As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be
translated from the French, homilies and saints' legends and rhyming
chronicles were still manufactured. But the poems of Occleve and Lydgate
and James I. had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to prolong
the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again slipped back
into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer.
In the history of every literature the development of prose is later
than that of verse. The latter being, by its very form, artificial, is
cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage of
society, when prose is simply the talk of men, and not thought worthy of
being written and kept. English prose labored under the added
disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue
and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries. Latin
was the language of the Church, and in the Middle Ages churchman and
scholar were convertible terms. The word _clerk_ meant either priest or
scholar. Two of the _Canterbury Tales_ are in prose, as is also the
_Testament of Love_, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, and the style of all
these is so feeble, wandering, and unformed that it is hard to believe
that they were written by the same man who wrote the _Knight's Tale_ and
the story of Griselda.
Pages:
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52