The vernacular idiom in Italy was still so little in repute, while the prejudice in favour of the Latin was so firmly rooted, that their youths were prohibited from reading Italian books. A curious anecdote of the times which its author has sent down to us, however, shows that their native productions operated with a secret charm on their sympathies; for Varchi has told the singular circumstance that his father once sent him to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his inveterate passion for reading works in the vernacular tongue.
The struggle for the establishment of a vernacular literature was apparent about the same period in different countries of Europe; a simultaneous movement to vindicate the honour and to display the merits of their national idiom.
Joachim de Bellay, of an illustrious literary family, resided three years with his relative the Cardinal at Rome; the glory of the great vernacular authors of Italy inflamed his ardour; and in one of his poems he developes the beauty of “composing in our native language,” by the deeper emotions it excites in our countrymen. Subsequently he published his “Defense et Illustration de la Langue Françoise,” in 1549, where eloquently and learnedly he would persuade his nation to write in their own language. Ferreira, the Portuguese poet, about the same time, with all the feelings of patriotism, resolved to give birth to a national literature; exhorting his countrymen to cultivate their vernacular idiom, which he purified and enriched. He has thus feelingly expressed this glorious sentiment—
| Eu desta gloria so’ fico contente Que a minha terra amei, e a minha gente. |
In Scotland we find Sir David Lyndsay, in 1553, writing his great work on “The Monarchie,” in his vernacular idiom, although he thought it necessary to apologise, by alleging the example of Moses, Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, and Cicero, who had all composed their works in their own language.
In our own country Lord Berners had anticipated this general movement. In 1525, when he ventured on the toil of his voluminous and spirited Froissart, he described it as “translated out of Frenshe into our maternal English tongue;” an expression which indicates those filial yearnings of literary patriotism which were now to give us a native literature.
The predominant prejudice of writing in Latin was first checked in Germany, France, and England by the leaders of that great Revolution which opposed the dynasty of the tiara. It was one of the great results of the Reformation, that it taught the learned to address the people. The versions of the Scriptures seemed to consecrate the vernacular idiom of every nation in Europe. Peter Waldo began to use the vernacular language in his version, however coarse, of the Bible for the Vaudois, those earliest Reformers of the Church; and though the volume was suppressed and prohibited, a modern French literary historian deduces the taste for writing in the maternal tongue to this rude but great attempt to attract the attention of the people. The same incident occurred in our own annals; and it was the English Bible of Edward the Sixth which opened the sealed treasures of our native language to the multitude. Calvin wrote his great work. “The Institute of the Christian Religion,” at the same time in the Latin language and in the French; and thus it happens that both these works are alike original. Calvin deemed that to render the people intelligent their instructor should be intelligible; and that if books are written for a great purpose, they are only excellent in the degree that they are multiplied. Calvin addressed not a few erudite recluses, but a whole nation.
It is unquestionable that the Reformation began to diminish the veneration for the Latin language. Whether from the love of novelty, or rather by that transition to a new system of human affairs, the pedantry of ancient standing was giving way to the cultivation of a national tongue. A great revolution was fast approaching, which would give a new direction to the studies of the scholastic gentry, and introduce a new mode of addressing the people. It was a revolution alarming those who would have walled in public opinion by circumscribing all knowledge to a privileged class. A remarkable evidence of this disposition appears in an incident which occurred to Sir Thomas Wilson, the author of two English treatises on the arts of Logic and of Rhetoric. An emigrant in the days of the Papistic Mary, he was arraigned at Rome before the Inquisition, on the general charge of heresy, but especially for having written his “Arts of Logic” and “of Rhetoric” in a language which, at least we may presume, the whole conclave could not have criticised. The torture was not only shown to him, but he tells us that “he had felt some smart of it.” The dark inquisitors taught our critic a new canon in his own favourite arts; and our English Aristarchus soon discovered how far those perfidious arts of reasoning and of eloquence may betray the hapless orator, when his words are listened to by malicious judges, equally skilled in mutilating sentences, or catching at loose words. “They brought down my great heart by telling me plainly that my defence had put me into further peril.” Our baffled rhetorician saw that his only safety was to abstain from using the great instrument of his art, which was now locked up in silence. He was left, as he expresses himself, “without all help and without all hope, not only of liberty, but also of life.” He escaped by a strange incident. It would seem that in an insurrection of the populace they set fire to the prison, and in a burst of popular freedom, forgetful of their bigotry, or from the spirit of vengeance on their hateful masters, they suffered the heretics to creep out of their cells; an ebullition of public spirit in “the worthy Romans,” which the luckless English expounder of logic and rhetoric might well account as “an enterprise never before attempted.” On Wilson’s return to England be was solicited to revise his admirable “Art of Rhetoric,” but he strenuously refused to “meddle with it, either hot or cold.” Still smarting from the torture which his innocent progeny had occasioned, he seems to have alleviated his martyrdom with the quaint humour of a querulous prologue.
In these awful transitions from one state of society to another, even the most sagacious are predisposed to discover what they secretly wish. Erasmus foresaw that a great change was approaching; but although he has delivered a prediction, it seems doubtful whether he had discerned the object aright. “I see,” he writes, “a certain golden age ready to arise, which perhaps will not be my lot to partake of, yet I congratulate the world, and the younger sort I congratulate, in whose minds, however, Erasmus shall live and remain, by the remembrance of good offices he hath done.” These “good offices” were restricted to his ardent labours in classical literature; but did Erasmus foresee in the change the subversion of the papal system by which Luther had often terrified the timid quietness of our gentle recluse, or the rise of the vernacular literature which had yet no existence? Erasmus, indeed, was so little sensible of this approaching change, that his amusing Colloquies, and his Panegyric on Folly, whose satirical humour had been so happily adapted to open the minds of men, he confined to the lettered circles; as Sir Thomas More did his “Utopia,” which, had it been intelligible to the people, might have impressed them with some principles of political government. The Sage of Rotterdam imagined that the great movement of the age was to restore the classical pursuits of antiquity, and never dreamed of that which, in opposition to the ancient, soon obtained the distinction of “the New Learning,” as it is expressed by Roger Ascham—the knowledge which was adapted to the wants and condition of the people. Erasmus would have been startled at the truth, that the language of antiquity would even be neglected by the generality of writers; that every European nation would have classics of their own; and that the finest geniuses would make their appeals to the people in the language of the people.
The predilection for composing in the Roman language long continued among the most illustrious writers both at home and abroad. A judicious critic in the reign of James I., Edmund Bolton, in his “Nero Cæsar,” recommends that the history of England should be composed in Latin by the classical pen of the learned Sir Henry Saville, the editor of “Chrysostom.” It is indeed a curious circumstance that when an English play was performed at the University of Cambridge