"Our English tongue driven almost out of kind (nature), Dismember'd, hack'd, maim'd, rent, and torn, Defaced, patch'd, marr'd, and made in scorn." A critic who has left us "An Arte of English Poetry," written perhaps about 1550 or 1560, exhorting the poet to render his language, which, however, he never could in his own verses, "natural, pure, and the most usual of all his country," seemed at a loss where to fix on the standard of style. He would look to the Court to be the modellers of speech, but there he acknowledges that "the preachers, the secretaries, and travellers," were great corrupters, and not less "our Universities, where scholars use much peevish affectation of words out of the primitive languages." The coarse bran of our own native English was, however, to be sifted; but where was the genuine English idiom to be gathered? Our fastidious critic remonstrates against "the daily talk of northern men." The _good southern_ was that "we of Middlesex or Surrey use." Middlesex and Surrey were then to regulate the idiom of all British men! and all our England was doomed to barbarism, as it varied from "the usual speech of the Court, and that of London within sixty miles, and not much above." But was our English more stable within this assigned circumference of the metropolis than any other line of demarcation? About 1580, CAREW informs us that "Within these sixty years we have incorporated so many Latin and French words as the third part of our language consisteth in them." Some there were among us who, alarmed that such ceaseless infusions were polluting the native springs of English, would look back with veneration and fondness on our ancient masters. Our great poet SPENSER,[6] then youthful, declared that the language of CHAUCER was the purest English; and our bard hailed, in a verse often quoted by the critics-- Dan Chaucer, well of English undefiled. But in this well are deposited many waters. Chaucer has been accused of having enriched the language with the spoils of France, blending the old Saxon with the Norman-French and the modern Gallic of his day, for which he has been vehemently censured by the austerity of philological antiquaries. Skinner and his followers have condemned Chaucer for introducing "a waggon-load of words," and have proclaimed that Chaucer "wrote the language of no age;" a reproach which has been transferred to our Spenser himself, who has transplanted many an exotic into the English soil, and re-cast many an English word for the innocent forgery of a rhyme! So that two of the finest geniuses in our literature, for recasting the language, must lay their heads down to receive the heavy axe of verbal pedantry.