Note 62 — Chapter VI

We would not dare to invent a word of bi-lingual derivatives if we had not the authority of all the bishops for so doing, and to this we may add that the member of the Episcopal Bench, who is a distinguished philologist, especially sanctions word-coining. Dr. Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, says (page 151 et seq. of his “Study of Words,”) that poets may at all times coin them, and prose (not prosy) writers occasionally, and His Grace refers, in proof, to Cicero and St. Augustine. “Pan,” is of the old Greek, but “Anglican,” as well as “Anglia,” are Latin words, that were coined two or three centuries after Latin was living and every-day-spoken. “Anglia” is in reality derived from the Angles, an ancient German nation, an off-shoot of the Suevi, who migrated to the parts of Denmark, now known as Schleswig and Holstein. In process of time they came over to this country in greater numbers than the inhabitants of the other nations that dwelt along the East Coast of Northern Europe. Tracing the derivation of “Angli,” we fear that the name comes from nothing more dignified than the Saxon word angel or engel, which signified a fish-hook. Being the most daring of all the pirates that infested the Northern Seas, they were specially distinguished as such among other nations, who said of the Angli, that they were like hooks, they caught all that was in the sea and made prey of it. Such were our ancestors of 2,000 years ago and upwards. (Has the vulgar saying of “with a hook,” any connection with our origin as an Anglo-Saxon nation?) But hear what Professor Henry Morley says of Englishmen, through Saxon and English Literature, for more than thirteen centuries. “Our writers before Chaucer, were men speaking the mind of our country during the period of the formation of the language, either in Latin, the common tongue of the learned, or in Anglo-Saxon, or in Anglo-Norman, or in English, of which the original elements were so variously proportioned and so incompletely blended, that it differs much from English of to-day. But with occasional impediment of a word that has passed out of use, the language of Chaucer, and those of his contemporaries who did not, like the author of “Piers Plowman,” write in the less developed English of a rural district, speaks to us all yet with a living warmth. With Gower and Chaucer, therefore, begins the literature of formed English; and as the best fruit of John Gower’s genius is contained, not in his English, but in his Latin poetry, it is by common consent to Geoffery Chaucer that we now look back as to the very spring and well of English undefiled.