Yet notwithstanding all this, it is very manifest, that the tongue itself has matter in it to furnish out an art, and that the same means which has been used in reducing other tongues to their best form, will serve this of ours, both for generality of precept and for certainty of foundation, as may be easily proved on those four grounds--the antiquity of our tongue, the people’s intelligence, their learning, and their experience. For how can it be but that a tongue which has continued for many hundreds of years not only a tongue, but one of good account, both in speech and pen, should have grown in all that time to some refinement and assurance of itself, by so long and so general a use, the people that have used it being none of the dullest, and labouring continually in all exercises that concern learning, and in all practices that procure experience, either in peace or in war, either in public or private, either at home or abroad? As for the antiquity of our speech, whether it be measured by the ancient Teutonic, whence it originally comes, or even but by the latest terms which it borrows daily from foreign tongues, either out of pure necessity in new matters, or out of mere bravery to garnish itself with, it cannot be young--unless the German himself be young, who claims a prerogative for the age of his speech, of an infinite prescription; unless the Latin and Greek be young, whose words we enfranchise to our own use, though not always immediately from themselves, but mostly through the Italian, French, and Spanish; unless other tongues, which are neither Greek nor Latin, nor any of the forenamed, from which we have something, as they have from ours, will for company’s sake be content to be young, that ours may not be old. But I am well assured that every one of these will strive for antiquity, and rather grant it to us than forgo it themselves. So that if the very newest words we use savour of great antiquity, and the ground of our speech is most ancient, it must needs then follow that our whole tongue was weaned long ago, as having all her teeth. As for the importance of our tongue, both in pen and speech, no man will have any doubt who is able to judge what those things are that make any tongue to be of account, which things I take to be three--the authority of the people who speak it, the subject-matter with which the speech deals, and the manifold uses which it serves. For all these three our tongue need not give place to any of her peers. First, to say something of the people that use the tongue, the English nation has always been of good credit and great estimation, ever since credit and estimation in the course of history came over to this side of the Alps, which appears to be true--even by foreign chronicles (not to use our own in a case that affects ourselves), which would never have said so much of the people if it had been obscure, and unworthy of a perpetual history.