CHAPTER VIII.
ENGLISH.
"If Chaucer, as has been said, is Spring, it is a modern, premature
Spring, followed by an interval of doubtful weather. Sidney is the very
Spring--the later May. And in prose he is the authentic, only Spring. It
is a prose full of young joy, and young power, and young inexperience,
and young melancholy, which is the wilfulness of joy; . . .
"Sidney's prose is treasureable, not only for its absolute merits, but
as the bud from which English prose, that gorgeous and varied flower,
has unfolded."--FRANCIS THOMPSON, "The Prose of Poets."
The study of one's own language is the very heart of a modern education;
to the study of English, therefore, belongs a central place in the
education of English-speaking girls. It has two functions: one is to
become the instrument by which almost all the other subjects are
apprehended; the other, more characteristically its own, is to give that
particular tone to the mind which distinguishes it from others. This is
a function that is always in process of further development; for the
mind of a nation elaborates its language, and the language gives tone to
the mind of the new generation. The influences at work upon the English
language at present are very complex, and play on it with great force,
so that the changes are startling in their rapidity.
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