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Selections from the poetical works of Geoffry Chaucer
Selections from the poetical works of Geoffry Chaucer Author:Geoffrey Chaucer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. The effect produced upon the English language by Chaucer's writings.— The grade and quality of his genius It will not be deemed presumptuous, p... more »erhaps, if, without venturing to pronounce critically upon the effect that Chaucer's writings had upon the English language and English poetry, we bring together the judgments of those who may be rightfully esteemed " doctors" upon that question. It is worthy of observation that the two principal censors of Chaucer's style, are men who made no pretensions to poetical sensibility. They were mere verbal pedants, and their censures are based upon a servile adhesion to those rules of philology, which their minds recognized as of the first importance. Honest old Verstegan, and long after him Skinner, the celebrated philologist, censure Chaucer as having " deformed, the English idiom by an immoderate admixture of French words." Diametrically opposed to these, and yet belonging to the same family of error, are they who deny that Chaucer imported words from the French, and who insist that he kept the language precisely as he found it. The most judicious critics stand upon a middle ground, and agree that he naturalized words both from the French and Provencal, and thereby improved and softened our barren and harsh tongue. This is the testimony of Dryden, who also asserts that from him the purity of the English tongue began. Warton also, the learned and elegant author of " The History of English Poetry," says, " Edward the Third, while he perhaps intended only to banish a badge of conquest, greatly contributed to establish the nationaldialect, by abolishing the use of the Norman tongue in the public and judicial proceedings, and by substituting the national language of the country. But Chaucer first taught m's countrymen to write...« less