficulties and the obstructions of
that native literature in whose prosperous state every European people
now exults. Homogeneous with their habitual associations, moulded by
their customs and manners, and everywhere stamped by the peculiar
organization of each distinct race, we see the vernacular literature
ever imbued with the qualities of the soil whence it springs,
diversified, yet ever true to nature. Had the native genius of the great
luminaries of literature not found a vein which could reach to the
humblest of their compatriots, they who are now the creators of our
vernacular literature had remained but pompous plagiarists or frigid
babblers, and the moderns might still have been pacing in the trammels
of a mimetic antiquity.