The Low-
Dutch of Holland, anyhow, are indisputably as genuine Dutch as the
High-Dutch of Germany Proper. But do they write sentences like this
one--informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum? If not, the question must
be asked, not how we have come to deviate, but how the Germans have
come to deviate. Our modern English prose in plain matters is often
all just the same as the prose of King Alfred and the Chronicle.
Ohthere's North Sea Voyage and Wulfstan's Baltic Voyage is the sort
of thing which is sent in every day, one may say, to the Geographical
or Ethnological Society, in the whole style and turn of phrase and
thought.'
The mass of a stock must supply our data for judging the stock. But
see, moreover, what I have said at p. 100.
{120} Lord Strangford's note on this is: --'The Irish monks whose
bells and books were found in Iceland could not have contributed
anything to the old Norse spirit, for they had perished before the
first Norseman had set foot on the island. The form of the old Norse
poetry known to us as Icelandic, from the accident of its
preservation in that island alone, is surely Pan-Teutonic from old
times; the ar and method of its strictly literary cultivation must
have been much influenced by the contemporary Old-English national
poetry, with which the Norsemen were in constant contact; and its
larger, freer, and wilder spirit must have been owing to their freer
and wilder life, to say nothing of their roused and warring paganism.
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