That
they are obsolete now, and indeed were obsolete before they were dead,
is a warning to authors who intend similar extravagances. Strangeness
and exoticism are not lasting wares. By the time of "Love's Labour Lost"
they had become nothing more than matter for laughter, and it is only
through their reflection and distortion in Shakespeare's pages that we
know them now.
Had not a restraining influence, anxiously and even acrimoniously urged,
broken in on their endeavours the English language to-day might have
been almost as completely latinized as Spanish or Italian. That the
essential Saxon purity of our tongue has been preserved is to the credit
not of sensible unlettered people eschewing new fashions they could not
comprehend, but to the scholars themselves. The chief service that Cheke
and Ascham and their fellows rendered to English literature was their
crusade against the exaggerated latinity that they had themselves helped
to make possible, the crusade against what they called "inkhorn terms."
"I am of this opinion," said Cheke in a prefatory letter to a book
translated by a friend of his, "that our own tongue should be written
clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with the borrowing of other
tongues, wherein if we take not heed by time, ever borrowing and never
paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.
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