CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY ENGUSH COLLECTION THE GIFT OF JAMES MORGAN HART PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH Cornell University Library PE 1075.M36L4 1864 Lectures on the English language 3 1924 026 570 774 The original of tliis book is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026570774 HON. G. P. MARSH'S WORKS. Now ready, t/ie Fowrth Edition of I. LECTURES ON TEE ENGLISH LANG UA GE. 1 vol., octavo, $3.50 ; in half calf or h.alf morocco, $6. Second Edition. IT. THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LAN- GUAGB AND OF THE EARLY LITEE.4.TUKB IT EMBODIES. 5 vol., octavo, $8.60; Ijalt calf or half morocco, $6. ///. MAN AND NATURE; OR, PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY, AS MODIFIED BY HUMAN ACTION. 1 vol., octavo, cloth, $3.50 ; half calf or half morocco, §6. AI.SO, A HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. AND OF THE ENGLISU LANGUAGE. From the Roman Conqnest. By Prof. G. L. Ceaik. 2 vols., octavo. Printed at tlie Riverside Press, on tinted paper, $7; in half calf, extra, or half morocco, $13. DWIGHT. {BENJ. M.,) MODERN PHILOLOGY: ITS DIS- COVERIES, HISTORY AND INFLUENCE. In 2 vols., octavo. LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. By Max MuLLER, M A. From the Second Revised London Edition. 1 vol., large 12mo. Printed .at the Riverside Press, on laid tinted paper, $2 ; half calf, $8. Copies sent hy mail, postpaid, on receipt of price. LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BY GEORGE P. MAESH. FIRST SERIES. What ! crave ye wine, and have Nilus to drinke of ? Pbscennius Niger to his Soldiers in Egypt, (.Old translaiion.y FOUP.TH EDITION. • EEVISED AND EITLAEGED. NEW YORK: CHAELES SCEIBNEE, GEAND STEEET. LONDON: SAMPSON LOW, SON & COMPANY. 1864. U i^ A.XS^H^^ EwTBRED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1S5£, f-y CHAELES SCKIBNEK, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United S-:»tes for the Southern District oi New Toifc. JoH> F. Taow, rrinter, Stereotypor, nnd Elcctrotypw, 46, 48 Ic 60 Greene Street, BatweoQ Urnnil & Broome, Sevr York. PREFACE. In pursTiance of a plan for enlarging the means of education afforded by Columbia College in tlie city of "New York, courses of instruction, called Post-graduate Lectures, were organized in tlie summer of 1858. I was invited by tbe Trustees of that institution to give readings on the English language. The Lectures which compose the present volume were prepared and delivered in the autumn and winter of 1858-1859, and they are printed very nearly in their original form. The title " Post-graduate " and the Introduc- tory Address sufficiently indicate the class of persons for whom they were designed. It was supposed that the course might extend through two terms, and the plan of the Lectures was arranged accordingly. The purpose of the first or introductory series was to excite IV PREFACE. a more general interest among educated men and women in the histoiy and essential character of their native tongue, and to recommend the study of the language in its earlier literary monuments rather than through the medium of grammars and linguistic trea- tises. The second term would have been devoted to what might be called a grammatical history of English literature, or a careful and systematic examination of the origin and progressive development of English, as exhibited in actual practice by the best native writers. This statement wiU explain many apparent de- ficiencies in the Lectures now published, and especially the omission of any notice of the minor dramatists, and of the Scottish dialect and other local peculiarities of English, as well as the small amount of critical dis- cussion upon the diction, style, and literary merits of different authors. In selecting illustrations, I have chosen to draw attention to the less known fields of our literature, and I have had recourse to works neither so rare as to be inaccessible, nor, though highly deserving, so common as to be familiar, to most readers. Hence I have sel- dom cited Shakespeare, Milton, Addison, or other au- thors whose productions are, or ought to be, in every man's hands, though I am aware that they would often PKEFACE. V have supplied more apposite quotations than those I have employed. In the number of illustrations I have been sparing, and I have introduced only so many as I thought necessary to make my meaning plain, and, in two or three important cases, to establish the point for which I was contending. It would have been easy to make a show of cheap learning by multiplying extracts, but I have preferred, after pointing out suffi- cient, and I fear for the most part neglected, sources of instruction, to leave to the reader the pleasant and profitable task of seeking authorities for himself The Lectures are addressed to the many, not to the few ; to those who have received such an amount of elementary discipline as to qualify them to become their own best teachers in the attainment of general culture, not to the professed grammarian or linguistic inquirer. The many well-edited republications of old English authors which have issued from the Boston press, the learned and valuable labors of Mr. Klipstein in Anglo-Saxon philology, and the admirable elucida- tions of Shakespeare by Mr. White and other Amer- ican critics, abundantly prove the existence among us of the knowledge and the taste, the further promotion of which has been my special aim. These studies are, we may hope, soon to receive a new impulse and nev/ VI PREFACE. aids from the publication of a complete dictionary of tlie English language — a work of prime necessity to all tlie common moral and literary interests of the Brit- ish and American people, and which is now in course of execution by the London Philological Society, upon a plan, and with a command of facilities, that promise the most satisfactory results. I have only to add, that the occasional allusions to the political condition of Europe are to be under- stood with reference to the time when the Lectures were delivered, and that subsequent events have but strengthened the convictions I have expressed on this important subject. BuBLiNGTON, Vbemont, October 26, 1859. PEEFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION. Ik tMs edition, mimerotis errors of tlie copyists of my manuscript and of tlie press, wMcli through inexperience in proof-reading I had failed to detect, as well as many inadvertences of my own, are cor- rected, and the appendix is much enlarged. The additions consist principally of citations and proofs in illustration of statements and opinions not suffi- ciently supported before. It is Avith some reluctance that I have multiplied my excerpts and references, because I know that though, in a country new to him, the true angler is thaniful to be told where lie the clear lakelets and the fishy brooks, yet he desires no man to catch his trout for him. But the wealth of English literature is such, that I need not fear to exhaust its stores by twenty pages Vlll PREFACE TO THE FOUEITI EDITIOlir. of quotation; and he who patiently explores its abundant waters, will not fail to find, that, after all that I and other laborers have extracted, there are still as good fish in the sea as ever were caught. I entitle this volume. First Series, because I am about to publish a second, consisting of a course of Lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute upon tlie history of the English language, and particularly of its lexical and grammatical changes, with special reference to its literary capabilities and adaptations Burlington, Vt., January 1, 1861. TABLE OF CONTENTS. LECTUEE I. Pao> Introductory ..... ' LECTUEE II. Origin of Speech, and of the English Language . . 29 LECTUEE lU. Practical Uses of Etymology .... 54 LECTUEE IV. Foreign helps to the knowledge of English . . .76 LECTUEE T. Study of Early English ... .91 LECTUEE VI. Sources, Composition, and Etymological pu'portions of English — .. Ill LECTUEE VIL Sources and Composition of English — 11 .... 150 LECTUEE VIII. The Vocabulary of the English Language — I. . . . 173 LECTUEE IX The Vocabulary of the English Language — II. . . 191 LECTUEE X. The Vocabulary of the English Language — III. . . 218 LECTUEE XL The Vocabulary of the English Language — IV. . . . 238 LECTUEE XII. The Vocabulary of the English Language — V. . . 260 LECTUEE Xm. Intetjections and Intonations ..... 281 X TABLE OF CONTENTS. LECTUKE XIT. P-^*" The Noun, the Adjective, and the Verb . • ^®° LECTUEE XV. Grammatical Inflections — I. . . . . • ^18 LECTUEE XVL Grrammatical Inflections — II. . . ■ • ^^^ LECTUEE XVII. Grammatical Inflections — III. ... • 360 LECTUEE XVIIL Grammatical Inflections — IV. . . . • 37 8 LECTUEE XIX. English as affected by the Art of Printing — ^I. . . . 407 LECTUEE XX. English as afiected by the Art of Printing— II. . . 426 LECTUEE XXL English as aSected by the Art of Printing — III. . . 444 LECTUEE XXIL Orthoepical changes in English .... 468 LECTUEE XXIIL Khyme ....... 499 LECTUEE XXIV. Accentuation and Double Rhymes . . . . 616 LECTUEE XXV. Alliteration, Line-Hhyme, and Assonance .... 542 LECTUEE XXVL Synonyms . . . . . .671 LECTUEE XXVIL Principles of Translation • • . . . 696 LECTUEE XXVIIL English Bible 617 LECTUEE XXIX Corruptions of English . . . g^ LECTUEE XXX. The English Language in America .... 667 LECTURES ON THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LECTURE I INTRODUCTOEY. The severe Koman bestowed upon the language of hk country the appellation of patrius sermo, the paternal or national speech ; hut we, deriving from the domesticity of Saxon life a truer and tenderer appreciation of the best and purest source of linguistic instruction, more happily name our home-bom English the mother-tongue. The tones of the native language are the medium through which the affections and the intellect are first addressed, and they are to the heart and the head of infancy what the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical frame. " Speech," in the words of Heyse, " is the earliest organic act of free self-consciousness, and the sense of our person- ality is first developed in the exercise of the faculty of speech." Without entering upon the speculations of the Nominalists and the Realists, we must admit that, ia the process of ratiocination, properly called thought, the mind acts only by words. "Cogito, ergo sum, I think, there- 2 INTEODUCTOET. fore I am," said Descartes. Whether this is a logical con- clusion or not, we habitually, if not necessarily, connect words, thought, and self-recognizing existence, as conditions each of both the others, and hence it is that we have little or no recollection of that portion of our life which preceded our aequaintasce with language. Indeed, so necessary -are words to thought, to reflection, to the memory of fomier states of self-conscious being, that though the intelligence of persons born without the sense of hearing sometimes receives, through the medium of manual signs, and without instruc- tion in words, a very considerable degree of apparent cul- ture, yet, when deaf-mutes are educated and taught the use of verbal language, they are generally almost wholly unable to recall their mental status at earlier periods ; and, so far as we are able to judge,- they appear to have been previously devoid of those conceptions which we acquire, or at least retain and express, by means of general terms. So, our recollection of moments of intense pain or pleasure, moral or physical, is dim and undefined. Grief too big for words, joy which finds no articulate voice for utterance, sensations too acute for description, when once their cause is removed, or when time has abated their keenness, leave traces deep indeed in tone, but too shadowy in outline to be capable of distinct reproduction ; for that alone M'hich is precisely form- ulated can be clearly remembered. ITature has made speech the condition and vehicle of social intercourse, and consequently it is essentially so ele- mentary a discipline, that a thorough knowledge of the mother-tongue seems to be presupposed as the basis of all education, and especially as an indispensable preparation for tlio reception of academic instruction. It is, doubtless, for ^ INTEODUCTOET. 3 this reason, that, in cur American system of education, the Btudj of the English language has usually been almost wholly exclu ied from the collegial curriculmn, and recently, indeed, from humhler seminaries, and, therefore, so great a no\elty as its abrupt transfer from the nursery to the auditorium of a post-graduate course, may seem to demand both explanation and apology. It is a trite remark, that the national history and the na- tional language begin to be studied only in their decay, and scholars have sometimes shown an almost superstitious reluc- tance to approach either, lest they should contribute to the aggravation of a symptom, whose manifestation might tend to hasten the catastrophe of which it is the forerunner. In- deed, if we listen to some of the voices around us, we are in danger of being persuaded that the decline of our own tongue has not only commenced, but has already advanced too far to be averted or even arrested. If it is true, as is intimated by the author of our most widely circulated dictionary — a dictionary which itself does not explain the vocabulary of Paradise Lost — that it is a violation of the present standard of good taste to employ old English words not used by Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, and Cowper ; if words which enter into the phraseology of Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Mil- ton, though important " to the antiquary, are useless to the great mass of readers ; " and, above all, if the dialect of the authoritative standard of the Christian faith, in the purest, simplest, and most beautiful form in which it has been pre- sented to modern intelligence, is obsolete, unintelligible, for- gotten, then, indeed, the English language is decayed, extinct, fossilized, and, like other organic relics of the past, a fit siib- ject for curious antiquarian research and philosophic investi- gation, but no longer a theme of living, breathing interest. INTEODUCTOET. In reasoning from the past to the present, we are apt to forget that Protestant Christianity and the invention of printing have entirely changed the outward conditions of at least Gothic, not to say civilized, humanity, and so distin guished this new phase of Indo-European life from that old world which lies behind us, that, though all which was true of individual man, in the days of Plato, and of Seneca, and of Abelard, is true now, yet most which was conceived to be true of man as a created and dependent, or as a social being, is at this day recognized as either false or abnormal. The reciprocal relations between the means and the ends of hu- man life are reversed, and the conscious, deliberate aims and voluntary processes and instrumentalities of intellectual ac- tion are completely revolutionized. Hence, we are constantly in danger of error, when, in the economy of social man, we apply ancient theories to modern facts, and deduce present effects or predict future consec[uences from causes which, in remote ages, have produced results analogous to recent or expected phenomena. This is especially true with reference to those studies and those pursuits which are less immedi- ately connected with the fleeting interests of the hour. "We are, accordingly, not warranted in concluding that, because tjie creative spirits of ancient and flourishing Hellenic litera- ture did not concern themselves with grammatical subtleties, but left the syntactical and orthoepical theories of the Greek language to be developed in late and degenerate Alexandria, %erefore the study of native philology in commercial London and industrial Manchester proves the decadence of the heroic speech, which in former centuries embodied the epic and iramatic glories of English genius. The impulse to the study of English, and especially of its INTEODUCTOET. 5 earlier forms, which has lately begun to oe felt in England and in this country, is not a result of the action of domestic causes. It has not grown out of any thing in the political or social condition of the English and American people, or out of any morbid habit of the common language and literature of both, but it had its origin wholly in the contagion of Con- tinental example. The jealousies and alarms of the turbu- lent period which followed the first French Revolution, and which suspended the independent political existence of so many of the minor European States, at the same time threat- ening all with ultimate absorption, natui-ally stimulated the self-conscious individuality of every race, and led them alike to attach special value to every thing characteristic, every thing peculiar, in their own constitution, their own posses- sions, their own Mstoric recollections, as conservative ele- ments, as means of resistance against an influence which sought, first, to denationalize, and then to assimilate them all to its own social and governmental system. Hence, con- temporaneously with the wars of that eventful crisis, there sprung up a universal spirit of local inquiry, local pride, and local patriotism ; the history, the archaeology, the language, the early literature, of every European people, became ob- jects of earnest study, first with its own scholars, then with allied nations or races, and, finally, by the power of interna- tional sympathy, and the unexpected light which etymologi- cal researches have thi'ovni on some of the most interesting questions belonging to present psychology and to past his- tory, with enlightened and philosophic thinkers everywhere. The people of England were less agitated by the fears which disturbed the repose of the Continental nations, and they are constitutionally slow in yielding either to moAl, to 6 mTKODtrCTOEY. intellectual, or to material influences from without. Accord- ingly, while the philologists and historians of Denmark* and of Germany were studiously investigating and elucidating the course of Anglo-Saxon history, the laws of the Anglo- Saxon language, and the character of its literature, as things cognate with their own past glories and future aspirations, few native English inquirers busied themselves with studies, whose obscure, though real, connection with the stirring events of that epoch no timid sensitiveness had yet taught the British mind to feel. It was only when the new politi- cal relations between England and the important Germanic States had awakened the donnant moral and intellectual sympathies between these nations, that the literature and the learning of Germany became objects of interest and sources of instruction to British scholars. To that period we trace the first impulses, whose gi-adual action has led to the tardy revival of national philology in England, and the labors of Danish and German linguists form the real groundwork of all that native inquirers have since accomplished. But although the interest now manifested in the history and true linguistic character of the English speech originated in external movements, yet it must be admitted that it is, at this moment, strengthened in England by a feeling of appi-e- hension concerning the position of that country in coming * Thorkelin had prepared the poem of Beowulf for publication as early as 1807, but the press copy was destroyed in the siege of Copenhagen. He, how- erer, renewed his labors, and in 1815, brought out the first edition of that im- portant work. Five years later, Grundtvig published a Danish version of Beo- wulf, with emendations, in a great measure conjectural, of the original printed by Thorkelin. These are among the most successful instances of the application of sound learning and critical sagacity to the restoration of corrupt texts. Eask, also a Dane, published in 1817, the first complete Anglo-Saxon grammar, and this has hardly even yet been superseded. INTEODUCTOET. 7 years — an apprehension which, in spite of occasional manifes- tations of hereditary confidence and pride, is a Tery widely prevalent sentiment among the British people. Eecent oc- currences have inspired an anxiety amounting almost to alarm, concerning their relations with their nearest, as well as their more remote. Continental neighbors, and those who com- pare the policy and position of England in 1815, 1851, and 1859, may well be pardoned for some misgivings with regard to the present tendencies of the British social and political state. In such circumstances, it is natural that enlightened Englishmen should cherish a livelier attachment to all that is great and reverend in the memories of their early being, and thought, and action, and should regard with increasing inter- est the monuments that record the series of intellectual and physical triumphs by which the Anglo-Saxon and the Nor- man raised the Empire they successively conquered to such an unexampled pitch of splendor and of power. Modern pliilology, then, did not, like ancient grammatical lore, originate in the life-and-death struggle of perishing na- tionalities, nor in a morbid consciousness of internal decay and approaching dissolution, but in a sound, philosophic ap- preciation of the surest safeguard of national independence and national honor^ — ^an iatelligent comprehension, namely, of what is good and what is great in national history, nation- al institutions, national character. It is a pulsation of life, not a throe of death ; a token of regeneration, not a sign of extinction. The zeal with which these studies are pursued is a high expression of intellectual patriotism, a security against the perils of absorption and centralization which are again menacing the commonwealths of the Eastern Continent, a bulwark against the dangers with which what exists of Con INTEODUCTOEY. tinental liberty is threatened, now by tl.e amoitious dreame of German ' nationality,' now by Muscovite barbarism, and now by pontifical obscurantism. The fruits of increased attention to domestic philology have been strikingly manifested in the reviving literatures, and the awakening moral and political energies of many lesser European peoples, which, until the agitations I speak of, seemed to be fast sinking into forgetfulness and inaction. States and races, long deemed insignificant and decrepit, have given a new impulse to the intellectual movement of our age, and, at the same time, are throwing up new barri- cades against the encroachments of the great Continental despotisms. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, have roused themselves to the creation of new let- ters, and the manifestation of a new popular life. The Eu- ropean Continent is to-day protesting against being Teuton- ized, as energetically as it did, at the beginning of this cen- tury, against a forced conformity to a Gallic organization, and we may well hope that the same spirit will be found eqvxally potent to resist the Panslavic invasion, which will be the next source of danger to the civil and intellectual liberties of Christendom. There are circumstances in the inherent character of the English language which demand — ^there are circumstances in its position which recommend — the most sedulous and perse- vering investigation. I will not here speak of what belongs to another part of our course — the general value and impor- tance of linguistic inquiry — but I will draw your attention to the multifarious etymology of our Babylonish vocabulary, and the composite structure of our syntax, as peculiarities of the English tongue not shared in an equal degree by any INTEODUCrOET. V other European speeeli known in literature, and requiring an amount of systematic study not in other cases usually neces- sary. Tlie groundwork of English, indeed, can be, and hest is, learned at the domestic fireside — a school for which there is no adequate substitute ; but the knowledge there acquired is not, as in homogeneous languages, a root, out of which will spontaneously grow the flowers and the fruits which adorn and enrich the speech of man. English has been so much affected by extraneous, alien, and discordant in- fluences, so much mixed with foreign ingredients, so much overloaded with adventitious appendages, that it is, to most of those who speak it, in a considerable degree, a conven- tional and arbitrary symbolism. The Anglo-Saxon tongue has a craving appetite, and is as rapacious of words, and as tolerant of forms, as are its children of territory and of religions. But, in spite of its power of assimilation, there is much of the speech of England which has never become connatural to the Anglican people, and its grammar has pas- sively suffered the introduction of many syntactical combina- tions, which are not merely irregular, but repugnant. It has lost its origiaal organic law of progress, and its present gi'owth is by accretion, not by development. I shall not here inquire whether this condition of English is an evil. There are many cases where a complex and cunningly-devised machine, dexterously guided, can do that which the congen- ital hand fails to accomplish ; but the computing of our losses and gains, the stnking of our linguistic balance, be- longs elsewhere. SuSice it to say, that English is not a lan- guage which teaches itself by mere unreflecting usage. It can be masterad, in all its wealth, in all its power, only by conscious, persistent labor ; and, therefore, when all the 10 rNTEODTTCTOET. world is awaking to the value of general philological science, it would iU become us to be slow in recognizing the special importance of the study of our own tongue.* But, in order that this study may commend itself to the popular mind, its value and its interest must first be made apparent to the thinking spirits by whom the current of public opinion is determined. Knowledge has its sources oe the heights of humanity, and culture derives its authority from the example of the acknowledged leaders of society. Studies which are neglected or undervalued by the educated man, will have still less attraction for the pupil, and English philology cannot win its way to a form in American high- schools, until it shall have been recognized as a worthy pur- suit by the learned and the wise, who are no longer subject to the axithority of academic teachers. But, great as is the practical importance of the knowl- edge of words, let it not be said that, for its sake alone, we encourage inquiry into the structure and constitution of our national speech. The discipline we advocate embraces a broader range, and extends itself to the scientific notion of * For easie obtaining is enemie to iudgement, not onlie in words and na- turall speche, but in greater matters and vcrie important. Aduised & con- siderat camming by, as it proves by those tungs, wliioh we learn by art, wliere time and tranell be the compassing means, emplanteth in wits both certaintie to rest on & assurance to rise by. Our natural tung cummeth on vs by hudle, and therefor hedelesse, foren language is labored, and therefor learned, the one still in vse and neuer well known, the other well known and verie seldom vsed. And yet continewal vse should enfer knowledge, in a thing of such vse, as the naturall deliurie of our mind and meaning is. And to saie the truth what rea- son is it, to be acquainted abrode and a stranger at home ? to know foren tungs by rule, and our own but by rote ? If all other men had been so affected, to make much of the foren, and set light by their own, as we seme to do, we had aeuer had these things which we like of so much, we should neuer by compar- ng haue discerned the bciter.—Iiidiavd Mulcaster, First Part of the Element- arie, 1582, p. 767. mTEODUCTOEY. 11 philology, which, though familiar in German literature, has not vet become the recognized meani.ia; of the word in Ens lish. The course we propose includes, natiirally and necessa- rily, the study of those, old English writers, in whose works we find, not only the most forcible forms of expression, but a marvellous affluence of the mighty thoughts, out of which has grown the action that has made England and her children the wonder and the envy of the world. With respect to the technicalities of primitive grammar and etymology, the radical forms of structure which characterize our ancient tongue, the American student has but narrow means of orig- inal research. His investigations must, for the present, be pm'sued at second hand, by the aid of materials inadequate in themselves, and, too often, collected with little judgment or discrimination. The standard of linguistic science in Eng- land is, or rather, till recently, has been, comparatively low. British scholars have produced few satisfactory discussions of Anglo-Saxon or Old-English inflectional or structural forms, and it is to Teutonic zeal and learning that we must still look for the elucidation of many points of interest connected with the form and the signification of primitive English. A large proportion of the relics of Anglo-Saxon and of early Eng- lish literature remains yet unpublished, or has been edited with so little sound learning and critical ability as to serve less to guide, than to .lead astray. Hence, in the determina- tion of ancient texts, we must often accept hasty conjecture, or crude opinion, in place of established fact. But a better era has commenced. Englishmen have learned from Conti- nental linguists to do what native scholarship and industry had hitherto failed to accomplish ;* and we may hope that, * The recent admirable editions of Layamon, of the Ormulum, and of the 12 INTEODUCTOET. at no distant day, the yet hidden treasures of British philol- ogy will all be made accessible, and permanently secured for future study, by means of the art which has been styled Ars omnium Artium Conservatrix. The general inferiority of English and French to Scandi- navian and Teutonic scholars, in philological and especially etymological research, is a remarkable, but an indisputable fact, and its explanation is not obvious. I can by no means ascribe the difference to an inherent inaptitude on our part for such subtle investigations, to a native insensibility to the delicate relations between allied sounds and allied significa- tions ; but I believe the cause to lie much in the different in- tellectual habits which are formed in early life, by the use of the respective languages of these nations. The German is remarkably homogeneous in its character. An immense pro- portion of its vocabulary consists either of simple primitives, or of words obviously drawn by composition or derivation from radicals still existing in current use as independent vo- cables. Its grammatical structure is of great regularity, and there are few tongues where the conformity to general rules is so universal, and where isolated, unrelated philological facts Wycliffite translations of the Scriptures, are exceedingly valuable contributions to English philology, and in the highest degree creditable to the critical skill and industry of the eminent scholars who have prepared and published them. The publications of the various literary societies which occupy themselves with old English literature, are of very unequal value, and some of them, certainly, both intrinsically worthless, and badly edited. But, in spite of the sneers of Garnett, there are few students of our early literature who have not derived very important aid from the Jabors of Halliwell and of Wright. The value of Kerable's and Thorpe's contributions to our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon lan- guage and literature is too familiar to require special notice ; and I need not here speak of the eminent British ethnological and grammatical, or rather lin- guistic inquirers of the present day, because this course of lectures is confined to quite another field, and I shall only incidentally have occasion to refer to them. INTEODUCTOEY. 13 are so rai-e. At tlie same time, there is enough of grammat- ical inflection to familiarize the native speaker with syntacti- cal principles imperfectly exemplified in French and English, and a suflieiently complex arrangement of the period to call into constant exercise the logical faculties required for the comprehension and application of the rules of universal grammar. "\Yhile, therefore, I by no means maintain that German has any superiority over English for the purposes of poetry, of miscellaneous literature, the intercourse of society, or the ordinary cares and duties of life, yet as, in itself, an intellectual, and especially a linguistic discipline, it has great advantages over any of the tongues which embody the gen- eral literature of modern Europe. The German boy comes out of the nursery scarcely a worse grammarian, and a far better etymologist, than the ancient Eoman, and is already imbued with a philological culture which the Englishman and the Frenchman can only acquire by years of painful study. Hence we account readily for the comparative ex- cellence of the German dictionaries and other helps to the full knowledge of the language, while in English, having no grammar, we have till lately possessed no grammars, and we still want a dictionary. In both English and French, the etymology is foreign, or obscured by great changes of form, the syntax is arbitraiy and conventional, (so far as those terms can be applied to any thing iu language,) the inflections are bald and imperfectly distinguished, and the number of solitary exceptional facts, especially in French, is very great. vVTien I speak of the poverty of French inflections, I am aware I contradict the accidence, which shows a very full system of varied terminations ; but the native language is learned by the ear, and the spoken tongue of France reduces 14 INTEODUCIOET. its multitude of written endings to a very small list of artic- ulated ones. The signs of number and of person, and often of tense and gender, to whicli the inflections are restricted, though well marked in written French, disappear almost wholly in pronunciation, and for those who only speak, they are non-existent.* While, therefore, for speaking French by rote, as natives do all tongues, no grammar is needed, yet few written dialects require grammatical aid more imperiously ; while, at the same time, the grammar is of so special a char- acter as to teach little of general linguistic principle. The German philologist, then, begins where the English- man and the Frenchman leave off — or, rather, at a point to which the great mass of French and English literary men never attain ; and, with such an advantage in the starting ground, it would be strange if he did not surpass his rivals. The American student shares with the Englishman and the Frenchman in the defect of early grammatical discipline, and, possessing few large libraries, no collections of rare early editions, no repositories of original manuscripts, he labors under the further inconvenience of a want of access to the primitive sources of etymological instruction. For the pres- ent, therefore, he must renounce the ambition of adding any thing to the existing stores of knowledge respecting English philology, and content himself with the humbler and more selfish aim of appropriating and elaborating the material which more fortunate or better trained European scholars have gathered or discovered. We must, in the main, study English with reference to practical use, rather than to philo- " Aimais, aimait, aimaient are identical in sound ; and aimer, aimez, aimai, aimd, aim6s, aim6e, and aim^es differ so little from the former group, that igno rant persons often confound them all in writing, as well as in speabin". INTKODTTCTOEY, 15 sopliic principle ; aim at the positive and the concrete, rathei than tlie absolute and the abstract. And this falls in with what is eminently, I will not say happily, the present ten- dency of the American mind. ^Ye demand, in all things, an appreciable, tangible result, and if a particular knowledge cannot be shown to have a value, it is to little purpose to recommend its cultivation because of its worth. We must all, then, men of action and men of thought, alike, study Eng- lish in much the same way, and by the aid of the same in- strumentalities — the practical man, because he aims at a practical end ; the philosophic thinker, because he is desti- tute of the means of approximating to his end by any higher method than the imperfect course which alone is open to the American scholar. There are circumstances which recommend the study of English especially to us Americans, others which appeal equally to all who use the Anglican speech. Of the former, most prominent is the fact that wc, in general, require a more comprehensive knowledge of our own tongue than any other people. Except in mere mechanical matters, and even there far more imperfectly, we have adopted the principle of the division of labor to a more limited extent than any modern civilized nation. Every man is a dabbler, if not a master, in every knowledge. Every man is a divine, a statesman, a physician, and a lawyer to himself, as well as a counsellor to his neighbors, on all the interests involved in the sciences appropriately belonging to those professions. We all read books, magazines, newspapers, all attend learned lectures, and too many of us, indeed, write the one, or deliver the other. We resemble the !Margites of Homer, who UoXfC fiTrtaTaro epya, practised every art, and if, as he KaKw<; 8' rjirlaTaTO 16 utteodfctoet. ^hvra, bungled in all, we, too, must fall short of universal perfection, we still need, with our multifarious strivings, an encyclopedic training, a wide command over the resources of our native tongue, and, more or less, a knowledge of all its special nomenclatures. But this very fact of the general use of the whole English vocabulary among us is a dangerous cause of corruption of speech, against which the careful study of our language is an important antidote. Things much used inevitably become much worn, and it is one of the most curious phenomena of language, that words are as subject as coin to defacement and abrasion, by brisk circulation. The majority of those who speak any tongue incline to speak it imperfectly; and where all use the dialect of books, the vehi- cle of the profoundest thoughts, the loftiest images, the most sacred emotions, that the intellect, the fancy, the heart of man has conceived, there special precautions are necessary to prevent that medium from becoming debased and vulgarized by corruptions of form, or, at least, by association with de- praved beings and unworthy themes. "While, therefore, I would open to the humble and the unschooled the freest ac- cess to all the rich treasures which English literature em- bodies, I would inculcate the importance of a careful study of genuine English, and a conscientious scrupulosity in its accurate use, upon all who in any manner occupy the posi- tion of teachers or leaders of the American mind, all whose habits, whose tastes, or whose vocations, lead them to speak often er than to hear. But, as I observed, there are considerations, common to the Englishman and the American, which powerfully rec- ommend the study of our language to thinking men. One of the most important of these is a repetition of the aryd INTEODUCTOEY. 17 ment I have just used, but in a more extended application. I allude to what, for want of any other equally appropriate epithet, I must characterize by a designation much abused both by those who rally under it as a watchword of party, and by those to whom it is a token of offence — I mean the conse)'vatism of such studies. It is doubted by the ablest judges, whether, except in the introduction of new names for new things, English has made any solid improvement for two centuries and a half, and few are sanguine enough to believe that future changes in its structure, or in its vocabu- lary, unless in the way just stated, will be changes for the better. It is obvious, too, that, in proportion as new gram- matical forms, and new designations for familiar things and thoughts, are introduced, older ones must grow obsolete, and, of course, the existing, and, especially, the earlier literature of England, will become gradually less intelligible. The importance of a permanent literature, of authoritative stand- ards of expression, and, especially, of those great, lasting works of the imagination, which, in all highly-cultivated na- tions, constitute the " volumes paramount " of their litera- ture, has been too generally appreciated to require here argu- ment or illustration. Suffice it to say,- they are among the most potent agencies in the cultivation of the national mind and heart, the strongest bond of union in a homogeneous peo- ple, the surest holding ground against the shifting currents, the- ebb and flow, of opinion and of taste. The Anglo-Saxon race is fortunate in possessing more such volumes paramount than any other modern people. The Greeks had their moral and sententious Hesiod ; their great tragic trio ; their comic Aristophanes and Menan- der ; and, above all. their epic Homer, whose story and whose 2 18 INTEODTJCTOET. speech were more closely interwoven with the very soul of the whole Hellenic people than was ever other secular com- position with the life of man ; the Romans had Ennius, and Terence, and Plautus, and, at last, but only when all was lost, Horace and Yirgil ; the Italians have Dante, and Pe- trarch, and Tasso, and Ariosto ; the Icelanders have Laxdsela, the story of E"jall, and the Chronicles of Snorro ; * and we, more favored than all, have Chaucer, and Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Milton— each, in his own field, as great as the mightiest that ever wielded the pen in the like kind ; and, beyond these, we have the oracles of our faith, stamped with the self-approving impress of certain verity, and ren- dered, by English pens, in a form of rarer beauty than has elsewhere clothed the words of God in the speech of man. ITow, all those books have been for centuries a daily food, an intellectual pabulum, that actually has entered into and moulded the living thought and action of gifted nations ; and, in the case of the Anglican people, it will not be dis- puted that, working as they have, all in one direction, their great poets have been more powerful than any other secular influence in first making, and then keeping, the Englishman and the American what they are, what for hundreds of years they have been, what, God willing, for thousands they shall be, the pioneer race in the march of man towards the highest summits of worthy human achievement. * The Icelandic sagas, thougli containing many short rliythmical lays, are not metrical, and therefore not poems in the usual sense of the word. But they are highly poetical in conception and treatment, and thus unite the fascination of more artificial forms of composition with the attractions of authentic history. , Id the civiUzation of the Scandinavian people, the prose saga occupied much the same place as the metrical epic in the life of the Greeks, or the heroic ballad in other modern nations, and it may therefore fairly claim a place in iniagin itive Uterature. INTEODUCTOET. 19 The patli of national literatures is like the orbit of those comets, which long approach the central source of light and warmth, and long recede, but never return to the perihelion, and the language of a people has ordinarily but one period of culmination. "When genius has evolved the best thoughts of a given state of society, and elaborated the choicest forms of expression of which a given speech is capable, it has an- ticipated and appropriated the greatest results of that condi- tion of human life, and subsequent literature is but repro- ductive, not creative in its character, until some mighty, and, for the time, destructive revolution, has dissolved and re-amal- gamated the elements of language and of social life in new and diverse combinations. That the English tongue, and the men who speak it, will yet achieve great victories in the field of mind, great works in the world of sense, we have ample self-conscious assurance ; but, in the existing state of society, it is vain to expect that any future literary productions can occupy the place, or exert the deep, pervading influence, of the volumes I have named. To them, therefore, and to the dialect which is their medium, the instinct of self-preservation impels us tenaciously to cHng; and when, throngli our appetite for novelty, our incurious neglect of the beautiful and the great, these volumes cease to be authorities in language, standards of moral truth and ffisthetical beauty, and inspiriters of thought and of action, we shall have lost the springs of national greatness, which it most concerned us to preserve. "W"e hear much, in political life, of recurrence to first principles, and startling novelties not unfrequently win their way to popular acceptance under that disguise. "With equal truth, and greater sincerity, we may say that, in language 20 mriiODucTOEY. and in literature, nothing can save ns from ceaseless revolu- tion but a frequent recourse to the primitive authorities and the recognized canons of highest perfection. In commencing the study of early English, young persons are not unfrequently repelled by differences of form, which seem to demand a considerable amount of labor to master, and the really trifling difficulties of our archaic dialect are magnified into insurmountable obstacles. Unhappily, Eng- lish scholars, themselves often better instructed in other tongues than in their own, have very frequently sanctioned the mistake, and encouraged the indolence of contemporary readers, by editing modernized editions of good old authors, and, in thus clothing them anew, so changed their outward aspect, and often their essential character, that the parents would scarcely be able to recognize their own progeny. The British press has teemed with mutilated and disguised edi- tions, while scrupulously faithful reprints of early English works have, until lately, not been often attempted, or ever well encouraged. As a general rule, in the printing of old manuscripts, and the republication of works which genius and time have sealed with the stamp of authority, no change whatever, except the correction of obvious clerical or typo- graphical errors, should be tolerated ; and even this should be ventured on only with extreme caution, because it often turns out that what is hastily assumed to have been a mis- spelling or a misprint, is, in fact, a form deliberately adopted by a writer better able to judge what was the true orthogra- phy for the time, than any later scholar can be. The rule of Coleridge has nowhere a juster application than here : That, when we meet an apparent error in a good author, we are to presume ourselves " ignorant of his under- INTEODUCTOET. 21 standing, until we are certain tliat -we understand his igno- rance." The number of scholars who are so thoroughly pos- sessed of the English of the sixteenth, not to mention earlier centuries, as to be safely intrusted with the correction of authors of that period, is exceedingly small, and I doubt whether it would be possible to cite a single instance where this has been attempted, without grievous error, while, in most eases, the book has been not merely lessened in value, but rendered worse than useless for aU the purposes of phi- lology and true literatui-e. But for the uufortimate readiness with which editors and publishers have yielded to the popular demand for conformity to the spelling and the vocabulary of the day, the knowledge of genuine English woidd now be both more general and further advanced than it is. The habit of reading books as they were written would have kept up the comprehension, if not the use, of good old forms and choice words which have irrecoverably perished, and the English of the most vigorous period of our literature would not now be sneered at as obso- lete and unintelligible. After all, the difficulties of acquiring a familiar acquaint- ance with the dialect of the reign of Edward III. are ex- tremely small. Let not the student be discouraged by an antiquated orthography,* or, now and then, a forgotten word, and a month's study will enable him to read, with entire readiness and pleasure, all that the genius of England has * The irregularity of the spelling in early English books is rery frequently chargeable almost wholly to the printer. The original manuscript of the Ormu- lum is nearly as uniform in its orthography as the most systematic modern writers, and some of the codices on which Pauli's edition of Gower is founded are described as scarcely less consistent in their spelling. — See poat, Lectures XX. and xxi. 22 INTEODtrCTOKi". produced dui'iBg the five centuries that ha-e elapsed since English literature can be said to have had a being. I cannot, of course, here dilate upon the value of a famil- iarity with the earlier English writers, but I may, perhaps, be indulged in a momentary reference to the greatest of them, the perusal of whose works alone would much more than compensate the little labor required to understand the dialect in which they are written. Neither the prose nor the verse of the English literature of the fourteenth century comes up to the elaborate elegance and the classic finish of Boccaccio and of Petrarch. But, in original power, and in all the high- est qualities of poetry, no Continental writer of that period, with the single exception of Dante, can, for a moment, be compared with Chaucer, who, only less than Shakespeare, deserves the epithet, myriad-minded, so happily applied by Coleridge to "the great dramatist. He is eminently the crea- tor of our literary dialect, the introducer, if not the inventor, of some of our finest poetical forms, and so essential were his labors in the founding of our national literature, that, with- out Chaucer, the seventeenth century could have produced no Milton, the nineteenth no Keats.* It is from defect of * I must here, once for all, make the sad concession, that many of Chaucer's works are disfigured, stained, polluted, by a grossness of thought and of lan- guage which strangely and painfully contrasts with the delicacy, refinement, and moral elevation of his other productions. The only apology, or rather pallia- tion of this offence, is that which serves to excuse similar transgressions in Shakespeare ; namely, that the thoughts, the images, the words, are such as be- long to the character presented, or for the time assumed, by the poet ; and we must remember that the moral and religious degradation of the fourteenth was far deeper and more pervading than that of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies. I am not ignorant that Chaucer's poems are in great part translations, para- phrases, or imitations. But this was the habit of the time. Every man built onthe foundation of his predecessors, and Chaucer, while he touched nothing which he did not improve, is always best when he is most original in the coneep' INTEODFCTOEY. 23 knowledge alone, tliat his diction and i.is versification have teen condemned as rude and unpolished. There are, indeed, some difficulties in his prosody, which have not yet been fully solved ; but these will, doubtless, chieily yield to a more crit- ical revision of the text, and even with the corrupt reading of the old printed editions, the general flow of his verse is scarcely inferior to the melody of Spenser. There can be Kttle doubt that his metrical system was in perfect accordance with the orthoepy of his age, and it was near two centuries before any improvements were made upon his diction or his numbers. I remarked that there are circumstances in the position and the external relations of the English language, which . recommend its earnest study and cultivation. I refer, of course, to the commanding political influence, the wide- spread teiTitory, and the commercial importance of the two tion as well as the treatment of his theme. There is no doubt a strong resem- blance between the general diction of this poet and of Gower. The etymological proportions of their vocabularies are not widely different, nor are the grammat- ical discordances between them very great. But in the choice of words as de- termined by subject, in metrical construction, in poetic coloring, in compass, variety, beauty, and appositeness of illustration, in dramatic power, in nice per- ception of character, and in justness of thought, the superiority of Chaucer is almost jnmeasurable. A reader who should note the passages in his works, which, in point of thought or expression, are particularly suited to serve as effective quotations, would find on reviewing his list, that no Enghsh writer ex- cept Shakespeare, has uttered so many striking and pithy sentences as Chaucer. Few of his greater qualities were inherited by his immediate successors. The influence of his style is perceptible enough in the poetic diction of all after ages; but it is strange that the following century should have given birth to ajmost nothing better than what, in spile of the ingenious arguments of Skelton'a defenders, I must still characterize as the wretched ribaldry of that author. In speaking of the relations of Chaucer to the author of Paradise Lost, I, of course, refer to language only, and especially to the diction of the minor poems of Milton, which are as important in any just view of his poetical character as his great epie itself. Keats, both in verbal form and in the higher qualities of poetry, is constantly reminding us of the more imaginative works of Chaucer. 24 inteodtjCtobt. great mot] ler-coun tries whose vernacular it is. Although England is no longer at the head of the European political system, yet she is still the leading influence in the sphere of commerce, of industry, of progressive civilization, and of enlightened Christian philanthropy. The British capital is at the geographical centre of the terrestrious portion of the globe, and while other great cities represent individual nationalities, or restricted and temporary aims, the lasting, cardinal interests of universal humanity have their brightest point of radiation in the city of London. Tlie language of England is spoken by greater numbers than any other Christian speech, and it is remarkable that. Mobile some contemporaneous dialects and races are decaying and gradually disappearing from their natal soil, the English speech and the descendants of those who first employed it are making hourly conquests of new territory, and have al- ready established their posts within hailing distance through- out the circuit of the habitable globe. The English language is the special organ of all the great, world-wide charities which so honorably distinguish the present from all preced- ing ages. With little of the speculative universal philan- thropy which has been so loudly preached and so little practised elsewhere, the English people have been foremost in every scheme of active benevolence, and they have been worthily seconded by their American brethren. The English Bible has been scattered by hundreds of millions over the face of the earth, and English-speaking missionaries have planted their maternal dialect at scores of important points, to which, had not their courageous and self-devoting energy paved the way, not even the enterprise of trade could have opened a path. Hence, English is emphatically the language v INTEODUCTOET. 25 of commerce, of civilization, of social and religious freedom, of progressive intelligence, and of active catholic philanthro- py ; ajid, therefore, beyond any tongue ever used by man, it is of right the cosmopolite speech. That it will ever become, as some dream, literally univer- sal in its empire, I am, indeed, far from believing ; nor do I suppose that the period will ever arrive, -whcTi our many-sided humanity will content itself with a single tongue. In the incessant change Avhich all language necessarily undergoes, English itself will have ceased to exist, in a form identifia- ble with its present character, long before even the half of the human family can be so far harmonized and assimilated as to employ one common medium of intercourse. Lan- guages adhere so tenaciously to their native soil, that, in general, they can be eradicated only by the extirpation of the races that speak them. To take a striking instance : the Celtic has less vitality, less poAver of resistance, than any other speech accessible to philological research. In its whole known history it has made no conquests, and it has been ever in a waning condition, and yet, comparatively feeble as is its self-sustaining power, two thousand years of Eoman and Teu- tonic triumphs have not stifled its accents in England or in Gaul. It has died only with its dying race, and centuries may yet elapse before English shall be the sole speech of Britain itself. In like manner, not to notice other sporadic ancient diar lects, the primitive language of Spain, after a struggle of two and twenty centuries with Phoenicians, and Celts, and Carthaginians, and Eomans, and Goths, and Arabs, is still the daily speech of half a million of people. If, then, such be the persistence of language, how can we look forward to 26 mXEODUCTOEY. a period when English shall have vanquished a: d superseded the Chinese and the Tartar dialects, the many tongues of polyglot India, the yet surviving Semitic speeches, in their wide diifusion, and the numerous and powerful Indo-Eu- ropean languages, which are even now disputing with it the mastery ? In short, the prospect of the final triumph of any one tougue is as distant, as improbable, I may add, as unde- sirable, as the subjection of universal man to one monarchy, or the conformity of his multitudinous races to one standard of color, one physical type. The Author of our being has implanted in us our discrepant tendencies, for wise, pur- poses, and they are, indeed, a part of the law of life itself. Diversity of growth is a condition of organic existence, and so long as man possesses powers of spontaneous development and action, so long as he is more and better than a machine, so long he will continue to manifest outward and inward dif- ferences, unlikeness of form, antagonisms of opinion, and varieties of speech. But yet, though English will not super- sede, still less extirpate, the thousand languages now spoken, it is not unreasonable to expect for it a wider diffusion, a more commanding influence, a more universally acknowl- edged beneficent action, than has yet been reached, or can hereafter be acquired, by any ancient or now existent tongue, and we may hope that the great names which adorn it will enjoy a wider and more durable renown thin any others of the sons of men. These brief remarks do but hint the iniportance of the studies I am advocating, and it will be the leading object of my future discourses more fully to expound their claims, and to point out the best method of pursuing rliem. A series of lessons upon the technicalities of English phi- INTEODrCTOET. 27 lology would, it is tLought, be premature ; and, moreover, adequate time and means for tlie execution of an undertak ing, involving so vast an amount of toil, have not yet been given. That must be the work, if not of another laborer, at least of other years, and our present readings must be re- garded only as a collection of miscellaneous observations upon the principles of articulate language, as exemplified in the phonology, vocabulary, and syntax of English ; or, in other words, as a course pi'eparatm'y to a course of lectures on the English tongue. Such as I describe the course, too, I shall endeavor to make each individual lecture, namely, a somewhat informal presentation of some one or more philo- logical laws, or general facts, in their connection with the essential character, or historical fortunes, of our own speech. The lectures are, under the circumstances, essentially an experiment, the character and tastes of the small audiences I was encouraged to expect, uncertain ; but the necessities of the case have decided the character of the series for me, and, as in many other instances where external conditions control our action, in a way which my own judgment would proba- bly have approved. The preparation of a series of thoroughly scientific dis- courses upon the English tongue, within the time and with the means at my command, was impossible ; and I therefore adopted the plan I have described,, as the only practicable course, and, not improbably, also the best. .This point being disposed of, there remained only the embarrassment arising from the uncertainty of the amount of philological attain- ment generally possessed by my audience. I have thought myself authorized to presume that, however small in num- ber, it would embrace persons somewhat widely separated in 28 INTEODUCTOET. degree of culture, and as I desire to make my discourses, so far as it lies in my power, acceptable, if not instructive, to all, I sliall ask tlie scholar sometimes to pardon familiar, even trite statements of principle, illustrations which can scarcely claim to be otherwise than trivial, and repetitions which clearness and strength of impression may render necessary for some, while I shall hope the less advanced will excuse me when I indulge in speculations designed for those to whom long study has rendered recondite doctrine more intelligible. In the main, I shall address you as persons of liberal culture, prepared, by general philological education, to comprehend linguistic illustrations drawn from all not widely remote and unfamiliar sources, but who, from unexcited curiosity, or the superior attractions and supposed claims of other knowledges, have not made the English language a matter of particular study, thought, or observation ; and such I shall hope to con- vince that the subject is possessed of sufficient worth and sufficient interest to deserve increased attention, as a branch of American education. LECTURE II. ORIGM OF SPEECH AND OF THE ENGLISH LjifGUAGE. Although, for the reasons assigned in tlie introductory lecture, the plan I propose to pursue does not conform to philosophic method, it will not be amiss to follow the exam- ple of more scientific speakers, by prefacing these lessons with a formal announcement of the subject to be discussed, and a definition of the terms of art employed in propounding it. The course upon which we are now about to enter has for its subject the English Language, the mother-tongue of most, and the habitual speech of all, to whom these lectures are addressed. It may seem that the adjective English, and the noun language, are so familiar to the audience, and so clearly and distinctly defined in their general use, that no inquiry into their history can make their meaning plainer. Eut our business is with words, and it will not be superflu- ous to examine into the origin and grounds of the signification ascribed even to terms so well understood as those which express the subject of our discourse. Neither the epithet nor the substantive is of indigenous growth. The word language is derived, through the French, 30 LANGUAGE, ESSENTIAL CHAEACTEE OF from the Latin 1 i n g xi a, the tongue, a name very commonly applied to speech, because the tongue, from its relative bulk,_ its flexibility, and the greater power of the voluntary muscles over it, is the most conspicuous, if not the most important organ concerned in the production of articulate sounds. The Anglo-Saxons had several words for language, as g e r e o r d, gef)eode, lyden, reord, spell, spsec, sprsec, |)eodisc, tunge. Some of these cannot be traced baei to any more radical form ; and we therefore cannot positively say, as we can of the corresponding words in most other tongues, that they are of a figurative character. Lyden is recognizable in our modern English adjective loud, and Chaucer, and other early writers, use leden for language ; spjec, in speech j tunge, in tongue; and spell still sub- sists in the noun sjpell, a charm, the verb to spell, and as the last member of gospel.* " It is not clear whether the first syllable of this word is the name of the divinity, God, or the adjectiTe god, good. Bosworth (under God) and many other etymologists, adopt the former supposition; and this view is supported by the analogy of the Icelandic, which has guSspjAU, Crock's wm-d. On the other hand god-spell, as a compound of the adjective g6d and spell would be the exact etymological equivalent of the Greek ivayyiXwi', and the author of the Ormulum, who lived at a period when Anglo-Saxon was not yet forgotten, evidently adopts this derivation. Goddspell onn Ennglissh nemmnedd iss God word, annd god ti{)ennde, God errnde, &c. Ormulum, Preface, 157. And again, Off all |)iss god uss brinnge{) word Annd errnde annd god ti^innde Goddspell, and forr|)i raagg Itt well God errnde ben gehatenn, &c., &c. Ormulum, Preface, 175. Layamon, iii. 182, v. 29508, has & beode {)er godes godd-spel ; and preach there God's gospel, a phrase not likely to be employed if gospel liad been understood to mean, of itself, God's word. See Appendix, 2. OEIGIN OF SPEECH. 31 The word language, in its most limited application, ia restricted to liuman articulate speech ; but in its metaphor- ical use, it embraces every mode of communication by which facts can be made known, sentiments or passions expressed, or emotions excited. We speak not only of the audible lan- guage of words, the visible language of written alphabetic characters, or other conventional symbols, whether arbitrary or imitati\'e, the dumb and indeiinable language of manual signs, of facial expression and of gesture, but of the language of brute beast and bird ; and we apply the same designation to the promptings of the silent inspiration, and the lessons of the intelligible providence, of the Deity, as well as to the Voice of the many-tongued operations of inanimate nature. Language, therefore, in its broadest sense, addresses itself to the himian souj both by direct intuition, and through all the material entrances of knowledge. Every organ may be its vehicle, every sense its recipient, and every form of existence a speaker. Many men pass through life without pausing to inquire whether the power of speech, of which they make hourly usage, is a faculty or an art — a gift of the Creator, or a pain- fully-acqiiired accomplishment — a natural and universal pos- session, or a human invention for carrying on the intercom- munication essential to social life.