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Updated: June 9, 2025
At the top of the room was a chair in which Johnson had sat. The club was a club in which Wilkes had spoken, in a time when even the ne'er-do-weel was virile. But all these things by themselves might be merely archaism. The extraordinary thing was that this hall had all the hubbub, the sincerity, the anger, the oratory of the eighteenth century.
For a theory of taste the expression of an accepted ideal of archaism, on whatever basis it may have been accepted, is perhaps best rated as an element of beauty; there need be no question of its legitimation.
The Convention thought that it detected a "Romanizing germ" in the place assigned to "penitence," and an archaism in the temporal sense assigned to "space," and accordingly rearranged the whole sentence. But in their effort to mend the language, our legislators assuredly marred the music.
The termination, which suggests either wilful archaism or useless slang, adds nothing of sense or sound to the word. It is like a piece of dead wood in a tree, and is better lopped off. Nor does the use of "bully" prove a wholesome respect for the past. It is true that our Elizabethans used this adjective in the sense of great or noble.
It is of moment to know with some precision what is the degree of archaism conventionally required in speaking on any given topic. Usage differs appreciably from the pulpit to the market-place; the latter, as might be expected, admits the use of relatively new and effective words and turns of expression, even by fastidious persons.
Leaf suspects that this is a piece of "false archaism," but we do not think that early poets in an uncritical age are ever archaeologists, good or bad. A tall man might inherit the shield of a short father, or versa. A man in turning to fly might trip on the rim of his shield, which proves how large it was: "it reached to his feet."
We can trace by successive steps the swift development of Egyptian art from the rude archaism of the Ist Dynasty to its final consummation under the Vth, when the conventions became fixed. In the time of Khäsekhemui, at the beginning of the IId Dynasty, the archaic character of the art has already begun to wear off.
In it more than ever the old is interpenetrated with the new the domestic and scientific with the ideal and sentimental. He dares, in every page, to make use of modern words and notions, from which the mingled clumsiness and archaism of his compeers shrinks, as unpoetical.
These take thought, at least ostensibly or permissively, for the temporal welfare of the laity, as well as for their own. Their manner of life, not only in the privacy of their own household, but often even before the public, does not differ in an extreme degree from that of secular-minded persons, either in its ostensible austerity or in the archaism of its apparatus.
With all the archaism of his diction and metre, Langland, even more than Chaucer, reflects the modernity of his age. Vision of Piers Plowman, i.,220, ed. Skeat. Ibid., i., 222. Even the universities were growing more national, for the war prevented Oxford students from seeking, after their English graduation, a wider career at Paris.
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