(b) I think it was of true scholarly desire to vindicate English Literature from the charge of being ‘too easy,’ that—­as their studies advanced—­they laid more and more stress on Middle-English and Old English writings than on what our nations of England and Scotland have written since they learned to write.  I dare to think also that we may attribute to this dread of ‘easiness’ their practice of cumbering simple texts with philological notes; on which, rather than on the text, we unhappy students were carefully examined.  For an example supplied to Dr Corson—­I take those three lines of Cowper’s “Task” (Bk I, 86-88): 

     Thus first necessity invented stools,
     Convenience next suggested elbow-chairs,
     And luxury th’ accomplish’d SOFA last.

Now in these three lines the word ‘accomplish’d’ is the only one that needs even the smallest explanation.  ‘But,’ says Dr Corson, ’in two different editions of “The Task” in my library, prepared for the use of the young, no explanation is given of it, but in both the Arabic origin of ‘sofa’ is given.  In one the question is asked what other words in English have been derived from the Arabic.’ (’Abracadabra’ would be my little contribution.)

(c) These valiant fighters—­having to extol what Europe had, wrongly enough, forgotten to count among valuable things—­turned aggressively provincial, parted their beards in the Anglo-Saxon fashion; composed long sentences painfully innocent of any word not derivable from Anglo-Saxon, sentences in which the ‘impenetrability of matter’ became the ’un-go-throughsomeness of stuff (but that may have happened in a parody), and in general comported themselves like the Anglo-Saxons they claimed for their forbears; rightly enough for anything anyone cared, but wrongly enough for the rest of us who had no yearning toward that kinship and went on spelling Alfred with an A.

(d) They were—­I suppose through opposition—­extremely irascible men; like farmers.  Urbanity was the last note in their gamut, the City—­urbs quam dicunt Romam—­the last of places in their ken.  There was no engaging them in dialectic, an Athenian art which they frankly despised.  If you happened to disagree with them, their answer was a sturdy Anglo-Saxon brick.  If you politely asked your way to Puddlehampton, and to be directed to Puddlehampton’s main objects of interest, the answer you would get (see “Notes and Queries” passim) would be, ’Who is this that comes out of Nowhere, enquiring for Puddlehampton, unacquainted with Stubbs?  Is it possible at this time of day that the world can contain anyone ignorant of the published Transactions of the Wiltshire Walking Club, Vol.  III, p. 159—­“Puddlehampton, its Rise and Decline, with a note on Vespasian?"’

(e) These pioneers—­pushing the importance of English, but occupied more and more with origins and with bad authors, simply could not see the vital truth; that English Literature is a continuing thing, ten times more alive to-day than it was in the times they studied and belauded.  The last word upon them is that not a man of them could write prose in the language they thrust on our study.  To them, far more than to the old classical scholars, English was a shut book:  a large book, but closed and clasped, material to heighten a desk for schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.