* We may answer this • A similar questiou has been raised with regard to the cries of animals, Thich, for certain purpo333 at least, perform the office of speech. About the beginning of this century, Daines Barrington, a member of the Royal Society, tried a series of experiments to determine how far the notes of birds were spon- taneous and uniform, and how far dependent on instruction and imitation. The result, (which, however, has been questioned by later observers,) was that though there is much difference in flexibility, power, and compass of voice in birds of different species, yet, in general, the note of the bird is that which he is taught in the nest, and with more or less felicity of imitation, he adopts the 32 OEiem of speech. query, in a general way, by saying tliat the use of articTilate language is a faculty inherent in man, tliougli wo cannot often detect any natural and necessary conneation between a particular object and tbe vocal sound by wbicb this or that people represents it. There can be little doubt that a colony of children, reared without hearing words uttered by those around them, would at length form for themselTes a speech. What its character would be could only be determined by the method of Psammetichus, an experiment too cruel to be re- peated by inquirers intelligent enough to be interested in the result. It is not improbable that a language of manual signs would precede articulate words, and it may be presumed that these signs would closely resemble those so much used as a means of communication among savages, and which are, to a great extent, identical with what have been called the nat- soiig of his nurse, whether the maternal bird or a stranger. To what extent the notes of birds, of beasts, of insects, and offish, (for, in spite of the proverb, all fishes are not dumb,) are significant, it is quite out of our power to deter- mine. Coleridge, tenaciously as he adheres to the essential distinction in kind between the faculties of the brute and the man, admits that the dog may have an analogon of words. (Aids, Aph. ix.) All will agree in denying to the lower animals the possession of language as a means of intellectual discourse ; but even this conclusion must rest upon stronger grounds than the testimony of the ear. Sounds, whicli to our obtuse organs appear identical, may be infinitely diversified to the acuter senses of these inferior creatures, and there is abundant evidence that they do in many instances communicate with each other by means, and in a degree, wholly in- appreciable by us. When a whale is struck, the whole shoal, though widely dis- persed, are instantly made aware of the presence of an enemy ; and when the gravedigger beetle finds the carcass of a mole, he hastens to communicate the discovery to his fellows, and soon returns with his four confederates, (("on- science, Boek der Natuer vi.) The distinction we habitually make between ar- ticulate and inarticulate sounds, though sufficiently warranted as applied to human utterance, may be unfounded with reference to voices addressed to or- ganizations less gross ; and a wider acquaintance with human language often teaches us that what to the ear is, at first, a confused and inexpressive mutter- ing, becomes, by some familiarity, an intelligible succession of significant sounds. SIGN-LANGUAGE. 33 ural signs of tlie deaf-and-duinb. If joxi bring together two uneducated but intelligent deaf-mutes from different coun- tries, tbey will at once comprehend most of each other's signs, and converse with freedom, while their respective speaking countrymen would be wholly \mable to communi- cate at all. And it is often observed at deaf-and-dumb asy- lums, when visited by natives of Polynesia, or American Indians, that the pupils and tlie strangers very readily mi- derstand each other, nature suggesting the same symbols to both. Thus, the savage and the deaf-miite alike express the notion of parity in general, and especially the fraternal rela- tion, by joining and extending the two fore-fingers. The all- observing Shakespeare must have remembered this, when he made Fluellen say, " As like as my fingers is to my fingers." * In this instance, as also when the savage and the deaf-mute both express the speaking of truth by passing the extended index directly forwards from the lips, and the utterance of falsehood by cai-rying it crookedly sidewise, there seems to be some natural analogy between the gesture and the thought. So the coincidence, by which they agree in moving the hand with a rapid circular or spiral motion over the top of the head to indicate a fool, though less familiar, is equally expli- cable ^ but there are signs common to the savage and the deaf- mute, or at least mutually intelligible to them, which are apparently arbitrary, and without any discoverable relation to the thing signified. Trained, as we are, to a grave and unimpassioned manner, it is difficult for us to realize that the movements and gestures * I remember that when I told a Turcoman, in reply to a question whether I was an Englishman, that I was an American, he expressed his notion of the identity of the two peoples by the same sign. See App. S. 3 34: SIGK-LANGUAGE. witli whicli Italian vivacity accompanies its social intercourse, are all really significant. But, thougli in the cultivated circles of Italy, and other countries of Southern Europe, manual signs are less resorted to, yet telegraphic communications by hands, face, feet, the whole person, in short, are everywhere kept up, as qualifications of animated oral discourse. A foreigner, there- fore, who understands no language but that addressed to the ear, loses much of the point of the lively conversation around him. Among the lower classes in the Mediterranean countries, the use of signs, with or without words, is very general. If you ask an Italian servant, who has returned empty-handed from the Post-Office, whether he has letters for you, he will reply by moving his uplifted fore-finger slowly backwards and for- wards before his nose ; while a Greek, under similar circum- stances, would throw back the head, elongate the face, roll up the eyes, and give a cluck with the tongue, not unlike the note of a setting hen. You see the coachmen, servants, and others of the lower classes in Italy, constantly communicating by signs, sometimes, indeed, throwing in a word, but often expressing a whole sentence in a silent gesture ; and in con- versation, especially on subjects where caution is necessary, a speaker will often stop in the middle of a period, and finish his remarks in dumb pantomime. Italian scholars have shown that the sign-language of modern, is very closely anal- ogous to that of ancient Italy, to which the classical writers often allude, and its origin dates back very far into the night of time. In an artistic point of view, a knowledge of these signs is of considerable interest, for it serves to intei-pret much of the action in the pictorial compositions of Italian masters which would be otherwise hardly intelligible.* Be- * The language of gesture is so well understood in Italy, that when King SIGN-LANGUAGE. 35 sides articulate sounds and the language of signs, we have another means by which we often, involuntarily and uncon- sciously, communicate, or rather betray, if not facts, at least the state of our own minds, our thoughts and feelings, prompted by known or supposed facts. I refer here to the spontaneous action of the muscles of the face, and sometimes of the whole frame, when we are excited by powerful emo- tions, or are specially interested in the topic of a conversation which we hear or participate in. That much practice may enable any one to control, in a great degree, this involuntary expression, is imdoubtedly true ; but an acute observer of the human face can, in very many cases, read what is passing in the breast of another, in spite of the most strenuous efforts to conceal it. So much more truth-telling than words, in fact, are these self-speaking muscles to those who have studied their dialect, that it is a current adage, that language was given us to enable us to conceal our thoughts. Ferdinand returned to Naples after the revolutionary movements of 1822, he made an address to the lazzaroni from the balcony of the palace, wholly by signs, which, in the midst of the most tumultuous shouts, were perfectly intelli- gible to his public. He reproached, threatened, admonished, forgave, and final- ly dismissed the rabble as thoroughly persuaded and edified by the gesticulations of the royal Punch, as an American crowd by the eloquence of a Webster. The system of semeiology, if I may coin a word for the occasion, is even more per- fected in Sicily, and it is traditionally affirmed that the famous conspiracy of the Sicilian Vespers was organized wholly hy facial signs, not even the hand being employed. The general use of signs in Italy has grown, in a great measure, out of the fact that their swift expressiveness is often better suited to the rapid com- munication required by an impassioned people than the slow movement of ar- ticulate phrase. But there is another reason for the employment of a sign-lan- guage in the States of the Church, in Naples, and other despotic countries. Every man knows that he is constantly surrounded by spies, and it is therefore safer to express himself by gestures, whose application is unintelligible to a lis- tener not already acquainted with the subject to which they refer, and which, besides, cannot be so readily recorded or repeated, even when understood. 36 IMITATIVE AVOEDS. There is a familiar class of words called imitative, or, to use a liard term, onomatopoetic, where there is an evident connection between the soimd and the sense. These are all, or nearly all, words descriptive of particular sounds, or acts accompanied by characteristic sounds, such as buzz, crash, gurgle, gargle, hum, whiz, coo, howl, bellow, roar, whistle, whine, creak, cluck, gabble ; and, in conversation, we often allow ourselves to use words of this class not to be found in the largest dictionaries. The remark of a contemporary of Dr. Johnson, that much of the effect of his conversation was owing to his " iow-wow way," will be remembered by every one. A great modem English poet, following the authority of Sidney, has even introduced into verse a word borrowed from the voice of the sheep, when, speaking of certain censur- able follies, he calls them " iaaing vanities." That these resemblances are in niauy instances imaginary, appears from the fact that different nations sometimes express the same sound by different imitative words. Thus, we represent the report of fire-arms by the word icmg ! the Germans by puff, or p af f ! ; and Sylvester, in his translation of Du Bartas pub- lished two centuries and a half since, uses fork, porJc, instead of the modern caw, caw, as an imitation of the note of the * A passage, cited by Suidas from Ci-atinus, imitating the bleating of alieep, has been appealed to as a proof that the pronunciation of the modern Greeks is erroneous, because according to their orthoepy, the syllables in question would be sounded not ba, ha, but ve, ve. On the other hand, it might be ob- served, that perhaps the Grecian sheep in the time of Cratinus were of breeds whose bleat was as distinct from that of the modern European stock as the croaking of what Tassoni calls the " syrens of the ditch," in Western Europe is from that of their aquatic brethren of Athens, whose song, as every observin" traveller in Greece can testify, the ^Spe/teKeKe'f Kod^ koo| of the Aristophanio comedy so well represents. OBIGIN or SPEECH. Z1 There Las been mncli ingenious and plausible speculation upon tlie natural significance of articulate words ; and it is at least established, that certain elementary sounds are very extensively, if not viniversally, employed to express certain primary conceptions. The subject has not, however, yet been prosecuted far enough to bring us to very precise results ; but we are probably authorized to say that, as a general law, there does exist, or has existed, a natural connection between the sound and the thing signified, and consequently, that the forms of language are neither arbitrary or conventional on the one hand, nor accidental on the other, but are natural and necessary products of the organization, faculties, and condition of man. ~Sa,j, some philologists maintain that the laws of the gennination and growth of these forms are so constant, that if the structure and powers of the organs of speech, and all modifying outward conditions afi"ecting the internal or external life of a particular race, could be pre- cisely known, their entire language might be predicted and constructed beforehand, with as much certainty as any other result of the action of human faculties. Hence it would fol- low that a resemblance between particular radicals or gram- matical forms in different languages does not prove that one is derived from the other, or that both are historically refer- able to any one original source ; but the likeness may be simply an instance of a similarity of effect from the operation of similar causes. It would therefore, be conceivable that words identical in fonn, yet absolutely new, might even now spring up simultaneously or successively in nations between which there is no communication, and no coimection but that which is implied in unity of species and of organization. When, therefore, we find in the language of the Tonga Isl- 38 OEIGIN OF SPEECH. ands the verb mate, to hill, we are not authorized to infei an affinity between that speech and the Spanish, which uses m a t a r in the same sense, or the Latin which has m a c t a r e, also of the like signification. "We must either refer such cases to some obscure law of universal humanity, or agree with an old writer, who remarks that " The judicious behold these as no regular congruities, bul casual coincidences, the like to which may be found in lan- guages of the greatest distance, which never met together since they parted at the confusion of Babel ; and we may not enforce a conformity between the Hebrew and the Eng- lish because one of the three giants, sons of Anak, was called A-hi-man." The origin of language is shrouded in the same impen- etrable mystery that conceals the secrets of our primary mental and physical being. "We cannot say, with some, that it is of itself an organism, but we regard it as a necessary, and, therefore, natural, product of intelligent self-conscious organization. Yet we do not believe that the rage of the naturalistic school of philosophy for detecting law and prin- ciple, where our limited human faculties must be content tci accept ultimate fact, will ever succeed in pointing out the quo modo, the how, of its germination and early development. "We know no language in a state of formation. So far as ob- servation goes, its structure is as complete among the most un- lettered savages, and in the remotest periods, as in the golden age of Hellenic literature. The history of its changes we can but imperfectly trace ; the law of its being lies beyond our reach. Its contemporary mutations, even, elude us, and to most of our inquiries into the rationale of its forms we find uo more satisfactory answer than that one given by the quaint OEIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 39 author of the Keligio Medici, in the seventh of his Miscel- lany Ti-acts, Why saith the Italian, Sigaor, si ! the Spaniard, Si Senor ! Because the one puts that behind, the other puts before. But though the faculty of articulate speech may be con- sidered natural to man, it differs from inost other human powers, whether organic or incorporeal, in this : that it is a faculty belonging to the race, not to the individual, and that the social condition is essential, not to its cultivation, but to its existence. Hence, its exercise is not spontaneous, or in any sense self-taught, as are all purely organic processes. Nevertheless, considered in its mode of action, the use of the mother-tongue may be regarded as an instinctive function, because it is acquired through the promptings of natural im- pulses, and without any conscious, calculating effort. We retain no recollection of the process by which we learned to understand and employ our maternal speech, at least as re- spects that portion of it which is mastered in infant life, and not taught in the artificial form it assumes in books. In actual speaking, the movement, both physical and intellec- tual, is as completely automatic and unconscious as the action of the nerves, muscles, and tendons, by whose instrumentality the hand is raised or the foot thrown forward. We will the result, and it follows, mechanically in both cases, so far as any conscious operation of our volition upon the material agencies is concerned. It is, therefore, no abuse of words to call the mother-tongue, as the unlearned often do, our natwral language. Speech, fully possessed and absolutely appropriated, is purely subjective, but it becomes inorganic and foreign when we make it matter of objective study, observation, or con- 40 MOTHEE-TONGTTE. seious effort. Learning a foreign language, or even studi ously conforming our o^n-n to abstract rule, is analogous to those half-intellectual, half-coi-poreal processes, by which we acquire the power of controlling the action of the involun- tary muscles, so as to give movement to parts of the system ordinarily quiescent ; and speech, like bodily motion, is sel- dom graceful or free, except while its action is spontaneous. Tlie moment it betrays itself as artificial, it becomes con- strained, awkward, inelegant. And hence it is that the mother-tongue, though it may be forgotten, can never be completely supplanted or supplied by any other. Those who grow up speaking many languages,- very seldom acquire a complete mastery over any of them. They are linguistic orphans, without a maternal speech, and they use language not as an organ, but as an implement.* * It is wonderful to what extent purely conventional articulate symbols may be made to supply tlie place of a more natural language, and to serve as a means of very raried communication. In most of these cases, the signs agreed upon must be considered as standing for words, not ideas, and they are rather an index to speech than a language of themselves. Take the exhibitions often witnessed, where, when you show an object to one in the secret, a confederate, blindfolded or in an adjoining room, will instantly name it. A method of com- munication in such cases is this. The parties agree to designate certain words of frequent occurrence, chiefly names of familiar objects, by numerals, and the table of words and their corresponding numbers is committed to memory by both. The simple digits up to nine, including also the cipher, will represent words which may, without exciting suspicion, be used in asking the name of the object. Let us suppose 1 to stand for what, 2 for is, and 3 for this ; and further, that the number corresponding to pen-lcnife is 123. The performer, when a spectator produces a pen-knife, asks, What is this ? The confederate combines the corresponding numerals one, two, three, into the number 123; llie answer to which is pen-lcnife. Or again, 4, 5, and 6 may stand respectively for tell, me, and nam, and the number 645 for pencil. A pencil is held up by a spectator, the conjuror cries, Now, tell me ! and the answer 6, 4, 5 — 645, a pencil, is at once given. I have known this numeral vocabulary carried up to four thousand words, and the principle is capable of aln jst unlimited variation and eiten. aion. THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 41 The origin of the appellative English, as the e.?clusive designation of a tongue employed by the Saxon, as well as the Anglian colonists of our fatherland, is not altogether clear. The etymology of the national names of both the principal immigrant races is very uncertain, but it is famil- iarly known, that for several centuries after, and not improb- ably before, the commencement of the Christian era, bands of warlike adventurers from the conterminous borders of what are now the Kingdom of Denmark and the Gennan States, made frequent incursions into Britain, and at last established themselves as its masters. The native Celtic inhabitants, who were compelled to retire before the martial prowess of the strangers, do not seem to have distinguished very accurately between the different nationalities of their conquerors. A common name was applied by the Britons to the whole alien immigration ; and, though each tribe had its own domestic designation, they were, and still are, all called Saxons by the Celtic aborigines. Popular narrative has fixed the most important of these expeditions at about the middle of the fifth century, and it is said to have been composed chiefly of Jutes, or Jutland- ers, under the leadership of Hengist and Horsa, who were afterwards joined by successive reinforcements from the Gothic tribes on the coast of the Gennan Ocean. Among these are particularly named, first, the Saxon conquerors, who, at different periods, and under different leaders, subdued and colonized Sussex, "Wessex, Essex, and Middlesex ; and sec- ondly, two considerable bodies of Angles from Sler.wick, who occupied Suffolk and ISTorfolk, and the south-western districts of Scotland. These tribes, together with Frisians and emi- gi'ants from other neighboring Scandinavian and Teutonic 4:2 IHE ANGLES AND SAXONS. countries, soon amalgamated, and gradually extended tlieir joint sway over the whole island, except the more inacces- sible provinces of [Northern and Western Britain. Such are the traditional accounts of the Anglo-Saxon con- quest, as detailed by the Saxon Chronicle, and other native annals, and they have been received, without suspicion or in- quiry, by most succeeding historians. But the evidence on which these supposed facts rest, is of too doubtful character to command, by any means, implicit belief. The real history of this period is wrapped in the darkest obscurity, and we can hardly say that any thing is certain beyond the simple fact, that before the 'close of the sixth century after Christ the most important portion of Great Britain had been sub- dued, and was possessed, by Gothic tribes knOwn to the iadi- genous populations as Saxons. There is no historical proof by which we can identify the Anglo-Saxon language, and the people who spoke it, with any Continental dialect and na- tion ; nor, on the other hand, by which we can establish a diversity of origin or of speech between the Anglian and the Saxon colonists of Great Britain. But there i&lingmstic jvidence of a great commingling of nations in the body of mtruders. The Anglo-Saxon, in its obscure etymology, its confused and imperfect inflections, and its anomalous and irregular syntax, appears to me to furnish abundant proof of a diversity, not of a unity, of origin. It has not what is con- sidered the distinctive character of a modern, so much as of a mixed and ill-assimilated speech, and its relations to the various ingredients of which it is composed are just those of the present English to its own heterogeneous sources. It bor- rowed roots, and dropped endings, appropriated syntactical combinations without the inflections which made them logi- THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 43 cal, and had not yet acqiiired a consistent and harmonious structure when the Norman conquest arrested its develop- ment, and imposed upon it, or, perhaps we should say, gave a new stimulus to, the tendencies which have resulted in the formation of modern English. There is no proof that Anglo- Saxon was ever spoken anywhere but on the soil of Great Britain ; for the Heliand, and other remains of old Saxon, are not ^TigrZo-Saxon, and I think it must be regarded, not as a lan- guage which the colonists, or any of them, brought with them from the continent, but as a new speech resulting from the fusion of many separate elements. It is, therefore, in- digenous, if not aboriginal, and as exclusively local and national in its character as English itself.* But independently of such internal evidence, it is very improbable that, at a period when there existed little politi- cal, or, so far as we have reason to believe, linguistic unity in any considerable extent of maritime territory occupied by the Gothic race, any one branch, or any one dialect, of that race, could have supplied a sufficient number of emigrants for so extensive conquest and occupation. The dialects of the islands and south-eastern coasts of the North Sea, are at this day extremely numerous and discordant,-}' the population * See Lecture vi. f The dialects referred to in the text are generally grouped under the com- mon denomination of Frisic or Frisian, but they vary so much both in structure and vocabulary, that, in many instances, they cannot be considered as having much direct relationship with each other. In no part of Europe are there so many speeches within the same area, which are mutually unintelligible to those who employ dialects held to be cognate. At least five principal varieties or patois are recognized in modern Frisic, and each of these is subdivided into several local jargons. No Frisic literature can be said to exist, for neither the ancient legal codes, nor the few modern rhymes, constitute a body of writings sufBciently various and comprehensive to be dignified with such an appellation. Accidences and partial vocabularies of several Frisic dialects have been com 44 THE AJ*rGLES AND SAXONS. very mixed and diversified in blood ; and there is no reason to suppose that there was less diversity of language or of ori- gin among the inhabitants of those shores, at the rude and remote period of the conquest of Britain. To determine, therefore, the relative share of diflPerent tribes and different dialects in the formation of the Anglo-Saxon people and the Anglo-Saxon speech, vrould be a hopeless and an unprofita- ble task ; but we may safely adopt the general conclusion, that in both the Teutonic element predominated over the Scandinavian.* piled, but as, in spite of these and occasional dilettantisms in tlie way of verse, written Frisic is nerer employed for any practical purpose, the language has no orthography, and is, philologically speaking, an unwritten tongue. It is therefore subject to all the uncertainty and vacillation of other languages, which exist only in the mouth of the people ; nor is there any satisfactory evidence to show that it was ever much more consistent and homogeneous, as an independ- ent speech, than it is at this hour. The data are too insufficient in amount, and too vague and uncritical in character to serve as a basis for speculation upon the relations between Frisic as a whole, and other tongues ; and we might almost as well build arguments concerning the grammatical system of the Latin upon the modern patois of Normandy, Gasoony, and Provence ; or construct a theory of the Anglo-Saxon inflections and syntax from a comparison of Tim Bobbin's dialogues, the mercantile jargon of Canton, and the TalUee-talkee of the negroes of Surinam. See Lecture xviii. * German and Germanizing philologists appear to me to make Frisic too ex- clusively Teutonic. Take for example the argument from the frequent termina- tion of the names of places in urn, as Husum and others, which is said to be in all cases a contraction of helm. Now there are, in unequivocally Scandina- vian districts, local names ending in um, which in these instances are taken from the dative plural of the original appellation of the locality. Thus, in Old Northern, Upsal was a plural, Uppsalir; at or in Upsal, A or 1 Uppsolum. In speaking of towns, we use in English most frequently the objective with the prepositions at or in, and in like manner in Old Northern, the dative, as i or i Husum, would occur oftener than any other ease of the name of that town. When the inflections were dying out, as in the confused mixture of races in Schleswig-Holstein and its borders, they did very early, the case oftenest in use would survive all others, and become the indeclinable name of the town, just as, in Danish and Enghsh, Holum is the only form for all the cases of the Ice- landic Holar, the name of a place in northern Iceland, remarkable as having THE ANGLES AND SAXONS. 43 There is, moreover, pretty satisfactory evidtnce that An- gles formed some portion, at least, of the new population, and tliough we have no reliable direct proof of the emigra- tion into Britain of any tribe that bad called itself Saxon while resident on Germanic soil, yet, apart from tradition, we are authorized to infer such an emigration from the local names Sussex, Essex, Wessex, and Middlesex, (South Sax- ons, West Saxons, East Saxons, and Middle Saxons ;) from the fact that all the intruders alike were named Saxons by the native Celts ; and from the further circumstance, that after the language was reduced to writing, it was called by those Avho spoke it Saxon as well as English. How then did England become the exclusive appellation of the country, English of the language ? "We have no evidence whatever of the application of any general or collective name to the people, the country, or the speech, before the introduction of Christianity into England. The new inhabitants of the isl- long possessed the only printing press in the island. In the case of Husum, the dative plural, which would mean at the houses or at the village, is a much more probable etymology than Hiishjem, (Haus-heim,) which would be pleonastic. These instances in the modern Scandinavian dialects are precisely analogous to the formation of Stanchio from h rav Ko>, and other similar names in modern Greek, the accusative in that language supplying the place of the dative, which is obsolete. See, further. Appendix, 4. The names of the two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, who are said to have headed the most eventful incursion of the invaders, are words in one or another form common to all the Scandinavian and the Teutonic dialects. Both are names of the genus horse, but in most localities hengst is appropriated to the male, while in some, and particularly in Schleswig, horsa or hors is confined to the female animal. J. 0. Kohl informs ua that both the proper names are still current in the district from which the ancient conquerors are reported to have emigrated. A Danish colonel told the traveller that in a company of his regiment there were two privates bearing these names; and it happened, odd- ly, that in this case Hengist and Horsa, like Castor and Pollux, were still in- separably united, the places of the two soldiers being side by side in the ranks. Inseln u. Marschen Schlesw-Holst. i., 290. 4:6 AlfGLO-SAXON LANCUAGE. and became firbt known to the Eoman see througli Anglian captives who were carried to Kome in the sixth centuiy. The name of their tribe, in its Latinized form, Angli, we may suppose was bestowed by the Komans upon the whole people, and the derivative, Anglia, upon the ten-itory it occupied. The Christian missionaries who commenced the conversion of Britain would naturally continue to employ the name by which the island had become known anew to them, and their converts, especially if no general name had been already adopted, would assume that which their teach- ers brought with them. This, in the absence of any satisfac- tory proof that the Angles were a particularly numerous or powerful element in the population, appears the most proba- ble reason that can now be assigned, why a people, who, in large proportion, retained for themselves and their several provinces the appellation of Saxon, and who were known to neighboring nations by no other name, should have suiTen- dered this hereditary designation, and given to their language the name of English, to their country that of England, or the land of the Angles. The language itself, in the earliest existing remains of the native literature, whether composed in Latin or in the ver- nacular, is generally called English, but sometimes Saxon. These remains are all of later date than the adoption of Christianity by the English people, and, of course, however prevalent the use of English as a national appellative may be in them, nothing can be thence inferred as to the extent to which the term was applied at earlier periods. The com- pound term, Anglo-Saxon, first occurs in the life of Alfred, ascribed to his contemporary, Asser, who calls that prince Angul-Saxonum Eex, king of the Anglo-Saxons. The ANGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. 47 employment of the word as a designation of the language and literature is much more recent.* The Anglo-Saxon langviage, though somewhat modilied by Scandinavian influence, differs too widely from the Old JSTorthern or Icelandic, (which I use as synonymous terms,) to afford any countenance to the supposition that either of them is derived from the other. ISTor is there any good i-eason for rejecting the term Anglo-Saxon, and, as has been proposed, employing English as the name of the language, from the earliest date to the present day. A change of no- menclature like this would expose us to the inconvenience, not merely of embracing, within one designation, objects which have been conventionally separated, but of confoi^nd- ing things logically distinct ; for though our modern English is built upon and mainly derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the two dialects are now so discrepant, that the fullest knowledge of one would not alone suffice to render the other intelligible to either the eye or the ear. They are too unlike in vocabu- lary and in inflectional character, to be still considered as one speech, though in syntactical structure they resemble each other more closely than almost any other pair of related an- cient and modern tongues. But even in this respect, the accordance is not so strict as some writers conceive it to be. Sir Thomas Browne, for instance, in the eighth of his Miscel- * The pretended formal imposition of the name of England upon the Anglo- Saxon possessions in Great Britain, by a decree of King Egbert, is unsupported by any contemporaneous or credible testimony. It is rejected as fabulous by most historical investigators, and it is certainly very improbable that a king, him- self a Saxon by birth and name, ruling Saxon subjects and Saxon provinces, should have voluntarily chosen for his realm a designation borrowed from an- other people and another territory. The title of Angliae or Anglorum rex is much more naturally explained by the supposition that England and English had been already adopted as the collective names cf the country and its inhabitants. 48 AKGLO-SAXON LANGUAGE. lany Tracts, has, by a compendioiis process, established very nearly an absolute identity between the two. Taking, or, more probably, composing a page or two of English, from which all words of Latin or French origin are excluded, he has turned, or, to use a Germanism here not inappropriate, overset it into Anglo-Saxon, by looking out the corresponding terms in a Saxon Dictionary, and arranging them word for word as in English, with scarcely any attention to grammati- cal form, and has thus manufactured a dialect bearing no greater relation to Anglo-Saxon than the macaronic composi- tions of the sixteenth century do to classical Latin. In the want of more extensive means than the press has yet made accessible for the study of the dialects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the transition period — we cannot assign any precise date to the change from Anglo- Saxon to English ; nor, indeed, is there any i-eason to sup- pose that any such sudden revolution occurred in the Angli- can speech as to render it hereafter possible to make any thing more than an approximative and somewhat arbitrary determination of the period. For the purposes of an introduc- tory course, no nice distinctions on this point are necessaiy, and it will suffice to say that the dialect of the period be- tween the middle of the twelfth and the middle of the thir- teenth centuries partakes so strongly of the characteristics of both Anglo-Saxon and English, that it has been usually, and not inappropriately, called Semi-Saxon. It is a matter of still greater difficulty to refer the subse- quent history of English to fixed chronological epochs. The name of Old-English has been applied to the language as spoken from the latter date to the end of the reign of Ed- ward III. in 1377; that of Middle-English to the form of EPOCHS IN ENGLISH. 49 speech extending from the close of Edward's reign to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, while all its subsequent phases are embraced under the common designation of Mod- ern-English. This is, in many respects, an objectionable division of our philological history. The Old-English era would include many of the works of Chaucer, which belong properly to a later stage of our literature, and at the same time exclude the English Bible of "Wycliffe and his fellow- laborers, whose style is more, archaic than that of Chaucer. Middle-English would embrace the Confessio Amantis of Gower, who, philologically, is older than Chaucer, and the entire works of Hooker, as well as many of the plays of Shakespeare, both of whom belong imequivocally to the Modern-English period. It would, I think, be more accurate to commence the second era about the year 1350, and to ter- minate it -with the third quarter of the sixteenth century. The first marked and specific change in the English lan- guage took place in the time, and in a very considerable degree, by the influence of Wycliffe, Gower, and Chaucer, the period of whose lives extended through the last three quarters of the fourteenth century, and included the bi'illiant reign of Edward III., and the glorious history of the Black Prince. The works of "Wycliffe and his school, including their translations of the Bible, which are known to have been widely circulated, undoubtedly exerted a very important influence on the prose, and especially the spoken dialect. " The moral Gower," as Chaucer calls him, was inferior in ability to his two great contemporaries, and his literary influence less marked ; but his contributions to the improvement of his native tongue are of some importance ; and if it is true, as Fuller quaintly remarks, that he " left English very bad," it 4 50 EPOCHS IN ENGLISH. is also tnie, as Fuller further observes, that he fcund it " very very bad." The great poetical merit of Chaucer, the popular character of his subjects, and his own high social position, gave him an ascendency in the rising literature of England that scarcely any subsequent writer has attained ; and there is perhaps no English author who has done more to mould, or rather to fix, the standard of the language, and to develop its poetical capabilities, than this great genius.* From this period to the introduction of printing by Caxton, and the consequent diifusion of classical literature in England, about the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, the language remained nearly stationary ; but at that period a revolution commenced, which was jDromoted by the [Reformation, and, for a hundred years, English was in a state of transition. At the close of the period to which I have proposed to apply the name Middle-English, or about the year 1575, that revolution had produced its first great and most striking eff'ect upon the structure and vocabulary of our tongue, and thus rendered possible the composition of such writings as those of the great theologian and the- great dramatist, which signalized the commencement of the last and greatest era of our literature. English now became fixed in grammar and vocabulary, so far as a thing essentially so fleeting as speech can ever be -said to ho fixed, and for nearly three centuries it has undergone no very important change. Our orthography has indeed become more uniform, and our stock of words has been much enlarged, but he that is well read in Spenser, Hooker, and Shakespeare, not to speak of other great luminaries of that age, and above all, of the * See Lectures i., v., vi., and vii. PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. 51 Standard translation of tlie Bible, whicli, however, appropri- ately belongs to an earlier period, ^vill doubt whether it has gained much in power to expand the intellect or touch the heart.* Besides the words which express the general subject of the present course, I must here notice certain other terms of art, and apologize for an occasional looseness in the use of them, which the poverty of the English grammatical nomen- clature renders almost unavoidable. Our word language has no conjugate adjective, and for want of a native term, Eng- lish scholars have long employed the Greek derivative, phi- lological, in a corresponding sense. But j)hilology, and its derivative adjective, have acquired, in the vocabulary of Continental science, a different meaning from that which we give them, more comprehensive in one direction, more limited in another, and, to supply the want which a restriction of their earlier sense has created, linguistic or linguistics, a term Latin in its radical, Greek in its form, has been introduced. Philology was originally applied in Germany to the study of the classical languages and literature of Greece and Eome, as a means of general intellectual culture. In its pres- * " I take this present period of our English tung to be the verie height thereof, bycause I find it so excellently well fined both for the bodie of the tung itself, and for the customarie writing thereof, as either foren workmanship can giue it glosse, or as home-wrought hauling can giue it grace. When the age of our people which now Tse the tung so well, is dead and departed, there will another succede, and with the people the tung will alter and change ; which change in the full haruest thereof male proTe comparable to this, but sure for this which we now vse, it seemeth euen now to be at the best for substance, and the brauest for circumstance, and whatsoerer shall become of the English state, the English tung cannot prove fairer than it is at this dale, if it male please our learned sort so to esteme of it, and to bestow their trauell upon such a subject."— Uulcaster, First Part of the Elementarie, p. 159. A. D. 1582. 52 PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. ent use, it is defined as a " Hstorical science, whose cad is the knowledge of the intellectual condition, labors, and products of a nation, or of cognate nations, at particular epochs of general chronology, with reference to the historical develop- ment of such nations." * There are, then, not one, namely, a Greek and Eoman, but many philologies, as many, indeed, as there are distinct peoples, or families of peoples, whose intellectual characters and action may be known through their languages. In philology thus considered, the study of languages is a means to the end specified in the definition just given. In linguistics, on the other hand, language itself, as one of the great characteristics of humanity, is the end, and the means are the study of general and comparative gram- mar. Every philology is the -physiology of a species in lan- guage ; linguistics, the comparative anatomy of all the several systems of articulate communication between man and man. Linguistics, as a noun, has hardly become an English word. Philology, as used by most English and American writers, embraces the signification of the two words by which, in Continental literature, the study of language is characterized, according to the methods by which, and the objects for which, it is pursued. The adjectives, philological and linguistic, are employed, sometimes interchangeably in the same sense as philology, and sometimes as adjectives conjugate in meaning to the noun language. I shall not attempt, in this course, a strict conformity to Continental usage in the employment of these words, nor, indeed, would it be practicable to do so, until a new adjective shall be coiaed to relieve one of them of its double meaning ; but I shall endeavor so to use them * Heyse : Sprachwissenschaft, ff. Vj. PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS. 53 all, that the context or the subject matter -will determine the sense which they are intended to bear for the occasion.* From the distinction here pointed out, it results that phi- lology concerns itself chiefly with that which is peculiar to a given speech and its literature, linguistics with those laws and properties which are common to all languages. Philol- ogy is conversant with distinctions ; linguistics with analo- gies. The course of lectures I am commencing is intended to be strictly philological, and I shall introduce illustrations from the field of linguistics only when they are necessary for etymological reasons, or 'to make the distinguishing traits of English more palpable by the force of contrast. * Our English grammatical and philological vocabulary is poor. We have no adjective strictly conjugate to speech, tongue, language, verb, noun, and many other terms of art in this department. lAnguistic is a barbarous hybrid, and, in our use, equivocal, as are also the adjectives verbal, nominal, and the like. A native equivalent to the sprachlich of some German writers, correspond- ing nearly to our old use ol philological, as in the phrase, sprachliche Forschungen, where the adjective embraces the meaning both oi philologi- cal and linguistic, is much wanted. LECTURE III. PKACTICAL USES OF ETYMOLOGY. In the last lecture, the distinction made in recent gram- matical nomenclature between philology and linguistics was illustrated by comparing the former to the physiology of a single species, the latter to the comparative anatomy of dif- ferent species. Etymology, or the study of the primitive, derivative, and figurative forms and meanings of words, must of course have difierent uses, according to the object for which it is pursued. If the aims of the etymological in- quirer be philological, and he seek only a more thorough comprehension and mastery of the vocabulary of his own tongue, the uses in question, though not excluding other col- lateral advantages, may be said to be of a strictly practical character ; or, in other words, etymology, so studied, tends directly to aid us in the clear understanding and just and forcible employment of the words which compose our own language. If, on the other hand, the scholar's objects be ethnological or linguistic, and he investigate the history of words for the purpose of tracing the relations between differ- '^nt races or difi'erent languages, and of arriving at those gen- PHILOLOGICAi STUXIIES. b5 eral principles of universal grammar which determine the form and structure of all human speech, his studies are in- deed more highly scientific in their scope and method, but they aid him little in the comprehension, and, as experience abundantly shows, scarcely at all in the use, of his maternal tongue. But though I admit that philology is of a less rig- orously scientific character than linguistics, I by no means concede to the latter any pre-eminence as a philosophic study, or as requiring higher intellectual endowments for its success- ful cultivation ; and it cannot be disputed that, as a means of ethical culture, philology, connecting itself, as it does, with the whole mental and physical life of man, illustrating as well the in'Ward thought and feeling as the outward action of a nation, has almost as great a superiority over linguistics as history over pure mathematics. Philological studies, when philology, as explained in the last lecture, was restricted to the cultivation of the languages, literature, history, and arch- aeology of Greece and Rome, were very commonly called 1 i t e r se h u m a n i o r e s , or, in English, the humanities / and it is the conviction of their value as a moral and intellectual discipline, which has led scholars almost universally to as- cribe the origin of this appellation to a sense of their refinmg, elevating, and humanizing influence. This, however, I think, is an erroneous etymology. They were called litergs hu- maniores, the humanities, by way of opposition to the literse divinas, or divinity, the two studies, philology and theology, then completing the circle of scholastic knowl- edge, which, at the period of the introduction of the phrase, scarcely included any branch of phj'sical science. But though the etymology is mistaken', its general reception is an evi- dence of the opinion of the learned as to the worth and im- portance of the study, and, now that so many modern litera- 56 USES OF ETTMOLOGT. tures have attained to an excellence scarcely inferior to that of classic models, their special philologies have even stronger claims npon us than those of ancient lore, because they are not only almost equally valuable as instruments of mental culture, biit are more directly connected vs'ith the clear intel- ligence, and fit discharge of our highest moral, social, and religious duties. Etymology is a fundamental branch of all philological and all linguistic study. Tlie word is used in two senses, or rather, the science of etymology has two offices. The one concerns itself with the primitive and derivative forms and significations of words, the other with their grammatical in- flections and modifications ; the one considers words independ- ently and absolutely, the other in their syntactical relations. In discussing the uses of etymology, I shall confine myself to the first of these offices, or that which consists in investi- gating the earliest recognizable shape and meaning of words, and tracing the history of their subsquent changes in form and signification. A knowledge of etymology, to such an extent as is required for all the general purposes of literature and of life, is attainable by aids within the reach of every man of moderate scholastic training. Our commonest dic- tionaries give, with tolerable accuracy, the etymologies of most of our vocabulary, and where these fail, every library will furnish the means of further investigation. It must be confessed, however, that no English dictionary at all fulfils the requisites either of a truly scientific or of a popular ety- mologicon. They all attempt too much and too little— too much of comparative, too little of positive etymology. Of course, in a complete thesaurus of any language, the etymol- ogy of every word should exhibit both its philology and its linguistics, its domestic history, and its foreign relations, but ENGLISH DICTIONAEIES. 57 in a haud-lexicon of any modern tongue, this wide range of lin- guistic research is misplaced, because it necessarily excludes much that is of more iminediate importance to the under- standing and the use of the vocabulary. Kichardson's, which, however, is faulty in arrangement, and too bulky for conven- ient use as a manual, best answers the true idea of an English dictionary, because it follows, more closely than any other, the history of the words it defines. For the purposes of general use, no foreign roots should be introduced into the etymologi- cal part of a dictionary, barely because they resemble, and are presumably cognate with, words of our own language. The selection of such should be limited to those from which the English word is known to be derived, and such others as, by their form or their meaning, serve more clearly to explain either its orthography or some of its significations. What- ever is beyond this belongs to the domain of linguistics, com- parative grammar, ethnology, to a thesaurus not a dictionary, and it can find room in this latter only by excluding what, for the purposes of a dictionary, is of greater value. I have already assigned what seemed to me sufficient reasons for making the present course philological, not lin- guistic, and I cannot, without occupying time more appro- priately employed otherwise, enter into a discussion of the aims and importance of linguistic studies in their bearing upon etymology, the great question of the unity of the species, and the general laws of intellectual action, the high- est problems which unaided humanity can aspire to solve. I freely allow their profound interest and their strict scientific character, but they must, for the present, be the special property of the few, not, like the mother-tongue, the com- mon heritage of the many ; and I now again refer to them unly to protest against the inference that I deny or depreci- 58 EXTEAVAGAirCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. ate their worth, because I think it necessary, in a preparatorj course, to exclude them from consideration. The extravagance of etymologists has brought the whole study of words into popular discredit ; and though that study is now pursued in much stricter accordance with philosophic method, instances of wild conjecture and absurd speculation are still by no means wanting. Menage, formerly often, and now sometimes, cited as an authority in French etymologj', and of course with respect to the origin of English words borrowed from the French, is among the boldest of these in- quirers. He hesitates not to assign any foreign primitive, no matter how distant the source, as the origin of the French word resembling it ; and when none such offers, he coins a Low- Latin root for the occasion. In such cases, the detection of the falsehood is difficult, its refutation next to impossible, for in the chaos of monkish and secular writers in that corrupted dialect, who can say what barbarisms may not occur ? Me- nage is not the only etymologist who has sinned in this way, for it is one of the safest and easiest of literary frauds. Dr. Johnson thought we were not authorized to deny that there might be witches, because nothing proved their non-existence ; and the same principle may compel us to pause in disputing a plausible etymology, for want of evidence to show that the supposed root does or does not actually exist in a given vo- cabulary. The wise old Fuller, whom no lover of wit, truth, beauty, and goodness can ever tire of reading, says, in refer- ence to an extravagant etymology : " As for those that count the Tatars the offspring of the ten tribes of Israel, which Salmanasar led away captive, be- cause Tatari or Totari signifieth in the Hebrew and Syriack tongue a residue or remnant, learned men have sufficiently confuted it. And surely it seemeth a forced and overstrained EXTEAVAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 59 deduction to farre-fetch the name of Tartars from i Hebrew word, a language so far distant from them. But no more here- of ; because, perchance, herein the woman's reason hath a mas- culine truth; and the Tartarians are called so, because they are [called] so. It may be curious etymologists (let them lose their wages who work in difficult trifles) seek to reap what was never sown, whilst they study to make those words speak reason, which are only voces ad placitum, imposed at pleasiu'e." The theory of Fuller was better than his practice, and he not unfrequently indulged in etymological speculations as absurd as that which he ridicules respecting the Tatars, for he derives compliment, not, as he says others did, "a c o m - pletione mentis," but "a complete mentiri," be- cause compliments arc usually completely mendacious ; and elsewhere he quotes with seeming assent Sir John Harring- ton's opinion that the old English elf and goblin came from the names of the two great political factions of the Empire, the Guelphs and Ghibellines. One can hardly believe Eoger Ascham serious in deriving war from wa/rre or werre, the old form of the comparative worse, because war is worse than peace ; * but even this derivation is only less absurd than * Allied to this is Spenser's derivation oi world: But when the word woxe old, it woxe warre old, CWhereof it hight,) Faerie Queen, B. iv., C. Tiii., S. xxxi. The ingenious author of the excellent little work on English Synonyms, editeu by Archbishop Whately, supposes world to be the participle whirled, and says the word was evidently expressive of roundness. The wJi in whirl, (liv in the corresponding Gothic words,) is radical, and would not have been represented in Anglo-Saxon byw, asinworuld, weoruld, world. Besides this, the word world is older than the knowledge of the globular form or the rotation of the earth among the Gothic tribes. A still more conclusive argument against this etymology is the fact, that the Anglo-Saxon woruld, the Icelandic verolld, 60 EXTEAVAGAJTCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. Blackstoiie's of parson from persona, persona eccle- sise, because the parson personates or represents thecliurcli. The most extraordinary word-fanciers we have had in English literature are Murray and Ker. Murray derives all English, in fact all articulate words, from nine primary monosyllables, which are essentially natural to primitive man. The family likeness between the nine is so strong that Murray might, with much convenience and small loss of probability, have reduced them to one, for they all agree in their vowel and final consonant. The catalogue of these surprisingly prolific roots is this : 1, ag, wag, or hwag ; 2, bag, or bwag ; 3, dwag ; 4, cwag ; 5, lag ; 6, mag ; Y, nag ; 8, rag ; and 9, swag. Ker is somewhat less ambitious, but quite as original and ingenious in his theories. He found the English public simple enough to buy two editions of a work in two vol- umes, the object of which is to show that a very large pro- portion of our current English proverbs are, not translations or imitations of Dutch ones, but mere mispronunciations, corruptions of common Dutch phrases and expressions totally different in meaning from that which is ascribed to the prov- erbs, as we employ them. Thus the proverbial phrase, ' He took the bull by the horns,' is a corruption of 'hii tuck tije bol by die hoorens,' which means, here head calls contrivance in ; that it is as it ought to be. ' As stUl as a mouse,' is, 'als stille als er mee hose,' as still as one without shoes, ^nd even the national cry, ' Old Eng- land forever ! ' is not plain English at all, but Low-Dutch for ' Hail to your country — evince your zeal for her ! ' did not mean the earth, the physical, but the moral, the human world, the Latin seculum. The Anglo-Saxon name of the «artA was middan-eard, or middan-geard, corresponding to the Moeso-Gothic midjungards. Thi! most probable etymology of world seems to be w c r , (cognate with the Latin vir,) man, and old, age or time. EXTEAVAGAlfCE OF ETTMOLi. GISTS . 61 The general idea is of course too absurd to be met by ar- gument, and tbe book is of about tlie same philological value as Swift's Medical Consultation, and other trifles, where the words are Latin in form, but similar in sound to English words of diiferent signification, so that the Latin words i s , his, honor, sic, mean, Is his Honor sick? Tlie specula- tions of more recent and more eminent philologists, though certainly made more plausible by historical evidence and by apparent analogies, are, sometimes, not less unreasonable.* Crambe, a character in the Memoirs of Scriblerus much given to punning, declares that he was always under the dominion of some particular word, which formed the theme of his puns. Muys, a very late and learned German philol- ogist, who occupies himself with Greek etymology, is, un- consciously no doubt, under the influence of a similar verbal * I certainly do not intend to class Dr. Latham with the dreamers to whom I refer in the text, but I must be permitted here to notice what is, at least, an inaccuracy of expression in his etymology of our English word drake.. He says, (English Language 2d Edition, p. 214,) " It [drake] is derived from a word with which it has but one letter in common; viz., the Latin anas, duck.'' The common name of the duck in the Gothic languages is doubtless allied to anas, and in most of them the same root occnrs in forms which contain the consonant- al elements of the word drake. Two of these elements, the rand i, arc signs of the masculine termination. The d is radical, as are also the corresponding mute f In the Latin anas, (genitive anat-is,) and the m which has been dropped from drake, or rather perhaps formed the d by coalescence with the t, as in modern Greek, where pt is pronounced d, and therefore drake and anas are related as being both derived from a common root. But to assert that drake is derived from anas is not only a violation of the legitimate rules of etymolog- ical deduction, but it involves the historical improbability of affirming that a people as old as the Bomans themselves were without a name for one of the commonest and most important game-birds of their climate, until they borrowed one from their foreign invaders. In fact, if either nation received the word from the other, instead of both inheriting it from some common but remote source, the habits of the bird in question, whose birthplace and proper home is in the far North, would render it more probable that the Gothic was the origmal, the Latin the derivative form. 62 JsrXTEAVAGAlfCE OF ETTMCLOGISTB. crotchet. The particular word which tyrannizes over his re- searches is the German verb etossen, in English to push. There are several Sanscrit roots possessing this signification, and, according to onr author, there are few Greek words not derived from some one of them. His own special favorite among these Sanscrit radicals is dhu, and he finds a proba- bility, amounting very nearly to certainty, that the following words, as well as hundreds of others ec[ually discrepant from the primitive type, are derived from it : Agamemnon, Asia, Athene, J^gyptus, ^at^.o';, Gallus, Geryon, Demeter, Eido- thea, Helle, Enarete, Zephyrus, Hebe, Jocasta, Leda, Poly- deuces, Sisyphus. The process by which these derivations are made out is as simple as possible. Take for instance Gallus. Beginning with dhu, spelled d, h, u, if you cut off d, you have hu, whence it is but a step to hva; hva passes readily into ga, and by adding I, you obtain gal, which wants only the inflectional final syllable us, with the reduplication of the I, and your word is finished. After this, we may well say that etymology, like misery, makes us ac- quainted with strange bed-fellows. In admitting that most English etymological dictionaries point out the origin of the greater part of our vocabulary, I must limit the concession to words derived, as are the great majority of ours, directly from Greek, Latin, French, or An- ■glo-Saxon roots still to be found in the recorded literature of those languages. With respect to words which have tradi- tionally descended from the old Gothic storehouse, and which do not occur in the existing remains of Anglo-Saxon litera- ture, or which have been borrowed from remoter sources, and especially with respect to the attempts made by lexicograph- ers to trace English words, through the languages I have named, back to still older dialects, and to detect affinities to EXTEAYAGANCE OF ETYMOLOGISTS. 63 words belonging to the vocabularies of languages not of tbe Gothic or Komance stock, I knoAV no English dictionary which is -worthy of the smallest confidence. Take for exam- ple our noun and verb issue. Nothing can be plainer than its origin to one who is content with the simple truth. We have borrowed it from the obsolete French is sir, which, as well as the cognate Italian n s c i r e , is evidently a modern form of the compound Latin infinitive ex-ire, to go out. A celebrated lexicographer gives, as related words, the French and Italian forms, but he fails to see that they arc derived from the Latin exire, and suggests that they coincide with the Ethiopic watsa ! The tendency of this constant search after remote analogies is to lead the inquirer to overlook near and obvious sources of derivation, and to create a per- plexity and confusion with regard to the real meaning of words, by connecting them with distant roots slightly similar in form, and, frequently, not at all in signification. There are, in all literatures, numerous instances where words have been corrupted in orthography, and finally changed in mean- ing, in consequence of the adoption of a mistaken etymol- ogy. An example of this is the common adjective abom- inable, which was once altered in form and meaning by a mistake of this sort, though better scholarship has now re- stored it to its true orthography, and more nearly to its prop- er signification. It is evidently regularly formed from the Latin verb abomin or, itself derived from ab and omen. Abominable accordingly involves the notion of that which is in a religious sense profane and detestable, or, in a word, of evil omen ; and Milton never uses it, or the conjugate noun abominations, except with reference to devilisli, pro- fane, or idolatrous objects. Quite early in English literature some sciolist fancied that the true etymology was ab and 64 TRUE METHOD OF ETYMOLOGY. homo, and that its proper meaning was rejpugnani to hu- manity, inhuman. This derivation being accepted, the or- thography -was changed to abAominable, and in old English books it is often used in a sense corresponding to its supposed origin, nor has it even yet fully recovered its appropriate meaning. We may, in numerous instances, trace back the use of a word to a remote antiquity, and find at the same time that it was employed in many languages between which we are un- able to detect any historical or even grammatical relation. When, in such case, any of the foreign derivative or inflec- tional changes of the root throw light on the form of the corresponding English word, or when its radical meaning serves to explain any of the different senses which we as- cribe to our own vocable, and which are not deducible from its known historical etymology, the fact of the existence of such a word becomes philologically, as well as linguistically, interesting. If, liowever, the foreign word does not aid us in understanding or employing the corresponding English one, whatever may be its importance in linguistics, it is in Eng- lish philology, and of course etymology, whoUy insignificant. I will borroAV an example from languages which I can hardly presume to be familiar to many of my audience, and others from some domestic sources. The Portuguese word sau- dade, which expresses an afi"ectionate, regretful longins ior a lost or absent beloved object, has been said by Portuguese scholars to be peculiar to their own tongue, and to have no equivalent in any other European speech. A similar word, however, with the same general, and often the same precise, signification, occurs in Icelandic, Swedish and Danish, in the respective forms saknaSr, saknad, and Savn. Now tliere is no link of relationship, by which any actual connec- usKs ;f etymology. 