Lumberingness

1869, Topics of the Day. A Forecast of the Session, The Spectator, Volume 42, p. 188, 13 February, 1869, […] the one doubt in the public mind as to parliamentary government, the one cause which is so visibly alarming to the “philosophers” who influence the masses, is the excessive, sometimes the intolerable, lumberingness of its action.

[…] the English translator […] must not follow the model offered by Mr. Longfellow in his pleasing and popular poem of Evangeline; for the merit of the manner and movement of Evangeline, when they are at their best, is to be tenderly elegant; and their fault, when they are at their worst, is to be lumbering; but Homer’s defect is not lumberingness, neither is tender elegance his excellence.

One can feel little doubt about the increasing delicacy and precision of expression to-day if we compare a contemporary book with some English classic of the eighteenth or nineteenth century. That is still quite understandable to us, but in its bareness and occasional ineptitudes it seems halfway back to the limitations and lumberingness of Early English or Gothic.