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Updated: June 9, 2025
It is a paradox worth noting for its strangeness that the first revival of mediaevalism in modern English literature was in the Renaissance itself. Talking in studious archaism seems to have been a fashionable practice in society and court circles. "The fine courtier," says Thomas Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric, "will talk nothing but Chaucer."
So far from hesitating whether to imitate, he rather hesitated whom not to include, if only by a single reference, in his mosaic of all that had entered into the history of Rome. His archaism is but another side of the same thing.
So the portents described by Virgil as following on the death of Caesar are told again by Manilius at the end of Bk. In Metre. In all these points Manilius is a little less strict than Ovid, e.g. He also follows Virgil in alliteration, which Ovid does not. The great frequency of elision in Virgil must be regarded as an archaism. This is, perhaps, rather an artistic defect, but it is designed.
Like Lucilius, he introduces single Greek words, a practice which Horace wisely rejects, but which is revived in the poetry of the Empire. His poetical ornaments are those of the older writers. Archaism, alliteration, and assonance abound in his pages.
About as much as this peerless Niobe of mine is attached to me." He struck the marble statue as he spoke. "Then, how could she marry him?" asked Beulah naively. "Ha! ha! I will present you to the Smithsonian Institution as the last embodiment of effete theories. Who exhumed you, patron saint of archaism, from the charnel-house of centuries?"
His archaism in the use of pure Latin, and, alongside of it, his free adoption of Grecisms, are the first open sign of two movements which profoundly affected the prose of the earlier and later empire. The acrid critic of the Augustan age, Asinius Pollio, accused him of having had collections of obsolete words and phrases made for his use out of Cato and the older Roman writers.
A few picturesque glimpses in pleasing and poetical phrases, with a touch of archaism, and reminiscences of Hamlet and Jeremy Taylor, "the Shakspeare of divines," as he has called him, are what we find in this chapter on Commodity, or natural conveniences. But "a nobler want of man is served by Nature, namely, the love of Beauty" which is his next subject.
An archaism that might have been spared, since so little of the poem was retained, is the sad old Händelian style of repeating the same words indefinitely, to all neglect of emptiness of meaning and triteness.
In early life it was not scrupulously correct, and to the end it was marked here and there by an archaism such as "I have strove," and "they are rode over." It was singularly uninvolved and uncomplicated, and was animated, natural, and vigorous in the highest degree. As years went on, it gained both in ease and in accuracy, but never lost either its force or its resonance.
And behold, before history had time to hatch another war of the like proportions in the intensity of aroused passions and the greatness of issues, the dead flavour of archaism descended on the manly sentiment of those self-denying words. Mankind has been demoralised since by its own mastery of mechanical appliances.
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