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The Provencal poets were unquestionably the masters of the Florentine. But they wrote in an age which could not appreciate their merits; and their imitator lived at the very period when composition in the vernacular language began to attract general attention. Petrarch was in literature what a Valentine is in love.
But worse, by a great deal, and not even intelligible in England, is the word thereafter, used as an adverb of time, i.e., as the correlative of hereafter. Thereafter, in pure vernacular English, bears a totally different sense. In 'Paradise Lost, for instance, having heard the character of a particular angel, you are told that he spoke thereafter, i.e., spoke agreeably to that character.
Peggy and Polly were to dance it, one with Dick Allyn, the other with his room-mate, Calhoun Byrd, who, in Bancroft's vernacular "spooned on Ralph" and had always considered Polly "a clipper." Juno was to go with Guy Bennett, Nelly, Rosalie, Marjorie and Natalie had, alack! to look on from the gallery, escorted by second-classmen. But now of immediate happenings at Columbia Heights School.
Metals also had great medicinal potency. Antimony, lead, iron, mercury, were well known, and of special importance was copper, the Venus of the early chemists. The medicinal virtue which inhered in Butler's stone and in other powerful fermental remedies, van Helmont designated as "drif," which he said means, in the vernacular, virgin sand or earth.
And as in the course of a week Mark showed no signs of improvement in vernacular French or Italian, Lord Kirkaldy's conscience would let him give no other advice than that his nephew should stick to English law living still on the allowance his father gave him, and hoping for one of the chance appointments open to an English barrister of good family and fair ability.
There was nothing remarkable in the meal itself; but the hospitality of our host, more Danish than Icelandic, reminded me of the heroes of old. It was evident that we were more at home than he was himself. The conversation was carried on in the vernacular tongue, which my uncle mixed with German and M. Fridrikssen with Latin for my benefit.
Mother Carey's chicken hovers near when the elements are at strife. He was immensely satisfied with his diggings, he said, liked the natives, and considered this a splendid chance for improving his Spanish. He was reading "Don Quixote" in the vernacular.
I sipped my absinthe drip and sawed wormwood. One absinthe drip is not much but I said again to Kerner, kindly: "You are a fool." And then, in the vernacular: "Jesse Holmes for yours." And then I looked around and saw the Fool-Killer, as he had always appeared to my imagination, sitting at a nearby table, and regarding us with his reddish, fatal, relentless eyes.
And in the achievement of a type of beauty so national and vernacular, the votaries of purely Dutch art might well feel that the Italianisers, like Berghem, Boll, and Jan Weenix went so far afield in vain.
Some idea of the wide area covered by the nomenclature of plants, as seen in the gradual evolution and descent of vernacular names, may be gathered even from a cursory survey of those most widely known in our own and other countries.
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