A History of English Language

The appeal to authority, 1650-1800 247
A succession of writers voiced the fear that in a few generations their works would not
be understood. Shortly after the Restoration the poet Waller wrote (Of English Verse):
But who can hope his lines should long
Last, in a daily changing tongue?
While they are new, Envy prevails;
And as that dies, our language fails….
Poets that Lasting Marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek;
We write in Sand….
A little later Swift wrote: “How then shall any man, who hath a genius for history equal
to the best of the ancients, be able to undertake such a work with spirit and cheerfulness,
when he considers that he will be read with pleasure but a very few years, and in an age
or two shall hardly be understood without an interpreter?” And he added, “The fame of
our writers is usually confined to these two islands, and it is hard it should be limited in
time as much as place by the perpetual variations of our speech.” 10 Pope echoed the
sentiment when he wrote in his Essay on Criticism, “And such as Chaucer is, shall
Dryden be.” Even after the middle of the century, when the hope of fixing the language
was less frequently expressed, Thomas Sheridan addressed a plea to the earl of
Chesterfield to exert his influence toward stabilizing the language: “Suffer not our
Shakespear, and our Milton, to become two or three centuries hence what Chaucer is at
present, the study only of a few poring antiquarians, and in an age or two more the
victims of bookworms.” 11
It is curious that a number of people notable in various intellectual spheres in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries should have been blind to the testimony of
history and believed that by taking thought it would be possible to suspend the processes
of growth and decay that characterize a living language. It is the more remarkable in that
the truth had been recognized by some from a considerably earlier date. The anonymous
author of the pamphlet Vindex Anglicus: or, The Perfections of the English Language
Defended and Asserted (1644) 12 noted that changes in language are inevitable. Even
earlier (1630) that delightful letter writer James Howell had observed: “that as all other
sublunary things are subject to corruptions and decay,… the learnedest and more
eloquent languages are not free from this common fatal-
10
Proposal.
11
British Education (1756), p. xvii.
12
Harleian Miscellany, 5 (1808–1811), 428–34.