proceedings in the law courts were ordered to be conducted in the native
tongue. Yet when Chaucer wrote his "Canterbury Tales," it seems still to
have continued the pedantic affectation of a profession for its members,
like Chaucer's "Man of Law," to introduce French law-terms into common
conversation; so that it is natural enough to find the "Summoner"
following suit, and interlarding his "Tale" with the Latin scraps picked
up by him from the decrees and pleadings of the ecclesiastical courts.
Meanwhile, manifold difficulties had delayed or interfered with the fusion
between the two races, before the victory of the English language showed
this fusion to have been in substance accomplished. One of these
difficulties, which has been sometimes regarded as fundamental, has
doubtless been exaggerated by national feeling on either side; but that it
existed is not to be denied. Already in those ages the national character
and temperament of French and English differed largely from one another;
though the reasons why they so differed, remain a matter of argument. In
a dialogue, dated from the middle of the fourteenth century, the French
interlocutor attributes this difference to the respective national
beverages: "WE are nourished with the pure juice of the grape, while
naught but the dregs is sold to the English, who will take anything for
liquor that is liquid." The case is put with scarcely greater politeness
by a living French critic of high repute, according to whom the English,
still weighted down by Teutonic phlegm, were drunken gluttons, agitated at
intervals by poetic enthusiasm, while the Normans, on the other hand,
lightened by their transplantation, and by the admixture of a variety of
elements, already found the claims of esprit developing themselves within
them. This is an explanation which explains nothing--least of all, the
problem: why the lively strangers should have required the contact with
insular phlegm in order to receive the creative impulse--why, in other
words, Norman-French literature should have derived so enormous an
advantage from the transplantation of Normans to English ground. But the