65 tion can be made out between tbe Scandinavian and tlio Portuguese words, no common source to which both can be referred, nor does the form or meaning of either serve in the least to explain those of the other. The coincidence is a re- markable fact ; it may become linguistically important ; but at present it is not of the slightest consequence to the phi- lology of either of the langiiages in question. In like man- ner, I understand the English words father, mother, brother, sister, not at all the better for knowing that they are used in forms not widely differing from our own, in most of the lan- guages belonging to the Indo-European family. It will be found pretty generally true, that with respect to words used in their simple form and literal sense, the study of their derivation is of little use in aiding us to form a just conception of their meaning ; but if they are compounds, and especially if their employment in our own language is a figurative one, we are essentially assisted by a knowledge of their etymology. If you tell a child that our noun and ad- jective purple is the Anglicised fontn of the Latin purpu- reus, a word of similar signification, you tell him nothing. So if, for the origin of pi^ecijntate and precipitation, he is barely referred to the Latin praeceps as the source of these English words, he has learned what is not worth remembering. But if you go further, and explain to him that prseceps is a compound of prse, iefore, and the root of caput, the head, so that praeceps and precipitate both mean head- foremost, he will have gained an entirely new conception of the force of the words. I will illustrate the emptiness of etymology as usually pursued, and its practical value when studied by simpler and less pretentious methods, by the history of our English word 5 66 ETYMOLOGY OF GEAIN. grain in a single one of its many senses. I observe in read- ing II Penseroso that Milton describes Melancholy as clad " All in a robe of darkest grain." Upon turning to Webster for an explanation of grain, I find its etymology in twelve closely printed lines, giving twenty- five words, which the lexicographer supposes to be cognate with grain, from thirteen languages. Fifteen meanings, sev- eral of which, though distinguished, are indistinguishable, are ascribed to grain. Among them is dye or tincture, no particular hue being assigned to the dye, and as an exempli- fication of this sense of grain, the fine descriptive invocation to Melancholy, to which I have alluded, is cited : " Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast and demure. All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestic train." It is evident that the lexicographer understands Milton as clothing the Divinity simply in a garb of a dark color, with- out indication of the quality of the color ; but this concep- tion of the meaning of grain, as used in the passage, is wholly erroneous, as I shall proceed to show. Of the twenty-five words referred to in "Webster's ety- mology, only the Latin granum, with three or four deriv- atives from it in as many modern languages, and the Scan- dinavian gren, have any probable afiinity with grain, in origin or in any of its significations, Rnd with the exception of the sense of a prong or tine, and perhaps, also, of Jibre and the imitations of fibre in painting, every one of the fifteen meanings ascribed to the word is referable to the Latin granum, and not to any of the other roots adduced. Both these exceptions belong to a Gothic radical (in Swe- ETYMOLOGY OF GEArNT. 67 dish, gren) signifying a branch or twig, and still extant in tlie Scottish dialect with the same sense. Tlie history of the word grain, in the sense of a dye, is this: The Latin granum signifies a seed or kernel, and it was early applied to all small objects resembling seeds, and finally to all minnte particles. A species of oak, or ilex, the quercus coccifera of botanists, common on all the Med- iterranean coasts, and especially in Spain, and there called coscoja, (a corruption of the Latin cusculium or qnis- q u i 1 i u m ,) is frequented by an insect of the genus coccus, the dried body, or rather ovarium, of which furnishes a variety of red dyes. From its round seed-like form, the prepared coc- cus was called in later Latin, granum, and so great were the quantity and value of the coccum or granum pro- duced in Spain, that, according to Pliny, it paid half the tribute of the province.* It is even said that the city and territory of Granada derived their name from the abundance of g r a n u m, c o c c u m , or grain, gathered there. Granum becomes gran a in Spanish, graine in French, and from one of these is derived the particular use of the English word grain, which we are now investigating. Grain, then, as a coloring material, strictly taken, means the dye produced by the coccus insect, often called, in commerce and in the arts, Tcermes, but inasmuch as the kermes dye, like that extracted * Coccum is from the Greek k6kkos, a kernel or herry. k6kkos was one of the names applied by the Greeks to the insect and the tree on which it bred. From k6kkos comes the adjective kSkkivo!, denoting the color obtained from the insect, as also the Latin coccinus and coccineus employed in the same sense. In the Wycliffite translations of the Bible,this word is found in eight dif- ferent forms, cok being the nearest to the root, coetyn the most remote from it. Cottyn, which occurs in Apocalypse xvi. 12, in the yersion printed as Wycliffe's in Bagster's Hexapla, is either a typographical error, or a yarious reading foi coetyn, and not an early orthography of cotton. The form coccus (masculine) is the modern scientific name of the insect, but I believe the neuter, coccum, alone occurs in classical Latin. 68 ETYMOLOGY OF GKAIN. from the murex of Tyre, is capable of assuming a considera- ble variety of reddisb tones or hues, Milton and other Eng- lish poets often use grain as equivalent to Tyrian pwyle. "We will now apply this etymology to the interpretation of the passage which Webster cites from Milton, and will also examine all the other instances in which grain is employed in the sense of a color by that poet and by Shakespeare. First, then, the verses from H Penseroso : "Come, pensive Nun, devout and pure, Sober, steadfast and demure. All in a robe of darkest grain, Flowing with majestic train." Here the epithet " darkest," and the character and attributes of the Divinity who is clothed in grain, show that the poet meant, not, as "Webster supposes, a mourning black, or a dull, neutral tint, but the violet shade of purple. "What a new beauty of imagery this explanation sheds on one of Milton's most exquisite creations ! Coleridge, who, of all English writers, is most attentive to etymology, and most scrupulously accurate in the use of words, in the preface to his Aids to Eeflection has this pas- sage, apparently, however, a quotation : " doing as the dyers do, who, having first dip't their silks in colors of less value, then give them the last tincture of crimson in grain^^ thus employing the word with a just appreciation of its meaning in ordinary poetic usage, but assigning to it a lighter shade than the purple or violet which it evidently designates in the passage cited from II Penseroso. It should, however, be ob- served, by way of note, that the process of dyeing, in ancient times when both grain and TjTian purple were in use as col- oring materials, was nearly the reverse of that described by Coleridge ; for Pliny, speaking of the practice of dyeing ETYMOLOGY OF GRAIN. 69 with two colors or shades of color, says : " Nay, it will not serve tiieir turne to mingle the ahovesaid tinctures of sea- fishes, but they must also doe the like by the die of land- colors ; for when a wool or cloth hath taken a crimson or skarlet in graine, it must be dyed again in the Tyrian purple, to make the light red, and fresh lustie-gaUant. As touching the graine serving to give tincture, it is red, and cometh out of Galatia, or else about Emerita in Portugal," &c. Hol- land's Pliny, ix., 41. Again, in the 11th Book of Paradise Lost, v. 243-9, Mil- ton employs the same word to denote stiU another tone of color : " The archangel soon drew nigh, Not in his shape celestial, but as man Clad to meet man : oTer his lucid arms A military vest of purple flowed Livelier than Melibcean, or the grain Of Sarra, worn by kings and heroes old In time of truce ; Iris had dipped the woof." In this passage a brighter color, approaching to scarlet, is evidently meant. Now, grain of Sarra is grain of Tyre, SaiTa being used by some Latin authors for Tyrus, and grain of Sarra is equivalent to jmrple of Tyre, Milton here em- ploying, as I have just observed, the name of the color ob- tained from the kermes, coccus or grain, as synonymous with purple of Tyre, which latter dye was the product of different species of shell-fish.* The Greek irop^^vpeo^, and the Latin * The ancient writers carefully distinguish between the costly shell-fish purple and the cheaper c o c c u m . Thus Martial V. 23 : TSou nisi vel c o c c o madid4, vel m u r i c e tincta Veste nites. And Ulpiau Dig. xxxii. 1, 70, 13. Purpurae appellatione omnis generis purpuram contineri puto, sed c o c c u m non continebitur. There is an interesting and even eloquent passage on the value attached by the Bomans to the true purple in Pliny, Nat. Hist. IX. 36. 70 ETTMOLOGT JF 6EAIN. purpureus, embraced all shades of color between scarlet and dark violet inclusive, because all these hues were ob- tained from shell-fish by different mixtures and processes. In fact, though in common speech we generally confine our use of the English ;purple to the violet hue, yet it is employed poetically, and in reference to ceremonial costumes, to express as wide a range of colors as the corresponding Greek and Latin adjectives. In describing the " proper shape " of the Archangel Ea- phael in the Fifth Book of Paradise Lost, the poet uses grain in the sense of purple, and gives to it at once the whole ex- tent of its varied significations : Six wings lie wore, to shade His lineaments divine : the pair that clad Each shoulder broad came mantling o'er his breast With regal ornament ; the middle pair Girt like a starry zone his waist, and round Skirted his loins and thighs with downy gold And colors dipp'd in heaven ; the third his feet Shadowed from either heel with feathered mail, Sky-tinctured grain. Those who remember the hues which the painters of the sixteenth century give to the wings of angels, wiU be at no loss to understand the epithet sTcy-tinctured, which here qual- ifies grain. Sky-tinctured is not necessarily azure, for shy, in old English and the cognate languages, meant clouds, and Milton does not confine its application to the concave blue, but embraces in the epithet all the brighter tints which be- long to meteoric phenomena. Doubtless he had in his mind the angels that he had seen depicted by the great Italian mas- ters, and chose the phrase " sky-tinctured grain " as embody- ing, like their pinions, all the gorgeous spontaneous hues of sun-lit cloud, and rainbow, and cerulean- vault, together with the richest colors which human cunning had extracted from ETTMOLOGT OF GEAIN. 7.1 che materials of creative nature. It is interesting to observe how the brilliancy of the image floating in the poet's fancy pervades the whole passage, and anticipates, by a vague and general expression, the specification of the particular colors which he ascribes to the wings of the archangel ; for in his description of the first pair, which Came mantling o'er his breast With regal ornament : he, no doubt, meant to suggest the imperial purple, the ap- propriate cognizance of royalty. In Comus [748] we find grain again employed as the name of a particular color : " It is for homely features to keep home, They had their name thence ; coarse complexions, And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply The sampler, and to toaae the housewife's wool. What need a rermeil tinctured lip for that. Love-darting eyes, or tresses like the morn ?" Grain here does not refer to the texture of the skin, which is sufficiently indicated by the epithet coarse in the preceding line, but to the color, the vermilion of the cheek and lips which, for those devoted to such humble duties, the enchanter Comus thinks may well be sorry or of inferior tint. This interpretation is confirmed by a passage in Chaucer, " His lippes reed as rose, His rode is like scarlet en grayn ;" rode meaning complexion. And in the epilogue to the Nonnes Preestes Tale, in Tyrwhitt's edition, Chaucer, speak- ing of a man of a sanguine complexion, says : Him nedeth not his colour for to dien. With Brazil, ne with grain of Portingale. The ■phra.se pwrple ir^grain, applied to the beard in Mid- 72 ETYMOLOGY OF GEAIN. summer Night's Dream, I. 2, signifies a color obtained from kermes, and doubtless refers to a hair-dye of that material : Bottom. — Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I best to play it in ? Quin. — -Why, what you will. Bottom. — I will discharge it in either your straw-colored beard, your orange-tawny beard, jour jmrple-^n-grain beard, or your French crown-colored beard, your perfect yellow. Again, Webster defines the phrase to dye in grain, " to dye in the raw material, as wool or silk, before it is manufac- tured." That the phrase is popularly misunderstood, and has long been commonly used in , this sense is true, but the original signification is dyed with grain or kermes. The explanation of this familiar and figurative sense, which is given by the lexicographer as the proper and literal one, is simple. The color obtained from kermes or grain was a peculiarly durable, or as it is technically called, a fast or fixed dye, ior fast used in this sense is, etymologically, fxed. When then a merchant recommended his purple stuff's, as being dyed in grain, he originally meant that they were dyed with hermes, and would wear well, and this phrase, by a com- mon process in language, was afterwards applied to other col- ors, as a mode of expressing the quality of durability.* Thus in the Comedy of Errors, (iii. 2,) to the observation of An- tipholus : That's a fault that water will mend — Dromio replies : No, Sir, 'tis in grain ; Noah's flood could not do it. * The bright reds of the old Brussels tapestry, so remarkable for the durabil- ity, as well as the brilliancy of their tints, are known to have been dyed with kermes or grain. ETYMOLOGY OF UtEAIN. 73 And in Twelftli Night, (act 1, scene 5,) when Olivia had unveiled, and speaking of her own face had asked : Is it not well done ? to Yiola's insinuation that her complexion had been improved by art ; Excellently done, if God did all ; Olivia replies : "Tis in grain. Sir ; 'twill endure wind and weather. In both these examples it is the sense of permanence, a well-known quality of the purple produced by the grain or hermes, that is expressed. It is familiarly known that if wool be dyed before spinning, the color is usually more permanent than when the spim yarn or manufactured cloth is first dipped in the tincture. When the original sense of grain grew less familiar, and it was used chiefly as expressive of fastness of color, the name of the effect was transferred to an ordinary known cause, and dyed in grain, originally meaning dyed with kermes, then dyed with fast color, came at last to sig- nify dyed in the wool or other raw material. The verb in- grain, meaning to incorporate a color or quality with the natural substance, comes from grain used in this last sense, and is now very extensively employed in both a literal and a figurative acceptation. Kermes, which I have used as a synonym of gran a or grain, is the Arabic and Persian name of the coccus insect, and the word occurs in a still older form, krmi, in Sanscrit. From this root are derived the words carmine and crimson, common to all the European languages. The Eomans some- times applied to the coccus the generic name vermiculus, a little worm or insect. Y e r m i c u 1 u s is the diminutive of vermis, which is doubtless cognate with the Sanscrit krmi, 74: ETYMOLOGY OF GEAIN. as is also the English word worm. From vei niculus comes vermilion, the name of an allied color, erroneously supposed to be produced by the kermes, though in fact of a different origin, and I may add that cochineal, as the name both of a dye which has now almost wholly superseded the European grain, and of the American insect which produces it, is de- rived, through the Spanish, from coccum, the Latin name of the Spanish insect. Johnson, and even Eichardson, mis- take the meaning of grain, and ascribe to it the same signifi- cation as Webster. Eichardson derives it from the Saxon geregnan, certainly a wrong etymology, and they both refer to most of the passages I have quoted, as exemplifica- tions of the erroneous definition they have given it. This is a remarkable oversight, because grain, as the English for coc- cum, was in very general use in the seventeenth century, and it is only recently that Tcermes has superseded it. Good exemplifications of this employment of the word will be found in Holland's Pliny, i. 259, 261, 461, ii. 114, and in many other old English writers. It will, I think, be admitted that in every passage which I have cited in illustration of the meaning of the word grain, the knowledge of its true origin and signification gives addi- tional force and beauty to the thought in the expression of which it is employed, and I have selected it as a striking ex- ample of the advantages to be derived from the careful study of words, and especially of the light which is thus often thrown upon obscure figurative expressions, as contrasted with the insignificance of the bare fact, that the same word or root exists in other languages. It is, however, rarely the case that a simple uncompounded word eo well repays the labor of investigation, though the analysis of many com- pound words will be found equally instructive. ETYMOLOGY OF GEAIN. 76 The importance of habitual attention to the exact mean- ing of words, considered simply as a mental discipline, can hardly be overrated, and etymology is one of the most ef- ficient means of arriving at their true signification. But ety- mology alone is never a sure guide. In passing from one language to another, words seldom fail to lose something of thfeir origiaal force, or to acquire some new significance, and we can never be quite safe on this point, until we have estab- lished the precise meaning of a word by a comparison of different passages where it occurs in good authors. LECTURE IV. FOREIGN HELPS TO THE KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. Fkom the opinions I have already expressed, it will have been observed, that I do not hold any wide range of linguistic learning necessary to the attainment of a good knowledge of English etymology. I am equally well persuaded that Eng- lish grammar, so far as respects the application of its principles to practical use, may be thoroughly mastered with little aid from foreign sources. The purpose of the present remarks will be to enforce this opinion, and in a cursory way to point out how far the study of foreign languages is useful in this respect, and what particular tongues are most important to the student for the purposes of English philology. In con- sidering the subject of grammatical inflections in a subsequent part of the course, I shall particularly notice the relations between inflected and uninflected languages, and for this reason I shall, on this occasion, refer to the grammar of the classical languages only in very general terais.* * A speaker, who strives to accustom himself to accuracy of thought and precision of expression, is often made painfully sensible of the danger of mis- apprehension to which he is exposed in discoursing upon subjects incapable of illustration by visible symbols, representations, or experiments. The danger ia goethk's opinions on philology. 77 It is an apophthegm of Goethe, that " He who is ac quainted with no foreign tongue knows nothing of his own." The indiscriminate admiration with which this great writer is regarded by his followers, leads them to consider his most trivial and unguarded utterances as oracles. Even so able a linguist as Heyse has quoted this apophthegm as an authority in proof of the value and importance of linguistic studies ; but I must express my total dissent from both what is expressed and what is implied in this sweeping declaration. If, by knowledge, is meant the power of expressing or conceiving the much increased, if the range of his discussion is comprehensiTe. His language must necessarily be condensed, and his propositions must succeed each other with a rapidity which hardly allows the unprepared hearer to distinguish and comprehend them. Besides this, he must often express himself in general terras, omitting the exceptions and qualifications which are necessary for the exhibition of the whole truth. In this latter necessity, lies one of the most fertile sources of error with respect to all those doctrines which are communicated by general propositions. Again, so strong is the natural tendency to generalize that which is particular, that every public teacher runs also the opposite risk of being un- derstood to announce as universal propositions opinions which he intends to confine to very special cases. It is against this last mistake that I am at this moment particularly solicitous to guard. While I admit that a knowledge of other tongues, including the Greek and Latin as well as the modern dialects more nearly allied to our own, may be so employed as to be of great value as an auxiliary to the study of English — a truth of which this course of lectures will adduce many illustrations — I am proceeding to avow my conviction, that the value of foreign philological studies, in this particular respect, is too often overrated by classical scholars. And here I beg not to be understood as mean- ing any thing more than I express. I am speaking of the study of one gram- mar as an aid to the knowledge of another ; of languages, not of letters ; of the forms of speech, not of the embodied thoughts of the great masters of literature in other tongues. As a means of that encyclopedic culture which is one of the most imperious demands of modern society, an acquaintance with foreign, and especially with classical, literature is indispensable, because the records of knowledge and of thought are many-tongued, and even if a genial writer could have framed his original conceptions or equivalents of them in a Jifierent speech, it is certain that another mind can, only in the fewest cases, adequately translate them. We can therefore, in general, know little of ancient or foreign intellectual action, without t> knowledge of the medium of thought in which that action has been exerted, 78 Goethe's opinions on j-hilologt. laws of a particular language in formal rules, the opinion may be well founded, but if it refers to the capacity of understand- ing, and skill in properly using, our own tongue, all obser- vation shows it to be very wide of the truth. Goethe, him- self, certainly knew German, and his intellectual training and general culture were no doubt much advanced by the study of other literatures, but, if tried by the present standard of philological learning, or even by that of his own time, he must be pronounced at best an indifferent linguist, and it would be very difficult to trace any of the excellences of his marvellously felicitous style to the direct imitation, or even the unconscious influence, of foreign models. He declares, himself, that his knowledge of French was acquired by prac- tice, " without grammar or instruction," and remarks that in his early years his attention was specially devoted to German writers of the sixteenth century. Probably the study of these authors contributed more than any thing else to the diction he finally adopted ; for his writings contain no evidence of familiarity with the remoter etymological sources of his own tongue, or with the special philologies of the cognate lan- guages. The comparison of his autobiography, Dichtungund Wahrheit, in which his style reached perhaps its culminating point, with the best writers of antiquity, will show few paral- lelisms in any thing that can be said to be purely indicative of classical learning. The works of Goethe, in which critics, unacquainted with his literary biography, would find the strongest internal evidence of a great knowledge of foreign philology and literature, would probably be the Oriental poems in the West-Oestlicher Divan, and his Slavic imita- tions. Yet I believe it is quite certain that he knew nothing of Arabic and Persian, or of the Slavonic languages. He had formed his acquaintance with the characteristics of those CJOETHE S OPINIONS ON PHILOLOGY. 79 literatures only from translations and critical discussions, and his reproduction of their poetry in his native German was not a proof of linguistic learning, but it was the exercise of a genius above learning, of a power that divined and appropri- ated the spirit of compositions, to the comprehension of which other men attain only by a critical study of the letter. I might, therefore, confidently rely on the works of Goethe himself, as a test example in refutation of the theory which ascribes such value to linguistic pursuits. All literature is full of similar instances, and there is scarcely a nation which boasts a written speech, that cannot produce writers of the highest rank, so far as respects force, accuracy, and purity of diction, whose knowledge of language was confined to their mother-tongue. The measure of our knowledge of a par- ticular art is the ability to use it, and he who most aptly says that which he has to say has given the best evidence, that he possesses, in full measure, what is appropriately called hnowl- edge of the tongue he employs. To can and to Teen or Jcnow are, both in German and English, associate ideas and related words, and in all that belongs to human language, as in most other fields of thought and action, knowledge is power, and power is knowledge. At the most flourishmg period of ancient Grecian litera- ture, the Greeks had developed no grammatical system, nor is there any satisfactory evidence, internal or external, that written rules for the use of their language then existed. All this was the work of later ages. In no era of their literary history, did they produce critical treatises which exhibit a sound theoretical acquaintance with the principles of general grammar, and their etymological researches were never any thing but absolutely puerile. The great writers of Greece, as 80 STYLE OF THTTCTDIDES. there is every reason to believe, were, in general, wliolly ignorant of any speecli but the common tongue of the Hel- lenic nation, and yet no literature can exhibit more marked examples, not merely of high intellectual culture and power, but of the most consummate dexterity in the choice and col- location of words, in the adaptation of style and vocabulary to the subject, or a more delicate sense of fitness and propriety in determining when to conform to the laws of rigorous gram- matical concord, and when to rise above them ; when to give full expression to every word that could modify the thought to the mind of the listener, and when to electrify him by bold ellipsis and sudden transition. The mightiest master of words the world ever knew was Demosthenes, who certainly was acquainted with no language but Greek, and who built his own magic style on the foundation of Thucydides, a writer most remarkable for his independence of all that was arbi- trary, all that was formal, and all that was conventional in the dialect of his country and his time. The education of this greatest of historical writers was purely Hellenic. ISTo study of old Pelasgic, or Egyptian, or Phoenician, or Persian, had taught him any thing of the re- mote analogies and primitive etymologies of the Attic speech, nor could his principles of literary composition have been deduced from grammatical or rhetorical precepts, but the 'un- tutored expression of his native genius spontaneously shaped itself into the style, which has made his great work what he prophetically hoped, a KTr^^ia e? aet, a perpetual possession for fiil coming ages. The frequency of obvious etymologies in Greek, it may be thought, would serve to a native the same purpose as the study of foreign tongues to us, who speak a language of bo KTTMOLOQT OF COMPOTINDS. 81 mixed a character. But there is a large proportion of the Gi*eek vocabulary whose derivation is very obscure, and though the perpetual habit of forming words at will must have drawn the attention of the Greeks to the composite character of their vocables, and to the sources of figurative and abstract words, and of terms of art drawn from humble and familiar roots, yet such speculations do not seem to have been systematically followed, nor does the manner in which Greek authors use established compounds often betray any consciousness of their origin. The etymology of words compounded of very familiar roots will no doubt often occm* to those who use them. The word steam-hoat is very apt to suggest the notion of the agency by which such vessels are propelled, and the boy who asks for ginger-hread, the ambrosial cate of rustic life, is reminded by its very name of the characteristic ingredient which enters into the composition of that delicacy. But long use deadens us to the susceptibility of such images, and if the source of a word is in the least unfamiliar, it habitually passes unnoticed. I have heard a distinguished poet say that the Latin imago first suggested itself to him as the root of the English word imagination, when, after having been ten years a versifier, he was asked by a friend to define this most important term in the critical vocabulary of his art. To come down to later tioaes, and a remote but cognate people, we find in the early literature of Iceland a historical work of uncertain authorship, but probably of the twelfth century, entitled Njala, the saga or biography of Njall, a work betraying no evidence of classical or other foreign lin- guistic knowledge, and most certainly bearing no analogy to any known model of composition in any other language, but 82 EDUCATION OF SHAKESPEAKE. wliieh, as an example of pure stylistic excellence, may fairly be pronounced altogether unsurpassed by any existing monu- ment in the narrative department of any literature ancient or modern. Scarcely less conclusive on this point is the example of Shakespeare. We cannot indeed positively deny that the great dramatist had enjoyed a partial scholastic training, yet on the other hand there is no extraneous proof that he pos- sessed any foreign linguistic attainment, and the attempt to infer his classical education from the internal evidence of his works is simply a begging of the question. It has been ar- gued that Shakespeare was a classical scholar, because Ben Jonson says he possessed " small Latin and less Greek," while another contemporary ascribes to him " little Latia and no Greek." Halliwell thinks he certainly knew Italian, be- cause Manninghani compares Twelfth Night to an Italian play called Inganni. But such proofs as these are even feebler than those by which it has been attempted to convict him of deer-stealing, or to show, now that he was a cabin-boy, now an incipient Lord Chancellor. So far as concerns the facts of ancient and modem European history and biography, we know that the English reader had, through translations, abundant means of access to all the information on these points which Shakespeare displays, and in an age when prominent writers affected Latinism in style, classical turns of expression were too common in English to need to be sought in the dead languages alone. The supposition of such a scholastic training, as even a very moderate acquaintance with Latin alone implies, is at variance with the known facts of . Shakespeare's history, and it is highly improbable that a young man of his coimtry and social condition, who mar- SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATURE. 83 ried and entered upon tlie duties and cares of active life at tlie age of eigliteeu, could have acquired such an amount of philological learning as perceptibly to affect his style and his command of the resources of his native tongue. We are then fairly entitled to class him among the men of one speech, until stronger evidence shall be adduced than has yet appeared to the contrary. Not many English authors have possessed a more attractive or more strictly idiomatic style, not many have exhibited a wider variety of expression, than Izaak "Walton, but "Walton had no classical learning, and his orthography, liogoe* for haut gout, shows that he knew as little of French. Our American Franklin formed his remarkable style by the as- siduous study of English models, before he had any acquaint- ance with other languages, and we have in our own times an illustrious example of the possession of an excellent style and a very wide command of words, without any philologi- cal attainment whatever, except such as can be acquired by the study of the English tongue. The late Hugh Miller, to whom I refer, had few contemporaneous superiors as a clear, forcible, accurate and eloquent writer, and he uses the most cumbrous Greek compounds as freely as monosyllabic Eng- lish particles. Tet it is certain that he was wholly ignorant of all languages but that in which he wrote, and its ITorthern provincial dialects. "When we consider the wide range of modern intellectual pursuits, the immense accumulation of apparently isolated but certainly related facts, which the press in its multiplied forms of activity is hourly bringing before us, the vast addi tions to even our fireside vocabulary from every branch of * Compleat Angler, edition of 1653, p. 160. 84 SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATUKE. natural science, every field of speculative ii-vestigation, it is easy to perceive that we require many accessory disciplines to mate us thorough masters even of the dialect of ordinary cultivated society. To exemplify : our metaphysical and mathematical nomenclatures are, with modified meanings, borrowed chiefly from the Latin, our chemical from the Greek, and hundreds of words have heen introduced from the dialects of these studies into the vocabulary of common life, often indeed with changes or qualifications of significa- tion, but still retaining much of their original value. 'Now, no amount of classical knowledge will enable us to compre- hend the meaning attached to most of these words in the modem vocabulary. Hydrogen and oxygen, meiocene and pleiocene, are modern compounds of Greek roots, but how- ever familiar their radicals, these terms would no more ex- plain themselves to the intelligence of a Greek, than to an unlettered Englishman. Their scientific signification must be sought in scientific treatises, and the etymology of such words is of no importance as a guide to their meaning, though as a remembrancer, it may be of some value.* "We cannot leam all words through other words. There is a large and rapidly increasing part of all modem vocabularies, which can be comprehended only by the observation of nature, scientific experiment, in short by the study of things, and therefore Goethe might have said, with greater truth, " He that is im bued with no scientific culture has no knowledge of his mother-tongue. ' ' It must, nevertheless, be admitted that a knowledge of certain other philologies is a highly useful auxiliary in the study of our own. Indeed, so important are such studies, and See Lecture ii. COMPOSITION DF ENGLISH. 82 SO few ai-e they who will seriously set themselves about the investigation of the structural laws of the English tongue, with such seemingly inadequate helps alone as it offers to fa- cilitate the researches of the native inquirer, that in laying down general plans of education, a course of foreign philology and literature has been usually prescribed, avowedly as a means of instruction in English grammar and syntax, rather than as an independent discipline. There are two languages, which, considered simply as phi- lological aids to the student of English, must take precedence, the one as having contributed most largely to our vocabulary and built up the framework of our speech, the other, both as having somewhat influenced the structure of English, and as being in itself a sort of embodiment of universal gram- mar, a materialization, I might almost say a petrification, of the radical principles of articulate language. These are the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin tongues. When an intelligent foreigner commences the study of English, he finds every page sprinkled with words, whose form unequivocally betrays a Greek or Latin origin, and he observes that these terms arc words belonging to the dialect of the learned professions, of theological discussion, of criticism, of elegant art, of moral and intellectual philosophy, of abstract science and of the various branches of natural knowledge. He discovers that the words which he recognizes as Greek and Latin and French have dropped those inflections which in their native use were indispensable to their intelligibility and grammatical significance ; that the mutual relaticns of voca- bles and the sense of the English period are much more often determined by the position of the words, than by their form, and in short that the sentence is built up upon structural 86 COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. principles wholly alien to th.se of the classical languages^ and compacted and held together by a class of words either un- known or very much less used in those tongues. He finds that Yery many of the native monosyllables are mere deter- minatives, particles, auxiliaries, and relatives ; and he can hardly fail to infer that all the intellectual part of our speech, all that concerns our highest spiritual and temporal interests, is of alien birth, and that only the merest machinery of gram- mar has been derived from a native source. Further study would teach him that he had overrated the importance and relative amount of the foreign ingredients ; that many of our seemingly insignificant and barbarous consonantal monosyl- lables are pregnant with the mightiest thoughts, and alive with the deepest feeling ; that the language of the purposes and the affections, of the will and of the heart, is genuine English-born ; that the dialect of the market and the fireside is Anglo-Saxon ; that the vocabulary of the most impressive and effective pulpit orators has been almost wholly drawn from the same pure source ; that the advocate who would convince the technical judge, or dazzle and confuse the jury, speaks Latin ; while he who would touch the better sensibili- ties of his audience, or rouse the multitude to vigorous action, chooses his words from the native speech of our ancient fatherland ; that the domestic tongue is the language of pas- sion and persuasion, the foreign, of authority, or of rhetoric and debate ; that we may not only frame single sentences, but speak for hours, without employing a single imported word ; and finally that we possess the entire volume of divine revelation in the truest, clearest, aptestform in which human ingenuity has made it accessible to modern man, and yet with a vocabulary, wherein, saving proper names and terms not in SAXON ELEMENT IN ENGLISH. 87 their nature translatable, scarce seven words in the hundred are derived from any foreign source. In fact, so complete is the Anglo-Saxon in itself, and so much of its original independence is still inherited by the modern English, that if we could but reeov er its primitive flexibility and plastic power, we might discard the adventi- tious aids and ornaments which we have borrowed from the heritage of Greece and Rome, supply the place of foreign by domestic compounds, and clothe again our thoughts and our feelings exclusively in a garb of living, organic, native growth. Such then being the relations between Anglo-Saxon and modern English, it can need no argument to show that the study of our ancient mother -tongue is an important, I may say an essential, part of a complete English education, and though it is neither possible, nor in any way desirable, to reject the alien constituents of the language, and, in a spirit of unenlightened and fanatical purism, thoroughly to Angli- cize our speech, yet there is abundant reason to hope that we may recover and reincorporate into our common Anglican dialect many a gem of rich poetic wealth, that now lies buried in more forgotten depths than even those of Chaucer's " well of English undefiled." The value of Anglo-Saxon as a branch of English philol- ogy is most familiar in its relations to our etymology, and its importance as an auxiliary in the study of English syntax is far less obvious, though not less real. But the structure of the languaffe is too inartificial to be of much use as an instru- ment of grammatical discipline. So far as respects English or any other uninflected speech, a knowledge of grammar is rather a matter of convenience as a nomenclature, a medium of thought and discussion about 88 8TUDT OF GEAMM&.E. language, than a guide to the actual use of it, and it is as impossible to acquire the complete command of our own tongue by the study of grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by attending a course of lectures on anatomy. I shall show more fully on another occasion,* that when language had been, to use an expressive Napoleonism, once regimented, and instruction had grown into an art, grammar was held with the Greeks, and probably also with the Romans, so elementary a discipline, that a certain amount of knowl- edge of it was considered a necessary preliminary step towards learning to read and write; but in English, grammar has little use except to systematize, and make matter of objec- tive consideration, the knowledge we have acquired by a very different process. It has not been observed in any modern literature, that persons devoted chiefly to grammatical studies are remarkable for any peculiar excellence, or even accuracy, of style, and the true method of attaining perfection in the use of English is the careful study of the actual practice of the best writers in the English tongue. " Another will say," argues Sir Philip Sidney in his De- fence of Poesie, " that English wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wants not grammar ; for grammar it might have, but needs it not, being so easie in itselfe, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods and tenses, which I think was a piece of the tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to leame his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde, which is the ende of speech, that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world.' * See post, Lecture xx. ENGLISH GEAMMAE. 89 The forms of English are so few, its syntax so simple, that they ai-e learned by use before the age of commencing scho- lastic study, and what remains to be acquired belongs rather to the department of rhetoric than of grammar. " Undoubt- edly I have found," observes Sidney further, " in divers smal learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some possessors of learning ; of which I can ghesse no other cause, but that the courtier, following that which by practice he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth accord- ing to art, though not Jy art ; where the other using art to shew art, and not hide art, (as in these cases he should doe), flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art." Upon questions of construction in inflected languages, where every thing depends on simple verbal form, appeal is made to the sense of sight if the period is written, to that of hearing if pronounced, and the meaning is often determined by no higher faculties than those concerned in the comparison of mere material and sensuous objects. In English, on the contrary, although we have fixed laws of position, yet as posi- tion does by no means necessarily conform to the order of thought, and nothing in the forms indicates the grammatical connection of the words, there is a constant intellectual effort to detect the purely logical relations of the constituents of the period, to consider the words in their essence not in their acci- dents, to divine the syntax from the sense, not infer it from casual endings, and hence it may be fairly said that the con- stniction and comprehension of an English sentence demand and suppose the exercise of higher mental powers than are required for the framing or understanding of a proposition in Latin. Nevertheless, a clear objective conception and com pre- 90 GENERAL GEAIIMAE. hension of the general principles of syntax is very desirable, and this can hardly be obtained except by the presentation of them in a materialized, and, so to speak, visible shape. To the knowledge of grammar as a science, and therefore to a scien- tific comprehension of English grammar, as well as of the general principles of language, the study of some tongue organized with a gross and palpable machinery is requisite, and the laws of syntax must be illustrated by exhibiting their application in a more tangible form than can be exemplified in a language so destitute of infiections, and so simple, and consequently so subtle, in its combinations as the English. This advantage, or, for it is very doubtful whether it is an advantage to those who use the language possessing it, this convenience, rather, as an educational engine, is eminently characteristic of the Latin. The vocabulary of the Latin is neither copious nor precise, its forms are intricate and inflexi- ble, and its literature, as compared with that of Greece, exhibits the inferiority which belongs to all imitative compo- sition. But in the regularity, precision, and distinctness of its inflections and structure, it atones for much of the indefinite mistiness of its vocables, and it is an admirable linguistic machine for the manufacture of the coarser wareb of intel- lectual produce and consumption. For the expression of technicalities, the narration of marches and battles, the description of sieges and slaughters, the enunciation of posi- tive rules of pecuniary right, the promulgation of dictatorial ordinances and pontifical bulls, the Latin is eminently fitted. Its words are always Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas ; and it is almost as much by the imperatorial character of the LATIN GEAltSIAE. 91 language itself— the speech of masters, not of men— as by the commanding position of the people to whom it was vernacular, and of the church which sagaciously adopted it, that it has so powerfully influenced the development and the existing tendencies of all modei-n European tongues, even of those which have borrowed the fewest words from it.* The Latin grammar has become a general standard, where- with to compare that of all other languages, the medium through which all the nations of Christendom have become acquainted with the structure and the philosophy of their own ; and technical grammar, the mechanical combinations of language, can be nowhere else so advantageously studied. "While then the study of Anglo-Saxon and of the older * The power of Rome was a more widely diffused, pervading, and all-inform- ing clement in the ancient world, than written history alone would authorize us to infer, and we find traces of her language, as well as amazing evidences of her material greatness and splendor in provinces which we should scarcely otherwise know that her legions had overrun. Not Eoman coins only, which commerce might have borne farther than her eagles ever flew, but fortified camps, forums, roads, temples, inscriptions, throughout almost the whole Mediterranean basin as well as the Atlantic slope of the Eastern continent, everywhere attest her power, while palaces, theatres, aqueducts, baths, buried statues and scattered gems, prove that her taste and luxury had spread from the banks of the Elbe to the sands of the Libyan Desert. The presence, however, of remains of the Latin language and of Eoman art ia not always to be regarded as proof of the actual subjugation of the countries where such relics are found. With the view partly of familiarizing those whose conquest she meditated with her laws, institutions, and manners, and thus preparing them for the yoke they were des- tined to wear, and partly of facilitating such conquests by demoralizing the scions of royal and noble families, whose claim upon the loyal attachment of their people was one of the great barriers against the extension of her sway, it was the policy of Rome to train up at the capital, either as hostages or as national guests, as many foreign princes and other high-born youths as could be gathered from dependent and allied countries. Returning to their fatherland, they car- ried with them the speech, the arts, a id often the artisans of their proud nurse, and thus many existing remains, of apparently Roman architecture, are doubt- less imitations of Roman buildings, erected by native potentates who had ac- quired a taste for Roman life on the banks of the Tiber. 92 MCESO-GOTHIC. literature of English itself promises tlie most abundant har- vest of information with respect to the etymology of the fun- damental part of our present speech, and an inexhaustible mine of material for the further enrichment of our native tongue, we must, in spite of the close analogy between the syntax of primitive and modern English, and the great diver- sity between that of the latter and of Latin, still turn to the speech and literature of Home, as the great source of scientific grammatical instruction. The Moeso-Gothic, both intrinsically, and as being the earliest form in which considerable remains of any dialect cognate with our own have come down to us, is of much philological interest and importance. There are extant in Moeso-Gothic a large proportion of a translation of the gospels and epistles by Ulphilas, a semi-Arian bishop of that nation in the fourth century, portions of commentaries on different parts of the Ifew Testament, and only some other less important fragments. i It is a point of dispute how far any of the later Teutonic dialects can claim direct descent from the Moeso-Gothic, but it is certain that it is very closely allied to all of them, and scarcely any modern Germanic forms are too diverse from that ancient tongue to have been dei-ived from it. In variety of inflection, and power of derivation and composition, in the possession of a dual and of certain passive foi-ms, and in abundance of radical words, an inexhaustible material for development and culture, the Moeso-Gothic bears a certain resemblance to the Greek, while on the other hand, it is iden- tified as a Germanic speech, by the character of its radicals, almost all of which yet exist in the Teutonic languages, by its want of any verbal tenses but the present and the past, GOTHIC LAlfGUAGEa. 93 by tlie co-existence of a very complete sys.em of vowel- changes in a strong, witli a well-marked weak, order of in- flection, and by general syntactical principles.* The Scandinavian languages, the Swedish and Danish, and especially their common mother the Icelandic or Old- Northern, the Frisic, which, in some of its great multitude of dialects, perhaps more than any other language resembles the English, the Dutch, and the German, particularly in the Platt-Deutsch or low German forms, are all of value to the thorough etymological and grammatical study of our native tongue. They are important, not so much as having largely con- tributed to the vocabulary, or greatly influenced the gram- matical structure of English, but because in the poverty of accessible remains of Anglo-Saxon literature in diff'erent and especially in early stages of linguistic development, we do not possess satisfactory means of fully tracing the history of the Gothic portion of our language. There are very many English words and phrases, whose forms show them to b*e Saxon, but which do not occur in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts. These may generally be explained or elucidated by reference to the sister-tongues, and consequently some knowledge of them is almost as useful to the English student as Anglo- Saxon itself. I should unhesitatingly place the Icelandic at the head of these subsidiary philologies, because, from its * It is a question of curious interest whether those Crimean Goths, whom the Austrian ambassador, Busbequius, saw at Constaotinople about the middle of the sixteenth century, and of whose vocabulary he has given us some scanty specimens in his fourth letter, were of Moeso-Gothic descent. It is difficult to account for their presence in that locality upon any other supposition, but the few words of their language left us by Busbequius do not enable us positively to determine to what branch of the Gothic stock their linguistic affinities ivould point. 94 mPOETANCB OF FRENCH. close relationship to Anglo-Saxon, it furnishes more abundant analogies for the illustration of obscure English etymological and syntactical forms than any other of the cognate tongues.* It is but recently that the great value of Icelandic philology has become known to the other branches of the Gothic stock, and one familiar with the treasures of that remarkable liter- ature, and the wealth, power, and flexibility of the lan- guage which embodies it, sees occasion to regret the want of a thorough knowledge of it in English and American gram- matical writers, more frequently than of any other attain- ment whatever. French, of course, is of cardinal importance, both with reference to the history of our grammatical inflections, and as having contributed, though chiefly as a conduit, much more largely to our vocabulary than any other foreign source. The English words usually referred to a Latin original, have, in a large majority of cases, come to us through the French, and we have taken them with the modifications of orthosra- phy and meaning which our Norman neighbors had impressed * English philologists formerly ascribed perhaps too much to the Scandina- vian Gothic as an element in the structure and composition of Anglo-Saxon, and more recent inquirers have erred as widely, in denying that early English was sensibly modified by the same influence. The dialects of Northern England, where the population partakes in greater proportion of Danish blood, show » large infusion of Scandinavian words and forms, and many of these hare be- come incorporated into the general speech of Britain. The written Anglo- Saxon and Old-Northern certainly do not resemble each other so closely as to render it probable that they could have been mutually intelligible to those who spoke them ; and we find that by the old Icelandic law the representatives of EugUshmen dying in Iceland were expressly excluded from the right of inherit- ance, as foreigners, of an unknown speech, |>eir menn er menn kunna eigi hbr mdli eSr tungu viS. At the same time, it appears abundantly fronj the sagas that the Old-Northern was well understood among the higher circles in England, and the Icelandic skalds or bards were specially welcome at ;he English court. STUDY OF GEEEK. 95 upon them. The syntax of English, in its best estate, has been little affected by French influence, and few grammatical combinations of Eomance origin have been permanently approved and employed by good English writers. Every Gallicism in syntax is presumably a corruption ; but ISTorman French itself, as known to our ancestors, had been much modified by an infusion of the Scandinavian element, and therefore, forms of speech which we have borrowed from the French are sometimes referable, in the last resort, to a Gothic source. I cannot speak of even Greek as being of any such value in reference to English grammar or etymology, as to make its acquisition a well-spent labor, unless it is pursued for other purposes than those of domestic philology. But that I may not be misunderstood, let me repeat that so far from dissuad- ing from the study of Greek as a branch of general educa- tion, I do but echo the universal opinion of all persons com- petent to pronounce on the subject, in expressing my own conviction that the language and literature of ancient Greece constitute the most efficient instrument of mental training ever enjoyed by man ; and that a familiarity with that won- derful speech, its poetry, its philosophy, its eloquence, and the history it embalms, is incomparably the most valuable of in- tellectual possessions. The grammar of the Greek language is much more flexible, more tolerant of aberration, less rigid in its requirements, than the Latin. The varium et mu- tabile semper femina, of the Latin poet, for example, is fio rare an instance of apparent want of concord, that it star ties us as abnormal, while similar, and even wider grammat- ical discrepancies, are of constant occurrence in Greek. The precision, which the regularity of Latin syntax e'ives to a 96 AirCIENT SANSCEIT. period, the Greek more completely and clearly accomplishes by the nicety with which individual words are defined in meaning ; and while the Latin trains us to be good grainma- rians, the Greek elevates us to the highest dignity of manhood, by making us acute and powerful thinkers. Nothing could well have been more surprising than the discovery that the ancient Sanscrit exhibits unequivocal evi- dence of close relationship to the Greek and Latin, as well as to the modern Eomance and the Gothic languages, in both grammar and vocabulary, and these analogies have served to establish a general alliance between a great number of tongues formerly supposed to be wholly unrelated. When linguistic science shall be farther advanced, the Sanscrit will probably in a great measure supersede the Latin as the common stand- ard of grammatical comparison among the European tongues, with the additional advantage of standing much more nearly in one relation both to the Gothic and the Romance dialects. But at present, Sanscrit is accessible only to the fewest, and the English student can hardly be advised, as a general rule, to look beyond the sources from which our maternal speech is directly derived, for illustrations either of its grammar or vocabulary. With respect to verbal forms, and points of grammatical structure not sufficiently explained by Anglo- Saxon, Latin, and French inflection and syntax, it may in general be said, that any one of the Gothic dialects will sup- ply the deficiency, and if the inquirer's objects be limited to the actual use of his own tongue, the study of English authors is a better and safer guide than any wider researches in for- eign philologies. LECTURE V. STUDY OF EAKLT ENGLISH. The systematic study of the mother-tongue, like that of all branches of knowledge which we acquire, to a sufficient extent for ordinary practical purposes, without study, is nat- urally very generally neglected. It is but lately that the English language has formed a part of the regular course of instruction at any of our higher seminaries, nor has it been made the subject of as zealous and thorough philological in- vestigation by professed scholars, as the German, the French, or some other living languages. It is a matter of doubt how far we are aided in acquiring the mastery of any spoken tongue by the study of scientific treatises ; but however this may be, it is only very recently that we have had any really scientific treatises on the subject, any gi-ammar which has at- tempted to serve at once as a philosophical exposition of the principles, and a guide to the actual employment of the Eng- lish tongue. The complete history of the language, the char- acterization of its periods, the critical elucidation of its suc- cessive changes, the fuU exhibition of its immediate and certain foreign relations, as distinguished from its remote and 7 98 DIFFICULTY OF ENGLISH. presumptive affinities, has never, to my knowledge, been undertaken.* While, therefore, for class instruction, and for many purposes of private study, there is no lack of text-hooks and other critical helps, yet a historical knowledge of English must be acquired by observing its use and action, as the living speech of the Anglican race in different centuries, not as its organization is demonstrated in the dissecting-room of the grammarian. English is generally reputed to be among the more diffi- cult of the great European languages, but it is hard for a native to say how far this opinion is Avell founded. The com- parison of our own tongue with a foreign speech is attended with a good deal of difficulty. Particular phrases and con- structions, of course, are easily enough set off against each other, but the general movement of our maternal language is too much a matter of imconscious, spontaneous action to be easily made objective, and, on the other hand, in foreign tongues we are too much absorbed in the individual phenom- ena to be able to grasp the whole field. The enginery of the one is too near, the idiomatic motive power of the other too distant, for distinct vision. But I am inclined to the belief, that English is more difficult than most of the Continental languages, at least as a spoken tongue, for I think it is cer- tain that fewer natives speak it with elegance and accuracy, if indeed violations of grammatical propriety are not more frequent among the best English writers, and it sometimes * I am certainly not blind to the great importance and utility of the works of Latham, Fowler, Brown, and other learned and laborious inquirers into the facts and theory of English Grammar, but the consideration of their merits does not come within the scope of these lectures, the object of which is to recom- mend and enforce the study of English, not at second hand or through the me- dium of precept, but by a direct acquaintance with the great monuments of its literature. ' ENGLISH INCXJEEEOTLY SPOKEN. 99 happens that persons exact in the tise of mdividual words are lax in the application of rules of syntactical construction. A distinguished British scholar of the last century said he had known hut three of his countrymen who spoke their native language with uniform grammatical accuracy, and the obser- vation of most persons widely acquainted with- English and American society confirms the general truth implied in this declaration. Courier is equally severe upon the French. " There are," says that lively ■writer, " five or six persons in Europe who know Greek ; those who know French are much fewer." Primd facie, irregular as English is, we should ex- pect it to be at least as correctly spoken as French, because the number of unrelated philological facts, of exceptions to what are said to be general rules, of anomalous and conven- tional phrases, is greater in the latter than in the former ; but ^he proportion of good speakers, or rather of good talkers, is certainly larger among the French than among the English or Americans. It is interesting to observe how much value has been attached to purity of dialect in some of the less known countries of Europe. The grand old Catalan chron- icler, Kamon Muntaner, who wrote about the year 1325, himself no book-worm, but a veteran warrior, often con- cludes his eulogiums of his heroes with a compliment to the propriety and elegance with which they spoke his native tongue, and he gives an interesting account of the means by which two of the nobility arrived at such perfection of speech. " And this same Syr Corral Llanga became one of the fayrest menne in the world, and best langaged and sagest, insomuch that as at that tyme menne saide, the finest Cathalan in the worlde was hys and Syr Koger de Luria's ; and no mervaile, for as yee have harde before, they came ryght yonge into 100 DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN LANGUAGES. Cathalonye and were norysslied there, and in alle the good townes of Cathalonie and of the reaume of Yalence whatso- ever seemed to them choyce and faire langage, they dyd their endeavoure to learne the same. And so eche of hem was a more parfyt Cathalonian than alle other, and spake the fayrest Cathalan." * The systematic cultivation of the modern Continental lan- guages began much earlier than that of English. They had generally advanced to a high degree of development, and acquired the characteristic grammatical features which now distinguish them, at a period when even the most polished of the English dialects was but a patois. Several of them in- deed had produced original works in both poetry and prose, which still rank among the master-pieces of modern genius, before Anglo-Norman England had given birth to a single composition which yet maintains an acknowledged place in the literature of the nation. Although the Icelandic can hardly be called a modern language, yet it possesses, besides the poems and traditions of the heathen era, an original mod- ern literature modified by the same general Christian in- fluences which have colored all the recent mental efforts of Europe. Tlie twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced in that remote island poems of remarkable merit, and prose compositions which have no superiors in the narrative litera- ture of any age. The Nibelungen Lied, the great epic of Ger- * "E aquest en Corral Llan9a exi hu dells bells homeng del mon, e mills par- lant e pus saui, si que en aquell temps se deya, quel pus bell cathalanesch del mon era dell c del dit en Roger de Luria ; e no era marauella, que eUs, axi com dauant tos he dit, Tengren molt fadrins en Cathalunya, e nudrirense de cascun lloch de Cathalunya k del regne de Valencia tot go que bo ne bell parlar los paria ells aprengueren. E axi caseu dells fo lo pus perfet Cathala que negun iltre, e ab pus bell cathalanesch." — Kamon Muntaner, 1662 cap. xTiii. DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. 