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Updated: June 12, 2025
Such archaisms are much less numerous than certain critics would fain represent them to be: and they have rarely indeed been admitted where other words could have been employed without a glaring anachronism, or a tedious periphrase.
How archaic is much of the thought of the "Imitation of Christ;" shot through and through as it is with the tissue of mediæval Catholicism! But we forget these archaisms in the spell of a holy soul, in love with wisdom, "intoxicated with God." No archaisms in Biblical thought destroy its spiritual power over us.
In point of language he was a purist like Augustus; but unlike him he mingled archaisms with his diction. While at Rhodes he attended the lectures of Theodorus; and the letters or speeches of his referred to by Tacitus indicate a nervous and concentrated style. Poetry was alien from his stern character.
His chief virtue seems to have been the purity of his Latin idiom. He neither copied Greek constructions nor affected archaisms, as Rutilius Scaurus, Cotta, and so many others in his own time, and Sallust, Lucretius, and Varro in a later age.
But Virgil is old Latin to him no less than Ennius or Pacuvius; in this very passage, with its elaborate archaisms, there are three phrases taken directly from the first book of the Aeneid. In the Metamorphoses the elaboration of the new style culminates. In its main substance this curious and fantastic romance is a translation from a Greek original.
It is plain, clear, pointed, familiar, perfectly modern in its texture, but with a grave and sparkling admixture of archaisms in its ornaments and occasional phraseology. He is the best and most natural prose-writer of any poet of the day; we mean that he is far better than Lord Byron, Mr. Wordsworth, or Mr. Coleridge, for instance.
Borrow, in whose mouth are the tongues of Babel, selects, as he dashes along currente calamo, the exact word for any idiom which best expresses the precise idea which sparkles in his mind." This habit of Borrow's should be compared with Lamb's archaisms, but, better still, with Robert Burton's interlardation of English and Latin in "The Anatomy of Melancholy."
Compare each of these two stories with the two stories interwoven in the play, noting all the analogous passages and the use Shakespeare has made of them. Do Shakespeare's borrowed and additional archaisms and his confusion of names and places show carelessness? Is his continuation of the story merely a playwright's device to join the two parts of the plot and make a good stage piece end happily?
The archaisms are defended in the first place, indeed, because they are appropriate to rustic speakers, but in the second because Cicero says that ancient words make the style seem grave and reverend. Further praise E.K. grants the author because he avoids loose sentence structure and affects the oratorical period.
Regarding the cabalistic words and phrases, things which had long given me great trouble to get any comprehension of, the Doctor gave me great help. He says some of these phrases and words are coined by the person himself, others are archaisms handed down from ancestors and believed to possess an efficacy, though their actual meaning is forgotten.
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