14. =MODERN ENGLISH, 1485-1882.=--The year 1485 marks the accession of the House of Tudor to the throne, in the person of Henry VII. By this time almost all inflections had disappeared from our language. Many hundreds of French words had come into the language. From the time of the Revival of Letters[6]--which may be said to have begun in the sixteenth century--several thousands of Latin words were poured into the English vocabulary. The period which lies between 1485 and 1603--the year in which James I. came to the throne--is sometimes called the period of =Tudor English=. Its greatest verse-writer is Shakspeare; its greatest prose-writer is Hooker, who wrote _The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_. 15. =ENGLISH WORDS IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.=--The English language has for centuries been importing words from many foreign tongues into its own vocabulary; and it has given a hearty welcome to all kinds of strangers. So much is this the case, and so far has this habit of taking in strangers gone, that we can now quite accurately say: _Most of the words in our English language are not English._ There are more Latin words in our tongue than there are English. But this statement is true only of our words as we find them _in the dictionary_. The words which we use every day--the language _of the mouth_--is almost entirely English. The _fixed vocabulary_--the vocabulary printed in the dictionary--is more Latin than English; the _moving vocabulary_--the words which are daily spoken--is English. Thus, if we take a passage in our translation of the Four Gospels, we shall find from 90 to 96 per cent. of the words used are English--and pure English. In the _Prologue_ which Chaucer wrote to his famous set of poems called _The Canterbury Tales_, 88 per cent. of the words are English; while, in Mrs Browning’s _Cry of the Children_, the English words rise to the large proportion of 92 per cent. The following is a list of a few more percentages of purely English words in the writings of well-known authors: Spenser (_Faerie Queene_, ii. 7) 86 per cent. Shakspeare (_Henry IV., Part I._, Act ii) 91 “ Milton (_Paradise Lost_, Book VI.) 80 “ Swift (_John Bull_) 85 “ Johnson (Preface to _Dictionary_) 72 “ Gibbon (_Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, I., cap. vii.) 70 “ Macaulay (_Essay on Lord Bacon_) 75 “ Tennyson (_In Memoriam_, first twenty poems) 89 “