labour on it. And why, I pray you, should such labour not be bestowed on English, as well as on Latin or any other language? Will you say it is needless? Certainly that will not hold. If loss of time over tongues, while you are pilgrims to learning, is no injury, or lack of sound skill, while language distracts the mind from the sense, especially with the foolish and inexperienced, then there might be some ground for holding it needless. But since there was no need for the present loss of time in study through labouring with tongues, and since our understanding is more perfect in our natural speech, however well we may know the foreign language, methinks necessity itself calls for English, by which all that bravery may be had at home that makes us gaze so much at the fine stranger. But you will say it is uncouth; so it is, through being unused. So was it with Latin, and so it is with every language. Cicero himself, the paragon of Rome while he was alive, and our best pattern now though he is dead, had great wrestling with such wranglers, and their disdain of their natural speech, before he won from the public of his time the opinion in which he was held by the best of his friends then, and is held by us now. Are not all his prefaces to his philosophical writings full of such conflicts with these cavillers? English wits are very well able, thank God, if the good will were present, to make that uncouth and unknown learning very familiar to our people in our own tongue, even by the example of those very writers we esteem so highly, who having done for other languages what I wish for ours in the like case, must needs approve of us, unless they assert that the merit of conveying knowledge from a foreign tongue died with them, not to revive among us. But whatever they may say to continue their own credit, our fellow-countrymen cannot but think that it is our praise to obtain by purchase and transplanting into our own tongue what they were so desirous to place in theirs, and are now so loth to forgo again; it is indeed the fairest flower of their whole garland, for these tongues would wither soon, or decay altogether, but for the great knowledge contained therein. If our people were not readier to wonder at their workmanship than to take trouble with their own tongue, they might have the same advantage. Our English is our own, and must be used by those to whom it belongs, as were those others that were ranked with the best.