101 many, dates probably as far back as the year twelve hundred, Castilian, Catalan, Provenzal and French genius had already embodied themselves in poetic forms, which determined the character of the subsequent literatures of those languages, before the close of the thirteenth century, and the commence- ment of the fourteenth was marked by the appearance of Dante's great work, which still stands almost alone in the poetry, not of Italy only, bxrt of modern Europe. The later origin of English literature is to be ascribed partly to the fact that England, from its insular position, was less open to the exciting causes which roused to action the iatellect of the continent, but chiefly, no doubt,- to the condi- tion of the language itself. The tongues of Iceland, of Ger- many, of Italy, of Spain, and in a less degi'ee of France also, were substantially homogeneous in their etymology and struc- ture, and the separate dialects of each stock, Gothic and Eo- mance, were closely enough allied to facilitate the study of all of them to those to whom any one was vernacular, and thus to secure to them a great reciprocal philological and lit- erary influence. The eounti'ies to which they belonged were also territorially and politically more or less connected, and thus an unbroken chain of social and literary action and re- action extended from the Arctic ocean to the Mediterranean. English, on the contrary, was not only a composite speech, but built up of very discordant ingredients, and spoken in an isolated locality. The British islands had no relations of commerce or politics with any country but Northern and Western France, and the comparatively unimportant Nether- land provinces. A longer period was naturally required for the assimilation of the constituents of the language, and for the action of the influences which, before that assimilation 102 DETELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. was completed, liad already created the literatures of the Con- tinental nations. In a country ruled by l^orman princes, all governmental and aristocratic influences were unfavorable to the cultivation of the native speech, and the growth of a national literature. The Eomish church, too, in England, as everywhere else, was hostile to all intellectual effort which in any degree diverged from the path marked out by ecclesi- astical habit and tradition, and very many important English benefices were held by foreign priests quite ignorant of the English tongue. Robert of Grloucester, who flourished about two hundi-ed years after the conquest, says : Wyllam, |)ys noble due, |)0 he adde ydo al t)ys, I)en wey he nome to Londone he & al hys As kyng & prince of lond, wy|> nobleye ynou. Agen hym wy|) Tayre processyon |)at folc of town drou, And vnderuonge hym Tayre ynou, as kyng of jiys lond. {)U3 come lo ! Engelond into Normannes honde, And |)e Normans ne coufie speke f>o bote her owe speche. And speke French as dude atom & here chyldren dude al so teche. So {)at heymen of j)ys lond, {)at of her blod come, Holdef) alle j)ulke speche, |)at hii of hem nome. Vor bote a man cou|)e French, me tol|) of hym wel lute. Ac lowe men holdej) to Englyss, & to her kunde speche yute. Ich wene f>er ne be man in world contreyes none, t)at ne holdef) to her kunde speche, bote Engelond one, Ac wol me wot vorto conne bothe wel yt ys Tor {)e more |)at a man con, {)e more worf) he ys.* - And in the following centary, as we learn from an old chron- icler, " John Cornewaile, a maister of grammar, changed the lore in grammar scole, and construction, of Frenche into Eng- lische : so that now, the year of our Lord a thousand three hundred and 4 score and five, and of the seconde Kyng Eich- ard after the conquest nyne, in alle the grammar scoles of * Robert of Gloucester, p. 864. DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. 103 Engelond children levetli Frensche, and construeth and lemetli on Englisclie." Under sucli circumstances, it is by no means strange, that the progress of the language and literature of England should have been slow, and it is rather matter of surprise that the fourteenth century should have left so noble monuments of English genius, than that the literary memorials of that era should be so few. But, although the long reign of Edward m. was as remarkable for the splendid first-fruits of a great national literature as for its political and martial triumphs and reverses, the language was not at that time sufficiently cleared of dialectic confusion, and sufficiently settled in its forms and syntax, to admit of grammatical and critical treat- ment, as a distinctly organized speech. While, therefore, the thirteenth century produced in Iceland a learned and com- plete treatise on the poetic art as suited to the genius of the Old-IliTorthem tongue,* and Jacme March, a contemporary of Chaucer, had composed a Catalan vocabulary and dictionary of rhymes, with metrical precepts and examples, the English had not even a dictionary or grammar, still less critical trea- tises, until a much later period. It wUl be evident from all this, that the remains of the English speech, in its earliest forms, as a literary medium, must be relatively few, and that it is by no means easy to trace the progress of changes which ended m the substitution of our present piebald dialect for the comparatively homogeneous and consistent Saxon tongue. A language which exists, for centuries, only as the jargon of an unlettered peasantry and a despised race, will preserve but few memorials of its ages of humiliation, and as I have be- fore noticed, the indifference with which English philology * The prose Edda, or Edda of Snorri Stniluson. 104 DEVELOPMENT OF ENGLISH. has been hitherto too generally regarded has suflFered to per- ish, or still withholds from the public eye, a vast amount of material which might have been employed for the elucidation of many points of great historical, literary, and linguistic interest. Halliwell's Dictionary, containing more than fifty thousand archaic and provincial words and obsolete forms, is illustrated with citations drawn in the largest proportion from unpublished manuscript authorities, and it is evident from the titles of the works quoted and the character of the extracts, as well as from the testimony of scholars, that many of them must be of very great philological value.* * Until very lately, the modernization of every I'cprint of an English classic was almost as much a settled practice as the adoption of a fashionable style of binding. Dryden, Pope, and Wordsworth have not scrupled to lay a profane hand upon Chaucer, a mightier genius than either, and Milton is not allowed to appear in the orthography which he deliberately and systematically employed. Archbishop Parker was so zealous for the preservation, or rather the restora- tion, of ancient forms, that he printed even the Latin of Asser's life of Alfred in the Anglo-Saxon character. The association which takes its name from Parker, in republishing the English theological writings of the sixteenth cen- tury, a. series extending to more than fifty volumes, and which, unmutilated, would have been invaluable as a treasure of genuine, primitive, nervous English, has clipped and restamped the whole in such a manner as to deprive these works of all their interest, except for professional theological inquirers, and very greatly to diminish their value even for them. The recently-discovered manuscript of the Earl of Devonshire's translation of Paleario's Treatise on the Benefits of Christ's Death is evidently a copy made by an ignorant transcriber, and its orthography is extremely incorrect and variable. In preparing it for the press, it was, unfortunately, deemed expedient to reform the spelling, for the sake of making it more uniform and intelligible, as well as correct, and the task has been executed with great care, and in as good faith as the erroneous prin- ciple adopted would admit of. As a frontispiece, a fac-simile of one of the very small pages of the manuscript is given, containing eighteen hues, or about one hundred and twenty-five words. In printing the text of this page, the editor has omitted a comma in the seventh line, and thereby changed, or, at least, ob- scured, the meaning of a very important and very clear passage, which contained the marrow of the whole treatise. Of course, any departure from the letter in a weighty period, unless it is supposed to be a mere typographical accident, destroys the confidence of critical readers in the edition, and the book, in a ijrammatical point of view, becomes worthless. The manuscript in question is VOCABULAEY OF ENGLISH. 105 I have already sufficiently stated my reasons for believing tli.it a colloquial or grammatical knowledge of other tongues is not essential to the comprehension and use of our own, and, considered solely as a means to that end, withoiit reference to the immense value of classical and modern Continental literature as the most powerful of all instruments of general culture, I have no doubt whatever that the study of the Greek and Latin languages might be advantageoiisly replaced by that of the Anglo-Saxon and primitive English. An over- whelming proportion of the words which make up our daily speech is drawn from Anglo-Saxon roots, and our syntax is as distinctly and as generally to be traced to the same source. We are not then to regard the ancient Anglican speech as in any sense a foreign tongue, but rather as an older form of our own, wherein we may find du-ect and clear explanation of many grammatical peculiarities of modern English, which the study of the Contiuental languages, ancient or modern, can but imperfectly elucidate. With reference to etymology, the importance of the Anglo-Saxon is too obvious to require argument. It is fan- to admit, however, that the etymology of compound Avords, and of abstract and figurative terms, must in general be sought elsewhere, for we have borrowed our scientific, metaphysical, and issthetical phraseology from other sources, while the vocabulary of our material life is al- most wholly of native growth. In determining the significa- tion of words, modern usage is as binding an authority as ancient practice, inasmuch as, at present, we know no ground but use for either the old meaning or the new ; but a knowl- one of the most important recent acquisitions to the theology of the Reforma- tion and the early Uterature of England, and the voluntary admission of any changes in its text shows a want of exact scholarship in a quarter where we had the best right to expect it. 106 FOKMS OF EAELT ENGLISH. edge of the primitive sense of a word very often enables us to discover a force and fitness in its modern applications wHcli we had never suspected before, and accordingly to employ it with greater propriety and appositeness. The most in- structive and impressive etymologies are those which are pursued within the limits of our own tongue. The native word at every change of form and meaning exhibits new do- mestic relations, and suggests a hundred sources of collateral inquiry and illustration, while the foreign root connects itself with our philology only by remote and often doubtful analo- gies, and when it enters our language, it comes usually in a fixed form, and with a settled meaning, neither of which admits of further development, and of course the word has no longer a history. The knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is important as a correc- tive of the philological eri'ors into which we may be led by the study of early English, and especially of popular ballad and other poetry, without such a guide. The introduction of Norman French, with a multitude of words inflected in the weak or augmentative manner, naturally confused what was sufiiciently intricate and uncertain before, the strong inflec- tion, or that by the letter-change, in the Anglo-Saxon. The range of letter-change in Anglo-Saxon grammar was indeed wide, but not endless or arbitrary. It however became so, at least in the poptic dialect, as soon as ITorman influence had taught English bards independence of the laws of Saxon grammar. Many of the barbarous forms so freely used in popular verse are neither obsolete conjugations revived, nor dialectic peciiliarities, but creations of the rhymesters who employed them, coin not uncurrent merely, but counterfeit, and without either the stamp or the ring of the genuine FOKMS OF EAKLT ENGLISH. 107 metal. The balladmongers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries concerned themselves as little about a vowel as the Orientals, and where the convenience of rhyme or metre re-^ quired a heroic license, they needed only the consonants of one syllable of a genuine root as a stock whereon to grow any conceivable variety of termination. Although they did not hesitate to conjugate a weak verb with a strong inflection, or to reverse the process, thus adding or subtracting syllables at pleasure, yet their boldest liberties were with the letter- change in the strong inflection. "We cannot indeed hold them guilty of corrupting the language of the nation With long-tailed words in -osity and -ation ; but we can fairly convict them of making it more desperately Gothic in its forms than even the Mceso-Gothic of Ulphilas. The confusion into which the English inflections were thus thrown combined with other circumstances to discourage the attempts of philologists to reduce its accidence to a regular system, and English scholars had shown very respectable ability in the elucidation of other tongues, before they pro- duced any thmg that could fairly be called a grammar of theii- own. Analogous causes had prevented the cultivation of native philology in Northern France, and though the langue d'oc, or Provenzal, was early a matter of careful study, the langue d'oil, the only French dialect known to the Norman race, possessed no grammar xmtil it was pro- vided with one by an Englishman.* * The French grammar of Palsgrave, to which I allude, prepared for the use of the Princess Mary, sister of King Henry VIII., and printed in 1530, under the title of Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, is, under the circumstances, the moat remarkable, if not the most important work, which had appeared in 108 FORMS OF EAELT ENGLISH. The function of grammar is to teacli what is, not what ought to be, in language. English, as I have said, was too irregular, fluctuating and incongruous in its accidence and syntax to be reduced to form and order until the close of the sixteenth century, and as its literature was of later origin than that of the continent, there was not, before that period, a sufficient accumulation of classical authorship to serve as illustration and authority in grammatical discussion.* modern philology before the commencement of the present century. Although it was designed only to teach French grammar, yet, as it is written in English, and constantly illustrates the former tongue by comparison with the latter, it is hardly a less valuable source of instruction with reference to the native than to the foreign language. In the careful reprint lately executed at the expense of the French govei-nment, it makes a large quarto of 900 pp., more than half of which is occupied with comparative tables of words and phrases, so that while it is a remarkably complete French grammar, it is much the fullest English dic- tionary which existed before the time of Elizabeth. It is also one of the amplest collections of English phrases and syntactical combinations which can be found at the present day, and at the same time the best authority now extant for the pronunciation used in French, and, so far as it goes, in English also, at the period when it was written. * One of the earliest English grammars which can lay claim to scientific merit is the brief compend drawn up by Ben Jonson, and published some time after the death of the author. It is too meagre to convey much positive instruc- tion, but it exhibits enough of philological insight to excite serious regret for the loss of Jonson's complete work, the manuscript of which was destroyed by fire. This little treatise throws a good deal of light on the orthoepy of English at that period, for the learning and the habitual occupations of Jonson make it authoritative on this point, so far as it goes, but there are statements concern- ing the accidence, which are not supported by the general usage of the best authors, either of Jonson's own time, or of any preceding age of English literature. For instance, he lays down the rule that nouns in z, s, sh, g, and ch, make the possessive singular in is, and the plural in ea, and as an example he cites the word prince, (which, by the way, does not end in either of the terminations enumerated by him,) and says the possessive case is princts, the plural princes. That individual instances of this orthography may be met with, I do not deny, but it is certain that it never was the general usage, and Jonson was doubtless BUggesting a theory, not declaring a fact, and he introduces the rule rather as furnishing an explanation of what he calls the " monstrous syntax," of using the Dronoun his as the sign of the possessive case, than as a guide to actual practice. It is curious that Palsgrave lays down the same rule, though he elsfewhere DIFFICTILTIES OF EAELY ENGLISH. 109 The same reasons which deterred early English scholars from laying down rules of grammatical inflection, would ren- der it impossible at the present day to construct a regular accidence of the forms of the language at any period before the writers of the Elizabethan age had established standards of conjugation, declension, orthography, and syntax. The English student therefore can expect little help from gram- marians in mastering the literature of earlier periods, and he must learn the system of each great writer by observation of his practice. Eut the inflections in English are so few, that the number of possible variations in their form is embraced within a very narrow range, and all their discrepancies to- gether do not amount to so great a number as the regular changes in most other languages. With respect to the vocab- ulary, the difficulties are even less. Most good editions of old authors are provided with glossaries explaining the obso- lete words, and where these are wanting, the dictionaries of Nares, HalUwell, Wright, and others, amply supply the de- ficiency. In fact, a mere fraction of the time demanded to acquire the most superficial smattering of French or Italian cODtradicta it, and in practice disregards it. " Also where as we seme to have a genityve case, for so moche as, by adding of is to a substantyve, we sygnifye possessyon, as, my maisteris gowne, my ladyis boke, which with us contrevail- leth as moche as the gowne of my maister, the boke of my ladye," &c. Intro- dnction, XL. Bat on page 191, he says : "Where we, in our tonge, use to putte s to ov.:e substantyves whan we wyll express possessyon, saying, ' a manues gowne, a woman [s] hose,' &c., &c., and afterwards, ' this is my maisters gowne, he dyd fette his maisters cloke.' " A. similar passage occurs on page 141, and I have not observed a single instance where Palsgrave himself makes the possessive in is, except that above quoted from page XL., where it is used by way of exemplifying the rule as he states it. Alexander Gil's remarkable Logonomia Anglica is interesting rather in an orthoepical, than in a grammatical point of view, and it wiU be particularly no- ticed in a Lecture on orthoepical changes in English, post. 110 EAELY ENGLISH LITERATUEE. will enable the student to obtain such a knowledge of early English, that he can read with facility every thing written in the language, from the period when it assumed a distinct form to its complete development in the seventeenth centujcy. Critical discussions of the literary merit of English au- thors would be foreign to the plan of the present course, and in noticing writers of different periods, I shall refer chiefly to their value as sources of philological instruction. First in time, and not least in importance, is the Ormulum, a very good edition of which was published in 1862. This is a metrical paraphrase of a part of the New Testament, in a homiletic form, and it probably belongs to the early part of the thirteenth century. Its merit consists mainly in the pur- ity of its Saxon-English, very few words of foreign origin occurring in it. The uniformity of its orthography, and the regularity of its inflections, are far greater than are to be found in the poetical compositions even of the best writers of the succeeding century. One reason of this is that the un- rhymed versification adopted by the author relieved him from the necessity of varying the terminal syllables of his words for the sake of rhyme, which led to such anomalous inflec- tions in other poetical compositions, and it accordingly ex- hibits the language in the most perfect form of which it was then capable. In fact, the dialect of the Ormulum is more easily mastered than that of Piers Ploughman, which was written more than a century later, and it contains fewer words of unknown or doubtful signification. It is, moreover, especially interesting as a specimen of the character and in- herent tendencies of the Anglo-Saxon language as affected by more advanced civilization and culture, but still uncorrupted by any considerable mixture of foreign ingredients ; for we EAELY ENGLISH LITEEAITJEE. lU discover no traces of the JSTorman element in the vocabulary, and but few in the syntax of this remarkable work.* Piers Ploughman, on the contrary, employs Latin and French words in quite as la^ge a proportion as Chaucer,^ although the forms and syntax of the latter author are much nearer the modern standard. The compliment which Spenser bestows upon Chau- cer's '' Well of English undefiled " is indeed well merited, if reference be had to the composite character that English as- sumed in the best ages of its literature, but it would be more litly applied to the Ormulum, as a repository of the indige- nous vocabulary of the Anglican tongue. In any event, no student of the works of Chaucer will dispute Spenser's opin- ion that "In him the pure well-head of poesy did dwell," and it is no extravagant praise to say that the name of Chau- cer was the first in English literature, until it was, not eclipsed, but surpassed by those of Shakespeare and Milton. In the earliest ages of all literature, poetry seems to be little more than an artificial arrangement of the dialect of common life, but as literary culture advances, both the phrase- ology and the grammar of metrical compositions diverge from the vulgar speech, and poetry forms a vocabulary and a syntax of its own. Although, therefore, the practice of * The vocabulary of the Ormulum consists of about twenty-three hundred words, exclusive of proper names and inflected forms. Among these I am un- able to find a single word of Norman-French origin, and scarcely ten which were taken directly from the Latin. The whole number of words of foreign etymology previously introduced into Anglo-Saxon, which occur in the Ormu- lum, does not exceed sixty, though there is some uncertainty as to the origin of several words common to the Latin and the Gothic languages in the earliest Btages in which these latter are known to us. — See Lecture vi. f See Lecture vi. 112 EAELY ENGLISH LITEEAT0EE. great poetical writers is authority for their successors, yet it is by no means trustworthy evidence as to the actual character of the language employed by speakers or prose writers ; and this is more emphatically true of the English than of most Continental languages, in consequence of the derangement of its Sectional system, which I have already noticed. The dialect of Chaucer doubtless approaches to the court language of his day, but the prose of "Wycliffe is more nearly the familiar speech of the English heart in the reign of Ed- ward III., and the pages of Holinshed more truly reflect the living language of Queen Elizabeth's time than the stanzas of Spenser. The English prose literature of the fifteenth century con- sists, in large proportion, of translations, and these always partake more or less of the color of the source from whence they were taken. There is, in fact, so little native English of that period extant in a printed form, that it is not easy to determine how far the prevalence of Gallicisms in the translations printed by Caxton is to be ascribed to the influ- ence of French originals upon the style of the translator, and how far it was a characteristic feature of the language of the time. The same remark applies, though with much less force, to Lord Berners' admirable translation of Froissart, the two volumes of which were published in 1523 and 1525 respec- tively ; but this translation is doubtless the best English prose style which had yet appeared, and as a specimen of pictur- esque narrative, it is excelled by no production of later periods. The dramatic character and familiar gossipping tone of the original allowed some license of translation, and the dialogistic style of the English of Lord Berners is as racy and nearly as Idiomatic as the French of Froissart. ENGLISH OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTtJEr. 113 Tyndale's translation of the New Testament is the most important pMlological monument of the first half of the six- teenth century, perhaps I should say of the whole period be- tween Chaucer and Shakespeare, both as a historical relic, and as having more than any thing else contributed to shape and fix the sacred dialect, and establish the form which the Bible must permanently assume in an English dress. The best features of the translation of 1611 are derived from the version of Tyndale, and thus that remarkable work has ex- erted, directly and indirectly, a more powerful influence on the English language than any other single production be- tween the ages of Kichard II. and Queen Elizabeth.* The most important remaining prose works of the six- teenth century are the writings of Sir Thomas More,t (which, however, with all their excellence, are rather specimens of what the language, in its best estate, then was, than actually influential models of composition,) and those of Hooker. These last, indeed, are not remarkable as originating new forms or combinations of words, but they embody nearly all the real improvements which had been made, and they may be considered as exhibiting a structure of English not equalled by the style of any earlier, and scarcely surpassed by that of any later writer. I shall reserve what I have to say upon the dialect of the authorized English version of the Bible for another occasion, and it would be superfluous to commend to the study of the inquirer such authors as Bacon, and Shakespeare, and Milton. There are, however, two or three classes of writers of the six- teenth and seventeenth centiiries, whose works are much less known than their philological importance deserves. First, * See Lecture xxviu. t See Lecture vi. 8 114 ENGLISH OF THE SETENTEENTH CENTUET. are what we must call, in relation to Shakespeare, and only in relation to him, the minor dramatists of the period in ques- tion. They are valuable, not only as perhaps the best author- ities upon the actual spoken dialect of their age, but as gen- uine expressions of the character and tendencies of contem- poraneous English humanity, and also for the aid they afford in the illustration and elucidation of Shakespeare himself, whose splendor has so completely filled the horizon of his art, that those feebler lights can hardly yet be said to have enjoyed the benefit of a heliacal rising. Next come the early English translators of the great mon- uments of Greek and Eoman literature. The reigns of Eliz- abeth and James firoduced a large number of translations of classical authors, as for example the Lives and the Morals of Plutarch, the Works of Seneca, the History of Livy, the Natural History of the Elder Pliny, and other voluminous works. These translations are naturally more or less tinc- tured with un-English classical idioms, but the vast range of subjects discussed in them, especially in Plutarch and Pliny, demanded the employment of almost the entire native vocab- ulary, and we find in these works exemplifications of numer- ous words and phrases which scarcely occur at all in any other branch of the literature of that important period. For the same reasons, the early voyagers and travellers, such as the voluminous collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, as well as the separately published works of this class, are very valuable sources of philological knowledge. Their vo- cabularies are very varied and extensive, and they are ren- dered especially attractive by the life and fervor which, at a period when all that was foreign to Europe was full of won- der and mystery, clothed in almost poetic forms the narratives of events, and descriptions of scenery and objects, now almost ENGLISH OF THE SEVENTEEN! a CENTTJET. 115 too familiar to excite a momentary curiosity. Hakluyt is perhaps to be preferred to Purchas, because lie allows the narrators whose reports he collected to speak for themselves, and appears in general to follow the words of the original ' journals more closely than Purchas, who often abridges, or i otherwise modifies, his authorities. The theological productions of the period between the reigns of Elizabeth and Anne, hoiivever eloquent and power- ful, are, simply as philological moiit-'n^Ats, less important than the secidar compositions of the same century, and they fm-nish not many examples of verbal form or combination which are not even more happily employed elsewhere. To these remarks, however, the works of Fuller are an exception. Among the writers of that age, Fuller and Su- Thomas Erowne come nearest to Shakespeare and Milton in affluence of thought apd wealth of poetic sentiment and imagery. They are both remarkable for a wide range of vocabulary. Fuller inclining to a Saxon, Browne to a Latinized diction, and their syntax is marked by the same peculiarities as their nomenclature. The interest which attaches to the literature of the eigh- teenth centnry is more properly of a critical and rhetorical than of a linguistic character, and, besides, in remarks which are rather intended to draw the attention of my hearers to unfamiliar than to every-day fields of study, it would be un- profitable to discuss the literary importance of Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Junius, Gibbon, and Burke. I must, for similar reasons, refrain from entering upon the literature of our own times, and I shall only refer to a single author, who has made himself conspicuous as, in certain par- ticulars, an exceedingly exact and careful writer. In point of thorough knowledge of the meaning, and constant and 116 WOEKS or COLEEIDGE. scrupulous precision in tlie use, of iudividual words, I suppose Coleridge surpasses all otter Englisli writers, of whatever fperiod. His works are of great philological value, because ihey compel the reader to a minute study of his nomencla- jture, and a nice discrimination between words which he em- jpiojr™ in allied, but still distinct senses, and they contribute more powerAiUy than the works of any other English author to habituate thb student to^hat close observation of the mean- ing of words whiclir -is essential to precision of thought and accuracy of speech. Few writers so often refer to the ety- mology of words, as a means of ascertaining, defining, or illustrating their meaning, while, at the same time, mere ety- mology was not sufficiently a passion with Coleridge to be likely to mislead him.* * Though Coleridge is a high authority with respect to the meaning of single words, his style is by no means an agreeable or even a scrupulously correct one, in point of structure and syntax. Among other minor matters I shall notice hereaftei', (Lecture xxix.,) his improper, or at least very questionable, use of the phrase in respect of, and I will here observe, that in opposition to the practice of almost every good writer from the Sason period to his own, and to the rule given by Ben Jonson as well as all later grammarians, he employs the affirmative or after the negative alternative neither; as neither this or that. In this inno- vation, he has had few if any followers. Again, he uses both, not exclusively as a dual, but aa embracing three or more objects. I am aware that in this latter case he had the example of Ascham and some other early authors, but it is contrary to the etymological meaning of the word, and to the constant usage of the best English writers. I do not think that any of these departures from the established construction were accidental. They were attempts at arbitrary reform, and though the last of them may be defended on the ground that dual forms are purely grammatical subtleties, and ought to be discarded, they will all probably fail to secure general adoption in English syntax. LECTURE VI. SOUKCES AKD COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH. I. The heterogeneous character of our vocabulary, and the consequent obscurity of its etymology, have been noticed as circumstances which impose upon the student of English an amoimt of labor not demanded for the attainment of lan- guages whose stock of words is derived, in larger proportion, from obvious and familiar roots. I now propose to give some account of the sources and composition of the English lan- guage. According to the views of many able philologists, comparison of grammatical structure is a surer test of radical linguistic affinity, than resemblances between the words which compose vocabularies. I shall not here discuss the soimdness of this doctrine, my present object being to display the ac- quisitions of the Anglican tongue, and to indicate the quarters from which they have been immediately derived, not to point out its ethnological relationships. I shall therefore on this occasion confine myself to the vocabulary, dismissing inquiry into the grammatical character of the language, with the simple remark, that it in general corresponds with that of the 118 SOUECES or VOCABULABY. otlier dialects of the Gothic stock. In structi re, English, though shorn of its inflections, is still substantially Anglo- Saxon, and it owes much the largest part of its words to the same source. There are two modes of estimating: the relative amount of words derived from different sources in a given language. The one is to compute the etymological proportions of the entire vocabulary, as exhibited in the fullest dictionaries ; the other, to observe the proportions in which words of indige- nous and of foreign origin respectively occur in actual speech and in written literature. Both modes of computation must be employed in order to arrive at a just appreciation of the vocabulary ; but, for ordinary purposes, the latter method is the most important, because words tend to carry their native syntax with them, and grammatical structure usually accords more nearly with that of the source from which the mass of the words in daily use is taken, than with the idiom of lan- guages whose contributions to the speech are fewer in num- ber and of rarer occurrence. Besides this, all dictionaries contain many words which are employed only in special or exceptional cases, and which may be regarded as foreign den- izens not yet entitled to the rights of full citizenship. At the same time, the method in question is a very difficult mode of estimation, because, not to speak of the peculiar diction of individual writers, every subject, every profession, and to some extent, every locality, has its own nomenclature, and it is often impossible to decide how far those special vo- cabularies can claim to form a part of the general stock. Upon the whole, we may say that English, as understood and employed by the great majority of those who speak it, or, in other words, that portion of the language which is not SOURCES OF VOCABULAJKT. 119 festricted to particular callings or places, but is common to all intelligent natives, is derived from the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the French. ]S"either its vocabulary nor its struc- ture possesses any important characteristic features * which may not be traced directly to one of these sources, although the number of individual words which we have borrowed from other quarters is still very considerable. Archdeacon Trench makes this general estimate of the relative propor- tions between the different elements of Enghsh : " Suppose the English language to be divided into a hundred parts ; of these, to make a rough distribution, sixty would be Saxon, thii'ty would be Latin, including of course the Latin which has come to us tlirough the French, five would be Greek ; we should then have assigned ninety-five parts, leaving the other five, perhaps too large a residue, to be divided among all the other languages, from which we have adopted isolated words." This estimate, of course, applies to the total vocabulary, as contained in the completest dictionaries. Sharon Turner gives extracts from fifteen classical English aiithors, beginning with Shakespeare and ending with John- son, for the purpose of comparing the proportion of Saxon words used by these authors respectively. These extracts have often been made a basis for estimates of the proportion of English words in actual use derived from foreign sources, but they are by no means sufficiently extensive to furnish a safe criterion. The extracts consist of only a period or two from each author, and few of them extend beyond a hundred words ; none of them, I believe, beyond a hundred and fifty. The • This general statement must be qualified by the admission that certain grammatical forms adopted in Northern England from the Danish colonists passed into the literary dialect, and finally became established modes of speech in Knglish. 120 ETTMOLOGICAl PEOPOETIONS OB WOEDS. results deduced from them are, as would be naturally sup- posed,, erroneous, but, such as they are, they have been too generally adopted to be passed without notice, and they are given in a note at the foot of the page.* In order to arrive Milton u 81 Cowley 11 89 English Bible 11 97 Thomson l( 85 Addison It 83 Spenser " 81 Locke " 80 Pope " 76 Young " 79 Swift " 89 Robertson (( 68 Hume " 65 Gibbon t( 58 Johnson t( 75 * The most convenient and intelligible method of stating the results is by the numerical percentage of words from diiFerent sources in the extracts referred to in the text ; according to these, — Shakespeare uses 85 per cent, of Anglo-Saxon, 15 of other words. 19 " 11 3 15 " 17 " 19 " 20 " 24 " 21 " 11 32 " 35 " 42 25 " A comparison of these results, derived from single paragraphs containing from sixty or seventy to a hundred and fifty words, with those which I have deduced from the examination of different passages from the same and other authors, each extending to several thousand words, will show that conclusions based on data so insignificant in amount as those given by Turner, are entitled to no confidence whatever. The extract from Swift contains ninety words, ten of which, or eleven per cent.. Turner marks as foreign, leaving eighty-nine per cent, of Anglo- Saxon. Now this is a. picked sentence, for in the John Bull, as thoroughly Eng- lish a performance as any of Swift's works, the foreign words are in the propor- tion of at least fifteen per cent. ; in his History of the four last years of Queen Anne, twenty-eight per cent. ; in his Politicul Lying, more than thirty per cent.; and in this latter work, many passages of considerable length may be found, where the words of foreign etymology amount to forty per cent. On the other hand, Euskin, in his theoretical discussions, often employs twenty-five or even thirty per cent, of Latin derivatives, but in the first six periods of the sixth Ex- ercise in his Elements of Drawing, containing one hundred and eight words, all but two, namely, pale and praclice, are Anglo-Saxon. My own comparisons, though embracing more than two hundred times the quantity of literary material examined by Turner, are still insufficient in variety and amount to establish any more precise conclusion than the geperal one stated in a following page, that ETYMOLOGICAL PEOPOETIONS ,F ENGLISH. 121 at satisfactory conclusionb on this point, more thorough and extensive research is necessary. I have subjected much longer extracts from several autliors to a critical examination, and the results I am about to state are in all cases founded, not upon average estimates from the comparison of scattered passages, but upon actual enumeration.* In writers whose style is nearly uniform, I have endeavored to select charac- teristic portions as a basis for computation ; in others, whose range of subject and variety of expression is wide, I have compared their different styles with reference to the effect produced upon them by difference of matter and of purpose. I have been able to examine the total vocabularies only of the Ormulum, the English Bible, Shakespeare, and the poet- ical works of Milton, because these are the only English books to which I can find complete verbal indexes. In these instances, the comparison of the entire stock of words possess- ed, and the proportions habitually used by the writers, is full of interest and instruction, and I regret that leisure and means were not afforded for making similar inquiries respect- ing the vocabularies of a larger number of eminent authors near our own time. In all cases, proper names are excluded from the estimates, but in computing the etymological pro- portions of the words used in the extracts examined, all othei words, of whatever grammatical class, and all repetitions of the authors of the present day use more Anglo-Saxon words, in proportion to the whole number known to educated men, than writers of corresponding eminence in the last century. * I have made no attempt to determine the etymological proportions of our entire verbal stock, because I believe no dictionary contains more than two- thirds, or at most three-fourths, of the words which make up the English lan- guage. Dictionaries are made from books, and for readers of books, aad they all omit a vast array of words, chiefly Saxon, which belong to the arts and to the humbler fields of life, and which have not yet found their way into literary cir- cles. 122 ETYMOLOGIC AJL PEOPOKTIONS OF ENGLISH. the same words; are counted. Thus, in the passage extending from the end of the period in verse 362 of the sixth book of Paradise Lost, to the end of the period in verse 372, there are seventy-two words. Eight of these are proper names and are rejected, hut all the other words are counted, though sev- eral of them are repetitions of particles and pronouns. In the comparison of the total vocabularies, every part of »peech is counted as a distinct word, but all the inflected forms of a given verb or adjective are treated as composing a sin- gle word. Thus, safe, safely, safety, and save, I make four words, but save, saved, and saving, one, as also safe, saf&i , safest, one. I have made no attempt to assign words not of Anglo- Saxon origin to their respective sources, but it may be as sumed in general that Greek words, excepting the modern scientific compounds, have come to us through the Latin, and both in this case and where they have been formed directly from Greek roots, their orthography is usually con- formed to the Latin standard for similar words. Words of orig- inal Latin etymology have been, as will be more fully shown in a future lecture, in the great majority of instances, borrowed by us from the French, and are still used in forms more in ac- cordance with the French than with the Latia orthography. The proportion, five per cent., allowed by Trench to Greek words, I think too great, as is also that for other miscellane- ous etymologies, unless we follow the Celtic school in refer- ring to a Celtic origin all roots common to that and the Gothic dialects. Taking the authors I have examined chronologically, I find, with respect to their total vocabularies, that in that of the Ormulum, which, in opposition to the opinion of most philologists, I consider English rather than semi-Saxon, ETTMOLOGIOAL PEOPOETIONS OF ENGLISH. 123 tliougli written probably not far from the year 1225, nearly ninety-seven per cent, of the words are Anglo-Saxon.* In the vocabulary of the English Bible, sixty per cent, are native ; in that of Shakespeare the proportion is very nearly the * With the exception of a very few Latin terms, such as quadriga, yip era, &c., I have observed in the Ormulum no word of foreign etymology which had not been employed by Anglo-Saxon writers, and thus naturalized, while Anglo-Saxon was still a living speech. There is a considerable class of Saxon words, some of them very important with reference to the question of the moral culture of the people, the source and etymology of which it is difficult to determine. Zaw and right, for example, are by many etymologists derived re- spectively from the Latin lex and rectus. It is said that lagu and lah do not occur in Anglo-Saxon before the reign of Edgar, A. D. 959-9To. But lagu bears the same relation to the Saxon verb 1 e c g a n, to lay, to set down, that the German Gesetz does to the verb setzen. The Mceso-Gothic lagjan is the equivalent of lecgan, and though no noun etymologically corresponding to law occurs in the slender remains we possess of that literature, yet a similar word is found in Old-Northern as well as in Swedish and Danish. We have in the eighteenth stanza of the Volo-spa, one of the oldest poems of the Edda, {)fBr lavg lavgdo, they enacted statutes, laid down the law. We cannot well doubt that lavg and lavgdo are related words, and it is not denied that the verb, as well as its cognates in the sister tongues, is of primitive Gothic origin. Jornandes, who wrote in the sixth century, has a word apparently from the same root, and even approximating to our by-law: Nam ethicam eas erudivit, ut barbaricos mores ab eis compesceret ; pbysicam tradens naturaliter propriis legibus vivere fecit, quas usque nunc conscriptas beUagines (Ihre, and some others, read, b i 1 a g i n e s ) nuncupaut. — De Reb. Get. cap. xi. See App. 1 5. Right is found not only in Anglo-Saxon (r i h t), but in all the cognate lan- guages, and it is certainly improbable that the Moeso-Goths of the fourth century borrowed from the Latin rectus their raihts, right, just, and garaihts, righteous, which, with several derivatives from them, are used by TJlphilas. We are, therefore, entitled to consider law and right, and all their derivatives, as at least prim& facie English and not Latin words. At the same time, it must be remembered that history has taught us almost nothing of the moral and hn- guistic relations between the Komans and the progenitors of the modern Gothic and Celtic tribes, except that in culture and civilization, as well as in material power, the Latin was the superior race, and that Rome was in a position to exercise an immense moral as well as social influence over those rude popula- tions. With respect, therefore, to the vocabulary of law, of political life, and of intellectual action, we are treading on uncertain ground, when we positively affirm the domestic origin of a Gothic or Celtic root resembUng a Latin one, and we can seldom be sure that such words have not passed directly from the latter *,o the former, instead of descending from a common but remote source. 124 VOCABULAEIEe OF AIJTHOES. same ; while of the stock of words employed in the poetical works of Milton, less than thirty-three per cent, are Anglo- Saxon. Bnt when we examine the proportions in which authors actually employ the words at their command, we find that even in those whose total vocabulary embraces the greatest number of Latin and other foreign vocables, the Anglo-Saxon still largely predominates. Thus : Robert of Gloucester, narrative of Conquest, pp. 354, 364, employs of Anglo-Saxon words, Ninety-six per cent. Piers Ploughman, Introduction, entire, Eighty-eight per cent. " Passus Decimus-Quartus, entire. Eighty-four per cent. " " Decimus-nonus and vicesimus, entire, Eighty-nine per cent. " Creed, entire. Ninety-four per cent. Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales, first 420 verses,* Eighty-eight per cent. " Nonnes Preestes Tale, entire. Ninety-three per cent. " Squiers Tale, entire, Ninety-one per cent. " Prose Tale of Meliboeus, in about 3,000 words. Eighty-nine per cent. Sir Thomas More, coronation of Richard III. &c., f seven folio pages, Eighty-four per cent. * For the purpose of determining more satisfactorily the true character of the diction of Langland and of Chaucer, I have counted both the different words of foreign derivation, and the repetitions of them, in the Passus Decimus-Quartua of Piers Ploughman, and in an equal amount of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Exclusive of quotations and proper names, the Passus Decimus-Quartna contains somewhat less than 3,200 words. Of these, including repetitions, 600, or sixteen per cent., are of Latin or French origin, and as there are about 180 repetitions, the number of different foreign words is about S20, or ten per cent. In the first 420 verses of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the number of words is the same, or about 3,200, of which, including repetitions, about 870, or rather less than twelve per cent., are Romance. The repetitions are but TO, and there remain 300, or rather more than nine per cent, of different foreign words. In either point of view, then, Chaucer's vocabulary is more purely Anglo-Saxon than that of Langland. It must be remembered, however, that there are few Komance words in Piers Ploughman which are not found in other Englisli writers of as early a date, while Chaucer has many which occur for the Qrst time in his verses, and were doubtless introduced by him. t Ellis (Preface to reprint of Ilardynge) doubts whether the life of Richard VOCABULAItlES OF AIJTHOES. 125 Spenser, Faerie Queene, Book 11. Canto VII., New Testament : John's Gospel, chap. I. IV. XVII., Matthew, chap. VII. XVIF. XVIII., Luke, chap. V. XH. XXII., Romans, chap. II. VII. XI. XV., Shakespeare, Henry IV., Part I., Act 11., '• Othello, Act v., " Tempest, Act I., Milton, L' Allegro, " II Penseroso, " Paradise Lost, Book VI., Addison, several numbers of Spectator, Pope, First Epistle, and Essay on Man., Swift, Political Lying, " John Bull, several chapters, " Four last years of Queen Anne, to end of sketch of Lord Cowper, Johnson, preface to Dictionary, entire, Junius, Letters XIL & XXIII., Hume, History of England, general sketch of Com- monwealth, forming conclusion of chap. LX., Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. I. chap. VII., Webster, Second Speech on Foot's Resolution, entire,* Eighty-six per cent. Ninety-six per cent. Ninety-three per cent Ninety-two per cent. Ninety per cent. Ninety-one per cent. Eighty-nine per cent. Eighty-eight per cent Ninety per cent. Eighty-three per cent. Eighty per cent. Eighty-two per cent. Eighty per cent. Sixty-eight per cent. Eighty-five per cent. Seventy-two per cent. Seventy-two per cent. Seventy-six per cent. Seventy-threeper cent. Seventy per cent. Seventy-five per cent. III., commonly ascribed to Sir T. More, was really written by him, but Ascham treats it as his, and ia the edition of Mere's works prepared by his nephew, and printed in 1557, the preliminary note to the Life of Richard states expressly that it was composed by Sir Thomas about the year 1513, when he was sheriff of London, and that it is now printed from "a copie of his own hand." The internal evidence is, indeed, with Ellis; for, in point of style, this work is much superior to any of More's undisputed productions, and in fact, deserves the high praise which Hallam has bestowed upon it. Still, I think there is hardly sufficient ground for denying the authorship to More, and I have selected it as the best example of original English of that period. * The apparently large proportion of words of Latin origin in this great speech, popularly known as the Keply to Hayne, is chiefly due to the frequent recurrence of ' Congress,' ' constitution,' and other technical terms of American political law. Wherever it was not necessary to employ these expressions, the style is much more Saxon. Thus, in the eulogy on Massachusetts containing more than two hundred words, eighty-four per cent, are native, and in the peroration, beginning ' God grant,' &c., the Anglo-Saxon words are in the pro- portion of eighty per cent. 126 INCEKASING IMPORTANCE OF SAXON ELEMENT. Irving, Stout Gentleman, Eighty-five per cent. " Westminster Abbey, Seventy-seven per cent Macaulay, Essay on Lord Bacon, Seventy-five per cent. Channing, Essay on Milton, Seventy-five per cent. Oobbett, on Indian Corn, chap. XI., Eighty per cent. Prescott, Philip II. B. I. c. IX., Seventy-seven per cent, Bancroft, History, vol. Til. Battle of Bunker hill, Seventy-eight per cent. Bryant, Death of the Flower, Ninety -two per cent. " Thanatopsis, Eighty-four per cent. Mrs. Browning, Cry of the Children, Ninety-two per cent. " Crowned and Buried, Eighty- three per cent. " Lost Bower, Seventy-seven per cent. Robert Browning, Blougram's Apology, Eighty-four per cent. Everett, Eulogy on J. Q. Adams, last twenty pages, Seventy-.six per cent. Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, Period II., chap. I., Seventy- three per cent Tennyson, The Lotus Eaters, Eighty-seven per cent. " In Memoriam, first twenty poems. Eighty-nine per cent. Huskin, Modern Painters, vol. II., Part III., Sec. II., Chap. V. Of the Superhuman Ideal, Seventy-three per cent. " Elements of Drawing, first six exercises, Eighty-four per cent. Longfellow, Miles Standish, entire, Eighty-seven per cent. Martineau, Endeavors after the Christian Life, III. Discourse. Seventy-four per cent. The most interesting result of these comparisons, perhaps the only one -which they can be said to establish, is the fact, that the best writers of the present day habitually employ, in both poetry and prose, a larger proportion of Anglo-Saxon words than the best writers of the last century. This con- clusion is not deduced from the numerical computations just given alone, for in estimating the relative prominence of a particular element in the vocabulary, we must take into view the whole extent of that vocabulary. Now, in this lattei particular, there has been a great change since the time of Johnson, for while the number of Saxon words remains the Rame, there has been, within a hundred years, a large increase STJTFICIENCY OF ENGLISH. 127 in terms of alien origin. Some older native words, it is true, have been revived, but these are not numerous. On the other hand, scarcely a word that Johnson and his contemporaries would have used has become obsolete, while the necessities of art, science, commerce, and industry, have introduced nany thousands of Latin, French, and other foreign terms. Hence, with respect to vocabulary, the writers of this gen- eration are naturally, and almost necessarily, in the position in which Milton was exceptionally and artificially. The stock of words they possess contains more Latin than Saxon elements ; the dialect in which they accustom themselves to think and write is, in much the largest proportion, home-born English. This recognition of the superior foi-ce and fitness of a Saxon phraseology, for all purposes where it can be em- ployed at all, is the most encouraging of existing indications with respect to the tendencies of our mother-tongue, as a medium of literaiy effort. Had words of Latin and French etymology been propor- tionally as numerous in the time of Johnson and of Gibbon as they now are, those authors, instead of employing twenty- eight or thirty per cent, of such words, would scarcely have contented themselves with less than fifty. And had either of them attempted the sesthetical theories so eloquently dis- cussed by Ruskin, with the knowledge and the stock of words possessed by that masterly writer, their Saxon would have been confined to particles, pronouns, and auxiliaries, the mere wheel-work of syntactical movement. Johnson thought that " if the terms of natural knowledge were extracted from Bacon ; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Ealeigh ; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want 128 VOCABTTLAET OF MILTON. of Englisli words in which they might he expressed." At present, the works of Bacon hardly furnish terms for the pre- cise enunciation of any one truth of physical science ; nor would any English writer now think it possible to narrate the history of a political revolution, to discuss the principles oi modern government, or of political economy, to detail the events of a campaign or a voyage, or to describe a battle, in the words of Ealeigh. Besides all this, the diffusion of knowledge, and of material appliances and comforts, has made the dialects of all the sciences more or less a part of the " diction of common life," and therefore we can no longer con- verse, even on fire-side topics, altogether in the language of Shakespeare. I do not think it at all extravagant to say that the number of authorized English words, the great mass of which is understood, if not actually used, by all intelligent persons, is larger, by at least one-fifth, than it was in the middle of the eighteenth century, and this great accretion of familiar vocables consists almost wholly of imported terms. Yet if we compare the usual proportion of Anglo-Saxon words employed by good writers of that epoch and of this with the whole vocabularies known to them respectively, we shall find the relative prominence of the Anglo-Saxon much greater in our own time ; for though we know numerically more foreign words, we actually use proportionally fewer in literary composition. The relation between Milton's entire verbal resources and his habitual economy in the use of them, is most remarkable. Some words of Greek and Latin origin, indeed, such as air, angel, force, glory, grace, just, mortal, move, nature, part, peace, &c., occur very often, but most of the foreign words employed by him are found in but a single passage, whereas mrLTJENCE OF SUBJECT. 129 the Saxon words are very many times repeated. Nor is the predominance of sucli to be ascribed to the number of parti- cles or other small words, for of these Milton is very sparing ; and if we translate almost any period in Paradise Lost into Latin, we sliall find the difference between the number of de- terminative words in the original and the translation by no means large. All this is true, though in a less degree, of Shakespeare, and as illustrating the infrequency of Latin words, now common, in his works, I may observe that ah- rupt, amhiguous, artless, congratulate, improbable, improper, improve, impure, inconvenient, incredible, are all aira^ Xeyofiepa, once used words, with the great dramatist. In comparing the linguistic elements which enter into the dialect of literatm-e as employed by different writers; I think the influence of subject and purpose upon the choice of words has not been sufficiently considered. "We find that the vocab- ulary of the same writer varies very much in its etymologi- cal ingredients, according to the matter he handles and the aims he proposes to himself. This appears veiy manifestly from a comparison of the specimens selected for the foregoing computations from the New Testament and from Milton, and not less remarkably in those from Swift, Irving, and Euskin. The following passages from Irving, in which the words of foreign origin are printed in italics, may serve as illustrations. From the Stout Gentleman, in Bracebridge-Hall : " In one aorner was a stagnant pool of water surrmmding an island * of muck ; there were several half-drowned fowls * Island is one of those English words where a mistaken etymology has led to a corrupt orthography. Isle may possibly be the French ile, anciently spelt isle, from the Latin insula, but the fact that Bobert of Gloucester and other early English writers wrote ile or yle, at a time when the only French or- thography was i s 1 e, is a strong argument against this deriTation. It is more prob- 9 130 TOCABrLAET OF lEVING. crowded together under a cart, among wliicli was a misera- Ue crest-MlQu cock, drenched out of all life and spirit / his drooping tail matted, as it were, into a single feather, along which the water trickled from his back ; near the cart was a half-dozing cow, chewing the cud, and standing patiently to be rained on, with wreaths of vapour rising from her reeking hide ; a wall-eyed horse, tired of the loneliness of the stahle, was poking his spectral head out of a window, with the rain dripping on it from the eaves ; an unhappy cur, chained to a dog-house hard by, uttered something every now and then be- tween a bark and a yelp ; a drab of a kitchen-wench tram- pled backwards and forwards through the yard ia pattens, looking as sulky as the weather itself ; every thing, in short, was comfortless and forlorn, excepting a crew of hard-drink- ing ducks, assembled like hoon companions round a puddle, and making a riotous noise over their liquor y From Westminster Abbey, in The Sketch Book : " It was the tomb of a crusader ; of one of those military enthusiasts, who so strangely mingled religion and romance, and whose exploits form the connecting \mk between yaci and fiction, between the history and the fairy tale. There is something extremely picturesque in the tomhs of these adven- turers, decorated as they are with rude armorial bearings and Gothic sculpture. They comport with the antiquated lap- els in which they are generally found ; and in considering them, the imagination is apt to kindle with the legendary as- sociations, the romantic fiction, the chivalrous pomp and pa- ably a contraction of iiaiwf, the Anglo-Saxon ealand, ealond, iglan.d, and the » was inserted in both, because, when Saxon was forgotten, the words were thought to have come through the French from the Latin insula, in which the s is probably radical. Mr. Klipstein refers the s in island to the genitive in s of the Anglo-Saxon ed or ie, but this would be an unusual form of composition, and I do not know that eAsland occurs in Anglo-Saxon. LATIN WORDS IN ENGLISH. 131 geantry which poetry has spread over the wars for the sepul- chre of GhrisV In the first of these extracts, out of one hundred and eighty-nine words, all but twenty-two are probably native, the proportions being respectively eighty-nine and eleven per cent. ; in the second, consisting of one hundred and six words, we find no less than forty aliens, which is proportion- ally more than three times as many as in the first. The most numerous additions to the Anglo-Saxon vocab- ulary, the most important modifications of English syntax, and consequently of the general idiom of our speech, have been mediately or immediately derived from the Latin. So far as grammatical structure is concerned, this influence com- menced in the pure Anglo-Saxon period, when of course proper English cannot be said to have existed. The Angles and the Saxons found upon the British soil some traces of the Koman conquest, and Christianity, and with it the lan- guage of the Komish church, were domesticated in England long before either had crossed the Elbe, and before a native literature had, been created by the race which gave to Britain a new name and a new population. The Old-Northern or Scandinavian, and some branches of the Gennanic families, on the contrary, had acquired a certain culture, and possessed what may fakly claim to be considered an independent lit- erature, before their adoption of Christianity. The 01d-!N'orth- em and Gennanic languages had accordingly been carried to a higher degree of polish and refinement than the Anglo- Saxon, and they both less needed, and were less suscep- tible of receiving, grammatical improvement from foreign sources. "We consequently find, even in the most ancient forms in which the Anglo-Saxon, itself but a compromise 132 INFLTJENCE OF LATIN AND NOKMAN. between discordant dialects,* has come down to us, a struc- ture more resembling that of the Eomance languages, than we meet in Old-Northern or in German. The arrangement of the period, the whole syntax, had been evidently already influenced, and the native inflections (if, indeed, they ever had been moulded into a harmonious system) diminished in number, variety, and distinctness. The tendencies which have resulted in the formation of modem English had been already impressed upon the Anglo-Saxon before the Norman Conquest ; and the more complete establishment of the ec- clesiastical domination of Rome had introduced some Latin and French words, and expelled from use a corresponding portion of the native vocabulary. It even appears that the Romance dialect of Normaiady had partially supplanted the Saxon as early as the reign of Edward the Confessor, and it is stated to have been a good deal used at that time at court, in judicial proceedings, and in the pulpit.f ' See Lecture ii. t Able philologists have denied that the change which took place in the ver- uacular in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, was, in any consider- able degree, due to the influence of the Norman invaders, and it is argued that the same change would have taken place without the Conquest. It is, I believe, denied by none that the language and literature of England were very power- fully affected by that influence in the fourteenth century, and those who main- tain the theory in question, ask us to believe, that though the relations between the immigrant and the indigenous population were still substantially the same, yet the causes which proved so energetic in the reign of Edward III. had been absolutely inert for two hundred and fifty years, and then suddenly and spon- taneously sprung into full action. I do not suppose it possible to distinguish between the effects produced by ecclesiastical Latin and by secular Norman, but to refuse to either of them a share in bringing about the change from the Anglo- Saxon of Alfred to the English of the reign of Henry IIL is to ascribe to tha Anglican tongue an unsusceptibility to external inGuences, which contrasts strangely with the history of its subsequent mutations. Price finds confirmation of this theory in alleged corresponding changes of the Low German dialects, and Latham in those of the Danish and Swedish. But ».he Low German, and the Danish and Swedish, have been exposed, not indeed PERFECTION OF ENGLISH. 133 The causes which have led to the adoption of so ,arge a proportion of foreign words, and at the same time produced so important modifications in the signification of many terms originally English, are very various. The most obvious of these are the eai-ly Christianization of the English nation, a circumstance not always suflSciently considered in the study of our linguistic history ; the Norman conquest ; the Cru- sades ; and especially the mechanical industry and commer- cial enterprise of the British people, the former of which has compelled them to seek both the material for industrial elabora- tion, and a vent for their manufactures in the markets of the whole earth ; the latter has made them the common carriers and brokers of the world. With so many points of external contact, so many conduits for the reception of every species of foreign influence, it would imply a great power of repul- sion and resistance in the English tongue if it had not become eminently composite iu its substance and in its organization. In fact, it has so completely adapted itself to the uses and wants of Christian society, as exemplified by the Anglo-Sax- on race in the highest forms to which associate life has any- where attained, that it well deserves to be considered the to precisely the same causes of rerolution as the Anglo-Saxon, but to somewhat analogous influences, and in all these cases the nature and amount of change is, not corresponding to that of the Anglo-Saxon, but almost exactly proportioned to the character and amount of extraneous disturbing force. The Latin has operated more or less on all of them. The Icelandic, isolated as it is, has re- mained almost the same for seven centuries ; the Swedish, and the dialects of secluded districts in Norway, being less exposed to foreign influences than the Danish, retain a very large proportion of the characteristics of the Old- Northern, while the language of Denmark, a country bordering upon Germany, and bound to it by a thousand ties, has become almost half Teutonic. If then we are to refer such changes to inherent tendencies only, how are we to explain these diversities between dialects, which, even after the birth of what is dis- tinctively the English language, were still nearly identical? See Sir N. Madden's Preface to Layimon, p. 1, and the authorities there cited. See also Lecture XVII. 134 PEEFJiOTION OF ENOLISH. model speech of modern Inimaiiity, nearly achieving m Ian guage the realization of that great ideal which wise men are everywhere seeking to make the fundamental law of politi- cal organization, the union of freedom, stability, and progress. It is a question of much interest how far the different constituents of English have influenced each other, or in other words, how far each class of them has impressed its own formal characteristics upon those derived from a differ ent source. Let us take the reciprocal influence of the Anglo- Saxon and the Latin. We shall find it a general rule, that where the English word is made up of a Latin root with new terminal syllables, or suffixes, which modify the signification of the word or determine the grammatical class to which it belongs, those syllables are Saxon, while instances of Saxon radicals with Latin terminations are comparatively rare. "With respect to prefixes, however, which, with the root, usually constitute compounds, not derivatives, the case is otherwise, and we have generally employed Latin prefixes with Latin roots,* seldom or never Latin prepositions with Saxon roots. We have indeed taken most of our Latin words entire in some derivative shape, as they were formed and employed by the Latms themselves, or the French after them, and thus the two great classes remain distinct in form, each following its own original law ; but neverthless if there is a change, the Latin yields. The Saxon roots with Latin pas- * The Saxon inseparable privative un-is an exception, a majority of our words beginning with this prefix being of Komance origin. At present, we incline to harmonize our etymology by substituting the Latin in- for the native particle, in words of foreign extraction. For example wtcapable is now ex- clusively used for the older uncapable. Palsgrave in his list of verbs, p. 650, gives us / outcept for / except, but I have not met with this anomalous compound elsewhere, though outtake fof except is very common in early English. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH. 135 sive terminations are chiefly adjectives like eataJfo, haaraUe, readaUe, to a few of which custom has reconciled us ; but many words of this class employed by old writers, such as doable, are obsolete, and the ear revolts at once at a new ap- Dlication of this ending ; whereas we accept, without scruple, Latin and French roots with a Saxon termination* Motion- less, j?a«;iful, painless, joyM., joyless, and even ceaseless, almost the only instance of the use of the privative ending with a verbal root,f offend no Englishman's sense of congru- ity ; nor do we hesitate to extend the process, and to sa,j joy- less -ncss, and the like. Foreign verbs we conjugate according to the Saxon weak form, but I remember scarcely an in- stance of the application of the strong conjugation, with the * There is a Saxon noun, of rare occurrence, aba 1, signifying ability, to which this termination might be referred. Did we not find in Icelandic a cor- responding root, abl or afl, which exists in too many forms to be otherwise than indigenous, I should suspect aba"l to be itself derived from the Latin ad- jective h a b i 1 i s. The historical evidence is in favor of deriving our adjectival end- ing in - 6Ze from the Latin -abilis , -ibil is, through the French -able, -ible. In early English, this termination had by no means a uniformly passive force, and it formerly ended many words where we have now replaced it by -al and -ful. Thus, in Holland's Pliny, medicinai/e is always used instead of mediciuaZ; Fisher, in his Sermon had at the Moneth Minde of the noble Prynces Margarete, countesse of Kichmonde and Darbye, has veugexh KoX ^\^ov ol Trora^iol, Kal iwvevaav oi tvinoi, KaX rpaiTiKO'fiaii M(ESO-GoTHic OF TJlphilas. Jah atiddja dala|) rign jah qemun awos jah vaivouu vindos jah bistugqun bi jainamma razna jah gadraua jah vas drus Is mikils. Anglo-Saxon. Tha rinde hyt, and thaer com flod, and bleowon windas, and ahruron on ihaet bus ; and thaet bus feoll, and hys hryre was mycel. Wycliffe. And rayn came doun, and floodis camen, and wyndis blewen, and thei hur- liden in to that boos ; and it felle doun, and the fallyng doun thereof was grete. Tyndale. And abundaunce of rayne descended, and the fluddes came, and the wyndes blewe and beet vpon that housse, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. From Luke vi. 49. 166 ENGLISH or THE FOUETEENTH CENTTTET. I cannot, upon this occasion, enter upon tLe history of the primary amalgamation of the incongruous elemciita which compose the English speech, for this would involve a minuteness of detail, and an amount of grammatical discus- sion, that could not be otherwise than fatiguing ; but it will not be irrelevant to our present purpose to make a few observations upon the change which took place in the four- teenth century, and which impressed upon our language many of the most striking features that distinguish it from the Anglo-Saxon. The work of Langland, called Piers Plough- man's Vision, and its sequel, the Creed, are of this century, but, both in poetic form and in vocabulary, they belong, not indeed to the Anglo-Saxon, but to the transition, or what may be called the tentative or experimental period, when the new speech was striving to detect and bring out its own latent affinities and tendencies. Besides, the diction and syntax of those works is marked by peculiarities which are, with ap- parently good reason, held to be characteristic rather of certain local dialects than of the general idiom of the period. Eng- lish literature must therefore be considered as commencing with the writings of Wycliffe, Gower and Chaucer. The MiEso-GoTHio OF TJlphilas. f)atei bistagq flodus jah suns gadraus, jah varj) so usTalteins {>i3 raznia mikla. Anglo-Saxon. And thaet flod in-fieow, and hraedlice hyt afeoll ; an 1 wearth myoel hryre tbaes buses. Wtcliffe. In to wWch the flood was hurlid, and a non it felde doun ; >nd the fallinge douu of that hous is maad greet. Tyndale. Agaynst which the fludde did bet ; and it fell by and by. And the fall of that housse was greate. DIALECT OF CHAUCEE. 167 advance of Wycliffe * upon Langland is chiefly grammatical, not lexical ; at least, the difference in the proportion of foreign words used by them respectively is inconsiderable. The in- fluence of Continental secular literature, as distinguished from the style and diction of theological compositions, is hardly traceable in Wycliffe, but very conspicuous in his poetical contemporaries. The crown of England, in the best days of Edward III., numbered perhaps as many French as British subjects, and its Continental territory, where French only was native, was scarcely less extensive than its English soil. The two languages had existed in England side by side for three whole centuries, and the JSTorman dialect was the favor- ite speech of court and aristocratic life. That Chaucer, him- self a courtier, should have imbibed a large infusion of the French element, was natural, and copying, too, from foreign models and translating from foreign authors, it was inevita- ble that his diction should exhibit traces of French influence. Chaucer accordingly used a number of French and Gallicized Latin words not found in other English writers of his time, and there is no doubt that many of them have been retained, in place of equally appropriate and expressive Saxon terms, upon his authority. So far, therefore, the charge often pre- ferred against him of having alloyed the language by the in- * I am not disposed to allow that the name of Wycliflfe was but a myth, the impersonation of a school of reformers, and I think we may well be slow in adopting the theory which reconciles the discrepancies between the different ac- counts of the life of the great English apostle, by the supposition that there were two or more Wycliffes, as in Greek mythology there was a plurality of Herakles. Still, the extreme uncertainty of the evidence which identifies any existing manuscript as an actual production of the translator Wycliffe, and the great stylistic differences between the works usually ascribed to him, require us to use great caution in speaking of the characteristics of his diction. In gen- eral, when I cite the authority of Wycliffe, I refer to the elder of the two ver- sions of the New Testament printed in the Wycliffite translations, Oxford, 1850. 168 ENGLISH OF THE FOTJKTEENTH OENTtJity. troduction of Frencli words and idioms, thougli by no means true in its whole extent, is not absolutely without foundation, but at the same time his syntax remained substantially and essentially Saxon, and a comparison of his poems with those of other writers of the period will show that the poetic dia lect of our speech, its flexibility, compass, and variety of ex- pression, were developed by him to such an extraordinary degree, that there are few instances in the history of litera- ture where a single writer has exerted so great, and in one direction at least, so beneficial an influence on the language of his time, as Chaucer. Langland, Gower, Chaucer, and WycliflTe belong chronologically to the same period, but the secular poets and the religious reformers moved in different spheres, addressed themselves to different audiences, and the vocabulary and style of each is modified by the circumstan- ces under which he wrote, and the subject on which he was employed. Gower and Chaucer, writing for ladies and cava- liers, used the phraseology most likely to be intelligible and acceptable to courtiers, while Wycliffe and the author of the Ploughman were aiming to bring before the popular mind the word of God and the abuses of the church. The vocab- ulary of the reformers, both in prose and verse, is drawn al- most wholly from homely Anglo-Saxon and the habitual language of religious life, while the lays of Gower and Chaucer are more freely decorated with the flowers of an ex- otic and artificial phraseology.* Wycliffe and his associates. * Notwithstanding the amount of poetical embellishment in Chaucer's works, he actually employs a smaller percentage of Latin and French words than the author of Piers Ploughman, though the general difference in this respect is perhaps lees than the computation given in Lecture VI. would indicate. The dialect of Piers Ploughman has been popularly supposed to be more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than that of Chaucer, because the former uses very ENGLISH OF .HE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 169 in their biblical translations, use few foreign words not trans- planted directly from the Latin Vulgate, but in their own orig- inal writings, they employ as large a proportion of Eomance vocables as occurs in those of Chaucer's works where they are most numerous. In the Sc[uires Tale, nine per cent, of the words are of Continental origin, in the Nonnes Prestes Tale the proportion falls to seven, while in the prose Per- sones Tale, a religious homily, it rises to eleven. The diction of Chaucer in the Persones Tale does not differ very essen- tially from that of other religious writers of the same period, and it is by no means the proportion of foreign words which distinguishes his poems from the common literary dialect of the times. It is the selection of his vocabulary, and the structure of his periods, that mark his style as his own, and it is a cm-ious fact, that of the small number of foreign words employed by him and by Gower, a large share were in a manner forced upon them by the necessities of rhyme ; for while not less than ninety parts in a hundred of their vocab- ularies are pure xinglo-Saxon, more than one-fourth of the terminal words of their verses are Latin or French. Englishmen have sometimes looked back with regret to the loss of the splendid conquests of Edward LH., and the older English provinces on the east and south of the channel, but there can be little doubt that the surrender of territory was a gain, so far as respects the imity and harmony of na- tional character, the development of the language, and the creation of an independent literature. The first effect of the great victories of that reign, no doubt, was to stimulate the many native words not found in the latter, and which are now obsolete ; but in point of fact, Chaucer's style is quite as idiomatic as that of Langland, if tried by either an Anglo-Saxon or a modern English standard. 170 ENGLISH OF THE FO0KTEENTH CENTUET. national pride of England, and to clothe oa cry thijg properly indigenons with new respectability and value. It is perhaps to this feeling that we are to ascribe the statute of the thirty- ninth year of Edward III., which prescribed that pleas should be pleaded, as well as debated and judged, in English, though they were to be enrolled in Latin. The self-conscious spirit of Anglo-Saxon nationality was for the moment thoroughly roused, but a large proportion of the nobility and gentry were of l^orman extraction, and still attached to their hered- itary speech. The statute does not appear to have been much regarded in practice, and French and Latin continued to be the oflBcial languages, for a long time after. From the Nor- man Conquest to the twenty -fifth year of Edward I., 12,91, all parliamentary enactments were recorded and promulgated in Latin. From that date to the third year of Henry Vil., in 1487, they are almost wholly in French, and thereafter only in English, but the records of judicial proceedings were made up in Latin down to a much later date ; and in fact England was never thoroughly Anglicized, until its political connec- tion with the continent was completely severed. " Had the Plantagenets," observes Macaulay, " as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under their government, it is probable that England would never have had an independent existence. The noble language of Milton and Burke would have remained a rustic dialect with- out a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed orthography, and would have been contemptuously abandoned to the boors. No man of English extraction would have risen to eminence, except by becoming in speech and in habits a Frenchman." Analogous, though certainly not identical, consequences, would have followed from the failure of the Eeformers to re- ENGLISH OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. lYl lease England from her allegiance to the Papal see ; for the mighty intellectual struggle, which shook Christendom in the sixteenth century, had a powerful influence in rousing the English mind to yigorous action, throwing it back on its own resources, and compelling it to bring out whatever of strength and efficiency was inherent in the national mind and the na- tional speech. Tyndale's Testament was, for its time, as im- portant a gift to the Enghsh people, as was King James's translation, of which indeed Tyndale's forms the staple, four- score years later, and in the theological controversies of that century our mother-tongue acquired and put forth a compass of vocabulary, a force and beauty of diction, and a power of precise logical expression, of which scarce any other Euro- pean tongue was then capable, and which the best English writers of later centuries can hardly be said to have sur- passed. LECTURE VIII. THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. I. The Anglo-Saxon represents at once the material sub- stratum and the formative principle of the English language. You may eliminate all the other ingredients, and there still subsists a speech, of itself sufficient for all the great purposes of temporal and spiritual life, and capable of such growth and development from its own native sources, and by its own inherent strength, as to fit it also for all the factitious wants and new-found conveniences of the most artificial stages of human society. If, on the other hand, you strike out the Saxon element, there remains but a jumble of articulate sounds without coherence, syntactic relation, or intelligible significance. But though possessed of this inexhaustible mine of native metal, we have rifled the whole orbis verio- rum, the world of words, to augment our overflowing stores, so that every speech and nation under heaven has contributed some jewels to enrich our cabinet, or, at the least, some hum- ble implement to facilitate the communication essential to the proper discharge of the duties, and the performance of the labors, of moral and material life. These foreign conquests, LOSSES Ai^D GAINS OF ENGLISH. 173 indeed, have not been acliieved, these foreign treasures won, without some shedding of Saxon blood, some sacrifice of do- mestic coin, and if we have gained largely in vocabulary, we have, for the time at least, lost no small portion of that orig- inal constructive power, whereby we could have fabricated a nomenclature scarcely less wide and diversified than that which we have borrowed from so distant and multiplied sources. English no longer exercises, though we may hope it still possesses, the protean gift of transformation, whict could at pleasure verbalize a noun, whether substantive or adjective, and the contrary ; we have dropped the variety of significant endings, which indicated not only the grammatical character, but the grammatical relations, of tlie words of the period, and with them sacrificed the power of varying the arrangement of the sentence according to the emphasis, so as always to use the right word in the right place ; we have suffered to perish a great multitude of forcible descriptive terms ; and finally we no longer enjoy the convenience of framing at pleasure new words out of old and familiar mate- rial, by known rules of derivation and composition, but are able to increase our vocabulary only by borrowing from for- eign and, for the most part, unalHed sources. Nevertheless, in the opinion of able judges, our gains, upon the whole, so far at least as the vocabulary is concerned, more than bal- ance our losses. Our language has become more copious, more flexible, more refined, and capable of greater philosophi- cal precision, and a wider variety of expression. The introduction of foreign words and foreign idioms has made English less easy of complete mastery to ourselves, and its mixed character is one reason why, in general, even edu- cated English and Americans speak less well than Continental 174 LOSSES OF ENGLISH. scholars ; but, on the other hand, the same composite struc- ture renders it less difficult for foreigners, and thus it is emi- nently fitted to be the speech of two nations, one of which counts among its subjects, the other among its citizens, peo- ple of every language and every clime. Our losses are greatest in the poetic dialect, nor have they, in this department, except for didactic and epic verse, been at all balanced by our acquisitions from the Latin and the French, or rather from the former through the latter. "We have suffered in the vocabulary suited to idyllic and to rural poetry, in the language of the domestic aiffections, and the sensibilities of every-day social life. In short, while the nomenclature of art has been enriched, the voice of nature has grown thin and poor, and at the same time, in the loss of the soft inflections of the Saxon grammar, English prosody has sustained an injury which no variety of foreign terminations can compensate. The recovery and restoration of very many half-forgotten and wholly unsupplied Saxon words, and of some of the melodious endings which gave such variety and charm to rhyme, is yet possible, and it is here that I look for one of the greatest benefits to our literature from the study of our ancient mother-tongue. Even Chaucer, whom a week's labor will make almost as intelligible as Dryden, might furnish our bards an ample harvest, and a knowledge of the existing remains of Anglo-Saxon literature would en- able us to give to our poetic vocabulary and our rhythm a compass and a beauty surpassed by that of no modern tongue. It is remarkable that Ben Jonson, in lamenting the disappearance of the old verbal plural ending -en, as, they loven, they complainen, instead of they love, they complain, a form which he says he " dares not presume to set afoot LOSSES OF ENGLISH. 1Y5 again, though the lack thereof, well considered, will he found a great blemish to our tongue," should confine the expression of his regret solely to the loss of a grammatical sign, without adverting to the superior rhythmical beauty and convenience of the obsolete form. Early English inherited from the Sax- on numerous terminations of case, number and person, with an obscure vowel or liquid final, constitutmg trochaic feet, and the loss of these has compelled us to substitute spondaic measiu-es to an extent which singularly interferes with the melody of our versification. Thus in Chaucer's time, the adjectives all, small, and the hke, and the preterite of the strong verbs, had a form in e obscure, which served as a sign of the plural. The e final in these and other words was ar- ticulated as it now is in French poetry, except before words beginning with a vowel or with h, and thus what we should write and pronounce, prosaically, And small fowls make melody That sleep all the night with open eye, becomes metrical as written by Chaucer, and pronoimced by his contemporaries : And smalS fowles maken melodle, That slgpgn al the night with opjn yhe. But this point will be more properly considered in a subse- quent part of our course. It has been observed in all literatures, that the poetry and the prose which take the strongest hold of the heart of a na- tion are usually somewhat archaic in diction ; behind, rather than in advance of, the fashionable language of the time. The reason of this is that the great mass of every people is slow to adopt changes in its vocabulary. ISTew words are 176 AEOHAIC DICTION. introduced, and long exclusively employed in circles that are rather excrescences upon society than essential constituents of it, while old words cling to the tongue of the stable mul- titude, and are understood and felt by it long after they have ceased to be current and intelligible among the changeful coteries that assume to dictate the speech, as well as the opin- ions and the manners, of their generation. Deep in the re- cesses of our being, beneath even the reach of consciousness, or at least of objective self-inspection, there lies a certain sensibility to the organic laws of our mother-tongue, and to the primary significance of its vocabulary, which tells us when obsolete, unfamihar words are fitly used, and the logical power of interpreting words by the context acts with the greatest swiftness and certainty, when it is brought to bear on the material of our native speech. The popular mind shrinks from new words, as from aliens not yet rightfully entitled to a place in our community, while antiquated and half-forgotten native vocables, like trusty friends returning after an absence so long that their features are but dimly remembered, are welcomed with double warmth, when once their history and their worth are brought back to our recollec- tion. So tenaciously do ancient words and ancient forms ad- here to the national mind, that persons of little culture, but good linguistic perceptions, will not unfrequently follow old English or Scottish authors with greater intelligence than grammarians trained to the exact study of written forms, and I have known self-educated women, who read Chaucei and Bums with a relish and an appreciation rare among per- sons well schooled in classic lore. Doubtless the too free use of archaisms is an abuse, but the errors which have been committed by modern writers in ARCHAIC DICTION. 177 this way have generally been not so much in employing too large a proportion of older words, as in applying them to new objects, thoughts, and conditions. The author of " Nothing to "Wear " would have committed a serious violation of the laws of propriety and good taste, if he had adopted the dialect of the sixteenth century in that fine satire, to which, what is currently called the local color of the composition gives so much point. On the other liand, the judicious use of antiquated words and forms ia the Cas- tle of Indolence, an imaginative conception altogether in har- mony with the tone of an earlier age, has clothed that ex- quisite creation with a charm which renders it more attractive than almost any other poetical production of the last century. The English author who has most affected archaism of phraseology is Spenser, but if he had confined himself to the use of roots and inflections which ever were true English, in- stead of coining words and forms to suit his metre and his rhyme, he would have escaped something of the censure which his supposed too conservative love of the reverend and the old brought upon him, at the close of a period during which, more than ever after the time of Chaucer, the lan- guage had been in a state of metamorphosis and transition.* S * Spen(jpr wanted not able defenders in his own time, and the argument of one of them is worth listening to as an exposition of the views of a good scholar, at an important crisis in the history of the English language, and as in itself a characteristic specimen of the euphuism which was then a fashionable style of literary composition. "And first of the wordes to speake," I graunt they bee something hard, and of most men unused, yet both English, and also used of most excellent authours, and most famous poets. On whom, when as this our Poet hath bin much tra- vailed and thoroughly read, how could it be, (as that worthie Oratour sayde,) but that walking in the Sunne, although for other cause he walked, yet needes he mought be sunburnt ; and having the sound of those auncient poets still ring- ing in his earcs, he mought needes, in singing, hit out some of their tunes. 12 178 AECHAIC DICTION. Ben Jonson sings : " Then it chimes, When the old worda do strike on the new times,'' and lie has happily conceived, and happily expressed in prose, the true rule for the selection of words in wiitings designed for permanence of duration and effect. " We must not," says he, " be too frequent with the miut, every day coining, nor fetch words from the extreme and ut- most ages. "Words borrowed of antiquity do lend a kind of Sure I thinke, and thinke I think not amisse, that they bring great grace, and, as one would say, authoritie to the Terse. For albe, amongst many other faults, it specially be obiected of Valla against Livie, and of other against Salust, that with over much atudie they affect antiquitie, as covering thereby credence and honour of elder yeares ; yet I am of opinion, and eke the best learned are of the like, that those auncient solemne words are a great ornament, both in the one, and in the other. Ofttimes an ancient worde maketh the stile seeme grave, and as it were rev- erend, no otherwise than wc honor and reverence gray haires for a certaine re- ligious regard which we have of old age. But if any will rashly blame his purpose in choice of olde and unwonted wordes, him may I more iustly blame and condemne, or of witlesse headiness in iudging, or of heedless hardiness in condemning, for in my opinion it is one especiall praise, of many which are due to this poet, that he hath labored to restore as to their rightful heritage such good and natural! English wordes, as have beene long time out of use, and almost cleane disherited. Which is the only cause, that our mother-tongue, which truly of itself is both full inougb for prose and stately enough for verse, hath Jong time beene counted most bare and barren of both. Which default when as some endeavoured to salve and recure, they patched up the holes with peeces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, every where of the Latin ; not weigh- ing how all these tongues accord with themselves but much worse with ours: so now they have made our English tong a gallimaufry, or hodge-podge of all other speeches. Other, some not so well scene in the English tongue, as perhaps in other languages, if they happen to hear an olde word, albeit very natural! and sig- nificant, cry out straightway, that we speake no English but gibberish, or rather such as in olde time Evander's mother spake ; whose first shame is that they are not ashamed, in their own mother-tongue to be counted strangers and aliens. The second shame no less than the first, that whatso they understand not, they streightway deeme to be senselesse and not at all to be undcrstoode." CHANGES IN VOCABTJLAET. 179 majesty to style, and are not without their delight sometimes. For they have the authority of years, and out of their iner- mission do win to themselves a kind of grace-like newness. But the eldest of the present^ and newest of the fast lan- guage is best." To ascertain the number of words in use at any given time, is a matter of great difficulty. As I have observed in a former lecture, new words are constantly making their ap- pearance, and of these, while the gi-eater part are forgotten with the occasions which produced them, some, from the great importance and abiding influence of those events, or from their own inlierent expressiveness, become permanent addi- tions to the language. The introduction of new words can scarcely fail to be marked, but the disappearance of old and established expressions is not a thing of so easy observation. Tlie mere non-user of a word is not likely to be noticed until it has been so long out of currency that it strikes us as un- familiar, when met with in authors of an earlier period. Nor does the fact, that a word is not actually employed at a par- ticular epoch, prove it to be permanently obsolete. Multa renascentur quae jam cecidere, cadentque, Quae nunc sunt in honore Tocabula. Words are constantly passing temporarily out of use, and resuming their place in literature again, and this occasional suspended animation of words, followed by a revival and restoration to full activity, is one of the most curious facts in their history. But this subject belongs to another part of our course, and we shall resume it hereafter. We can never overlook at once our whole contemporaneous literature, and of course we can never say how extensive its active vocabu- 180 CHANGES m MEANING OF WOEDS. lary is, nor how far its gains, wMcli we see and can estimate, are compensated by losses whicli escape our notice. Such computations no generation can make for itself, and the bal- ance can he struck only by the successor. There is one verbal revolution which is more within the scope of familiar observation. I refer to that change by which words once reiined, elegant and even solemn, come to suggest trivial, vulgar, or ludicrous thoughts or images. Spen- ser, ia speaking of an encounter between two armies or single knights, often says, they " let drive, or, rushed full drive, at each other," and both he and later writers, even to the time of Dryden, describe, in pathetic passages, a lady as having her face " blubbered with tears." The phrase " not to be named the same day," now a vulgarism, occurs in Abel Eed- ivivus ; and the grave Hooker warns sinners of the danger of " popping down into the pit." Fellow, originally meaniag sim- ply a coTwpcmion, is now a term of offence. Hooker and Shakspeare use companion, now become respectable, as we do fellow, and it is remarkable that in almost all the Euro- pean languages, the word corresponding to /eZZow is employed chiefly in a disparaging signification. "When a distinguished American politician expressed a willingness, under certain circumstances, to " let the Consti- tution slide," he was criticised almost as severely for the un- dignified character of the expression, as for the supposed unpatriotic sentiment ; but he had the authority of Chaucer and Shakspeare for the language, if not for the thought. Young Lord "Walter, in the Clerkes Tale, was so devoted to hawking, that Wcl neigh all other cures let he slyde; CHANGES m USE OF AVOEDS. 181 the discousolate Dorigene in the Frankeleines Tale was fain at last to Lete hire sorwe slide ; and Sly, in the Taming of the Shrew, Lets the world slide. Yery many humble colloquialisms current in this country, but not now used in England, and generally supposed to be Americanisms, are, after all, of good old British family, and our Eastern friends, who are sometimes ridiculed for talking of a sight of people, may find comfort in learning that the famous old romance, the prose Morte d'Arthttr, uses this word for multitude, and that the liigh-born dame, Juliana Berners, lady prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell in the fifteenth century, informs us that ia her time a lomynahle syght of monkes was elegant English for, ' a large company of friars.' No living language yet possesses a dictionary so complete as to give all the words in use at any one period, still less all those that have belonged to it during the whole extent of its literary history. "We cannot therefore arrive at any precise results as to the comparative copiousness of our own and other languages, but there is reason to think that the vocabulary of English is among the most extensive now employed by man. The number of English words not yet obsolete, but found in good authors, or in approved usage by correct speakers, including the nomenclature of science and the arts, does not probably fall short of one hundred thousand. Now there are persons who know this vocabulary in nearly its whole extent, but they understand a large proportion of it much as they are acquainted with Greek or Latin, that is, as the dia- lect of books, or of special arts or professions, and not as a 182 EXTENT OF T0CABT7LAET living speech, the common language of daily and hourly thought. Or if, like some celebrated English and American orators, living and dead, they are able, upon occasion, to bring into the field in the war of words even the half of this vast array of light and heavy troops, yet they habitually content themselves with a much less imposing display of verbal force, and use for ordinary purposes but a very small proportion of the words they have at their command. Out of our immense magazine of words, and their combinations, every man selects his own implements and weapons, and we Should find in the verbal repertory of each individual, were it once fairly laid open to us, a key that would unlock many mysteries of his particular humanity, many secrets of his private history. Few writers or speakers use as many as ten thousand words, ordinary persons of fair intelligence not above three or four thousand. If a scholar were to be requii-ed to name, without examination, the authors whose English vocabulary was the largest, he would probably specify the all-embracing Shakspeare, and the all-knowing Milton. And yet in all the works of the great dramatist, there occur not more than fifteen thousand words, in the poems of Milton not above eight thousand. The whole number of Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols does not exceed eight hundred, and the entire Italian operatic vocabulary is said to be scarcely more extensive. To those whose attention has not been turned to the sub- ject, these are surprising facts, but if we run over a few pages of a dictionary, and :bserve how great a proportion of the words are such as we do not ourselves individually use, we shall be forced to conclude that we each find a very limited vocabulary sufficient for our own purposes. Although we have few words absolutely synonymous, yet every impor- VOCABULAET OF INDITIDIIALS. 183 tant thought, image, and feeling, has numerous allied, if not equivalent forms of expression, and out of these every man appropriates and almost exclusively employs those which most closely accord with his own mental constitution, his tastes and opinions, the style of his favorite authors, or which best accommodate themselves to the rest of his habitual phra- seology. One man will say a thankful heart, another a grateful spirit; one usually employs fancy where another would say imagination ; one describes a friend as a person of a sanguine tenvper anient, another speaks of him as a man of a hopeful spirit ; one regards a winter passage around Cape Horn as a very hazardous voyage, another considers it a pe- culiarly dangerous trip. One man iegins to iuild, another commences building* Men of moderate passions employ few epithets, with verbs and substantives of mild significa- tions ; excitable men use numerous intensives, and words of strong and stirring meanings. Loose thinkers content themselves with a siagle expression for a large class of re- lated ideas ; logical men scrupulously select the precise word which coiTesponds to the thought they utter, and yet among persons of but aA'erage intelligence, each understands, though not himself emploj-ing, the vocabulary of all the rest. The demands of pm-e and of physical science, and of mechanical art, for a more extended nomenclature, wherewith to chron- icle their progress, and aid in their diffusion, are at present * Commence is used by good writers only as a transitive verb, and as such requires the participle or participial noun, not the infinitive, after it. The phrase I comTnence to build, now occasionally employed, is therefore not sanctioned by respectable authority. At the same time, there is no valid grammatical objec- tion to its use. The French, from whom we borrowed this verb, say commencer d parler, or commencer de parler, according to circumstances, and our restriction of it to a (echnically transitive character is purely conventional. 184 TECHNICAL TEEMS. giving occasion to a more ample coinage cf new words than are supplied from any other source. Science, with the ex- ception of Geologj^, borrows its vocabulary chiefly from Greek and Latin sources ; mechanical art, to some extent from the same languages, but it has more generally taken its technical terms from native, though often very obscure, roots. Tlie number of words of art which the last half century has thus introduced into English is very great, and a large pro- portion of them are sought for in vain in our most volumi- nous dictionaries. Indeed, it is surprising how slowly the commonest mechanical terms find their way into dictionaries professedly complete. I may mention, as instances of this, that pemiy, a denomination of the sizes of nails, as a six- penny, or a ten-penny nail, though it was employed by Featly two hundred years ago, and has been in constant use ever since, is not to be found in "Webster ; * and the great French * " Ho fell fierce and foule upon the Pope himeelfe, threatning to looaen him from his chayre, though he were fastened thereto with a tenpeny naile." — Life of Abhot, Abel Kedivivus, 546. Six-penny, eight-penny, ten-penny nails, are nails of such sizes, that a thousand will weigh six, eight, or ten pounds, and in this phrase, therefore, penny seems to be a corruption of pound. See App. 30. There is another very common and very proper expression, which the dic- tionaries and the sciolistic pride of precisians in speech rej ect as a vulgar inac- curacy. The phrase a pair of stairs is used by Palsgrave, Hakluyt, Shakespeare, and George Sandys, and it is found in the Memoirs of Scriblerus, as well as in many English classics of the best age of our literature. The fancied incorrect- ness lies in a, supposed misapprehension of the meaning of stair, which those who criticize the phrase imagine to be synonymous with step or tread. But this is a mistake. The Anglo-Saxon stseger, whence our stair, is derived from the verb stigan, to ascend or climb, which, in the form sty or stie, was in use as an English verb as late as the time of Spenser. Stasger and stair, though sometimes confounded with step, properly signify alike the entire system of successive steps by which we sty or climb from one floor to another, SCrENTIFIC VOCABULAHT. 186 and Italian dictionary of Alberti, in tlie edition of 1835, does not contain tlie word for steam-loat in either language. Tlie Tocabialary of science is founded upon the necessity, partly of new names for new things, and partly of more pre- cise and exclusive designation of well-known things. It is obvious that when chemistry discovers a new element or ele- mentary combination, physics a new law or principle, mathe- matics a new mode of ascertaining magnitudes or comparing quantities, new words must be coined in order properly to express the object discovered, or process invented ; but the need of new terms for familiar things, or properties of things, is not so clear to common apprehension.. It is not at first sight evident that a botanist, in describing a smooth, shaggy, or bristly, vegetable siirface, is under the necessity of saying instead, that the leaf or stalk is glabrous, hirsute, or hispid, but a sufficient reason for the introduction of new terms into newly organized branches of knowledge, is to be found in the fact, that the common words of every, living speech are pop- iilarly used in several distinct acceptations, some proper and some figurative. The purposes of natural science require that its nomenclature shall be capable of exact definition, and that every descriptive technical term be rigorously limited and they may therefore be considered as collective nouns. Thus Milton, Pa -a- dise Lost, iii., 540-3: Satan from hence, now on the lower itair. That scaled by steps of gold to heaven gate. Looks down with wonder at the sudden view Of all this world at once. But it is usual to divide the stair, when the height of the stories is consid- erable, into flights or sections separated by landing-places, and each flight might not improperly be considered an independent stair. Now in the great majority of stairs, there was but one intermediate landing-place, and of course the whole ascent from floor to floor was divided into two flights or stairs, and thus formed » ■pair of stairs. See Appendix, 32. 186 SCIENTIFIC TOCABULAEY to the expression of the precise quality or mode of action to the designation of which it is applied. JSTow, though smooth, shaggy, and 'bristly, may be, and often are, employed in senses precisely equivalent to those of glabrous, hirsute, and hispid, yet they have also other meanings and shades of meaning, and are almost always more or less vague in their sig- nification, because, being relative in their nature, they are constantly referred to different standards of comparison. The Latin words which, in the dialect of botany, replace them, have, on the contrary, no signification except that which is imposed upon them by strict definition, and no degree of sig- nification which is not fixed by reference to known and in- variable types. In a recent scientific journal, I find this sentence : " Be- goniaceae, by their anthero-connectival fabric indicate a close relationship with anonaceo-hydrocharideo-nymphseoid forms, an afiinity confirmed by the serpentarioid flexuoso-nodulous stem, the liriodendroid stipules, and cissoid and victorioid foliage of a certain Begonia, and if considered hypogynous, would, in their triquetrous capsule, alate seed, apetalism, and tufted stamination, represent the floral fabric of Nepenthes, itself of aristolochioid afiinity, while by its pitchered leaves, directly belonging to Sarracenias and Dionseas." This extract exemplifies, in an instructive way, the appli- cation of new words to objects and features familiar in them- selves, but which have only recently acquired a scientific value, and is interesting as showing to what extent the for- mation of compound and derivative words may be carried in English, when employed in the service of natural knowledge. Most of the descriptive epithets are derived from the scientific appellations of known species or genera, the names of which TECHNICAL TEEMS. 18Y suggest to the botanist tlieir characteristic forms. Where the particular form is common to two or three, the names of all ai-e grouped in one compound, and the whole word termi- nated with the Greek syllable -cdd, expressive of likeness. The nomenclature of science is often so repugnant to the ear, and so refractory to the tongue of our Anglican race, that it never finds admission into the dialect of common life, but as the principles of abstract reasoning, and the facts of natural knowledge become more widely diffused, much of the vocabulary which belonged originally to the schools, es- capes from its learned seclusion, and, generally with more or less modification of meaning, finally incorporates itself into the common language, the familiar speech of the people. At present the predominance of scientific pursuits is bestow- ing upon English a great number of words borrowed from the nomenclature, both of the various branches of natiiral history, and of the more exact sciences of pure and mixed math- ematics. Thus, conditions, in the sense of the circumstances under which a given phenomenon takes place, and which may be supposed to modify its character, prohlem, corollary, 'phenomenon, quantitative and qualitative, demonstrative, pos- itive and negative, the mean hetween extremes, antipodal, ze- nith, inverse ratio, and hundreds of other terms lately intro- duced for the special pui-poses of science, and denoting new, or at least unfamiliar things and relations of things, have now become a part of the general vocabulary of all educated persons.* * Exorhitani^Ha^ Latin conjugate verb to which, exorbito, acquired a popular figurative sense even in the classic age of Kome, was originally a term of art applied to those heavenly bodies whose path deviated much from the plane of the orUU of the planets most familiar to ancient astronomy. It has now lost its technical meaning altogether, and has no longer a place in the dia lect of science. 188 TECHNICAI, TEEMS. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the questions which absorbed the thoughts of men, and shook the dynas- ties of Europe, were not those immediately affecting material interests, but those concerning the relations of man to his Maker, and of the subject to his rulers. Theology and civil polity, and, as a necessary -preparation for the comprehension of both, metaphysical studies, were the almost exclusive pur- suit of the great thinkers, the active intellects of that long period. The facts, the arguments, the authorities which bore upon these questions, were principally to be sought for in the ancient languages, and when the reasoning was to be em- ployed to influence the unlearned, to be clothed in an Eng- lish dress, and to be popularized, so to speak, it was at once discovered that the existing language was destitute of ap- propriate words to convey ideas so new to the English mind. The power of forming new words from indigenous roots by composition and derivation, retained by the cognate lan- guages, had been lost or suspended in English, and, more- over, the Saxon primitives specially adapted for employment in this way, had been superseded by French words imported by the ISTorman nobility, or by a sectarian Latin phraseology' introduced by the Eomish ecclesiastics. Hence new voca- bles, and those almost uniformly of Greek or Latin etymolo- gy, were coined for use in theological and political discussion, and many of them soon became a constituent part of the general medium of thought. In fact, a complete English metaphysical nomenclature was formed, and freely and fa- miliarly used, by the great thinkers who lived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the materialistic age which followed, such portion of this vocabulary as was not already incorporated into the universal patrimony of the language, TECHNICAL TEEMS. 189 kad become obsolete, and when, fifty years ago, Coleridge attempted to revive the forgotten study of metaphysics, he found that the current dialect of the day afforded no terms for the adequate expression of logical and philosophical cat- egories. But a recurrence to the religious philosophy of a more intellectual age showed that the English metaphysicians of that period had in great part anticipated a nomenclature, which has been supposed to be the invention of German spec- ulators and theu- followers. Reason and understanding, as words denominative of distinct faculties, the adjectives sen- suous, transcendental, subjective and objective, supernatural, as an appellation of the spiritual, or that immaterial essence which is not subject to the law of cause and effect, and is thus distinguished from that which is natural, are all words revived, not invented by the school of Coleridge.* In the mean time, and down to the present day, the rapid progress of physical science and industrial art has given birth to a great multitude of technical terms, a large part of which, in more or less appropriate applications, or in figu- rative senses, has entered into the speech of every-day life. Thus the means of articulate and written communication * The following extract from Sir Kenelm Digby's Observations on Sir Thomaa Browne's Eeligio Medici is, both in manner and in matter, worthy o^ some much later metaphysicians. " If God should join the Soul of a lately dead man, (even wbilest his dead corps should lie entire in his winding sheet here,) unto a body made of earth taken from some mountain in America, it were most true and certain that the body he then should live by, were the same identical body he lived with before his death and late resurrection. It is evident that sameness, thisness, and that- ness, belongeth not to matter by itself, (for a general indifference runneth through it all ;) but only as it is distinguished and individuated by the form, which in our case whensoever the soul doth, it must be understood always to bo the same matter and body." 190 POPULAR TOCAEULABT. upon more familiar as well as more recondite subjects have been vastly extended, even since the period when Shake- speare showed, by an experimental test, that English was already capable of exhibiting almost every conceivable phase of internal and external being in our common humanity. The permanent literature of a given period is not a true index of the general vocabulary of the period, for the ex- emption of a great work from the fleeting interests and pas- sions, that inspire the words of its own time, is one of the very circumstances that insure its permanence. That which is to live for ever must appeal to more catholic and lasting sympathies than those immediately belonging to the special concerns of any era, however pregnant it may be with great consequences to the weal or the woe of man. The dialects of the field, the market, and the fireside in former ages have left but an imperfect record behind them, and they are generally to be traced only in the scanty pages of the comic dramatist, and in the few fragments of private correspondence that antiquarian curiosity has rescued from destruction. But, for a century, the historical novel, and the periodical press, in its various forms of newspaper, solid re- view and light magazine, have embodied the mutable speech of the hour, in its widest range of vocabulary, phraseological expression, and proverb. While, therefore, we do not possess satisfactory means of testing the humors, the aims, the mor- als, of our remoter ancestors by the character of their famil- iar speech, we have, in the lighter literature of later years, ample means of detecting the unconscious expression of the mental and moral tendencies, which have marked the age of our fathers and our own. LECTURE IX. VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. II. Foe the purpose of obtaining a comprehensive view of particular branches of knowledge, and of determining the special relations which subsist between them all, modern science has found the form of generalization termed classifi- cation, a very efSeient, not to say a necessary, iastrument In fact orderly, and what may be called progressive, ar- rangement, is considered so essential a feature in all scientific method, that the principles of classification have been made the subject of much profound investigation and philosophic discussion, and they may be said to have been erected into a science of themselves. As an auxiliary to the comprehension of a given classification, and especially as a help to the mem- ory in retaining it, a systematic, and, as some hold, so far as possible, a descriptive, nomenclature is indispensable. The wide range of recent physical science, and the extent to which, in its various applications, it enters into and pervades the social life of the age, have made its dialect in some sort a common medium of intercommunication between men of diflferent races and tongues. And thus Linnaeus, the father 192 SCrtNTIFIC NOMEHCLATTTKE. of modern botany and zoology, and Lavoisiei', who occupies a scarcely less conspicuous position in the history of modem chemistry, have indirectly exercised almost as important an influence on the language, as, directly, upon the science of succeeding generations. A full discussion of the principles of scientific nomenclature would be too wide a digression from the path of inquiry marked out for the present course, but it will be useful to notice some misapplications of them, and I shall have occasion to recur again to the subject, in treating of the parts of speech.* I will precede what I have now to say in relation to it, by some remarks on the classification of languages, and on deriva- tion and composition in English. Languages have been va- riously classed according to their elements, their structure, their power of self-development, their historical origin or their geographical distribution. But the application of scientific principle to the comparison of different languages, or families of language, is so new a study that no one system of arrangement can yet be said to have received the assent of scholars, in any other way than as a provisional distribu- tion. The nomenclature of the different branches of linguis- tic knowledge, phonology, derivative etymology, inflection and syntax, is perhaps still more unsettled, and almost every Continental grammarian proposes a new set of names for even the parts of speech. So far is the passion for anatomiz- ing, describing and naming carried, that some philologists, 8 for instance Becker, divide, subdivide, distinguish and specify language and its elements, until it is almost a greater effort to master and retain the analysis and its nomenclature, • See Lecture XIV. DEBIVATION OF WORDS. 193 than to leai-n tlie grammatical forms and syntactical rules of the speecli to wMch they are applied. I doubt the practical value of methods so artificial as to elevate the technicalities of art above art itself, and I shall, throughout this course, which I have more than once described as altogether intro- ductory and preparatory, confine myself, as far as practica- ble, to old and familiar appellations of all that belongs to the description of language and the elements which compose it. Among the various classifications of language, not the most scientific, certainly, but one of the most obvious, is that which looks at them with reference to their power of enlarg- ing their vocabulary by varying and compoundiag native radicals, or in other words, their organic law of growth. This classification is incomplete, because it respects words considered as independent and individual, leaving syntactical structiire and other important points altogether out of view ; but, as we are now considering the vocabulary, it is, for our present purpose, the most convenient arrangement. Derivation, in its broadest sense, includes all processes by which new words are formed from given roots. In ordi- nary language, however, grammatical inflections are not em- braced in the term, and it may be added, that where the primitive and the derivative belong to the same language, there is usually a change of form, a change of grammatical class, and a change of relative import.* I shall, at present, speak only of derivation from native roots. A radical, which, in its simplest form and use, serves only as an attributive, in * There is not always a change oiform, as will be seen hereafter, nor is there necessarily a change of grammatical class. The noun auctioneer is de- rived from the noun auction^ and again, since is derired from sithence, and that from a still older form, without any change of either class or meaning. See Lecture XIV. 13 194: DEEIVATION OF WCKDS. other words an adjective, may be made to denote tlie quality which it ascribes, or an act by which that quality is man- ifested or imparted, and thus become a noun or a verb ; or contrariwise, a root which affirms the doing of an act, the being in a state, or the consciousness of a sensation or emo- tion, and of course a verb, may become the name of an agent, a quality or a condition. Thus, to take the first case supposed, Tcd is the simplest form in which that root is known to the English language, and in that form it is an adjective denoting that the object to which it is applied pos- sesses a certain color. If we add to this root the syllable -ness, forming the derivative redness, the new word means the power of pi'oducing upon the eye the sensation excited by red objects ; it becomes the name of that color, and is a sub- stantive. If instead of that ending, we add the syllable -den, which gives lis redden, the derivative signifies to become red, or to make red, and is a verb. So in the other case, the verb ad- mire, (which for the present pui-pose may be treated as a rad- ical,) signifying to regard with wonder or surprise mingled with respect or affection, by the addition of the consonant -r, becomes a substantive, admirer, and denotes a person enter- taining the sentiment I have just defined. In the form adr miration, it is also a substantive, indicating the consciousness or expression of that sentiment, and if changed to admirable, it becomes an adjective expressing the possession of qualities which excite admiration, or entitle objects to be admired. In all these cases, the modified words are said to be derived fi'om, or to be derivatives of, the si]nple radical, and they are changed in form by the addition of a syllable. But the change of form may be made in a difi'erent way, namely, by the substitution of other letters, usually vowels, for some of DERIVATION OF WORDS. 195 those of tlie radical. Thus from the verb Und, wq have, by a change of vowel, the substantives band and hond, all ex- pressing the same radical notion ; from the verb think, by a change of both vowel and consonant, the substantive thought; from the verb see, by a like change, the substantive sight; from the verb to freeze, the substantive frost; from the sub- stantives glass and grass, by a change of the spoken not the written vowel, the verbs to glase and to graze. Thus far the change of grammatical class has been indicated by a change of form, and this is the usual, but not the constant process of derivation. There are still many instances, and in earlier stages of English there were many more, where a radical is employed in a new class, without a change of form. Thus the substantive man, without the alteration of a letter, becomes a verb, and we say to man a ship ; so from arm, to ar77i a fortress ; from saddle, tit, and iridle, to saddle, hit, or hridle a horse ; and the Morte d' Arthur speaks of a knight as being well sworded and well shielded, using participial forms which imply the verbs to sword, and to shield.* Composition in etymology means the forming of one word out of two or more, with or without change of form in either. In words framed by composition, each of the constituents may possess and still retain an independent significance, as for example in steam-ship, in which instance each half of the * In many cases of this sort the modern verb has been formed from an Anglo- Saxon word of the same etymology and grammatical class, by dropping the characteristic verbal ending - a n ; in others, it is altogether of recent origin, and so long as it has existed as a verb, it has been identical in form with its primitlye noun. Our American to progress is one of the few Tcrbalized nouns of recent coin- age. It has not much to recommend it besides its novelty, but it seems likely to secure full recognition on both sides of the Atlantic. See further, Lecture xiy. 196 COMPOSITION OF WOEDB. word has just tlie same sense as when employed by itself, though, in order to complete the meaning of the compound, something must be mentally supplied, understood, as English grammarians say, or as the Latins more happily express it, subauditum, underheard. In this case, the defect of meaning is in the want of connection between the two halves of the word, steam and ship, and a foreigner, unacquaiuted with the rules of English composition, an Italian for instance, would not be able to perceive how the English meaning could be given to the compound by the mere juxtaposition of its elements, any more than by saying vapor e-legno, which would express nothing. So long as this word was a new one, every English hearer supplied the notion of the elastic force of steam acting as the motive power of the ship, though now, both the name and the thing are so familiar, that steamship does not always suggest its own etymology. This mode of composition is more appropriately called agglutination, and ia the language of some rude peoples it is carried so far, that all the members of a period may be incorporated into one word, which alone expresses an entire proposition. There are, however, as I shall show in treating the subject of inflections, many highly refined and cultivated languages, where nearly the same thing is effected by a mere change in the form of an uncompounded word.* In the majority of compound * In speaking of polysyllabic inflectional forms as uncompounded, I do not mean to express dissent from the theory that weak inflections generally result from the coalescence of particles or pronouns with verbal roots. As, however, the source and history of such formations is in most cases unknown, the inflec- tions of cultivated languages must, in practice, be regarded as having lost the character of compounds, and this is especially true where old and established inflectional endings are applied to words of recent origin or introduction. See Lecture XV. COMPOSITION OF WOEDS. 197 woi-ds in the European languages, the component parts are not all separately significant, but the word consists of a princi- pal radical, the sense of which is reversed, extended, limited, specificated, or otherwise qualified, by combining with it a particle or other determinative, not of itself expressive of a state, quality, or act. Of this class of compounds, we have few purely English examples, the Saxon inseparable parti- cles, and the prepositions and adverbs used as qualificatives in composition, having become chiefly obsolete or limited in their employment, and the place of the native words into which they entered ha%'ing been supplied by French or Latin compounds ready-made to our hands.* There are languages whose vocabulary is chiefly made up of primitive words, and of words which by simple and ob- vious rules are derived from, or composed of, primitives. These primitives or radicals are usually monosyllables indig- enous to the language, and still existing in it as independent words. There are other tongues whose stock of words is of a composite character, and in a considerable degree bor- rowed from foreign languages, or derived from native roots now obsolete or so changed in form in the processes of deriva- tion and composition, that they are no longer readily recog- nized as the source of the word. Languages of the former * We have still some Saxon qualificatives left, and it is much to be desired that the use of them may be extended. Thus, we precede radical verbs, sub- stantives, and adjectives, by the negative or privative syllable, ««-, as in the words to undo, unbeliever, unknown ; the inseparable particle mis-, as in mis- appreJtend, mis-place, mis-apply, m-is-call ; the adverbs of place, out, up, and dovm ; as in out-side, up-hold, dovm-fall ; the prefix be- as in be-dew, bestrew. In these last instances, the particle be- retains its original force, and it was formerly much' more extensively used, such words as be-bled, for covered with blood, be- powdered for sprinkled with powder, being very common, but in most modern words with this prefix, it has ceased to modify the meaning of the radical ap- preciably. 198 CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES. class freely allow the fonnation of new words both by deri- vation and by composition ; those of the latter reluctantly admit a resort to either of these methods of enriching the vocabulary, and prefer rather to enlarge their stock by bor rowing from foreign tongues, than to develop and modify, by organic processes, the significance of their own primitives. Of course, here and elsewhere, I use primitive in a very re- stricted sense, and by no means as implying that the roots to which we refer European words are necessarily or even prob ■ ably aboriginal, but simply that they have no known and demonstrable historical descent from distant or apparently remotely related tongues, and therefore stand in the place of primitives to the vocabulary which is composed, or has grown out of them. To the former of the two classes I have mentioned, that, namely, where most of the words are either primitive, or de- rived by obvious processes from roots familiar to every native, belong the Greek, the German, the Icelandic, and the Anglo- Saxon ; to the latter, that is where the radicals of the words are often obsolete, or their derivation obscure, belong the Latin, and in a still higher degree, what are called the Ro- mance languages, or those derived from the Latin. English occupies a place between the two, but perhaps less resembles the former than the latter, particularly as it shares with these much of their incapacity of forming at will new words from familiar roots. The power of derivation and composition was eminently characteristic of our maternal Anglo-Saxon, but was much diminished upon the introduction of the ISTorman French, or to speak more justly, the Latin element, which refused to accommodate itself to this organic faculty of the Saxon tongue. A comparison of the Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospels with the received ve-s'on, is instructive on ANGLO-SAXON GOSPELS. 199 this point. The latter is distinguished for :ts freedom from Latinisms, and was made with constant reference to the Greek, and with an evident design sedulously to avoid un- necessary coincidences of expression with the Vulgate and the older translations made from it. Tlie Anglo-Saxon ver- sion was taken from the Itala or the Yulgate, and probably, though this is not certain, without any opportunity of com- parison with translations in other languages, and yet its vo- cabulary is ahnost purely of native gi-owth. Even the spe- cial words characteristic of the civil and political life of Judea, and of the Jewish and Christian religions, are very generally supplied by indigenous words, simple or compound, of cor- responding etymology. The standard English version adopts, without translation, the words prophet, scribe, sepulchre, cen- turion, baptize, synagogue, resurrection, disciple, parable, treasure, pharisee, whereas the Anglo-Saxon employs, in- stead, native words, often, no doubt, framed for this special purpose. Thus, for jprophet we have witega, a wise or knowing man; for scribe, bocere, book-man; for sepul- chre, byrgen, whence our words iury, and harrow in the sense of funeral-mound ; for centurion, hundred-man, the etymological equivalent of the Latin centurio; for 'baptize, fullian; iox synagogue, gesamnung, congregation; for resurrection, aerist, uprising; for disciple, leorning- cniht, learning-youth; for^«ra5Ze, bigspel, the German Beispiel, example; iov treasure, gold-hord; iov phar- isee, sun(J%.r-halga, over-holy. The word employed as the equivalent of repentance, or the Latin pcenitentia, is remarkable, because it does not involve the notion oi penance, a ceremonial or disciplinary satisfaction, which is a character- istic of the Eomish theology, and seems implied even in the Lutheran Busse thun. The Anglo-S axon dsedbote don, 200 COMPOSITION OF WOEDS. daadbote, wliich are used for repent and repentance, con vey the idea of making satisfaction or compensation, not to the church, but to the party wronged, and therefore, if not proper translations of the corresponding words in the Greek text, they are departures from the Yulgate. I cannot but re- gard these facts as an argument of some weight in support of the theory which maintains that the primitive English church was substantially independent of the papal see. Our present power of derivation and composition is much restricted, and while many other living languages can change all nouns, substantive and adjective, into each other, or into verbs, and vice versa, still retaining the root-form, which makes the new-coined word at once understood by every na- tive ear, we, on the contrary, are constantly obliged to resort to compounds of foreign and to us unmeaning roots, when- ever we wish to express a complex idea by a single word- The German and other cognate languages still retain this command over their own hereditary resources, and in point of ready intelligibility and picturesqueness of expression, they have thus an important advantage over languages which, like the Latin and its derivatives, possess less plastic power. There are, in all the Gothic tongues, numerous com- pounds, of very obvious etymology, which are most eminently expressive, considered as a part of what may be called the nature-speech of man, as contrasted with that which is more appropriately the dialect of literature and art, and thus those languages are very rich, just where, as I remarked in a former lecture, our own is growing poor. The vocabulary belonging to the affections, the terms descriptive of the spon- taneous action of the intellectual and moral faculties, the pic- torial words which bring the material creation vividly before us, these in the languages in question are all more numerous COMPOSITION OF WOEDS. 201 more forcible than tlie Latin terms by which wo have too of- ten supplied their places. Hie facility of derivation and composition in the Greek and Gothic languages is almost unlimited, and a native, once master of the radicals, and fully possessed of the laws of for- mation, can at any time extemporize a word for the precise ex- pression of any complete idea he may choose to embody in a single vocable. Aristophanes has a word of fourteen syllables, from six radicals, signifying meanly -rising-early-and-hurrying- to-the-tribnnal-to-denounce-another-for-an-infraction-of-a-law- concerning-the-exportation-of-figs, so that one word expresses an idea, the translation of which into English occupies twen- ty-two. In another case, the same dramatist coins a word of seventy-two syllables, as the name of a dish composed of a gi'eat number of ingredients, and Kichter quotes Forster as authority for a Sanscrit compound of one hundred and fifty- two syllables. Yoss has framed a German equivalent for the first mentioned of these sesquipedalia verba,* eigh- teen-inch words, as Horace calls them, and the Geiman word, like the Greek, is, in this and other similar cases, an example of agglutination rather than technical etymological composi- tion. In the Gothic languages, the elements of the com- pound are not generally very numerous, but Icelandic, An- glo-Saxon and German ha^e many very forcible inseparable particles and modes of composition, by which a wonderful life and vigor is imparted to language. Thus in Icelandic the particle of, too much, is instinct with meaning, and when a man of lower rank reproved his foster-son, a ISTorwe- gian king, for indiscreetly conferring too high rank on a sub- ject, he administered a more pointed rebuke by the single * MorgeiidammerUQgshandelmacherrechtsvei'derbmiiliwanderung. 202 INSEPAKABLE PAETICLES. compound, o f - j a r 1 , f 6 s t r i m i n n ! too mueii a jarl, my foster-son ! than if he had said, as one would express the same thought in English, You are too liberal in bestowing rank ! You promote Sveinn above his merits ! In the same admirable language, a word of three syllables precisely equivalent in its elements, and almost in form, to our words father and letter, means a son who has surpassed the merits of his father. The Anglo-Saxon inseparable particles waw-, Je-, and/o?'- corresponding to the German ver-, had great force, and beauty, and the writer who shall restore them to their primitive use and significance will confer a greater ben- efit upon our poetical dialect than he who shall naturalize a thousand Eomance radicals.* "We have a few compounds * It is very difficult to define the meaning of inseparable particles, because their force is usually more or less modified by that of the radical with which they are combined, and therefore their significance is best learned by the study of examples. Be- is sometimes an intensive of the sense of the verb to which it is prefixed, but it more usually and properly serves to express a peculiar re- lation between the radical notion conveyed by the verb and the nominative or objective of the verb, by which, while the nominative and objective retain their syntactical character of subject and object, they are logically placed in a differ- ent category. Thus, if I sprinkle water, the object on which the drops fall is beaprinJcled ; I bestrew the ground with roses by strevnng the flowers upon it ; dry earth is powdered to dust, and the garments of a traveller are he-powdered with the dust. In very many Anglo-Saxon, as well as modern English verbs, the prefix he- has no discoverable force, and in several instances we use he- where the primitive word was compounded with the particle ge. Our believe, for ex- ample, is the Anglo-Saxon ge-lyfan, (the German glauben.) I do not know that the history of this change has been traced, but it took place very early, for gereden, a participial form, is the only word in Layamonwith the prefix ge- and it occurs in the Ormulum only in gehatenn, also a participle. The pre- fix «-, (the Saxon participial and preterit augment ge-, possibly distinct from the prefix g e - used with other forms,) is met with in the Ormulum in one in- stance only, but in many cases in Layamon. The compound forn believe does not occur in the Ormulum at all, lefenn andtrowwonn, the modern trow, oeing employed instead ; but it is often used in Layamon in difTerent verbal and nominiil forms, as bileaf, bilef, verbs, and bilefue, bileue, noun. For- ;not to bo confounded with /ore-, as in/oretell) seems to have corresponded coMPosrnoN of woeds. 203 with the prefix /(??•- remaining. For example, forbid is com- pounded of Md and for- used in the sense of opposition or contrast, so that hid, which means to command, when com- pounded with for-, signifies to prohibit ; but most of the words into which this particle entered are unfortunately ob- solete. How much better a word is forhled, than faint from bleeding; fordo, than rnin; for dwined, than dwindled away ; forfoughten, than tired with fighting ; forjudge, than unjust- ly condemn ; forpined, than wasted away ; forwatched than weary with watching ; forwandred, than tired with wander- ing, or in another sense, than having lost the way ; fm^- chased, than weary of pursuit ; forwept, than exhausted with weeping ; forworn, than tired or worn out ; and so, what a losing bargain we made when we exchanged those beautiful words, wanhope, for despair, and wantrust, for jealousy or suspicion! *, -. .-.-r. ■■ However stable in its structure English must now be con- sidered, yet the warfare between its elements is not absolutely ended, and though peace has been proclaimed, some skir- mishing is still going on. "We yet forge out questionable derivatives and solder together unlawful compounds, in col- loquial and especially jocular discourse, and bold authors like Carlyle will now and then venture to print a heterodox for- mation. Good writers were less scrupulotis two hundred years ago, but since Queen Anne's time we are become too precise, and as the French say precious, to tolerate the words in which our progenitors delighted. Fuller concerned him- self little about starched verbal criticism, helped himself to a good word wherever he could find it, and, when need was, manufactured one for the purpose. Thus, in telling the story nearly to the German v e r- in all ita various vises, and as in the case of be, its pecnliar force is too subtle and variable to be fixed by definition. 204 COMPOSITION OF WOEDS. of the elderly gentleman with two female friends, one of whom, near his own age, plucked out his black hairs, the other, more juvenile, his white ones, he says the younger un- grayhaired him.* This however is not worse than our now common triplicate compounds, horse-rail-road, steam-tow- boat, and the like.f The Icelandic and the Anglo-Saxon, though not inferior to the German in facility of composition, had nevertheless a smaller number of distinctive and derivative forms, and they were thus driven to use composition in some cases, where the . Teuton expressed a similar notion by a difference of ending. Of these combinations, there is one common to the Scandi- navian and the English, which, in awkwardness, surpasses almost any thing to be met with in any other speech. I re- fer to that by which the distinction of sex is expressed, not by a termination or an independent adjective, but by using the personal pronoun as a prefix, as for example in the words he-iear and she-l)ear, he-goat and she-goat. The effort which German scholars have long been making to substitute native for foreign derivatives and compounds, * The privative un- was formerly much more freely used than at present. Heywood has wnput, and Fuller in his sermon, Comfort in Calamity, says, " God permitteth the foundations to be destroyed, because he knows he can wn-destroy them, I mean rebuild them." Sylvester, the translater of the " Divine " Du Bartas, the delight of Shakespeare's contemporaries, uses to un-olde for to re- juvenate ; Minde-gladding fruit that can un-oldo a man. Du Bartas, edition of 1611, p. 608. f Clumsy as are some of these compounds, the French are sometimes driven to employ combinations even more unwieldly. C/iinese-swgar-cane may be en- dured, but canne-d-sucre-de-la-Chine can only be paralleled by our mongrel pocket-hand-her-chief. Sylvester is remarkable for the boldness of his agglutinations. In his series of sonnets, "The Miracle of Peace," we find "the In-one-Christ-baptized," "the selfe-weale-wounding Lance," " th' yerst-most-prince-loyal people," and others 'jot less extraordinary. COMPOSITION OF W0KD8. 205 has occasioned the I'abrication of many extremely clumsy ■words, and the newly awakened zeal for the study of Anglo- Saxon and Old-English will probably lead to somewhat similar results in our tongue. The principles of composi- tion may then be considered to have a prospective, if not an immediate, practical bearing on English etymology, and I will illnstrate some of them by examples drawn from the German, which exhibit their actual application in more tan- gible and intelligible shapes than the present scientific dia- lect of English presents. Take, for instance, the idea of fluidity. The Anglo-Saxon and the Old-German had no sub- stantive to express this notion, the condition of being fluid, but tbey used the specific words water, oil, and the like, in- stead of framing a generic term to express them all. Science has taught that, besides the gross, heavy, visible, incompres- sible fluids, water and oil, there are other more ethereal sub- stances, possessing the quality of fluidity, that is of flowing and spreading indefinitely when only partially confined, and which are, besides, light and highly compressible, elastic, and, usually, invisible and apparently inadhesive. Of such fluids, common air, and the more recently detected gases, are famil- iar examples. Before the essential character of the gases was understood, English had borrowed the word fluidity from the Latin, to denote the most obvious and striking character- istic of water, oil, and other like bodies, and the Germans had formed from the native verb flies sen, to flow, a cor- responding substantive, Fliissigkeit, which is applied both to the property of fluidity and to bodies which possess it. The knowledge of the character of gaseous fluids rendered it desirable to contrive some means of grouping under separate denominations the two classes, namely, the incompressible, unelastie, visible, and the compressible, elastic, and invisible 206 SCIENTIFIC COMPOUNDS. fluids. Ill English, we have not yet distinguished them, ex cept by adding the epithets elastic, gaseous, compressible, or inelastic, incompressible ; but in Germany compound adjec- tives have been framed, which, clothed in an English form, would answer to elastic-Jkiid substances and droppcMe-jluid substances, or, those which left free expand themselves like air, and those which can be dropped or poured out, like wa- ter. In English we confine the appellation liquid to these latter, but we a:^^\j fluid indiscriminately to both. Thus we call oil and water liquids, but we cannot speak of air and the simple gases as liquids, though in poetry the phrase liquid ether and the like are used ; but on the other hand, we apply • the substantive and adjective _^i(? to air, water, and oil alike. Doubtless the period is not far distant when the elastic and the inelastic fluids will be distinguished by appropriate des- ignations in English, though it may be hoped less cumbrous ones than the German, and we shall also probably have spe- cific generalizations for the watery and the oleaginous fluids. However desirable it may be to recover the ancient plas- ticity of the Anglo-Saxon speech, and to restore to circulation many of its obsolete most expressive words, yet the preva- lence, among English scholars, of a purism as exclusive as that of Germany, would be a serious injury to the language, as indeed I think it is in German itself, though of course a far less evil in a harmonious and unmixed speech like the German, than in one fundamentally composite, and to use a legal term, repugnant, like ours. German is singularly ho- mogeneous and consistent in its vocabulary and its structure, and the desire to strengthen and maintain its oneness of char- acter is extremely natural with those to whom it is vernacu- lar. The essential unity of its speech gives its study im- mense value as both a philological and an intellectual disci- UNITY OF GEEMAN. 207 plinc, and it has powerfully contributed to tiie eminently national and original character of a literature, which, for a century, has done more to widen the sphere of human knowl- edge, and elevate the habitual range of human thought, than the learning and the intellect of all the world besides. I thinlv, nevertheless, that it has purchased its present linguistic purity at some cost of clearness and precision of expression, perhaps even at some loss of distinctness of thought. Although it must be admitted, that facility of word-coin- age is in many respects a great linguistic convenience, it is quite another question whether, in philosophical exactness of meaning, any thing is gained by using words derived from or compounded of roots so familiar that they continually force upon us their often trivial etymology, and thus withdraw our attention from the figurative or abstract meaning which we seek to impose upon them. "We express most moral affections, most intellectual func- tions and attributes, most critical categories and most scien- tific notions, by words derived from Greek and Latin primi- tives. Such words do not cany their own definition with them, and to the mere English student they are purely arbi- trary in their signification.* The scientific writer who intro- duces or employs them, may so define his terms as to attach to them the precise idea he wishes to convey, and the reader or hearer receives the word unaccompanied by any incon- gruous image suggested by its root-form. Where, on the contrary, words applied to so noble uses are derived from common and often vulgar roots, from the vocabulary of the market, the kitchen or the stable, the thoughts of the reader must be frequently disturbed by gross or undignified images, * See Lecture IV. 208 SCIENTIFIC COMPOUNDS. called forth by an etymology drawn from tlie names of famil- iar and humble objects and processes. Take, for instance, the geographical meaning of the Latin-English words, longi- tude and latitude. The ancients supposed the torrid and the frigid zones to be uninhabitable and even impenetrable by man, but while the earth, as known to them, was bounded westwardly by the Atlantic Ocean, it extended indefinitely towards the east. The dimensions of the habitable world, then, (and ancient geography embraced only the home of man, rj oivovfievTj,) were much greater, measured from west to east, than from south to north. Accordingly, early geog- raphers called the greater dimension, or the east and west line, the lengthy longitudo, of the earth, the shorter di- mension, or the north and south line, they denominated its hreadth, latitudo. These Latin terms are retained in the modern geography of most European nations, but with a modified meaning. The north or south distance of any point on the earth's surface from the equator is the north or south latitude of that point. The east or west distance be- tween two lines drawn perpendicularly to the equator, through two points on the earth's surface, is the east or west longi- tude of those points from each other. Latitude and longitude etymologically indeed mean hreadth and lengthy yet in their use in English, their form does not suggest to the student their primary radical signification, and he attaches to them no meaning whatever but their true scientific import. The employment of the English terms Ireadih and length, to de- note respectively north and south and east and west distance on the surface of a sphere, would, in the present advanced state of our knowledge, be a perversion of the true meaning of words. Tet this is exactly what German purism does when it rejects the precise, philosophic longitude and lati- GEEMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATUEE. 209 tilde, substitutes for them the vague and inaccurate terms Liinge and Breite, length and breadth, and says, accord- ingly, that St. Petersburg lies in sixty degrees of north hreadtk, and twenty-eight of east length from Paris. Still more pal- pable is this abuse of speech when a different form of ex- pression is employed, and we are told that the Ireadth of the city of N"ew York is 41°, its length T4° W.* In like manner, the English adjective great and the Ger- man gross are both, in their proper signification, appli- cable only to objects which, as tested by the ordinary stan- dards of comparison, are large, and their nouns, greatness in the one language, Gross e in the other, are strictly conjugate in meaning. In the philosophic dialect of English and the Eomance languages, we employ magnitude as the scientific equivalent of sise, dimensions. Magnitude is derived from the Latin magnus, great, but that etymology is not so familiar to English ears as to attach to the word magnitude the idea of relatively large bulk, and we apply the term, without a sense of incongruity, to the dimensions of any ob- ject however small. The Geimans use Gross e as the scientific equivalent of magnitude, and in this they pervert language in the same way we should do, in speaking of the greatness of niicroscopic animalculae so small that a hundred of them could lie on the point of a pin. So in chemistry and in the language of industrial art, to calcine signifies to reduce, by longer or shorter exposure to * I do not know whether the Germans or the Dutch were the first to trans- late longitude and latitude by natiTe words of their respective tongues. The earliest examples I have noted of the use of modern equivalents of these words are in Dapper, Beschrijving van Pcrsie, 1672. De stadt Derbend is gelegen op delengte van vijf en tachtig graden, en op de noorder breete van een en veertigh graden, dertigh minuten. — p. 20. 14 210 GEEMAJT SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATTJEK heat, metals and other bodies popidarly considered incombue- tible, to a friable condition. The burning of lime is a familiar instance of calcination, and in fact calcine is derived from calx, the Latin word for lime. Burnt limestone, and the substances to which metals and many other bodies are re- duced by heat, having a certain resemblance to each other in consistence and other properties, were conceived to be chem- ically related, and therefore the name of calx was applied to these substances in the dialect of the alchemists, and passed from their laboratories into the language of common life. The English verb calcine, to us, to whom the etymology of the word is not always present, expresses precisely the reduction of incombustible substances to the state of a calx. The modern German uses, instead of the alchemical calcini- ren, the verb verkalken derived from Kalk, lime, which is no doubt allied to the Latin calx, and probably enough derived from it. But Kalk has not the significa- tion of calx, and the verb verkalken, therefore, properly means to reduce to lime, not to bring to the condition of a calx, which latter acceptation the scientific purists have arbi- trarily, and in violation of the principles of their own lan- guage, imposed upon it. "We have some, but, happily, not many similar examples in the received scientific dialect of English. Our substan- tive acid, for instance, is Latin, but for want of a native term, we employ it as a conjugate noun to the adjective smr, and it has become almost as familiar a word as sour itself. Chemistry adopted acid as the technical name of a class of bodies, of which those first recognized in science were distin- guished by sourness of taste. But as chemical knowledge advanced, it was discovered that there were compounds pre- GERMAN SCIENTIFIC NOSIENCLATUEE. 211 cisely analogous in essential character, whicli were not sour, and consequently acidity was but an accidental quality of some of these bodies, not a necessary or universal charac- teristic of all. It was thought too late to change the name, and accordingly in aU the European languages the term acid, or its etymological equivalent, is now applied to rock-crys- tal, quarts, and flint. In like manner, from a similar mis- application of sait, in scientific use, chemists class the sub- stance of which junk-bottles, French mirrors, windows and opera-glasses are made, among the salts, while, on the other hand, analysts have declared that the essential character, not only of other so called salts, but of common kitchen-salt, the salt of salts, had been mistaken, that salt is not a salt, and accordingly have excluded that substance from the class of bodies upon which, as their truest representative, it had be- stowed its name."" The attempt to press into the service of the exact sciences words taken from the vocabulary of common life is thus seen to be objectionable, because such words are incapable of scientific precision and singleness of meaning, and, moreover, as in the instances cited, they often express entirely false notions of physical fact. With respect to compounds of trivial roots, it must be admitted that they are advantageously employed as the names of familiar material or immaterial objects and processes, * Es ist heutzutage nicht mehr moglich eine Definizion einer " Saure " oder eines " Salzes" zn geben, welche alle Korper, die man als Sauren oder Salze bezeichnet, in sich einachliesst. Wir haben Sauren welche geschmacklos sind, welche die Pflanzenfarben nicht rothen, welche die Alkalien nicht neutralisiren ; es gibt Sauren, in denen Sauerstoff ein Bestandtheil ist und in denen der Was- serstoff fehlt, in anderen ist Wasaerstoff, kein Sauerstoff. Der Begriff von Salz ist zuletzt so verkehrt geworden, dass man dahinkam das Kochsalz, das Salz aller Salze, von dem die andem den Namen haben, aus der Eeihe der eigentli- chen Salze auazuschliessen. Liebig, Chemische Briefe, Vierte Auflage, I., 96. 212 GEEMAN SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATUEE. of a somewhat complex but not abstruse nature. Tlius sUxumr Joai! is a better word tban the Greco-Freneb pyroscapbe, the German Vorgefiibl than presentiment. So Englisli physicians would have done more wisely in adopting the plain descriptive compounds, day-Mindness and nighi-Mind- ness, w^hich, as appellations of certain affections of the sight, explain themselves, than to borrow the Greek nyctalo- pia, which has been applied by some writers to one of these maladies, by others to its converse, and which, as we learn from Isidore, the grandson of the great King Theodoric, was just as equivocal twelve hundred and fifty years ago as it is to-day. But in the use of these words in the dialect of science, in their application to abstract or obscure philosophical con- ceptions, the inappropriateness of a nomenclature derived from familiar roots is often very obvious. Our English word anat- omy, which, referred to its Greek original, means simply cut- ting up, has come to have the signification of carefully dis- secting, separating, or laying open by the knife, the frame- work, tissues and vessels of animal bodies with a view of studying the structure and functions of their organs ; and all this is fairly implied and felt by every speaker or hearer, whenever the word is uttered, nor does it suggest to the mind any other possible signification, or call up any alien image. Many German writers have chosen to repudiate this so ex- pressive, definite, and strictly philosophic word, and to sub- stitute for it the compound Zergliederungskunst, which, dressed in an English form, would be equivalent to the Artrof -dismembering, or more exactly, the Vnlirnbing- a/rt. ISTow this unwieldy compound rather expresses the act oi dissecting, the .mechanical part of anatomy, and some there- fore have thought it necessary to employ another word, GEEMAlf SCIENTIFIC NOMENCLATITEE. 213 Zergliederungswissenscliaft, the knowledge or sci- ence of unlimbing, to indicate the scientific purpose and character of anatomy, which is so happily implied in what to as is a purely arbitrary word. "WTienever a derivative or compound term may, without violence, have several meanings, it is a matter of considera- ble difficulty for those to whom all these meanings are, so to speak, instinctively familiar, to confine their intellectual con- ceptions strictly to one, but, to the English student, anatomy is practically not a compound. He does not refer it to its etymological source, and to him it can mean nothing but scientific dissection ; nor can the word suggest any image not appropriately belonging to that idea. In the nomenclature of Chemistry, to designate the bod- ies, which, because analysis is not yet carried beyond them, are provisionally denominated simple substances, we employ Greek compounds, giving to them, by formal definition, and therefore arbitrarily, a precise, distinct, rigorously scientific meaning, excluding all other direct or collateral, proper or figurative, significations. In the German chemical nomen- clature, these bodies are designated by Teutonic compounds derived from roots as trivial as any in the language. The words carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, employed in Eng- lish, do not recall then- etymology, and their meaning is gath- ered only from technical definition. They express the entire scientific notion of the objects they stand for, and are abridged definitions, or rather signs of definition, of those objects. They are to the English student as purely intellectual sjth- bols as the signs of addition, subtraction, and equality in Al ■ gebra, or, to use a more appropriate simile, as their initials C for carbon, H for hydrogen, O for oxygen, and the like, 214 GERMAN SCIENTITIO NOMENCLATt BE. which, in conjunction with numerals, are used in expressing quantitative proportions in primary combinations. The cor- responding German compounds, Kohl-Stoff, "Wasser- Stoff, Sauer-Stoff, and Stick-Stoff, coal-stuff, wa- ter-stuff, sour-stuff and choTce-stuff, express, each, only a single one of the characteristics of the body to which they are applied, to say nothing of the unphilosophical tendency of thus grossly materializing and vulgarizing our conception of agencies so subtile and so ethereal in their nature.* * The use of the new German technical terms is subject to this further incon- venience, that the compound will not admit the adjectival form, and of course the noun is without a, conjugate attributive. While, therefore, a German may say, in pure Teutonic, for anatomy, the Art-of-dismembering ; for astronomy. Star-knowledge ; for geography, Earth-knowledge and Earth-description, (either of which by the way may as properly apply to soil or rock as to the globe,) yet when he has occasion for a corresponding adjective, he must resort to the Greek compounds anatomisoh, astronomisch, geographisch, and thus he introduces confusion into his scientific dialect, and loses whatever had been gained by the introduction of native compound nouns. So, in expressing tlie quantitative proportions determined by ultimate analysis in chemistry, he uses H and 0, the initials of hydrogen and oxygen, to represent those bodies, and the student of chemistry is taught that H stands for Wasserstoff, for Sauerstoif, and so of the rest. The puristico-descriptive nomenclature seems to have reached its acme in Volger's vocabulary of Crystallography. (Krystallographie, Stuttgart, 1854.) In another of his works, this author describes a form of Boracite, a solid of sixty-two sides, as the linkstimplig-hockertimplige, wurflig-kugel- timplige, rechts-timplige Knochling, and another variety of the same crystal as the linkstimplig-hockertimplig-knochlige, rechts- kugeltimplige, wiirflige (rechte) Timpling, the meaning of which would not be altogether obvious even to his countrymen, had he not mformed us that in the Niederdeutsche Mundart, Timpel signifies Zipfel, or scharfe Ecke. Volger, Monographic des Borazites, p. 120. Kenngott (Synonyraik der Krystallographie XXXY.) gives us this example of the application of Volger's nomenclature to a still more complicated form of crystallization; "Einplattliger, querstutzlig-stutzliger, querhooh- dachliger, quermitteldachliger, querhochthiirmliger, |uermit- telthiirmliger, querniederthiirmliger, schlankzinkliger, nieder- zinkliger, quaderligzweifachquerkantliger Idokras-Querling," »nd even this string of hard words leaves the form of the mineral but half de- GEEtMAif SCIENTIFIO NOMENCLATUEE. 215 It is no answer to tlie objections I am urging to say that habit reconciles us to the scientific use of unscientific terms ; that they at length, when employed in combination with other words of art, sink their etymology, so to speak, and cease to suggest disturbing images ; for just in the same pro- portion as they do this they cease to be descriptive at all, and the only argument left for theii- use is that of a form more in harmony with the ordinary orthoepical combinations of the language, an argument certainly not to be weighed against the obvious disadvantages of a vocabulary, which is not only trivial, but which scientific discovery is constantly showing to have been founded on false analogies, and erroneous theory. There is, it must be admitted, a convenience in the dou- ble forms of some part of the German neologistic nomen- clatiire, as for example in the distinction between Erd- scribed. In justice to our author, it ought to be observed that, long as his technical words are, they are much shorter than some of those employed by others. Thus Schiibliug, shoveling, is a trifle compared to pentagontriaHste- tetraeder, and K e i 1 i n g , wedgeling, has the like advantage over quadratic-sphenoid- iii-TUtrmal-position. Besides these, VolgerusesSchragling, slantling, T h u r m I i n g , towerling, Dachling, roofiing, Eckling, cornerling, and many more of like coinage, by all which More is meant than meets the ear. It is to be regretted that our author does not consistently adhere to the princi- ples of a system which he has taken such pains to elaborate, and it is not easy to see why he should speak of Halurgen and die halurgische Geologic, when he had so good etymological material as Salz to work upon. The philosophers of Holland have exhibited a greater degree of etymological courage than their German brethren. They have framed conjugate adjective.'' for their newly formed scientific compound nouns, and thus built up such words as ontleedkundig for area^wnica?, de proefonder vindelijke weteu- schappen for the experimental sciences, in which last heptasyllable, indeed, the radical word proef is probably not indigenous, but borrowed from the Latin through the French. See Afpendix, 36. 316 EQUIVOCAL WOEDS. kunde, the knowledge of the earth, and Erdbeschrei- bung, the description of the earth. These ideas are indeed logically distinguishable, because, we may know that which we do not undertake to describe, and we may undertake to describe that which we know, or, as experience unhappily too often shows, that which we do not know ; but it is by no means clear that there is any advantage in having a separate word for the expression of every distinguishable shade of hu- man thought. True it is, as is observed by Coleridge, that " by familiarizing the mind to equivocal expressions, that is, such as may be taken in two or more different meanings, we introduce confusion of thought, and furnish the sophist with his best and handiest tools. For the juggle of sophistry consists, for the greater part, in using a word in one sense in the premises, and in another sense in the conclusion." But it is equally true, as the same great master elsewhere remarks, that " It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish." Tlie ramific'ations and subdivisions of our vocabulary must end somewhere. The permutations and combinations of articulate sounds are not infinite, nor can the human memory retain an unlimited number of words. It is inevitable that in some cases one word must serve to ex- press different ideas, and if they be ideas, from the occa- sional confusion of which no danger to any great moral or intellectual principle is to be feared, we must be content to trust to the intelligence of our hearers to distinguish for them- selves. There is much intellectual discipline in the mere use of language. The easiest disciplines are not necessarily the best, and therefore a vocabulary so complete as never to ex- ercise the sagacity of a reader, by obliging him to choose between two meanings, either of which is possible, would EQUIVOCAL WORDS. 217 aiibrd very little training to faculties, of wliose culture speech is of itself the most powerful instrument.* * Few will deny that the French chemical nomenclature of Lavoisier's time, which spread so rapidly over Europe, was a highly beneficial improvement in the vocabulary of the branch of knowledge to which it was applied, but it operated in some respects both injuriously to that science and unjustly to the fam? of the philosophers whose discoveries had made chemistry what it was. It produced a complete severance between the old and the new, a hiatus in the history, and an apparent revolution in the character, of the science, which has led recent times to suppose that futile alchemy ended, and philosophical chem- istry began, with the adoption of the new nomenclature. The reader will find some interesting observations on this point in Liebig's Chemische Briefe, 4te., Auflage, Brief III. LECTURE X. THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. III. The aphorism, popularly, but perhaps erroneously, ascribed to Buffon, " The style is the man," is a, limited application of the general theory, that there is such a relation between the mind of man and the speech he uses, that a perfect knowl- edge of either would enable an acute psychological philolo- gist to deduce and construct the other from it. The distiac- tive characteristics of nations or races employing different tongues, so far as we are able to account for them, are due to causes external to the individual, though common in their operation to the whole people, such as climate, natural pro- ductions, modes of life dependent on soil and climate, or, in short, physical conditions. We might then admit this theory, without qualification, il it were once established that the langiiage of a people is altogether a natural product of their physical constitution and circumstances, and that its character depends upon laws as material as those which determine the hue and growth of the hair, the color of the eyes and skin, the musical quality of the human voice, or the inarticulate cries of the lower an- LANGUAGE AND CHAEACTEE. 219 imals. But those who believe that there is in man a life above organization, a spirit above nature, will be slow to allow that his only instrument for the outward manifestation of his mightiest intellectual energies and loftiest moral aspi- rations, as well as his sole means of systematic culture for the intellect and heart, can be the product of a mode of physical being, which, though in some points superior in degree, is yet identical in kind, with that shared also by the lowest of the brutes that acknowledge him as their lord and master. jSTor is the theory in question at all consistent with observed facts ; for while nations, not distinguished by any marked differences of physical structure or external condi- tion, use languages characterized by wide divei'sities of vo- cabulary and syntax, individuals in the same nation, the same household, even, display striking dissimilarities of per- son, of intellect, and of temper, and yet, in spite of percep- tible variations in articulation, and in the choice and colloca- tion of words, speak in the main not only one language, but one dialect. History presents numerous instances of a com- plete revolution in national character, without any radical change in the language of the people, and, contrariwise, of persistence of character with a great change in tongue. The forms of speech, which the slavish, and therefore deservedly enslaved, Koman of the first century of our era employed in addressing Tiberius, were as simple and direct as those of a soldier would have been in conversing with his centurion in the heroic age of Eegulus. The Icelander of the twelfth cen- tury carried the law of blood for blood as far as the Corsican cr the Kabyle of the nineteenth, and when his honor was piqued, or his passions roused, he was as sanguinary in his temper as the Spaniard, the Anizeh-Arab, or the Ashantee. His descendants, speaking very nearly the same dialect, are so 220 LANGUAGE AST) CHAEACTEE. mucli softened in character, that violence is almost unkL.^wn among them, and when, a few years since, a native was con- demned to death, not one of his countrymen could be induced to act as the minister of avenging justice. On the other hand, it would be difficult to make out any difference of character, habits, or even ethical system, between the Bedouin of the present day and his ancestors in the time of Abraham and of Job, and yet his language has unquestionably under gone many great changes. The relations between man and his speech are not capable of precise formulation, and we cannot perhaps make any nearer approach to exact truth than to say, that while every people has its general analogies, every individual has his pe- culiar idiosyncrasies, physical, mental and linguistic, and that mind and speech, national and individual, modify and are modified by each other, to an extent, and by the operation of laws, which we are not yet able to define, though, in par- ticular instances, the relation of cause and effect can be con- fidently affirmed to exist. But in the midst of this uncertainty, we still recognize the workifig of the great principle of diversity in unity, which characterizes all the operations of the creative mind, and though every man has a dialect of his own, as he has his own special features of character, his distinct peculiarities of shape, gait, tone, and gesture, in short, the individualities which make him John and not Peter, yet over and above all ihese, he shares in the general traits which together make up 'the unity of his language, the unity of his nation. " Unity of speech," says a Danish writer, " is a necessary condition of the independent development of a people, and the coex- istence of two langusvges in a political state is one of the greatest national misfortunes. Every race has its own or UlfITT OF NATIONAI. LANGUAGE. 221 ganic growth, whicli impresses its own peculiar form on the religious ideas and the philosophical opinions of the people, on their political constitution, their legislation, their customs, and the expression of aU these individualities is found in the speech. In this are embalmed that to which they have as- pired, that to which they have attained. There we find the record of their thought, its comprehension, wealth and depth, the life of the people, the limits of their culture, their appe- tencies and their antipathies, whatsoever has germinated, fructified, ripened and passed away among them, yes, even their short-comings and their trespasses. The people and their language are so con-natural, that the one thrives, changes, perishes with the other." So far our author, and with the allowances to be made for the exaggeration into which writers are often led by their enthusiasm for their subject, his views are entitled to general concurrence. We think by words, and therefore thought and words cannot but act and react on each other. As a man speaks, so he thinks, and as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. ' '" ' It is evident, therefore, that unity of speech is essential to the unity of a people. Community of language is a stronger bond than identity of religion or of government, and con- temporaneous nations of one speech, however formally sepa- rated by differences of creed or of political organization, are essentially one in culture, one in tendency, one in influence. The fine patriotic effusion of Amdt, " "Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland," was founded upon the idea that the oneness of the Deutsche Zunge, the German speech, implied a oneness of spirit, of interest, of aims and of duties, and the universal acceptance with which the song was received was evidence . that the poet had struck a chord to which every Teutonic heart responded. The national language is the key to the 222 LANGUAGE AND CHAEAOTEE. national intellect, the national heart, and it is the special vo- cation of what is technically called philology, as distinguished from linguistics, to avail itself of the study of language as a means of knowing, not man in the abstract, but man as col- lected into distinct communities, infornied with the same spirit, exposed to the same moulding influences, and pursuing the same great objects by substantially the same means. "Wp are certainly not authorized to conclude that all the individ uals of a nation are altogether alike because they speak the same mother-tongue, but their characters presumably resem- ble each other as nearly as the fragments of the common language which each has appropriated to his own use. Every individual selects from the general stock his own vo- cabulary, his favorite combinations of words, his own forms of syntax, and thus frames for himself a dialect, the outward expression of which is an index to the inner life of the man. No two Englishmen, Germans or Frenchmen speak and act in all points alike, yet in character as well as in speech, they would generally be found to have more points of sympathy and resemblance with each other, than either of them with any man of a different tongue. The relations between the grammatical structure or general idiom of a language and the moral and intellectual charac- ter of those who speak it, are usually much more uncertain and obscure than the connection between the particular words, which compose their stock, and the thoughts, habits and tendencies of those who employ them. Except under circumstances where our mouths are sealed and our thoughts suppressed, from motives of prudence, of delicacy or of shame, the names of the objects dearest to the heart, the ex- pression of the passions which most absorb us, the nomencla- ture of the religious, social or political creeds or parties to LANGUAGE AND OHAEACTEK. 223 which -we have attached ourselves, will most frequently rise to the lips. Hence it is the vocabulary and the phraseological combinations of the man, or class of men, which must serve as the clue to guide us into the secret recesses of their being ; and in spite of occasional exceptions, apparent or real, it is generally true that our choice of words, as also of the special or conventional meanings of words, is determined by the character, the ruling passion, the habitual thoughts, — by the life, in short, of the man ; and in this sense Ben Jonson ut- tered a great and important truth when he said : " Language most shows a man : speak that I may see thee ! It springs out of the most retii-ed and inmost parts of us, and is the im- age of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form and likeness so true as his speech." But there is much risk of error in the too extended appli- cation of this criterion. In two cases only can we be justified in condemning a people upon the strength of indications fur- nished by their language alone. The one is that of the vol- imtary, or at least the free, selection of a debased or perverted diction, when a higher and purer one is possible ; the other, that of the non-existence of words expressive of great ideas, and this will generally be found coupled with an abundance in terms denoting, and yet not stigmatizing, gross and wicked acts and passions. There are cases where the crimes of rulers are mirrored in the speech of their subjects ;* others, where governments by a long course of corruption, oppression, and tyranny, have stamped upon the language of their people, or at least upon * " 'Tis you that say it, not I. You do the deeds, And your ungodly deeds find me the words. Sophocles, as translated by Milton. 224: LANGUAGE OF ITALY. its temporary conventionalities, a tone of hypocrisy, false- hood, baseness, that clings to the tongue, even after the spirit of the nation is emancipated, and it is prepared to vindicate, by deeds of heroism, the rights, the principles, the dignity of its manhood. I think the language of Italy is a case in point. Landor argues the profound and hopeless depravity of the Italians from the abject character of their complimentary and social dialect, and the phraseology expressive of their relations with their rulers or other superiors, as well as from the pompous style by which they magnify the importance of things in themselves insignificant, and their constant use of superla- tives and intensives, with reference to trifling objects and occasions. Were it true, that the Lombards, the Piedmon- tese, the Tuscans and the Komans of the present day had not inherited, but freely adopted, the dialect, of which Lan- dor gives a sort of anthology, it would argue much in favor of his theory.* A bold and manly and generous and trutli- * The Imaginary Conversations of Landor are a very indifferent authority upon questions of fact, whatever opinions may be entertained concerning them as stand- ards in criticism, in language, or in morals. But a physiognomist may refer to a caricature for an illustration of the connection between moral traits and the physical features by which they are indicated, and I may, with at least equal propriety, cite the exaggerations of Landor as exemplifying the manner in which external causes may corrupt language, and, through it, the morality of those who use it. The metamorphosis of the frank, straightforward speech of ancient Eomc into the cringing form which it has in modern times adopted, is the natural con- sequence of centuries of tyrannies, that have crushed not so much the bodies, as the souls of men who have so long groaned hopelessly under them. But whatever may have been the character of the Italians, when Landor wrote the dialogue from which I have taken these examples, he would grossly misjudge their countrymen of this generation, who should infer that because the language has not yet recovered its native majesty, the people is not ripe for an enno- bling revolution. The habitual speech of the Italians is, at present, by no means of so unmanly a character as the author in question represents it, and LAITGTJAGE OF ITALY. 225 ful people certainly M-ould not choose to say umiliaro una supplica,to humiliate a supplication, for, to present a memorial ; to style the strength which awes, and the finesse which deeeives, alike, onesta, honesty or respectability; to speak of taking human life by poison, not as a crime, but simply as a mode of facilitating death, ajutare la morte; to employ pellegrino, foreign, for admirable; to apply to a small garden and a cottage the title of un podere, a power ; to call every house with a large door, un palazzo, a palace; a brass ear-ring, una gioja, a joy ; a present of a bodkin, un regalo, a royal munificence; an altera- tion in a picture, un pentimento, a repentance ; a man of honor, un uomo di gar bo, a well-dressed man; a ■ lamb's fry, una cosa stupenda, a stupendous thing; or a message sent by a footman to his tailor, through a scullion, una ambasciata, an embassy. We must distinguish between cases where words expres- sive of great ideas, mighty truths, do not at all exist in a language, and those where, as in Italy, the pressure of exter- nal or accidental circumstances has compelled the disuse or even when expressions, which jar with the self-respect of a citizen of » free state, are employed, they are not usually accompanied with a fawning or de- gradingly deferential manner, or an ostentatious sacrifice of the rights of private opinion and private interest. The leaven of French democracy, which, however unsparing in its career of overthrow at home, was a beneficent influence in the Italian peninsula, is still at work ; the last quarter of a century has brought the principles of civil and religious liberty within the intelligence, and commended them to the heart, of the masses ; occasion only has long been wanting ; the re- cent outrage perpetrated by the Papal government on the sanctities of domestic life, in the kidnapping of a Jewish child, will, it is to be hoped, hasten the dawn of the day when the whole Ausonian people shall be transformed, transfigured we may say, into what Milton describes as " a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strongman after sleep and shaking her invincible locks." Then they will reassert their claim to the divine rights of humanity, and then their speech, like themselves, will burst its fetters and become once more as grand and as heroic as it is beautiful. 15 226 ETHICAL CHABACTEE OF WOEDS. misapplication of such, and the habitual employment of the baser part of the national vocabulary. Where grand w^rds are found in a speech, there grand thoughts, noble purposes, high resolves exist also, or, at the least, the spark slumbers, which a favoring breath may kindle into a cherishing or a devouring flame. Every individual is, in a sense, a natural product of the people to whom he belongs, and the brave and good, who have so long pined in the dungeons of Naples and of Rome, are a sufficient proof that the oppression which has lopped the flower, has failed to extirpate the root, of Italian virtue. For the purposes of intellectual, moral, and especially religious culture, a speech must possess appropriate words for the expression of all mental, ethical and spiritual states and processes, and where such a nomenclature is totally wanting, there is no depth of depravity which we are not authorized to infer from so deplorable a deficiency of the means of ap- prehension, reflection and instruction, concerning the cardi- nal interests, and highest powers and perceptions of human- ity. It is in the non-existence of words of this class, that missionaries, and other teachers of Christianity and civiliza- tion, have found the most formidable obstacles to the propa- gation of intellectual and religious light and truth among the heathen. Even the Greek, with all its wealth of words, had, as Wesley long ago observed, no term for the Christian vir- tue of humility, until the Apostie to the Gentiles framed one for it, and for this the moral poverty of the classic speech compelled him to resort to a root conveying the idea, not of self-abasement in the consciousness of utter imworthiness in the sight of a pure and holy God, but of positive debase- ment, meanness, and miserableness of spirit. ETHICAL CHAEACTER OF WOEDS 227 Let us suppose a people cursed with a speecli wliicla had no terms corresponding to the ideas of holiness, faith, venera- tion, conscience, truth, justice, dignity, love, mercy, benevo- lence, or their contraries. Could its moral teachers frame an ethical system founded on qualities, whose very existence their language, and of course the conscious self-knowledge of the people, did not recognize ? Could they enforce the duty of truthfulness in word and deed ; of a reverential def- erence to what is great and worthy in man ; of love and adoration for the immeasurably higher and better attributes of the Deity ; of charity, of philanthropy, of patience, and of resignation, in a tongue which possessed no terms to de- note the moral and the religious virtues ? But even these alone would not render a language an adequate medium for the communication of all moral doctrine. Men must learn to fear, hate and abhor that which is evil, as well as to love and follow after that which is good; and to this end, the vices, as well as the virtues, nmst have names by which they can be described and held up as things to be di-eaded, loathed and shunned. We regard the Hebrew-Greek dic- tion of the New Testament as eminently plain and simple, and so indeed it is, as compared with the general dialect of Greek literature ; but what a richness of vocabulary does it display with respect to all that concerns the moral, the spir- itual, and even the intellectual interests of humanity ! What a range of abstract thought, what an armory of dialectic weapons, what an enginery of vocal implements for operat- ing on the human soul, do the Epistles of the learned Paul exhibit ! The Gospel of the unschooled John throws for- ward most conspicuously another phase of language ; for, as Paul appeals to the moral, through the intellectual faculties, 228 ETHICAL CHAKACTEE OF -,V0ED8. John, on the other hand, finds his way to the head by the channel of the heart, and his diction is of course in great part composed of the words which describe or excite the sensi- bilities, the better sympathies of our nature. Ifow the respec- tive dialects of these two apostles could have existed only as the result of a long course of mental and religious training in the races who used the speech employed by them, and where such training has not been enjoyed, there no such vocabulary can be developed, and of course no such doctrine expressed Hence the translation of the Eible into the tongues of nations of low moral training has been found a matter of ex- ceeding difficulty, and, in many instances, the translators have been obliged to content themselves with veiy loose ap- proximations to the expression of the religious ideas of Chris- tianity, with mere provisional phrases, which they necessarily employ for the time, and until, with more advanced mental culture, there shall grow up also a greater compass ot vocab- ulary, and a fuller development of a dialect suited to convey moral as well as intellectual truth. And hence it is that in the propagation of a religion which appeals so powerfully to the thought, the sympathies and the conscience of men, edu- cation and Christianization must go hand in hand ; for the teacher cannot reach the heart of his pupil, until they have mutually aided each other in creating a common medium, through which they can confer on the deep matters of moral and spiritual truth. The French boast that they have no word for tribe, and hence argue that they are less accessible than other men to that species of official corruption, of which a pecuniary, or other material consideration, is the reward. But has not the reproach implied in the very word a useful influence in brmg ETHlOAl CHAEACTEE OF WOEDS. 229 ing the act to the consciousness of men as a shame and a sin's Can we fully comprehend the evil chaiacter of a wrong, untU we have given it a specific objective existence by assigning to it a name, which shall serve at once to designate and con- demn? And do not the jocular pot de vin, and other vague and trivial phrases, by which, in the want of a proper term to stigmatize the crime, French levity expresses it, in- dicate a lack of sensibility to the heinous nature of the trans- gression, and gloss over, and even half commend, the recep- tion of unlawful fees, as at worst but a venial ofience, the disgrace of which lies more in the detection than in the com- mission ? * I drew your attention, on a former occasion, to the re- markable completeness of the technical vocabulary of Chris- tianity in Anglo-Saxon, as exemplified in the old translation of the Gospels ; and I think it is much to be regretted that the great English theologians of the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries did not endeavor, at a period when it would have been comparatively easy, to infuse a stiE. larger propor- tion of the native element into the moral and spiritual no- menclature they adopted. The extent to which Latin was used in theology by the Saxons themselves, seriously inter- fered with the tormation of a vocabulary adapted to the met- aphysics of Christianity, and we must remember that, as Latin was the only common language, and practicable means • When Justinian negotiated with the Persian ambassador Isdiagunas that ehameful convention, by which he purchased a truce of five years for two thou- sand pounds of gold, it was at first proposed that the money should be paid iu annual instalments of four hundred pounds, but upon further consideration, it was thought better to pay the whole at once, in order that it might be called a present, rather than a tribute. Ta yap alaxpa ovi/iar a, says Procopius, 6v ra T piy ixar a dt^Aaffip &p^panoi 4k tov i-jrtTr\ei{TToy aiffx^J'^0'^J)e at on. In gret loue longe y now, wan yt nolde o|)er gon. ' P. 161. So that the king & he Were there so at on us hii mizte bise P. 509. Many similar examples may be found in other early English writers. I hava not observed the noun atonement in any writer before Tyndal (1526) who em- ploys it in Komaua t. 11. It is not found in the Wycliffite Torsions, I belieTO. Coverdale (1536) uses it, in Exodus xxix. 3S, Leviticus iv. 20, 26, Komans v. 11, and in several other passages. It also occurs in the life of Edward V., as- cribed to Sir Thomas More, in Hardyng's Chronicles, 1543, p. il6 of EUis'a leprint. RELIGIOUS TEEMS. 231 older Gothic roots wLicli involve the notion of expiation, furnishes some reason to suspect that the real origin of the word lies further back, though we cannot trace it to any known Saxon radical. God, good, holy, bad, evil, sin, wicked, right, wrong, love, hate,* hope, wise, true, false,t life, death, soul, heaven, hell, and their many derivatives, are all genuine Anglo-Saxon, as are also many now obsolete words, belong- ing exclusively to the Christian religion, such as Jwusel, for eucharist, aneal,X to administer extreme unction, though most * What a fine English definition of hate is that which Chaucer gives in the Persones Tale, " Hate is old wrathe." See App. 38. f We cannot perhaps make out an etymological relation between false and any Moeso-Gothic root, unless we connect it with faldan, to fold, Lat. plicare, allied to which are simplex and duplex, whence our simplicity and duplicity. But the word occurs very early in all the Scandinavian and Teutonic languages, and there are several native radicals from either of which it may be supposed to be derived, if indeed we are to believe that the name of so fundamental an idea as that of the false must necessarily be borrowed from any other word. Ihre, in arguing against the etymology from the Latin falsus, regrets that he is obliged to recognize the word as indigenous, and exclaims, Quam vellem in laudem gentis nostras dici posse, illam mendacia et fallendi artes ne nominare quidem potuisse, antequam id A Latinis didicerit ! Ihre, Lex. Suio-Goth. under falsk. The comparison of the moral significance of particular words in Anglo- Saxon and English, presents many points of interest. A single one shall suffice. Old, which is now a term of reproach, was, strange as it may seem in these fast days of Young America and Toung England, a respectful and even reverential epithet with the Anglo-Saxons ; so much so, in fact, that it was the common designation of noble, exalted, and excellent things. E a 1 d o r was often used for prince, ruler, governor; ealdordom was authority, magistracy, principality ; ealdorlic, principal, excellent ; ealdor-apostole, chief- apostle ; ealdor-burh, chief city or metropolis, andealdorman, nobleman. ^ Ele or Eel, the root of the word aneal, is generally considered an Anglo-Saxon radical, but its resemblance in form and meaning to the Latin oleum, or rather to the Greek e'Aaio;', renders it probable that the name, as well as the thing, (olive oil,') found its way from Southern Europe into the Anglo- Saxon and the cognate languages and nations, at so early a period that the history of its introduction can be no longer traced. Housel (A. S. husel) has been suspected to be connected with the Latin hostia, but the occur- rence of the word (h u n s 1) in Ulphilas seems to be a siflficient refutation of this etymology. 232 EBLIGIOUS TEEMS. of the words which Christianity ingrafted upon the religious vocabulary of Judaism, are in modern English re.prteented by derivatives from Latin or Greek radicals. Both the moral and the intellectual characteristics which the prevalence of Christian doctrine has impressed on modem civilized humanity, and the dialect belonging to that doe- trine, are so special and peculiar, that the mutual relations between mind, and speech as the expression of mind, and as also a reagent upon it, in all matters connected with religion, are traced without any very serious difficulty, but the recip- rocal influence of word and thought in other connections, is, if not more obscure, at least less familiar. Take for example the tendency, in what are fashionable, and claim to be refined, circles in this country, and perhaps even more especially in England, to the use of vague and indefinite phrases, not so much to hide a deficiency of ideas, as to cover discreet reticences of opinion, or prudent suppressions of natural and spontaneoxTS feeling. The practice of employing these empty sounds — they have no claim to be called words — is founded partly in a cautious desire of avoiding embarrassing self-com- mittals, and partly in that vulgar prejudice of polite society, which proscribes the expression of decided sentiments of admiration, approval or dissatisfaction, or of precise and definite opinions upon any subject, as contrary to the laws of good taste, indicative of a want of knowledge of the world, and, moreover, arrogant and pedantic. In this notion there is just enough of truth to disguise the falsehood of the the- ory, and to apologize for the mischievous tendencies of the practice. Doubtless, if we have no clear, decided and well- grounded opinions, no ardor of feeling, and no convictions of duty, in reference to the subject of conversation, we EEACTION OF WOEDS. 233 should modestly avoid the use of pointed language, and, at the same time, a due regard for the feelings, the prejudices, the ignorance, of others, will dictate a certain reserve and caution in the expression of opinions or sentiments which may wound their pride, or violently shock then* preposses- sions. But the habit of using vague language at all, and es- pecially the current devices for hinting much while affirming nothing, are in a high degree injurious both to precision and justness of thought, and to sincerity, frankness, and manli- ness of character. Every vague and uncertain proposition has its false side, and the confusion of thought it implies is not more offensive to good taste, than its deceptive character to sound morality, and than both to true refinement. There is a fact of immense moral significance, which seems to have been only in modern, indeed in comparatively recent times, brought into notice, and made matter of distinct consciousness, though accessible to the observation of men ever since words first had a moral meaning. Its discovery is perhaps connected with the increased attention which in- dividual words, their form and force, have received in the study of the philosophy of language. It is one of those instances where, in the progress of humanity, we come sud- denly upon the outcrop of one of those great truths, which, like some rock-strata, extend for many days' journey but a few inches beneath the surface, and then burst abruptly into fuU view.* The fact to which I allude is that language is not a dead, • Thus the iniquity of the slave-trade was suddenly brought home, as a sin, to the conscience of otherwise good men, who had for many years pursued it, without one reproachful feeling, one thought of its enormous wickedness. 23i EEACTION OF WOEDS. unelastic, passive implement, but a powee, wl^ch, lite all natural powers, reacts on that whicli it calls into exercise. It is a psychological law, though we tnow not upon what ulti- mate principle it rests, that the mere giving of verbal utter- ance to any strong emotion or passion, even if the expression be unaccompanied by any other outward act, stimulates and intensifies the excitement of feeling to that degree that when the tongue is once set free, the reason is dethroned, and brute nature becomes the master of the man.* The connection be- tween the apparently insignificant cause and the terrible effect belongs to that portion of the immaterial man, whose workings, in so many fields of moral and intellectual action, lie below our consciousness, and can be detected by no efibrt of voluntary self-inspection. But it is an undoubted fact, and a fact of whose fearful import most men become ade- quately aware only when it is almost too late to profit by the knowledge, that the forms in which we clothe the outward expression of the emotions, and even of the speculative opin- ions, within us, react with mighty force upon the heart and intellect which are the seat of those passions and those thoughts. So long as we have not betrayed by unequivocal words the secret of the emotions that sway the soul, so long as we are uncommitted by formal expressions to pai*ticular principles and opinions, so long we are strong to subdue the rising passion, free to modify the theories upon which •we aim • Spenser was not ignorant of this important law. " But tiis enemie Had kindled such coles of displeasure, That the goodman noulde stay his leasure, But home him hasted with furious heate, Encreasing his wrath with many a threate." The Shepheards Calendar, Ittruarie, 190-4, KBACTION OF WOEDS. 235 to fashion our external life. Fiery words are the hot blast that inflames the fuel of our passionatb nature, and formu- lated doctrine a hedge that confines the discursive wander- ing of the thoughts. In a personal altercation, it is most often the stimulus men give themselves by stinging words, that impels them to violent acts, and in argumentative discus- sions, we find the most convincing support to our conclusions in the internal echo of the dogmas we have ourselves pro- nounced. Hence extreme circumspection in the use of vitu- perative language, and in the adoption of set phrases imply- ing particular opinions, is not less a prudential than a moral duty, and it is equally important that we strengthen in our- selves kindly sympathies, generous impulses, noble aims, and lofty aspirations, by habitual freedom in their expression, and that Ave confirm ourselves in the great political, social, moral, and religious truths, to which calm investigation has led us, as final conclusions, by embodying them in forms of sound words. itfot merely the strongest thinkers, and ablest and most convincing reasoners, but many of the most impressive and persuasive rhetoricians of modern times, have been remarka- ble rather for moderation than exaggeration in expression. It was a maxim of Webster's, that violence of language was indicative of feebleness of thought and want of reasoning power, and it was his practice rather to understate than over- state the strength of his confidence in the soundness of his own arguments, and the logical necessity of his conclusions. He kept his auditor constantly in advance of him, by sugges- tion rather than by strong asseveration, by a calm exposition of considerations which ought to excite feeling in the heart of both speaker and hearer, not by an undignified and theat- 236 MODEEATION m LAlfGUAGE. rical exhibition of passion in himself. And this indeed .s the sound practical interpretation of the Horatian precept : Si vis me fiere, dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi. Wouldst thou unseal the fountain of my tears, Thyself the signs of grief must show. To the emotion of the hearer, the poet applies a stronger word, f 1 e r e , to weep, than to that of the speaker or actor, who best accomplishes the aims of his art by a more mitigated display of the passions he would excite in the breast of his audience. Although our inherent or acquired moral and intellectual character and tendencies, and our habitual vocabulary and forms of speech, are influential upon each other, and though both are subject to the control of the will, yet, never- theless, their reciprocal action is not usually matter of con- sciousness with us. While therefore we are Jree in the em- ployment of particular sets of words, yet as the selection of those words depends upon ohscure processes, unintelligible even to ourselves, we cannot be said, in strict propriety of speech, to choose our dialect, though we are undoubtedly re- sponsible for its moral character, because we are responsible for the moral condition which determines it. So limited is our self-knowledge in this respect, that most men would be unable to produce a good caricature of their own individual speech, and the shibboleth of our personal dialect is gen- erally unknown to ourselves, however ready we may be to I remark the characteristic phraseology of others. It is a mark of weakness, of poverty of speech, or at least of bad taste, to contimie the use of pet words, or other peculiarities of language, after we have once become conscious of them as CHOICE OF DICTION 237 such. In dialect as in dress, individuality, founded upon any thing but general harmony and superior propriety, is offensive, and good taste demands that each shall please by its total impression, not by its distinguishable details. LECTURE XI. VOCABULAKT OF THE ENGLISH LANGJAOE. IV. I ENDEAvoEED in the last lecture to point out some of tlie relations between the moral and intellectual character of na- tions or individuals and the words of a given language em- ployed at particular periods, by the people or the man. But speech is affected also by humbler, more transitory, and more superficial iniluences, and whatever care we may exercise in this respect, it is scarcely possible that our ordinary discourse should not exhibit indelible traces of the associations and ac- cidents of childhood, as well as of the occupations and the cares, the objects and studies, the material or social struggles, the triumphs or defeats, and, in short, all the external condi- tions that affect humanity in riper years. Every mode of life, too, has its technical vocabulary, which we may exclude from our habitual language, its cant which we cannot, and hence an acute observer, well schooled in men and things, can read in a brief casual conversation with strangers much of the history, as well as of the opinions, and the principles of all the interlocutors. Writers of works of fiction are much inclined to represent PEOFESSIONAL DIALECT. 239 their characters as constantly employing the langL age of their calling, and as prone to apply its technicalities to objects of an entirely diverse nature. ISTow this may, in the drama, where formal narrative, description and explanation of all sorts are to be avoided, serve as 'a convenient conventional mode of escaping the asides, the soliloqides, the confidential disclosures of the actor to his audience respecting his charac- ter, position and pnrposes, and the other awkward devices to which even the expertest histrionic artisans are sometimes obliged to resort, to make the action more intelligible. It is better that a character in a play should use professional phrases, by way of indicating his occupation, than that he should tell the audience in set words, " I am a merchant, a physician, or a lawyer," but after all, considered as a repre- sentation of the actual language of life, it is a violation of truth of costume to cram with technical words the conversa- tion of a technical man.* All men, except the veriest, narrow- est pedants in their craft, avoid the language of the shop, and a small infusion of native sense of propriety prevents the most ignorant laborer from obtruding the dialect of his art upon those with whom he communicates in reference to mat- ters not pertaining to it. Every man affects to be, if not socially above, yet intellectually independent of and superioj to, his calling, and if in this respect his speech bewray him, it will be by words used in mere joke, or by such peculiari- ties of speech, as, without properly belonging to the exercise of his profession, have nevertheless been occasioned by it. A * King James, in his treatise of the Airt of Scottis Poesie, lays down a contrary rule : And finally, quhatsumeuer be zour subiect, to vse voeabula artis, quliairby ze may the mair vivelie represent that pcrsoun, quhais pairt ze paint out.— Chap. ni. 240 SPECIAL PHEASEOLOGIES. sailor will not be likely to interlard his go-ashore talk with clew-lines, main-sheets, and halliards, but if he has occasion to mention the great free port at the head of the Adriatic, he will call it not Ti-ieste, but Tryeast ; and if he speaks of our commercial representative at a maritime town, he will be sure to style that official the American counsel, not the Amer- ican consul. In fact, classes, guilds, professions, bonow their characteristics of speech from the affectations, not the serious interests, of their way of life. Technical nomenclatm-e rarely extends beyond the sphere to which it more appropriately belongs, and the language of a nation is not perceptibly affected by the phraseology of a class, unless that class is so numerous as to constitute the ma- jority, or unless its interests are of so wide-spread and con- spicuous a nature as to be forced upon the familiar observa- tion of the whole people. England has been distinguished above all the nations of the earth for commercial enterprise and mechanical production, but her navigation is confined to the sea-coast, her manufacturing industry to comparatively restricted centres. Of course, so far as foreign trade and domestic fabrics are concerned, the names of the new objects which they have brought to the notice of all English-bom people, have become familiar to all ; but, nevertheless, we do not find that metaphors from the dialect of the sea, or tech- nicalities from the phraseology of the workshop, are much more frequent in the literature or popular speech of England than in those of countries with little navigation or mechani- cal industry. On the other hand, figures drawn from agri- culture, which is universal, and from those arts which, like spinning and weaving, the fishery and the chase, in early stages of society entered into the life of every household, NEW WORDS, EIQESr OF. 241 ai-e become essential elements of both the poetical and the everj-day dialect of every civilized people. In language, general effects are produced only by causes general in their immediate operation. Nor is the fact that new words, originated by causes local in their source and ap- parently trivial and transitory in action, not unfrequently pass into the common vocabulary of the nation, at all in conflict with this principle, for, in such cases, the general reception of the word is indicative of a general want of it, to express some common idea just making its way into dis- tinct consciousness, and waiting only for a formula, an ap- propriate mode of utterance. Whenever a people, by emigration into a different soil and climate, by a large influx of foreigners into its territory, by political or religious revolutions, or other great and com- prehensive social changes, is brought into contact with new objects, new circumstances, new cares, labors and duties, it is obviously under the necessity of framing or. borrowing new words, or of modifying the received meaning of old ones, in such way as to express the new conditions of material exist- ence, the new aims and appetencies, to which the change in question gives birth. If we could suppose the whole population of a Greek isl- and to be transported to America, dispersed among us, and, after being detained long enough to learn our language and forget their own, to be restored to their native soil, to resume their former habits of life, and thenceforward to continue to exist, without communication with neighboring islands or foreign countries, but otherwise in the same circumstances \mder which the people of the Grecian archipelago and main- land have formed the Greek character and the Greek speech, 16 242 NEW USES OF W0ED8. they and their posterity would certainly not re-create and re-de- velop the Hellenic tongue, but they would retain the English as their national language, modifying it according to the exigen- cies of their situation, and it would, in the course of time, become a very different dialect from that which they had brought back with them. But what would be the nature of the change? Probably not in radical syntactical principle or other grammatical peculiarities, but mainly, doubtless, iu the vocabulary. New words would be formed by derivation or composition, to express a multitude of objects, processes and conditions, for which English has no appropriate desig- nations, but a still greater divergence from the original tongue would be produced by the employment of English words in new or modified senses. All this, in fact, is just what has been done, by the people of whom I am speaking, with the language of their country. Causes, to which I shall refer in discussing the subject of grammatical inflections, have con- siderably modified the Greek syntax in the passage from old Hellenic to modern Eomaic, but a greater apparent change has been produced by the introduction of new words ; a greater still, which is not apparent, except upon a considera- ble familiarity with both classic and modern Greek, by the use of classical words in senses very diverse from those which originally belonged to them. A more familiar illustration may be found in the speech of our own country. At the period when European colonists first took possession of the Atlantic coast of America, natu- ral history had taught men little of the inexhaustible variety of the material creation. The discoverers expected to find the same animals, the same vegetables, the same minerals, and even the same arts, with which observation had made them NEW USES OF W0ED3. 243 familiar iu corresponding latitudes of the eastern hemispliere. They came therefore prepared to recognize resemblances, not to detect differences, between the products of the old world and the new, and naturally saw what they sought and ex- pected. Their early reports accordingly make constant men- tion of plants, animals, and mechanical processes, as of com- mon occiirrence in America, but which we now know never to have existed on this continent. Longer acquaintance with the nature and art of the newly discovered territory corrected the errors of the first hasty observation ; but there was still, though almost never an identity, yet often a sti-ong analogy, between the trees, the quadrupeds, the fish, and the fowl of England, of Erance, and of Spain, on the one hand, and of Canada, New England, Virginia and Mexico on the other. The native names for all these objects were hard to pronounce, harder still to remember, and the colonists, there- fore, took the simple and obvious method of applying to the na- tive products of America the names of the European plants and animals which most nearly resembled them. Thus, we have the oak, the pine, the poplar, the willow, the fir, the beach and the ash ; the trout, the perch and the dace ; the bear, the fox and the rabbit ; the pigeon, the partridge, the robin and the sparrow ; and in South America, the lion and the ostrich ; and yet, though the American and the transatlantic object designated by these names in many instances belong to the same genus, and are only distinguished by features which escape all eyes but those of the scientific naturalist, in per- haps none are they specifically identical, while, not unfre- quently, the application of the European name is founded on very slight resemblances. Since the Norman Conquest, English, as spoken upon its 244 SPECIAL USES OF "W0ED8. native soil, lias been largely exposed to but one of the causes of change which I have noticed. I refer, of course, to the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century, which I believe to be the most powerful of the single influences that have concurred to give to the English race and their speech the character which now distinguishes them, as well from the rest of the world as from their former selves. At the same time, in all the Gothic languages, our own included, both the special vocabulary of each, and the use and signification of the words they possess in common, have been much affected by other causes, partly peculiar to one or more, partly acting alike upon all. Take as an instance the word winter. "When Icelandic was spoken in all the countries of Scandinavia, time was computed by -mjifers,' because in those cold climates the win- ter monopolized a large portion of the year, and from its length, its hardships and necessities, its boisterous festivities, the facilities it afforded for the pursuit of certain important occupations and favorite sports, and the obstacles it inter- posed to the prosecution of others, it impressed itself on the minds of the people as not only the longest, but the weigh- tiest portion of the twelvemonth, and it therefore stood for the whole year. For the same reason, winter was a very- common word for year in Anglo-Saxon, and it continued to be employed in that sense in English to near the close of the fifteenth century. In Iceland itself, where there is little change in the habits of material and social life, it is still thus used. But in modern England, Denmark, Sweden and Nor- way, the advancement of civilization and physical improve- ment has given to man the mastery over all the seasons. The campaigns of feudal warfare, whose marches were performed SPECIAL USES OF WORDS. 245 with greater ease over ice and snow, have ceased ; the chase, a winter occupation, is no longer an important resource ; ag- riculture has widely extended her domain, and the harvest months are the great epoch of the year, and characterize it as a period of trial or of blessings. Accordingly, in all these kingdoms men now count time not by winters, but by har- vests, for that is the primitive signification of our English word year, and its representative in the cognate languages.* In the figurative style, whether in poetry or in prose, we often put a season for the year, and in this case the subject determines the choice of the season. Thus, of an aged man we say : ' His life has extended to a hundred winters,' but in spealdng of the years of a blooming girl, we connect with them images of gladness, the season of flowers, and say : ' She has seen sixteen summers.' "We have in English a sim- ilar appHeation of another familiar word suggestive of the phases of the year, and it is curious that the same expression is used in Scandinavia. In Denmark and Sweden, as well as in England, the gentlemen of the chase and the turf reckon the age of their animals by springs, the ordinary birth-season of the horse, and a colt is said to be so many years old next grass. * I am aware that this is not the received etymology of year, nor do I propose it with by any means entire confidence. At the same time, I think the identity of the words for harvest and for the twelvemonth, a r , in the cognate Icelandic and the dialects derived from it, an argument of considerable weight in support of the derivation, which, however, finds still stronger evidence in the analogies of our primitive mother-tongue. In Anglo-Saxon, ear signifies an ear of grain, and by supplying the collective prefix g e , common to all the Teutonic languages, we have gear, an appropriate expression for harvest, and at the same time a term, which, as well as winter, was employed as the name of the entire year. The corresponding words in the cognate languages admit of a similar derivation, and this to me seems a more probable etymology, than those by which these words are connected with remoter roots. 246 SPECIAL USES OF WOEDS. Oiir a.djecti\e pecwniary is familiarly known to be deiired from the Latin pecunia, money, wMcli itself comes from peons, cattle, and acquired the meaning of money, because money is the representative of property, and in early society cattle constituted the most valuable species of property ; or, as others suppose, because a coin, which was of about the average value of one head of sheep or kine, was stamped with the image of the creature. Our English word cattle is derived, by a reverse process, from the Low Latin cat alia, a word of unknown etymology, signifying movable property generally, or what the English law calls chattels. In old English, cattle had the same meaning, and it is but recently that it has been confined to domestic quadrupeds as the most valuable of ordinary movable possessions. • In a former lecture, by way of illustrating my views of the value of etymology as pursued by what may be called the sim- ple historical, in distinction from the more ambitious linguis- tic, method, I traced the word grain from its source, through its secondary, to its present signification, in one of its senses. Corn, the Gothic etymological equivalent of grain, has also an interesting history, and it serves as a good exemplification of the modifications which the use and meaning of words undergo from the influence of local conditions. Like gr an- um, it signifies both a seed and a minute particle, and the two words are not so unlike in form as to make it at all im- probable that they are derived from a common radical, in some older cognate language, allied to the verb to grow, and originally meaning seed. Corn was early applied, as a generic term, to the cereal grains or breadstufifs, the most useful of seeds, and in fact almost the only ones regularly employed as the food of man. The word is still current in all countries SPECIAL USES OF "WJEDS. 24:7 ■where tlie Gotliic languages are spoken, but its signification is, in popular use, chiefly confined to the particular grain most important in the rural economy of each. Thus in Eng- land, wheat, being the most considerable article of cultivated produce, is generally called corn. In most parts of Germany this name is given to rye ; in the Scandinavian kingdoms, to barley ; and in the United States, to our great agricultural staple, maize, or Indian corn; the name in every instance being habitually applied to the particular grain on vfhich the prosperity of the husbandman and the sustenance of the la- borer chiefly depend. In the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and in other warm climates, animal food is not much used, and bread is emphatically the staff of life. Hence in those na- tions, as with the ancient Romans, the word lyread stands for food generally, other edibles being considered a mere relish or accompaniment, and this is still true of some colder cli- mates, where the poverty of the laboring classes confines them in the main to a like simple diet. The English figura- tive iise of lyread for the same purpose, however, is not founded on the habits of the people, but is borrowed from other literatures. The word Tueat has undergone a contrary process. The earliest occurrence of this word in siny cognate language is the form mats in Ulphilas, where it signifies food in general. The Swedish verb matt a, to satiate or satisfy, and other allied words, suggest the probability that the original sense of the radical, in its application to food, was that which satisfies hunger,* though it must be confessed » The Moeso-Gothic matjan, to eat, is more probably a derivative, than the primitive, of mats, and if so, corresponds to our verb to feed upon. On the other hand the resemblance between matjan and the Latin m a s t i - care would seem to refer both verbs and their derivatives to a root expressive of lie mechanical procefs of eating. 248 SPECIAI, USES OF WOEDS. that great uncertainty attends all atteu.pts to trace back words essentially so primitive to still simpler forms and less complex significations. The Anglo-Saxon and oldest English meaning of meat is food, and I believe it is always used in that sense in OTir English translations of the Bible. In Eng- land, and especially in the United States, animal food is now the most prominent article of diet, and meat has come to sig- nify almost exclusively the flesh of land animals. The primitive abundaiace of the oak, and of nut-bearing trees in England, and the northern portions of continental Europe, facilitated the keeping of swine to an extent which, now that the forests have been converted into arable land, is neither convenient nor economically advantageous, and the flesh of swine constituted a more important part of the ali- ment of the people than that of any other domestic animal. The word fiesTi appears to have originally signified pork only, and in the form, 2i flitch of bacon, the primitive sense is still preserved, but, with the extension of agriculture, the herds of swine became less numerous, and as the flesh of other quadrupeds entered more and more into use, tlie sense of the word was extended so as to include them also. Flesh and meat have now become nearly synonymous, the differ- ence being that the former embraces the fibrous part of ani- mals generally, without reference to its uses, the latter that of such only as are employed for human food. At present we use, as a compendious expression for all the materials of both vegetable and animal diet, Iread and meat. Piers Ploughman says : Flcsshe and breed bothe To riche and to poore. and a verse or two lower, And all manere of men That through mete and drynke libbeth. CHAITGES OF MEANKG. 24:9 The English vrovd Irihe and its derivatives, generally, but perhaps erroneously, traced to the French bribe, a morsel of bread, a scrap or fragment, present an interesting instance of a change of meaning. Brihery, in old English, meant not secret corruption, bnt theft, rapine, open violence, and very often official extortion. Tlius Jnlyana Berners, in her treatise of Fysshynge with the Angle, in speaking of the injustice and cruelty of robbing private fish-ponds and other waters, says : " It is a ryght shamefull dede to any nobleman to do that that theuys and bn/hours done." Lord Berners, in his translation of Eroissart, describes the captain of a band of the irregular soldiery called ' companions,' as the " great- est hryboii?' and robber in all Fraunce," and Palsgrave gives T p>/II and I pyll as synonyms of I bribe. At that dark period, the subject had " no rights which" his rulers "were bound to respect." The ministers of civil and ecclesiastical power needed not to conceal their rapacity, and they availed themselves of the authority belonging to their positions for the purpose of undisguised plunder. But when by the light, first of religious, and then of what naturally followed, civil lib- erty, men were able to see that it was of the essence of law, that it shoidd bind the governors as well as the governed, him who makes, him who administers, and him who serves under it, alike, it became necessary for official robbery to change its mode of procedure, and mantle with the cloak of secrecy the hand that clutched the spoil. But though the primitive form of this particular iniquity is gone, the thing remains, and the unlaAvful gains of power, once seized with strong hand, or extorted with menacing clenched fist, but now craved with open palm, are still bribes. Formerly the official extortioner or rapacious dignitary was etyled a briber, 250 SPECIAL USES OE WOEDS. and he was said to hribe when he boldly grasped his prey, but now the tempter is the Iriber, and the timid recipient is the 'bribed* Soldier, from the Latin solidus,t the name of a coin, meant originally one who performed military service, not in fulfilment of the obligations of the feudal law, but upon con- tract, and for stipulated pay. Soldier, therefore, in its primary signification, is identical with hireling or mercenary. But the regular profession of arms is held to be favorable to the development of those generous and heroic traits of character, which, more than any of the gentler virtues, have in all ages excited the admiration of men. Hence, since standing armies, composed of troops who serve for pay, have afiforded to military men the means of a systematic professional train- ing, including the regular cultivation of the traits in question, we habitually ascribe to the soldier qualities precisely the re- verse of those which we connect with the terms hireling and mercenary, and though the words are the etymological equiva- lents of each other, soldier has become a peculiarly honorable * Cranmer, Instruction into Cliristian Religion, Sermon VII., uses tribe in tlie modern sense : " And the iudge himselfe is -■• thefe before God, when he for hrybes or any corrupcion doth wittingly and wylUngly give wrong iudgc- ment." But, in Sermon X., he has this passage : " These rauenynge woulfes, that be euer thrystynge after other mennes goodes » * * lese the fauoure both of God and man, and ar called of euery man extorcioners, hryhers, pollers and piellers, denourera of widowes houses." And in the Instruction of Prayer, on the Fourth Petition, " But they that delyght in superfluitie of gorgyous apparel and deynty fare * * ' commonly ilo deceaue the nedye, brybe, and pyle from them." f Etymologists of the Celtic school affirm that soldatis from the Celtic souldar, a feudal vassal bound to military serrice, and from soldat they de- rive the French soldo and solder, and the German Sold, besolden; that is, they find the origin of a group of words, to every one of which the notion of pay is fundamental, in a word, the proper sense of which excludes that notion, for the very essence of feudal obligation is that it requires service without pay. Lucus ^ non lucendo. SPECIAL USES OF W;1EDS. 251 designation, wMle hireling and mercenary are employed only in an offensive sense. We may find in the cognate languages examples of changes of meaning dependent upon the same principles as these illustrations. Among the articles of merchandise sup- plied to the population of Denmark and Norway by the Hanse towns, during the commercial monopoly they so long enjoyed, one of the most important was common pepper, and the clerks in the Hanse trading factories in the Scandinavian seaports were popularly called Pebersvende, pejyper- loys. By the general regulations of the Hanse towns, these clerks were obliged to remain immarried, and hence Peber- svend, pepper-boy, became, and still is, the regular Danish word for single-man, or old hachelor. The heiTing-fishery was long the most lucrative branch of the maritime industry of Holland, and was the means by which a large number of the inhabitants of that country ac- quired their livelihood. Ne ring, ^German ISTahrung, iu Dutch signifies properly nourishment, sustenance, and, fig- uratively, the business or occupation by which men earn their bread. The importance of the pursuit of which we have just spoken made it emphatically the nering, or vo- cation of the Dutch seamen, and ter nering varen means to go on a fishing-cruise. The common English and American designation of bookselling and booksellers as the trade is a similar instance. The Greek fivarTjpiov meant originally the secret doctrines and ceremonies connected with the worship of particular di- vinities. In the middle ages, the most difiicult and delicate processes of many of the mechanical arts were kept relig- iously secret, and hence in all the countries of Europe those arts were themselves called mysteries, as mechanical trades 262 EXHAUSTION OF -VOEDS. still are in the dialect of the English law. Thus, when a boy is apprenticed to a tanner or a shoe-maker, the legal in- strument, or indenture, by which he is bound, stipulates that he shall be taught the art and mystery of tanning or shoe- making. Afterwards, mystery came to designate, in com- mon speech, any regular occupation, so that a man's mystei-y was his trade, his employment, the profession by which he earned his bread,* and as men are most obviously classed and characterized by their habitual occupations, the question which so often occurs in old English writers, ' "What mister wight is that ? ' means, what is that man's employment, and, consequently, condition in life ? "What manner of man is he ? In French, the word has had a different history. From m y s t e r i u m , in the sense of a trade or art, comes metier, of the same signification,f and because, in certain provinces, the art of weaving was the most important and gainful of the mechanic arts, first weaving, and then the implement by * In youthe he lerned hadde a good mistere, He was a wel good wright, a carpenters. Prol. to Canterbury Tales. \ This etymology seems to me more probable than the usual one, which de- rives mister and m6tier from the Latin ministerium, because the n in min- isteriumis radical, and in such combinations is generally, though indeed not uniyersally, retained in French and English derivatives. The earliest instance I have met with of the use of this word in English, (or semi-Saxon,) is in the ex- tracts from the Rule of Nuns in the Keliquise Antiqufe, vol. II., p. 2 : " Marthe meosior is to fedepovre," where indeed thesense favors the derivation from min- isterium. The old French and English maistrie, craft, art, science, probably from the Latin magister (magisterium) and mister, resemble each other in use and meaning, and the three words, mister, maistrie, and mystery are so .nearly alike in form, that they might readily be confounded in signification. The Spanish m e n e s t e r, need or necessity, is doubtless from ministerium, and the English mister, used rn that sense, must probably be referred to the same source, but the signification of necessity is so remote from that of oc that these end- ings are rather to be considered as elements of the imported word than as possessing a properly English significance. We have also the Saxon prefix 5c-, as to hedeio, to 'beleaguer^ gen- erally applied only to verbal and nominal roots, though we sometimes verbalize an adjective by the aid of this prefix, as to h&sot^ which is authorized by Milton and Shakespeare. But this formation is repugnant to the language, and nothing but the want of a good synonym has enabled Mr. Jefferson's verb to helittle to keep its place. The English verb, like that of most other languages, is, in the majority of cases, derived from a noun, and the want of a specific verbal form renders the trans- fer of a word from the class of nouns to that of verbs per- fectly idiomatic and proper, though, as I have just remarked, we now rarely employ that process. There is one important ending, however, by the aid of which we may convert adjec- tives into verbs. This is the ending -en^ as to blacker. The resemblance between this form and the Saxon infinitive end- ing -an, natiu'ally suggests the supposition of their identity, and this view would seem to be confirmed by the fact that it is applied to Saxon radicals only, but grammarians generally consider the coincidence of sound accidental, and the mod- em termination in -e?i, which is not the sign of a mood like the Saxon -an, but the characteristic of a part of speech, is re- garded as the development of a new grammatical form. A few verbs of this class, as lengthen and strengthen, are de- rived from nouns, the noun being probably employed instead of the conjugate adjective for orthoepical reasons, but, in general, only adjectives expressing the sensuous qualities of • Kobertson uses happified. Address to Working Man's Institute. 316 THE ENGLISH VERB. objects at present admit of this change. In es lier stages of the lana;uao;e it was otherwise. In the Ormulum we find to gooden, to make good, also to benefit, and Milton and Southey employ the verb to worsen, to make or grow worse, but this has unhappily fallen into disuse.* The reason of this is doubtless to be found in the disposition which long prevailed to restrict the employment of Saxon words to the expression of the material and the sensuous, and to borrow the phrase- ology of moral and intellectual discourse from the Greek, the Latin, and the French. The English substantive verb, or that which expresses being, and which in most instances serves only as a copula to connect the svibject and the predicate, partakes of the irreg- ularity which generally marks the conjugation of the corre- sponding verb in other languages. Its different parts are doubtless derived from different radicals, for he and am can hardly be supposed to be divergent forms of the same word. The Saxon weorthan, which corresponded to the German werden, has unfortunately become obsolete, and now sur- vives only in the phrases : wo worth the day ! wo worth the man! and the like. Weorthan, though in some sort often an auxiliary, was not used as a sign of the passive, like the German werden, but generally retained its independent * In Wycliife's time, the adjective was often used as a verb, without any change of form except such as was occasioned by the inflections then in use. Thus, Matthew xxiii. 12 : " Forsothe he that shal hie hym self shal be mekid; and he that shal meeke hymself shal ben enhaunsid." And in Luke xiv. 11:" And he that mekith him self, shal be highed.'" Wotton makes honest a verb, with no change but that of inflection. "The pretence, whereby a desperate discontented assassinate would after the perpetration have honested a meer private revenge." Eeliquiae, 1651 p. 34. The use of the passive form assassinate for assassin is also noticeable in this extract. See Appendix, 46. THE ENGLISH VEEB. 317 signification, and its disappearance is a real loss to the lan- guage.* In the opinion of the ablest, linguists, English has lost nothing in force, variety, or precision of expression, by the simplification of its forms, and the substitution of determina tives for inflections. The present movement is still in the same dii-eetion. The subjunctive is evidently passing out of use, and there is good reason to siippose that it will soon become obsolete altogether. The compound past infinitive also, for- merly very frequent, is almost disused. Lord Berners says : should have aided to have destroyed, had made haste to have entered, and the like, and this was common in colloquial usage until a very recent period. In cases of this sort, where the relations of time are clearly expressed by the first auxil- iary, it is evident that nothing is gained by employing a sec- ond auxiliary to fix more precisely the category of the infin- itive, but where the simple inflected past tense precedes the infinitive, there is sometimes ground for the employment of an auxiliary with the latter. I intended to go and I intended to have gone, do not necessarily express precisely the same thing, but the latter form is not likely long to resist the pres- ent inclination to make the infinitive strictly aoristic, and such forms as I had intended to go will supersede the past tense-of the latter mood. * Wearthan, or worthen, is not unfrequent in early English. For example, in one of the old Prologues to the English Scriptures, WyclifiSle Versions, I., p. 40, note, we find : " Alio gladnes and delite of this erthely vanyte vanyschith, and at the last worthith to nought " In fact this verb did not become altogether obsolete until the serenteentb century, for Hey wood says : "Thou therefore that wast nothing before thou wert, &c., &c." "Thou, which wast not, wert made." " Give me a reason (if thou canst) how thou wcrt created." The Hierarchic of the blessed Angells, London, 1635, p. 383. In these cases, wert is not the subjunctive of the verb to be, but a remnant of wortken, and, in the last two, used as a passive auxiliary. LECTURE XV. GRAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS* I. In considering the interjection, it was stated that words of that class were distinguished from all other parts of speech by the quality of inherent and complete significance, so that a single ejaculatory monosyllable, or phrase not syntactically connected with a period, might alone communicate a fact, or, in other words, stand for and express an entire proposition. The interjection might be involuntarily uttered, and impart a fact of a nature altogether subjective to the speaker, as, for example, that he was affected with sensations of physical pain or pleasure, with grief or with terror ; or it might as- sume a form more approximating to that of syntactic lan- guage, and address itself to an external object, as an ex- pression of love, of pity, of hate or execration, of desire, command or deprecation. » The illustrations, and much of the argument, in this and the following lec- tures on the same subject, are too familiar to be instructive to educated persons, but I have introduced them, in the hope that those engaged in teaching languages might derive some useful suggestions from them. PUEl'OSES OF INFLECTION. 319 The application of the distinction between interjections, as parts of speech, which, used singly and alone, may commu- nicate a fact, a wish, or command, and therefore express au entire proposition, and parts of speech which become signifi cant only by their connection with other vocables, is properly limited to the vocabulary of languages where, as in our own, words admit of little or no change of form, and to the simplest, least variable forms of words in those other languages, which express the grammatical relations, and certain other conditions of the parts of speech, by what is called inflection. I propose now to illustrate the distinction between in- flected and uninflected, or grammatically variable and gi-am- matically invariable words, and to inquire into the essential character and use of inflections. Inflection is derived from the Latin fleet o, I bend, curve or turn, and inflections are the changes made in the forms of words, to indicate either their grammatical relations to other words in the same period, or some accidental condition of the thing expressed by the inflected word. The possible relations and conditions of words are very numerous, and some languages express more, some fewer of them by the changes of form called in- flections. The languages which embody the general literature of Europe, ancient and modem, employ inflections for the fol- lowing purposes : First, in nouns, adjectives, pronouns and articles, to denote — (a) gender, (b) number, and (c) case, or grammatical relation. Secondly, in adjectives and adverbs, to mark degrees of com- parison. Thi/rdly, in adjectives, to indicate whether the word 320 PTJEPOSES OF INFLECTION. is used in a definite or an indefinite application. Fourthly^ in verbs, to express number, person, voice, mood and tense ; or, in other words, to determine whether the nominative case, the subject of the verb is one or more, singular or plural ; whether the speaker, the person addressed, or still another, is the subject ; whether the state or action or emotion ex- pressed by the verb, is conceived of solely with reference to the subject, or as occasioned by an external agency ; whether that state, action or emotion, is absolute or conditional ; and whether it is past, present or future.* Interjections, prepositions and conjunctions are unin- fleeted, or invariable in form. The variations of the verb are usually the most numer- ous, and the uses and importance of inflections may be well illustrated by comparing an English uninflected with a Latin inflected verb. The English defective verb ought is the old preterite of the verb to owe^ which was at an early period used as a sort of auxiliary with the infinitive, implying the sense of neces- sity, just as we, and many of the Continental nations, now employ have and its equivalents. I have much to do, in English; J'ai beaucoup a faire, in French; Ich habe * No single one of the languages to which I refer employs inflection for all the purposes I have specified. The Greek and Latin have the most complete, the Enghsh the most imperfect system of variation. The Icelandic, Swedish, and Danish exhibit the rare case of a modern passive voice, but, like the other tongues of the Gothic stock, they want the future tense; and, on the other hand, they possess, in common with these latter, the definite and indefinite forms of the adjective, which existed also in Anglo-Saxon, but are not distin- guished in Qreek and Latin. There may be some doubt whether this distinction is not rather a special exception than a general characteristic of the inflectional system which belongs to the cultivated languages of Europe, but the great importance of Scandinavian, German and Anglo-Saxon literature, entitle the peculiarities of Gothic grammar to a conspicuous place in all treatises upon mod- ern and especially English philology. THE VEKB OWE AND OfGHT. 32] \'iel zu thun, in German, all mean, substantially, there is much -n-hich I must do. Afterwards, by a common process in language, the general idea of necessity involved in this use of the word oice resolved itself into two distinct senses : the one of pecuniary or other liability in the nature of a debt, or the return of an equivalent for property, services or favors received ; the other that of moral obligation, or at least of expediency. Different forms from the same root were now appropriated to the two senses, to owe, with a newly formed ■weak preterite, owed, being exclusively limited to the notion of debt, and the simple form ought being employed in all moods, tenses, numbers and persons, to express moral obliga- tion or expediency, or as an auxiliary verb. Before I proceed to illustrate the use of inflections by comparing the invariable ought with a Latin inflected verb of similar signification, I will pause to offer some further observations on the history of the verb to owe. This verb is derived from a Gothic radical signifying to have, to possess, or, as we now say, in another form of the same word, to own. Shakespeare very often uses owe in this sense, both in the pres- ent and the new or weak preterite form, owed; for the separa- tion between the two forms owed and ought, though it com- menced before Shakespeare's time, was not fully completed till a later period. Thus in Twelfth Night, at the close of the first act, these lines occur : Fate, show thy force : ourselves we do not owe ; What is decreed must be, and be this so ! In like manner in the Tempest I. 2 : Thou dost here usurp The name thou ow^st not 21 322 THE VEEB OWE AND OUGHT. And in Macbeth I. 4 : To throw away the dearest thing he omjW, As 'twere a careless trifle. In these, and very many other cases, the sense is unmistaka- bly to possess or own. In English grammar, the auxiliary verbs incline to be invariable, as must, will, shall; and ought, therefore, at last followed the same rule. But, for some time after the distinction between pecuniary and moral obligation, as expressed by different forms of this word, made itself felt, the present tense owe continued to be occa sionally employed for both purposes, such expressions as you owe to do this, being not unfrequent,* and on the other hand. ought was occasionally, though rarely, used in place of owed as late as the time of Dryden. The two phrases, you owe to do this, and you ought to do this, are so nearly alike in sound, that they would readily be confounded in pronuncia- tion, and consequently in writing, and the difiSculty of distin- guishing between them facilitated the application of the rule that auxiliaries are invariable.f The introduction of a new '■ Thus, in one of the prologues to Wycliife's translation of Clement's Har- mony, (Wycliffite Versions, I. xv.,) "Symple men owen not dispute aboute holy writ * * but they owen stedfastly bileue." In this instance, the omission of the infinitiTe sign to is remarkable, as showing that is used absolutely for the Divine Being or Essence, by Herodotus and by JEschylus. The chorus in the Agamemnon applies it to the inspiration of the Divinity. 1083, XQ. XPV<^^^v eoiKev a^l tSiv aoTTjs KaKuv^ fJL^i/ei T h & ei y Sov\ia iraphy (ppevi ; and it occurs in the sense of Divine control in the Choephori, v. 356. KpaTeirai irttis t h s soon obso- lete than a prose work of equal merit and even popularity, and of course it has a greater influence in keeping alive the dialect in which it is expressed. Poetry, considered as an art, is more essentially imitative than any branch of prose writing. Its means are much more restricted, its rules more arbitrary, its models more authoritative. In studying the art, therefore, the poet takes form and material together, and he who has imbibed the spirit of a Spenser or a Milton, can hardly fail unconsciously to adopt a Spenserian CT a Miltonic diction. But our present business is rather with the inflectional forms, than with the vocabulary or the grammatical structure of the language. Inflected forms, being more or less alike in each class of words, have a tendency to produce similarity of INFLUENCE OF POETET 373 termination and, of conrse, rhyme. If, /herefore, a word is BO formed that by dropping an inflected syllable a convenient rhyme is lost, the inflection will be retained in poetry after it has begun to be obsolete in prose. So, if there are two forms of a given word, while, in the conversational and prose dia- lect, there is always a tendency to discard one of them, the poet will find in the necessities of rhyme, in the convenience of making a word at pleasure monosyllabic or polysyllabic, a half-foot, an iambus, or a dactyle, and in the advantage of repetition without monotony, reasons for retaining both, and thus poetry is constantly checking the progress of the lan- guage towards a rigid simplification. For instance, the present tendency of English is to reject the adjectival form in n, as wooden-, leathern, and the like, and to employ a noun in place of an adjective to express the material of which any thing is made ; but the multitude of verses in which the true adjective is employed, powerfully tends to prevent this ending from becoming altogether obso- lete. Woodworth's fine song, 'The Old Oaken Bucket,' which has embalmed in imdying verse so m^ny of the most touching recollections of rural childhood, wiU preserve the more poetic form oalcen, together with the memory of the almost obsolete implement it celebrates, through all dialectic changes, as long as English shall be a spoken tongue. The influence of inflections upon the accentuation, and consequently the whole articulation of language, is a curious, and so far as I am aware, nearly a new subject of inquiry. I shall have occasion to consider it more fully hereafter, but there are certain general principles which may be appropri- ately stated here. In languages varied by weak or augmen- tative inflections, the ending, which determines the gram- matical relations of a word, must be distinctly articulated, 374 rSTFLECTIONS AKD ACCENT. in order that the category of the word may be known To accomplish this, the principal accent must be carried for- ward towards the end of the word, so as to emphasize one of the variable syllables, or there must be a secondary accent upon the final syllable, unless this is prosodically long, and of course dwelt upon sufficiently to make it distinctly audi- ble. IsTow, in languages with uninflected or little varied end- ings, the relations of the words being indicated by particles, auxiliaries and position, the only syllable which requires to be made prominent by accent is the radical one, which gen- erally lies near the beginning of the word, and the following syllables may be slurred over, with liftle danger of ambigu- ity. The grammatical determinatives, being independent words, and usually monosyllabic, are necessarily pronounced with some distinctness, and accordingly, if the radical sylla- bles be made audible, the speaker is pretty certain to be un- derstood. And this is more especially true where, as in the German and the English for instance, there is a strong ten- dency to inflection by the letter-change. In almost all cases where this change takes place, it occurs in a syllable which is radical and therefore accented. Its distinct articulation makes the whole Avord intelligible, and we incline to sup- press, or at least slight, all other grammatical characteristics, while, in languages inflected by augmentation, both the rad- ical and all the variable syllables that follow it must be enunciated with a clearness that requires a certain efibrt. Other things being equal then, that is, the proportion of vo- cal elements being similar, and these of such character as to a(Jmit of equal facility of utterance, the language with strong inflections will be most easily pronounced by the speaker and at the same time most readily understood by the hearer It is, however, true, on the other hand, that by a natural AliTICTJLATIOK. 375 adaptation or compensation, tlie vocal elements seldom or never are equally proportioned in inflected and uninflected lang-nages, the clear vowel predominating in the former, and the obscure consonant in the latter, and, therefore, with a fidl, and musically speaking, staccato enunciation, such as is usually possessed by the natives of Southern Europe, the inflected language will be most intelligible to the listener. But the pronunciation of vowels requires a much greater ex- penditure of breath than that of consonants, and the moment the articulation becomes artificial, as in reading or speaking with an unnatural tone, the demands upon the respiration, and the necessity of distinctly pronouncing the unaccented terminal syllables, conspire to make it more fatiguing to the reader or speaker. I am aware that Humboldt remarks, that after having been long accustomed to use Spanish, he found the return to German fatiguing to the organs of speech. I think this, however, was from the necessity of employing in pronunciation m;iscles long disused, and that the sense of weariness was confined to those muscles. But let any one equally familiar with two foreign languages, one inflected and one invariable, or one with strong and one with weak in- flections, try the experiment of reading aloud an hour in each, and he will find, as a general rule, that the more nu- merous the weak inflections, the more fatiguing the reading. German and Italian may serve to illustrate the difference, the latter exhausting the voice of the reader much the soonest. It is true that the comparison -£ these two languages is not in aU respects a perfectly fair test of the soundness of 'he principles I have laid down. The German has terminal in- flections to as great an extent as the Italian, but it must be remembered that, in conjunction with these, it very often em- ploys the letter-change in the accented syllable, and this ren- S76 ITALIAN AETICULATION. ders it unnecessary to bring the final vowel fully oat. The plural of die Hand is dieB[ande,but the vowel-change in the radical syllable indicates the number with so much certainty, that the e final may be dropped or half-suppressed, without creating any ambiguity. In Italian, the inflected syllable or syllables always terminate the word, and them- selves end with a vowel. In the singular number of the verbs, the person, and in nouns and adjectives, both number and gender, are usually determined by the final vowel alone, so that in most cases the grammatical category of the word, and of course its relations to the period, depend upon a sin- gle vowel, which of course must be very clearly articulated. Again, the final vowel in German inflected words is very commonly the obscure e, while in Italian words it is the open vowel a, or long o and i, the feminine e being of less frec[uent occurrence. All these Italian endings make larger demands on the organs of speech than the German terminations. Further, the constant use of the nominative personal pronoun in German allows a less emphatic utterance of the signs of person in the verb, its frequent omission in Italian requires these signs to be made conspicuous. The geiieral result of all these circumstances is that in German, in most cases, the only syllable which requires a very distinct pronunciation is the radical ; in Italian, there is another syllable, and that a final vowel, which demands an equally full and precise de- livery. Of course, in Italian, both causes of exhaustion, the predominance of open vowels, and the necessity of accentu- ating and distinctly articulating a greater number of sylla- bles, co-exist, and allowance must be made accordingly in treating the German as a representative of uninflected, the Italian of inflected languages, with reference to facility of ITALIAlf AETIC0LATION. 377 utterance. A: the same time, I think similar general con- elusions will be arrived at, by comparing any two speeches, the one inflected, the other uninflected, or marked, the one by weak, the other by strong, inflections. LECTURE XVIII. GEAMMATICAL INFLECTIONS. IV. Ik order to compreliend and appreciate the nature and extent of tlie change which English has undergone in the transformation from an inflected to a comparatively unin- flected structure, we must cast a glance at the grammatical system of the Anglo-Saxon, from which modem English is chiefly derived. The border-land of the Scandinavian and Teutonic races, whence the Anglo-Saxon invaders of England appear to have emigrated, has always been remarkable for the number of its local dialects, and it is very doubtful whether there is anywhere to be found a district of so nar- row extent with so great a multitude of tongues, or rather jargons. The Erisic, which may be said, as a whole, to bear a closer resemblance than any other linguistic gi-oup to the English, differs so much -in different localities, that the dia- lects of Frisian parishes, separated only by a narrow arm of the sea, are often quite unintelhgible to the inhabitants of each other.* The general ultimate tendency of this confusion * It is not always safe to rely on the vocabularies of philologists who collect words to sustain theories, and therefore we may doubt the accuracy of the gener- AUGLO-SAXON GEAMMAE. 379 of tongues is undoubtedly towards uniformity, jut uniform- ity must be attained by mutual concessions. Each dialect must sacrifice most of its individual peculiarities before a common speech can be framed out of the whole of them. These peculiarities lie much in inflection. The dialects, it may be predicted, will be harmonized by dropping discord- ant endings ; and if the Frisic shall survive long enough to acquire a character of unity, it will be very nearly what the alizations of most inquirers into the Frisic patois. If we can depend on the testimony of unprejudiced observers, or of tlie people tliemselves, there is no such unity of speech among those who employ what, for want of a better term, or to support particular ethnological views, are collectively called the Frisian dialects, as to entitle them to a unity of designation. According to Kohl, the most acute and observant of travellers in Europe, "The commonest things, which are named almost alike all over Europe, receive quite different names in the different Frisic islands. Thus, in Anirum, father is called Aatj; on the Halligs, Baba or Babe ; in Sylt, Fodcr or Vaar; in many districts on the main land Tate; in the eastern part of Fohr, Oti or Ahitj. Although these people live within a couple of [German] miles from each other, these words differ more than pfere, pater, padre, Vater, and father used for the same purpose by the French, Latins, Italians, Germans, and English, who are separated by hundreds of leagues. We find among the Frisians not only primitive Germanic words, but what may be called common, European radicals, which different localities seem to have distributed among them.'' " Even the names of their districts and islands are tqtaUy different in differ- ent dialects. For instance, the island called by the I'risians who speak High- German, Sylt, is called by the inhabitants Siil, in Fohr Sol, and in Amrum Sal." "The people of Amrum call the Frisians Frask, with the vowel short; in the southern districts, the word is Freeske, with a long vowel; elsewhere it is pronounced Fraasche." Kohl. II., Chap. XX. It appears further, from the same excellent writer, that these numerous dia- lects are intelligible only to the inhabitants of the narrow localities where they are indigenous, and that their variations are too great to permit the grammars and glossaries which have yet appeared to be regarded as any thing more than expositions of the peculiarities of individual patois, and by no means as au- thorities for the existence of any such general speech as the imaginary Frisic of linguistic theories. The argument for the oneness of these dialects rests chiefly on negatives. It may be said of each of them : it is not Danish nor Dutch, nor Low-German nor High-German, but, at the same time, they all resemble any one of these languages very nearly as much as they do each other. See Lecture 11 aSO ANGLO-SAXON GEAMMAE. English would have been witliout the ii a-oduction of so many words of Romance origin. Siich a process as this the Anglo-Saxon actually under- went in England, and accordingly its fleetional system, in the earliest examples which have come do-*-n to us, is less com- plete than in either of the Gothic tongnels that contributed to its formation. In fact, the different Angle and Saxon dia- lects employed in England never thoroughly amalgamated, and there was always much irregularity and confusion in orthography and the use of inflections, so that thte accidence of the language, in no stage of it, exhibits the precision and uniformity of that of the Icelandic or the HcESO-Gotliic. In giving a general sketch of the grammar of our akcient Anglican speech, I shall not notice local or archaic peculiar- ities of form, and the statements I make may be considered as applicable to the Anglo-Saxon in the best period of its lit- erature, and, with unimportant exceptions, true of all its distinguishable dialects. In general, then, we may say that the article, noun, ad- jective and pronoun were declinable, having different forms for the three genders, for four cases, and for the singular and plural numbers ; besides which, the personal pronoun. of the first and second persons had a dual, or form exclusively ap- propriated to the number two. This, in the first person, was wit, we two ; in the second, git, you two.' Tlie possessive had also a dual. Tlie adjective, as in the other Gothic lan- guages, had two forms of inflection, the one employed when the adjective was used without a determinative, the other when it was preceded by an article or a pronoun agreeing also with the noun. These forms are called, respectively, the indefinite and the definite. Tims, the adjective correspond- ing to good, used in the definite form singular, or with a ANGLO-SAXON GEAMMAE. 381 dutenninative, makes the nominative masculine g6da, fem- inine gode, neuter, gode; the genitive or possessive, g6- dan, for all the genders. When used without a determina- tive, the nominative is god, for the three genders; the genitive or possessive, godes, for the masc'uliae and neuter, and godre for the feminine. The adjective was also regu- larly compared much as in the modern English augmentative form, but not by mare and most. The verbs had four moods : the indicative, subjunctive, in. perative and infinitive, and but two tenses, the present or ii definite, used also as a future, and the past. There were, how ever, compound tenses in the active voice, and a passive voiet formed as in modern English by the aid of other verbs. In English the auxiliaries are generally used simply as indica- tions of time, as, he will sing, which is merely a future of the verb to sing, like the Latin cantabit; he had sung, the Latin cantaverat. In Saxon, on the other hand, the aux- iliary usually retained its independent meaning, and was more rarely employed as a mere determinative. Thus wil- lan, corresponding to ouv will, when used with an infinitive, did not form a future, but always expressed a purpose, as in- deed it still often does, and with the remarkable exception of the verb b eon, to be, which is generally future, the Saxon had absolutely no method of expressing the future by any form or combination of verbs, so that the context alone de- termines the time. While, then, the English article has but one form for all cases, genders and numbers, the Saxon had ten. Our noun has two forms, one for the nominative and objective, one for the possessive and plural ; or, in the few nouns with the strong plural inflection, four, as man, man's, men, men's ; generally the Saxon had five or six. The modem adjective 382 CHANGES IN ENGLISH GEAMMAE. has one termination in the positive degree, the Saxon ten. The English regular or weak verb, as to love, seven endings ; the corresponding Saxon, thirteen, even without counting tlie inflected cases of the participles. From all this, it will be obvious that the Anglo-Saxon could indicate by inflections many relations and conditions of words which we can express only by particles ; and that consequently it was more inde- pendent of fixed laws of position, and less encumbered by determinatives, than modern English. By way of illustration of the force and beauty which the Anglo-Saxon element con- fers upon English, I compared the conclusion of the parable of the men who built their houses respectively upon sand and upon rock, in the versions of St. Matthew and St. Luke, as rendered by the authorized English translation. It will be interesting to analyze St. Matthew's account of the same catastrophe in the Anglo-Saxon, in "WyclifFe's translation of about 1380, in Tyndale's, of 1526, and King James's, of 1611.* The Anglo-Saxon, translated word for word into our present Enghsh, would read thus : Then rained it, and there came flood, and blew winds, and rushed on that house, and the [or that] house fell, and its fall was great. Here it will be observed that the verbs rained, came and hlcw all precede their nominatives, and it may be added that Uew and rushed both have a distinct plural form, bleowon and ahruroTi. In Wycliffe's time, although the plural form of the verb was still retained, yet the general loss of the inflections of the noun had compelled the introduction of a positional syn- tax, and he writes, in the modern order of arraneemcnt : * The texts of the Greek, Moeso-Gothic, Anglo-Saxon and modern English versions of the passage under consideration, will be found in a note to Lecture VU., pages ]fi5, 166. CH^VNGKS IN ENGLISH GEAMMAK. 383 " and rayn came doun, and floodis came h, and wyndis blewen, and tliei linrlidt'^ in to that house ; and it felle doun, and the fallyng doun thcrof was grete." Before Tyndale, 1526, the phiral form of the verb in «, had become obsolete. We read, accordingly, in his version : " And abundaunce of rayne descended, and the fluddes came, and the wyndes blewe, and beet upon that housse, and it fell, and great was the fall of it." Between the Anglo-Saxon and the English of Wycliife, the most important grammatical difference is the greater freedom of arrangement in the Anglo-Saxon verbs, which in this passage, in three instances, precede the nominative ; whereas in Wycliffe the verb uniformly follows its subject, as in the modern dialect. In the century and a half which intervened between Wycliffe and Tyndale, not only had the verbs dropped the plural ending, but the definite article had become common. In Saxon, we cannot deny that the defi- nite article existed, but it always partook very strongly of its original character of a demonstrative pronoun, and perhaps it should be rather regarded as such in the one instance where I have represented it by the^ " and the house fell." In "Wyc- liffe, rayn^ floodis and wyndis are all without the article, " rayn came doun, and fiuddes camen, and wyndis blewen ," and it is employed only before fallyng, " and the fallyng doun therof ; " but in Tyndale's time the noun had ceased to be used thus indefinitely, Siiid fluddes, wyndes and fall are all preceded by the article t/i£. The translators of 1611, with excellent judgment, adopted Tyndale's version word for word, with no change except to say simply " the raine,"for " abun- daunce of rayne," which Tyndale had used. And here 1 cannot but pause to notice a remarkable felicity of expression 384 NEW ENGLISH INTLECTIONS. in this translation, in the employment of an inversion of the regular order of words in the last clause of the verse. Tlie fact of the fall of the house had been already announced, and made additionally striking by an enumeration of the circum- stances which had preceded and caused it — the pouring of the rain, the rushing of the flood, the blast of the tempest. The im- mediate introduction of the noun fall would have added noth- ing to the efl'eet of what had gone before. To heighten and in- tensify the impression, therefore, the translator skilfully inverts the phrase, begins the concluding clause with the adjective — " and it fell, and great was the fall of it," — and thus produces a climax superior in force even to the original Greek text. When, as a natural result of Latin and JSTorman influence, the operation of such causes as I described in the last lecture had stripped the Anglo-Saxon of most of its inflections, and introduced a large number of Romance words and grammati-- cal forms, the first efi"ort of the newly-framed speech was to develop a new set of inflections, and if English had existed as an unwritten tongue for a sufiicient time after the coa- lescence of the two elements into one language, it is probable that it would have acquired as complete a system of declen- sion and conjugation, and consequently a syntax as free from restraints of position as either of its constituent tongues. The Saxon nouns had several modes of forming the plural, according to gender and declension. One of these declen- sions only made the nominative plural in s. This agreed ,vith the Norman grammar, which, like the modern French, used s or 3, (and in a few cases a;,) as the sign of the plural, and it was natural that this coincidence should have been seized iipon and adopted as a general rule for the construc- tion of all plurals. True, some plurals formed by letter KEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 385 change or in n remained, but most Saxou nouns dropped the regular inflection, and from the very commencement of the English language took a plural in s. This is abundantly shoM-n by Layamon and the Ormulum, the former using this plural (especially in the later text) very frequently, the latter employing it almost exclusively. The Saxon nouns had three genders, and the masculine and feminine were very often applied to objects incapable of sex. The E"orman had but two genders, the neuter not being recognized in its grammar. When the two languages coa- lesced, a compromise was efl^ected by employing the mascu- Hne and feminine as indications, not of grammatical gender, or termination, but of sex, and confining the neuter to ob- jects without sex. This, of course, led to the rejection of those Anglo-Saxon endings of the article, the noun and the adjective, which had indicated grammatical gender ; and as the Saxon inflections for case depended more or less upon the gender, they naturally were dropped also when grammatical gender was discarded. ]!^othing then was left for distinction but the numbers, singular and plural. Although one declen- sion of the Saxon nouns made the plural in s, and thereby the general adoption of s as a sign for the plural of nouns was facilitated, yet no plural fonn of the Saxon adjective em- ployed that sign. The termination in e was the general nom- inative plural ending of all adjectives in the indefinite form, and this continued to be used in English to designate that number for some centuries, though not with strict uniformity. Indeed, when the adjective was employed as a noun, it some- times made the plural in e, even down to the end of the six- teenth century.* The e, as a sign of number, was finally • See Lecture XIV. 25 386 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. dropped soon after that period, and adjectives have since been indeclinable. Tlie verb, which, to the distinctions of number and per- son, in most languages adds those of time and other condi- tions, is always subject to a greater number of inflectional changes than any other part of speech. The conjugations of the Saxon and the Norman verb had scarcely any point of resemblance except the employment of compound tenses, and the consequence naturally was, that the characteristic endings of both were principally rejected, and the radical of the verb left almost uninflected, and dependent on auxiliaries for the expression of the various modifications of its radical mean- ing. In its selection of auxiliaries, it conformed partly to Romance, partly to Gothic models ; and it must be admitted that with respect to the future tense, the English syntax is an improvement upon the Saxon. Shall and will, it is true, existed in that language, but not as true auxiliaries, and the use of them as signs of the future, if not directly borrowed from the Old-lSTorthern, at least belongs to the Scandinavian, not the Teutonic side of Anglo-Saxon. One of the most curious facts in the history of the Eng- lish verb is the tendency which existed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to the formation of new regular inflec- tions, by the coalescence or agglutination of verbs and pro- nouns. This was indeed, perhaps, in some sort, a dialectic peculiarity, but cases occur in too wide a range of writers to allow us to consider it as by any means altogether local in its character. It seems to have begun with the interrogative, where the pronoun, following the verb, would most easily unite with it ; but the agglutinate form is often used in affirmative periods. The coalescence of the pronoun of the NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 387 second person and the verb is most frequent, but examples of u like process in the other persons are not wanting. Thus in the fable of Dame Siriz in "Wright's Analecta Literaria, there are several instances of the use of wiUi and woldi, for I will and I would ; in the ancient Interlocutory Poem in the first volume of the Eeliquias Antiqu£e, we find Tcepi, hawy, cani, for I keep, I have, I can ; in the Thrush and the Night- ingale, in the same volume^ ne rechi, for I do not reck or care ; forbeddi^ for I forbid. The coalescence of the second person with the verb is extremely common, and there are few English writers of the fourteenth century who do not furnish exemplifications of it. Eobert of Gloucester has ^erikestow, misdostow, for thinkest thou, misdoest tliou. Dame Siriz, trov^tu, for trowest thou ; the Seven Sages, woltu, for thou wilt ; the ancient Interlocutory Poem above referred to a like form, with the pronoun, thu canstu ; and Piers Plough- man, among numerous other cases, the negative inflection, why nadistou, why hadst-thou-not.* In the carelessness of pronunciation, which usually marks hasty and familiar speaking, the auxiliary have is indistinctly articulated. "I should have gone," is pronounced almost. * Similar combinations are found in German, even as late as the time of Luther. Thus, in Wamunge D. M. Luther an seine lieben Deudsohen, Witten- berg, 1531, wiltu occurs at F. III., and mustu at F. b. In the much older Oreudel und Bride, Zurich, 1858, we find instances of the coalescence of all the three persons with the verb : woldich, p. 17 ; raahtu,6; vasthi, woldhi, 1 ; kondhi, 9. In the famous abrenuntio Diaboli, of the eighth century, Wright (Biog. Britan. Lit. I., 310,) prints forsachistu, gelobistu, but other critics separate the pronoun from the verb. There are many instances of like combi- nations in old Icelandic, and among others may be mentioned the construction of a negative form of the verb by affixing the particle, a, at, a{>, or aS ; also of negative forms of the noun, adjective, pronoun, and adverb, by affixing the syllables gi or ki. 388 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. " I should a gone," and by persons ignorant of reading and writing, altogether so. In old English hooks, many instances occur where the compound tense is thus printed, as, for ex- ample, in Lord Berners' Froissart, vol. I., chap. 225, " a man coude not cast an appell among the, hut it shuld a fallen on a hassenet or a helme ; " in Wycliffe's Apology for the Lol- lards, page 1, " I knowlech to a felid and seid f)us." In the Paston Letters, I. 22, " brybe's that wold a robbed a ship ; " Paston Letters, I. 6, " a gret nowmbre come to Arfleet for to a/rescuyd it," in which last example the coalescence is com- plete. A like tendency is discoverable in other classes of words, such as the formation of an objective of the definite article thehj a coalescence with the prepositions in, on and atj ythe, ith being often written for in the, oth for on the, atte for at the. There are also traces of a new form in the nouns. In Icelandic, Swedish and Danish, the nouns have a definite declension formed by aflaxing the termination of the definite article according to case and gender. Thus, in Swedish, konung means king, konungen, the king, konungens, ^Asking's; bus means house, huset, i/ie house.* A some- what similar contraction existed in early English, in the case of nouns beginning with a vowel. The empress was written * The definite article is den for the masculine and feminine, det for the neuter. In the process of coalescence, the initial consonant d is dropped, and konung den becomes konungen, hus det, huaet. This, at least, is the present grammatical resolution of the compound. Historically, howCTer, kon- ungen is the Icelandic kon{ingrinn,a definite formed by the coalescence of the noun k o n 6 n g r , and the definite pronominal article h i n n , (for which latter word the modern Swedish substitutes den,) and so of other nouns which have been traditionally handed down from the Old-Northern period. In the definite form of new words, the analogy of the primitive language has been foUoived, »nd the article retains the d only when it stands alone. NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 389 and spoken as one word, thempre^s y the evangel or gospel, thevangel ; the apostle, thapostle ; the ancre {ajadhov) thanare. There are even faint and doubtful indications of a like incli- nation with regard to the article an, and the creation of an in- definite form of the noun by employing this article as a prefix : thus we find a nedgetoole for a7i edge-tool, a nounpire* for an umpire, but these seem to be rather cases of orthographical confusion than really new combinations. The effect of reducing a language to writiag is to put a stop to the formation of inflections. Inflections doubtless often grow out of a hurried and indistinct pronunciation of familiar and frequently recurring combinations ; but, when the words are written, the mind is constantly brought back to the radical forms, and the tendency to coalescence thus ar- rested ; and indeed the effect of writing does not stop here, but it leads to the resolution of compounds not much altered in form, into their primitive elements. In listening to the conversation of uneducated persons, and even to the familiar colloquial speech of the better in- structed, we observe a strong inclination to the coalescence of words. Let a foreigner, who should be wholly ignorant of the grammatical structure of the European languages, but able to write down articulations, record the words of our or- dinary conversation as he would hear them spoken. The result would be an approximation to an inflected language. He would agglutiuate in writing the words which we agglu- tiuate in speaking, and thus, in many cases, form a regular conjugation. Take for example the interrogative use of the * The n in nmmpire may be radical, for it has been ingeniously suggested, that this obscure word is perhaps n o n pair, odd one, a third person called in to turn the scale between two disagreeing arbitrators. 390 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. verb to have; have I? have you? has he? The stranger would not suspect that each of these phrases was composed of two words, but would treat them as the first, second and third persons of an interrogative form of the verb to have. His spelling would conform to the pronunciation, and he would write havvi, havye, hazzy. Ifow those who first re- duce a language to writing are much in the condition I have just supposed. They record what they hear, and had Eng- lish long remained unwritten, the coalescences would have become established, and conjugations and declensions formed accordingly. The interrogative would have had its regular verbal inflection, and a past infinitive, agone. af alien, would have grown out of the combination of the participle with the auxiliary, the latter becoming a syllabic augment.* This is precisely analogous to what actually did take place in most of the Romance dialects, because they were used colloc[uially for centuries before they were written, the Latin being the language of the government, of law, of literature, and of religion. The two great elements of which English is composed had each its written dialect, and it would therefore have been quite natural that the new language should very early have become a written speech, if there had been an actual histor- ical hiatus between Anglo-Saxon and Norman-English. But the change from the one to the other was so gradual, that the spoken dialect always existed in a written form, orthographi- cal mutations following closely upon orthoepical revolutions. * In French, it was only the early reduction of the spoken tongue to writ- ing, which prevented the development of a regular negative verb, and definite noun. N'avoir would have become permanently navoir, and I'homme, lomme, in writing as well as in speech, had French remained merely an oral iialect a few centuries longer. NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. 391 Between Latin and the modern Eomance tongues, on the other hand, there was an interval, and consequently these latter, as literary dialects, had a definite commencement, while Eng- lish had none. Hence, English made little progress in new grammatical formations, and the predominance of Norman influence led to the rejection not only of Saxon endings, but of many other facilities of expression, the loss of which is a very serious evil to the English tongue. For instance, the Saxon had a negative form for all verbs beginning with a vowel, the aspirate A, or the semi-vowel w. This consisted in using the consonant n, the initial of the Saxon negative particle ne, as a prefix. The convenience of this form was strongly felt, and it was not abandoned in poetry for some centuries after English became a distinct language. Chaucer constantly says I narn, for I arn not, I nas, for I was not, he nould, for he would not, he nad, for he had not, I nill, for I will not. The Wyclifiite versions often use the negative verb in the imperative, as in Judges xviii. 9 : " Wyle ye be negligent, nil ye ceese." Sylvester at the end of the six- teenth century, occasionally employs this form, as, for exam- ple, in this verse of his twenty-sixth sonnet : Wlo nill be subjects, shall be slaves, in fine. "We still retain the negative nill in the phrase, will he, nill he, whether he will or not, where will and nill are not aux- iliaries, but independent verbs. Wesley attempted to revive nill, and wrote : " Man wills something, because it is pleasing to nature, and he mils something, because it is painful to na- ture." The linguistic sense of the English people was at a low ebb in Wesley's time, and his use of nill found few if any imitators, but the fact that we still employ similar compounds 392 NEW ENGLISH INFLECTIONS. in none, neither, never, which are simply one, either, ever, with the negative prefix n, shows that this form is not radi- cally repugnant to the present genins of the language, and I see nothing very improbable in the recovery of the negative verb. The ISTorinan, though it had its coalescences, like the other Romance dialects, as for instance in the case of the fu- ture, was nevertheless averse to compounds ; and as it became more and more an influential element in the organization of English, it not only checked further coalescence, but led to the resolution of some compounds which had become estab- lished, and hence the new inflections were soon abandoned.* The only deliberate, organized experiment for the restora- tion of an obsolete English form, is that of the Society of Friends, who have long stiiven to reintroduce what they call the plain language, or the employment of the singular thou, and the corresponding verbal inflection, in place of the plural you, in addressing a single person. It is not strange that a phraseology, which was adopted as the badge of a sect, should have failed to secure general acceptance, but the en- tire want of success in the attempt to establish it even among the Friends themselves, is a strong evidence of the rooted * Our English verb to hunt appears to be allied to a Mo3so-Gothic word of nearly similar form, which has been conjectured to be cognate with hand, so that the primary signification of hunt would bo, to take with the hand, or catch. Some etymologists derive ho%i,nd from hunt, but it is quite as probable that hunt is derived from hound, which in Saxon was spelt not with ou, but simply «. In that case, to hunt would be to chojse with hounds, or dogs, or, as we sometimes now say, to hound or to dog. At the period when there was ■< tendency to resolve compounds, this very obvious, and as I much inchne to believe true ety- mology, struck the rude philologists of the time, and, accordingly, we find hunts- man written in early English houndsman, sometimes as one word, but not un- frequently as two, hounds man. See the History of Helyas, Thorn's Early Prose Romances, III., 65, 65. KEW ENGLISH INFLEOTIONg. 393 aversion of the Anglican people and speech to much variety of inflection. In the first fervor of religious party zeal, doubtless, educated Friends spoke more grammatically, but the second person of the verb does not appear ever to have been generally employed by their followers ; and even the nominative of the pronoun of the second person was soon discarded, so that will thee, has thee, does thee, were substi- tuted for wilt thou, hast thou, dost thou. Tliat we shall recover many lost Saxon words there can be no doubt, and poetry will yet reanimate obsolete forms specially adapted to metrical convenience. E^ew regular in- fl.ections, however, are not to be expected, perhaps not even desired; and some grammarians even consider it probable that formal distinctions of case, number and person will be rejected altogether, and aH grammatical relations determined by auxiliaries, prepositions or other particles. That such has been the general tendency of English since the birth of its literature is quite certain, and the fact is too familiar to need to be established by proof, but one or two examples may be worth citing. The use of the possessive pronoiins, and of the inflected possessive case of nouns and pronouns, was, until a comparatively recent period, very much more extensive than at present, and they were employed in many cases where the preposition with the objective now takes their place. In modern English, the inflected possessive of nouns expresses almost exclusively the notion of property or appur- tenance. Hence, we say a mail's hat, or a man's hand, but the description of a man, not a man's description. And, of course, we generally limit the application of this form to words which indicate objects capable of possessing or enjoying the right of property, in a word, to persons, or at least ani- 394 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. mated and conscious creatures, and we accordingly speak of a woman's bonnet, but not of a house's roof. In short, we now distinguish between the possessive and the genitive. This we must allow is a well-founded distinction, but it is of recent in- troduction ; and indeed some modern writers are inclined to discard it, but thus far with few imitators. Clifford, who had been a follower of Wycliffe, and recanted, expresses his repent- ance in his will before referred to, by styling himself " unwor- thie and Ooddis traytor." So in the Paston Letters, wxitten in the fifteenth century, we find " the King's rebels, the King's traitors" for rebels against the king, traitors to the king, and in Froissart, " Jiis rebels." These expressions strike us oddly, but in reality they are not a whit more incongruous than the phrases, the Mng's enemies, our enemies, which have, singularly enough, remained current in English, and indeed in most European languages, but which will perhaps become as obsolete as the M^ig's traitors. "We may consistently say the Icing's friends, because we feel that men have certain rights, or at least interests, in their friends and in the senti- ments which constitute friendship, but the Icing's enemies is no way grammatically distinguishable from the Icing's rebels. Few instances now remain of this repugnant use of the pos- sessive, but its limitation to persons did not originate till long after the date of the authorities I have cited. Lodge, who translated the works of L. Annseus Seneca, near the beginning of the seventeenth century, says, in the preface to the second edition of that work : " Eeader, I here once more present thee Senecaes translation." In this case Seneca is to be considered the name, not of a person, but of his works collectively. This construction is frequent in Shakespeare, and Fuller in the In- fant's Advocate printed in 1653, has this passage : " If we can^ ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 395 not perceive the manner of sins poison, no wonder if we can- not conceive the method of graces antidote, in Infants souls." Similar examples might be multiplied ad infinitum.-^- In like manner, what is now a possessive pronoun was anciently but improperly used also as a genitive of the per- sonal pronoun. In the Wycliffite version of Genesis ix. 2, we read : " And yoiu^e feer and you7'e tremblyng be uponalle the beestis of erthe," where the modern version rightly has, " and the fear of you and the dread of you." The posses- sives of the third person his and their were employed in this way much later than those of the first and second person, and even in recent times many instances can be found where these pronouns take a relative after them, as " their life who violate the principles of morality," for " the life of those who."t * Notwithstanding this free use of the inflected possessive by old writers, we sometimes meet in them a long succession of the prepositional construction, as in this passage from the life of Beza in Abel Eedivivus, p. 471 : " for he not onely entred into a consideration of the truth of the doctrines of the Church of Rome, &c.'' f In Anglo-Saxon, the possessive pronoun singular of the frst person was min, of the second f)in. The genitive plural of the personal pronoun was il r e in the first person, e o w e r in the second, hira, hiora,orheora,in the third. The possessive pronouns plural of the first and second persons were formed by treating the genitive plural of the personal pronouns, as a nominative, and declining it like an adjective pronoun. For the third person, there was no possessive pronoun in either the singular or plural, but the genitives, his in the masculine and neuter singular, hire in the feminine singular, and hira, hio r a or h e o r a for all genders in the plural, were used instead of possessive pronouns. The similarity of form between the genitive plural of the first and second persons and the plural possessive pronoun for those persons, naturally led to grammatical and logical confusion in the use of both, and the expressions I have quoted from the Wycliflite versions, '■^ your fear," &c., were as improper at that time, as they would be now, for the logical distinction between the two pronominal forms was at no period of the language quite lost sight of, though it was not always strictly observed. In the transition from Anglo-Saxon to English, the genitive plural of the personal pronoun was dropped, and the objective, with a preposition, substituted 396 tNvJLIbH POSSESSIVE. At present, the Ube of whose, the possessive of who, is pretty generally confined to persons, or things personified, and we should scruple to say, " I passed a house whose win- dows were open." This is a modem, and indeed by no means yet fully established, distinction. In Anglo-Saxon, the foi-m hw£es, whence our whose, was the genitive of all the gen- ders of the pronoun h w a , and whose was universally em- ployed as a neuter by the best English writers until a recent period, as, in certain combinations, it still is by very good authorities. The origin of this distinction is to be found ia a fact to which I have before alluded, namely, the change in the office of genders in grammar. In Anglo-Saxon, gram- for it. This change was made before the time of Wycliffe, and the use of the possessive pronoun, instead of the genitive of the personal pronoun, was a vio- lation of the idiom of the language. This is shown abundantly by the authority of the Wycliffite translators themselves, for tbey very generally make the dis* tinction, as, for example, in Joshua vii. 13, where we read " cursyinge is in the midel of thee^^ in the older text, and " in the myddis of thee,''^ in the later, and in Ezekiel xxxvi. 23, where one text has "intherayddil of them" the other "in the myddis of them; " and so in many other passages, where these old trans- lations agree with the authorized version. The vulgarisni " in our midst," "in your midst," " in their midst," now unhappily very common, grows out of this confusion. The possessive pronoun cannot be properly applied, except as in- dicative of possession or appurtenance. The "midst" of a company or com- munity of persons is not a thing belonging or appurtenant to the company, or to the individuals composing it. It is a mere term of relation, of an adverbial, not a substantive, character, and is an intensified form of expression for among. The phrase in question, therefore, is a gross solecism, and unsupported by the authority of pure idiomatic English writers. Shakespeare, 2 Pt. Henry VI. iv. 8, has " through the very midst of you ; " and this is the constant form in the au- thorized translation of the Bible. In Leviticus xxvi. 11, the Anglo-Saxon is t o middes eowre (eower), to-middes being a preposition governing the personal pronoun eowre. The English tianslatlons all give " among you." In John i. 26, where the Gi-eek text is fidcros 5e ifiHv, the Anglo-Saxon is t o - middes eow; the later Wycliffite version, "in the my ddil of you; " the older "the rayddil man of you." See, further. Appendix, 5i. Milton's " my midst of sorrow," Samson Agouistes, 1339, is a poetical trans- position for ' the midst of my sorrow," and has no bearing on the present question. ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. 397 matical gender was independent of sex. So long as the mas- culine, feminine and neuter were indiscriminately applied to objects incapable of the distinction of sex, there was no very strong sense of a want of one possessive form for masculine and feminine, or in other -words,, personal objects, and an- other for neuter, or inanimate, impersonal things ; but as this distinction became better and better established, and who was appropriated to persons, which to things,* the use of one possessive foim for both was more and more felt to be incon- sistent, and the employment of the possessive of both nouns and pronouns was regulated accordingly. The necessity of a double form for the more precise ex- pression of ideas which have become distinct, has led to the development of one of the few new inflections which modern English has evolved. In Anglo-Saxon, the personal pronoun represented in English by he, she, it, made the gen- itive or possessive his for the masculine and neuter gender, her (hire) for the feminine, and so long as grammatical gender had not an invariable rel.ation to sex, the employment of a common fonn for the masculine and neuter excited no feeling of incongi'uity. The change in the grammatical sig- nificance of gender suggested the same embaiTassment with relation to the universal application of his as of whose, and when this was brought into distinct consciousness, a remedy was provided. At first, it was used as a possessive, without inflection or a preposition, and several instances of this oc- cur in Shakespeare, as also in Leviticus xxv. 6, of the Ei- * The Anglo-Saxon relative and interrogative was ii w a, masc. and fem., and hwaet, neut. It is true, h w a was generally employed in reference to per- sons, but, at least in interrogations, h w se t was very often used, in the same way, as Hwset is ^ea Mannes Sunu. Who is this Son of Man ? 398 mXEODTJCTION OF ITS- ble of 1611 : '' That whieli growetli of it own accord."* Its, although to be found in printed boolis of a somewhat earlier date, is not once used in that edition, his being in all cases but that just cited employed instead. The precise date and occasion of the first introduction of its is not ascertained, but it could not have been far from the year 1600. I believe the earliest instances of the use of the neuter possessive yet ob- served are in Shakespeare, and other dramatists of that age. Most English writers continued for some time longer to em- ploy Ids indiscriminately with reference to male persons or creatures, and to inanimate impersonal things. For a con- siderable period about the beginning of the seventeenth cen- tury, there was evidently a sense of incongruity in the appli- cation of his to objects incapable of the distinction of sex,, and at the same time, a reluctance to sanction the introduc- * The use of an uninflected form as a possessive, without the preposition oty was by no means confined to the pronoun it. In Robert of Gloucester, 93, wc have Conan Jje quene cosyn, he clepude out {)0 stille, and again J)e ioh be Ifyng of Breteyne, j)at was |)in vncle land. The first verse of Eobert de Brunne's version ofLangtoft runs thus: In Saint JBede bokes writen er stories olde ; and on page 13 : In Oharlemagn courte, sire of Saint Dinys. In the older Wycliffite version of Genesis xxix. IP, we find : " Whom whanne Jacob hadde seen, and wiste hir his unkil dowghter ; " and xxx. 36 : " and putto a space of thre daies weye bitwix hem and his dowghtir husboo7id." These latter cases might, it is true, be considered compounds, like the Danish Farbror, Mor- bro r (F ader - Br o dcr, M o der-Br o d e r), but this explanation will not apply to the earlier examples I have given, or to numerous instances of a later date. Thus in the Paston Letters, I. 6.. "for his sou'eyn lady sake;" I. 118, "on Seint Simon day andJude;" I. 122: "such as most have intrest in tha Lord Wyllughby Ooodes:' IL 298: " my brother iJoa/ asmf." mXEODUCTION OF ITS. 399 tion of the new form its as a substitute. Accordingly, for tlie first half of tliat century, many of the best writers i-e- ject them both, and I think English folios can be found, which do not contain a single example of either. Of it^ thereof, and longer cireumlocutior.s were preferred, or the very idea of the possessive relation was avoided altogether. Although Sir Thomas Browne, writing about 1660, some- times has its five or six times on one page, yet few authors of an earlier date freely use this possessive, and I do not re- member meeting it very frequently in any writer older than T. Hey wood. Ben Jonson indeed employs its in his works, but does not recognize it in his Grammar. It occurs rarely in ililton's prose, and not above three or four times in his poet- i-y. Walton commonly employs his instead. Fuller has its in some of his works, in others he rejects it, and in the Pis- gah Sight of Palestine, printed in 1650, both forms are some- tim.es applied to a neuter noun in the course of a single sen- tence.* Sir Thomas Browne, on the other hand, rarely, if ever, employs his as a neuter, and I think that after the Ees- toration in 1660, scarcely any instances occur of the use of the old possessive for the newly-formed inflection. It is som_e- what singular that the neuter possessive did not appear till long after the grammatical change with respect to gender had taken place in literature, but the explanation is to be found partly in a repugnance to the introduction of new in- flections, and partly in the fact that the old application of genders was kept up in the spoken language long after it had * " Many miles hence, tbis river solitarily runs on as consible of its sad fate suddenly to fall into the Dead Sea, at Ashdoth-Pisgah, where all his comfort ia to have the company of two other brooks," Book II. 58. "Whether from the violence of winds then blowing on its stream, and ang- ring it beyond his banks.'' Book II. 59. iOO INTEODirCTION OF ITS. become extinct in the written. Indeed, they are still applied to inanimate objects, in the same confused way, in some Eng- lish provincial dialects ; and, even apart from the poetical vocabulary, traces of the same practice exist among us to this day. The indiscriminate attribution of the three gen- ders, as in Anglo-Saxon and German, or of the masculine and feminine, as in French and Italian, to inanimate objects, is philosophically a blemish, and practically a serious incon- venience, in those languages, and it is a great improvement in English that it has simplified its grammar, by rejecting so superfluous, unmeaning and embarrassing a subtlety. A singular obsolete corruption in the sjmtax of our mother-tongue was revived not far from the period of the introduction of its, and it has been usually ascribed to a passion for generalizing the laws of language before its facts were well ascertained. Two centuries since- it was common to write John his stick, Mary her took, and the like. Ben Jonson says, that " nouns in s, s, sh, g, and ch, make, in the possessive singular, is, in the plural, es," " which distiac- tion," continues he, " not observed, brought in the monstrous syjitax of the pronoun his joining with a noun betokening a possessor, as the prince Ms house."* The practice appears to have been founded on the grammatical theory that s, as a sign of the possessive case, was a contraction of the possessive * Harvey, in 1580, in his reply to Immerito (Spenser), speaking of English orthography says: " But see what absurdities thys yl fauoured Orthographye, or \ ather Pseudography, hath ingendered ; and howe one errour still breedeth and begetteth an other. Have wee not Mooneth, for Moonthe ; sithence, for since ; whilest, for whilste ; phantasie, for phansie ; euen for evn ; diuel, for divl ; God hys wrathe, for Goddes wrath ; and a thousande of the same stampe, wherein the corrupte Orthography in the moste hath beene the sole, or principall cause of corrupte Prosodye in ouer many." Mulcaster, in 1582, remarks on this form: " Neither do I se anie cause wher to use his, saving after words which end in s, as ' Socrates his councell was this, Platoes that, and Aristotles this.' " HIS AS A POSSESSIVE SIGN. 401 pronoun his. Eut it is argued that those who introduced the innovation did not remember that s was the sign of the pos- sessive in feminine as well as iii masculine nouns, and in the plural number of the strong inflection also, in neither of which cases could it have been originally a contraction of his. They should have further considered, it is added, that upon this theory, the * final of the possessive pronouns hers and theirs must in like manner have been derived from his, which is a manifest absurdity, and that the s in his itself, which is evidently an inflected fonu of the nominative masculine per- sonal pronoun he, could not be thus explained. As I have just remarked, his is the Anglo-Saxon possessive form of the pronoun for both the masculine and neuter genders, the fem- inine having anciently had the form hire, nearly corre- sponding to the modern her. It should be added that the s final is the earliest known sign of the possessive or genitive case in most of the languages of the Indo-Em"opean stock, and it may fairly be insisted, that, for the present, this is to be received as an ultimate grammatical fact, not at this time admitting of etymological explanation.* There is a striking analogous fact in the modern history of the Gothic languages, which cannot be passed over. I refer to the nearly contemporaneous introduction of a pre- cisely similar syntactical form in the Swedish, Danish and German, all of which in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies very frequently employed the possessive pronoun, in the masculine and feminine genders, and both numbers, as the sign of the genitive case of the noun. In these dialects, there is the same discrepancy between the primitive form and * See Note at the end of Lecture. 26 i02 ENGLISH POSSESSIVE. the modem substitute, and e ren a greater difficulty in sup- posing the usual genitive sign to be derived from the posses- sive pronoun. This use of the pronoun is generally if not always confined to proper names, whereas in English it was applied also to common nouns, and in the former case it seems to have originated in the difficulty of declining foreign names with the native inflection. A similar device was sometimes resorted to in the Latin of that day, in the syntax of modem proper names, and I think it probable that the Gothic lan- guages borrowed it from this corrupt Latin form, for there is little reason to suppose that they could all have taken it from the syntax of the one among them which first introduced it. If, however, further investigation shall show that it spon- taneously originated in any two or more of them, the fact becomes very important, and it would be fair to regard it as an expression of the linguistic sense of the Gothic race en- titled to no little weight as an evidence that, in spite of the difficulty of reconciling the forms, the real origin of the Gothic genitive or possessive inflection is to be found in a coalescence of the noun and the possessive pronoun.* The rejection of inflections, and especially the want of a passive voice, has compelled the use of some very complex and awkward expressions. The phrases I am told, he Tiad heen gone half an hour, strike foreigners as particularly mon- * The grammar of the Moeso-Gothic presents a case of resemblance between the genitive of the personal pronouns, wbieli serres as a possessive, and the genitive or possessive case of certain nouns and adjectives. The genitive sin- gular of the personal pronoun is masc. i s , fern, i z o s , neut. is. The genitive singular of a numerous class of masculine nouns ends in is; as no!«. wigs, gen. wigis. The same case of many feminines ends in jos or os; as nom. |>iudangardi, gen. f)iudangardj os. Thus far, there is a certain likeness between the possessive of the pronoun and the possessive ending of the noun, but the coincidences are too few to authorize the supposition that the ending in ANOMALOUS CONSTEUCTIONS. 403 Btxoiis. Sacli combinations as " Tie was give.i a commission in a new regiment " are employed by some of the best writers of tlie present day, as well as by tbose of an earlier period.* I find, in a late discourse by an eminent divine, a recommen- dation to literary men to acquire some mamial occupation " wHeh may ie-fallen-lach-upon in case of need ; " and Cole- ridge speaks of an impediment to " r)ien^s turning their minds inwards upon tbemselves." " Such, a thing has heen- gone-tkrough-xoith,^^ "it ought to-ie-tahen-notice-of" " it ought not to-he-lost-sight-of,^^ are really compound, or rather agglu- tinate passives, and the number of such will probably rather increase than diminish. They make the language not less intelligible, but less artistic ; less poetical, but not less prac- tical, and they are therefore fully in accordance with those undefined tendencies which constitute the present drift of the English language. Note to P. 401. — Notwithstanding these arguments, some able philologists are of opinion that, however corresponding forms are to be explained elsewhere, » as the sign of the possessive in English nouns is derived from, and truly repre- sents, the possessive nronoun his, and hence it is important to examine the his- question was formed by a coalescence of the noun and pronoun, for in most Moeso-Gothic nouns, the possessive form admits of no such explanation. Be- tween the genitive of the adjective and the pronoun, the resemblance is much stronger. Take the indefinite form of the adjective gods, good. Masc rem. Nout Nom. gods, goda, gcij godata. Gen. godis, godaizos, godis. So superlative batists, best. Nom. batists. batista. batist. Gen. batistis. batistaizos. batistis. * Lord Bemers, in his translation of Froissart, Vol. I., chap. 89, says: "1 wa, PriTO, yd/iiia, SfKra, fteoS irop' e?, &0. See Becker, Charicles, II., 33. 414 PUCTCTUATION. acter of the sentence. If it is vocative, ejacnlatory, o|;tative, interjectional, it must hoist an exclamation point as a signal. If it is hypothetical or interrogative, it must announce itself by a mark of interrogation ; and the Spaniards carry the point so far that, in their typography, these signs precede, as well as follow the sent', nee. There is a necessity, or at least an apology, for the use of punctuation in most modern languages, English especially, but which applies with less force to Greek and Latin. I refer to the otherwise inevitable obscurity of long sentences, in lan- guages where the relations of the constituent words are not determined by inflection, but almost wholly by position. The use of commas, semicolons and brackets, supplies the place of inflections, and enables us to introduce, without dan- ger of equivocation, qualifications, illustrations and paren- thetical limitations, which, with our English syntax, would render a long period almost unintelligible, unless its members were divided by marks of punctuation. Without this aux- iliary, we should be obliged to make our written style much more disjointed than it now is, the sentences would be cut up into a multitude of distinct propositions, arid the leading thought consequently often separated from its incidents and its adjuncts. The practice of thus framing our written style cannot but materially influence our use of language as a me- dium of unspoken thought, and, of course, our habits of intellectual conception and ratiocination. It is an advantage of no mean importance to be able to grasp in one grammati- cal expression a general truth, with the necessary limitations, qualifications and conditions, which its practical application requires, and the habitual omission of which characterizes the shallow thinker ; and hence the involution and concentra- tion of thought and style, which punctuation facilitates, is MECHA^'ICAL CONDITIONS. 415 valuable as an antidote to the many distvactiug influences of modern social life. On tlie other hand, the principles of punctuation are subtle, and an exact logical training is requisite for the just application of them. Naturally, then, mistakes in the use of points, as of all the elements of lan- guage, written and spoken, are frequent, so much so, in fact, that in the construction of private contracts, and even of statutes, judicial tribunals do not much regard punctuation ; and some eminent jurists have thought that legislative enact- ments and public documents should be without it. As a guide to the intonation in reading aloud, in a language which has so few grammatical landmarks as English, it is invalua- ble, for it is as true in our days as it was in Chaucer's> that — A reader that pointeth ill A good sentence may oft spill. The art of printing has its special conditions and limita- tions, which have aflTected language in a variety of ways. Every person who writes for publication finds that the form and arrangement of his matter must often be controlled by what are called ' printer's reasons ;' and similar considera- tions of mechanical necessity, convenience, routine or preju- dice, exert a still more important influence on questions of punctuation, orthography, and even expression. The matter of the writer, or ' copy,' as it is technically called, must be accommodated to the space to be filled, and abridged or ex- tended accordingly. If you volunteer to enlighten your fel- low citizens through the pages of a daily, you may be told that but half a column can be spared for your article, and you must consent to cut down yom- lucubrations to that stand- ard, or allow them to be printed in a crowded and microscopic type. If you are a regular contribjtor to a magazine or a 4:16 MECHAlflCAL CONDITIONS. newspaper, you will often be called upon, quite mal-a-propos, to extemporize twenty lines of small pica, or to decide which stanza of your poem shall be omitted, that it may not over- run the page, and when you publish a book, you will be requested to confine your preliminary tete-a-t^te with your reader to the exact limits of the printer's ' form.' In the early history of printing, books sometimes under- went strange changes from analogous causes. Fonts of type were often so small that a large volume was necessarily dis- tributed among several ofiices to be printed. It would in this case be impossible to determine precisely how many printed pages a given quantity of manuscript would fill, and of course the printer who took the latter portion of the copy, must labor under a good deal of uncertainty as to the paging and signatures of his sheets. Hence, there would sometimes occur a considerable break between the last page of the first part, and the first page of the second, and this must either be left with an unseemly and suspicious blank or filled up with new or extraneous matter. Thus, in John Smith's Generall Historic of Virginia, 1624, there occurred in this way a hia- tus of ten pages, and the author partially fills it with compli- mentary verses addressed to him by several friends, making this apology for their introduction : " Now seeing there is this much Paper here to spare, that you should not be altogether cloyed with Prose ; such Verses as my worthy Friends bestowed upon New England, I here present you, because with honestie I can neither reject nor omit their courtesies." In like manner the editor of Fuller's Worthies, published in 1662, excuses the irregularity of the paging by saying that, " the discounting of sheets to expedite the work at sev- MECHANICAL CONDITIONS. 417 eral presses liatli occasioned the often mistake of tlie folios ; " and in Abel Kedivivus, 1651, an erroneous computation, as to tlie space -svliicli manuscript would require, compelled the leaving of ten folios unpaged between page 440 and page 441, from wbicb point another press had undertaken the printing. It is however mainly in smaller matters, that the mechan- ical influence of the press is most conspicuous, if not most important. Xot only what in the nomenclature of the art are called ' forms,' that is, the number of pages inclosed in a single frame and printed at one operation on one piece of paper, but the dimensions of the page, and, in printing prose, the length of the lines also, are inflexible, and our equally rigid characters cannot be crowded, superposed, or indefi- nitely extended by lengthening their horizontal lines, as they are in oriental books, to flt them to the breadth of the page, but if there is a deficiency or an excess of matter, something must be added or omitted. Modern ingenuity, it is true, has contrived methods of accommodation, or, to use a word char- acteristic of oui* times, of compromise, by which appearances may often be saved without a too palpable sacrifice of the author's or rather printer's principles of orthography and punctuation. But, at a somewhat earlier stage of the art, the convenience of the compositor overruled all things, and in spite of the improvements to which I have just alluded, there are few writers who do not even now sometimes sujBfer from the despotism of that redoubtable official. At the period when our language was in a more flux and unsettled condition, and the press was a less flexible instm- ment, if the words of the manuscript did not correspond exactly to the length of a line, and the difficulty could not be 27 418 UNIFOEMITT OF OETHOGEAPHT. remedied by tlie insertion or omission of printer's spaces, without leaving staring blanks or a crowded condition of tbe words at once distasteful to a typographical eye and perplex- ing to the reader, a comma might be dropped or introduced, a capital exchanged for a small letter, or vice versa. So if the author used a word the spelling of which was not well settled, (and all modern orthography was doubtful three hun- dred years ago,) a letter or two might be added or omitted, to give it the proper length. This is the explanation of much of the irregular orthography which occurs in the older, and sometimes in more recent editions of printed books. The ingenuity of more modern printers, as I have already ob- served, has devised methods of removing or greatly lessening this embarrassment, chiefly by the dexterous Tise of spaces ; and the convenience of spelling and punctuating according to a uniform standard so greatly overbalances the difiSculty of accommodating the matter to the page, that authors now complain, not that the printer's orthography is too variable, but that it is tyrannically inflexible. Landor, ia his second conversation between Johnson and Tooke, tells us that Hume's orthography was overruled by his printers. He wrote the preterites and past participles of the weak verbs with a t flnal, as Milton did, as, for example, lookb for looked, but in his printed works, the compositor and publisher would suflfer no such departure from the established laws of the chapel. An eminent French philological writer, when ac- cused of violating his own principles of orthography in one of his printed essays, thus replies : " It was not I that printed my essay, it was Mr. Didot. ISTow Mr. Didot, I confess it with pain, is not of my opinion with regard to the* spelling of certain plurals, and I cannot oblige him to print against rNIFuJi.MlTY OF OliTIIOGKAPHiT. 419 his conscience and liis Labits. You know that every printing office has its rules, its fixed system, from wliicli it will not consent to depart. For example, I think the present fashion f punctuation detestable, because the points are multiplied to a ridiculous excess. "Well, I attempt to prove this by precept and example, and the very printers who pubHsh my argument scatter points over it, as if they were shaken out of a pepper-box. It is their way. What would you have ! They will print my theory only on condition that I will sub- mit to their ^rae writenn, Himm bidde ice |)at het write rihht, Swa sumni jjiss boc himm taBche{)|), All {)werrt ut affterr |)att itt iss Uppo I)is3 firrste bisne, Wi{>{> all Bwillc rime alls her iss sett, Wi{){) all se fele wordess ; & tatt he loke wel J)att he An bocatafif write twiyyess, Eyywhajr |)ser itt uppo J)iss boc Iss writenn o {latt wise. Loke he well f)att het write swa, Forr he ne mayy nohht elless Onn Ennglissh writenn rihht te word t>att wite he wel to so|)e.* And whoso willeth this my book To write again hereafter, TEXT OF SHAKESPEAUE. 426 It is one of tlie most interesting questions in all literature liow far the original text of Sliakespeare has suffered from the license, the negligence, or the indolence of those who, with type and pen have multiplied his works. The dispute is likely to be a long one, and if Collier's folio does not prove the existence of myriads of errors in the cuiTent editions, it at least shows an alarming boldness of commentators in the way of conjectural emendation. Him bid I, tliat he write it right, So as this book him teacheth, Throughout according as it is In this the first example, With all such rhythm as here is set. With words, eke, just so many; And let him look to it, that he Write twice each single letter, WhercTer it, in this my book. In that wise is ywritten. Look he well that he write it «o, For otherwise he may not In English write the words aright, That, wete he well, is soothfasL LECTURE XX. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE AET OF PRINTING. n. Theee are circumstances peculiar to the history of English literature, which have rendered the mechanical conditions and imperfections of the typographical art more powerfully influential upon the language itself, than was elsewhere, ia general, the case. Caxton, the first English printer, was indeed both an Englishman by birth, and a man of scholarly attainments, but he acquired the art at Cologne, and it is probable, though not certain, that his first production, The Eecuyell of the Historyes of Troye, was printed either at Cologne or at Bruges. When he established his press at "Westminster soon after the year liTO, he brought over work- men from the continent, and, were stronger evidence want- ing, the names of his successors, Lettou and Machlinia, Wyn- kyn de Worde, Pynson, Eerthelette, Faques, Treveris, would sufliciently indicate that they also were of foreign birth. In- deed it appears from Strype's Memoirs of Cranmer,* that as late as 15B1, the printers in England were generally " Dutch- * See Southey's Common Place Book, Vol. II. EAKLY FEINTING IN ENGLAJJD. 427 men that could neither speak nor write true English," and ■when Grafton applied for an exclusive privilege for the trans- lation of the Bible which goes by his name, he represented that " for covetonsness' sake, these foreign printers would not employ learned Englishmen to oversee and correct their work," so that, as he complains, " paper, letter, ink, and cor- rection would be all naught." Three years later, Grafton asked permission to print the Bible at Paris, where he says that not only could he procure better and cheaper paper, but that the workmen were more skilful. Any one, who has had occasion to print so much as a familiar quotation in a foreign tongue can judge whether a volume printed in a lan- guage unknown to the compositor would be likely to prove very correct. Besides this, it must be remembered that the art of calligraphy had been less cultivated in England than on the continent, that the characters in common use differed somewhat from those employed in the other European lan- guages, and that the contractions and abbreviations stood, of course, for different combinations of sounds or letters. An instance of this is the employment of {> and S for the two sounds of tJi, in the Anglo-Saxon and Old-English alphabets, a trace of which long remained in the confounding of f) with y. In black-letter, the character y much resembles the f), and hence y was often used instead of it, and this gave rise to the forms ye for the, and yt for that. Thus many cir- cumstances combined to make an English manuscript ex- tremely illegible to a printer unacquainted with the language. While in almost every Continental country, the early printers were generally learned men, and sometimes among the most eminent scholars of their time, the followers of Caxton were for nearly two centuries principally mere 428 EAELT FEINTING IN ENGLAND. handicraftsmen, and typography fell far short both of the dign% and the artistic perfection to which it elsewhere attained almost immediately after its invention. For all these reasons it is obvious that early English printed books must have been veiy unfaithful copies of the manu- scripts they attempted to reproduce, and the great incorrect- ness of their execution had a prejudicial effect upon the forms of the language and sometimes on the meaning and use of important words. There is a large class of words of Latin and French origin belonging to the dialect of books, and at first, of course, used exclusively by literary men, who could not be ignorant of their etymology or true orthogra- phy, but which are found very vaguely spelled iu the printed books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, the printers did not discriminate between eminent and imminent, president and precedent, ingenious and ingemous, and these words were used or rather printed interchangeably almost to the beginning of the eighteenth century. A passage in Ful- ler, however, clearly marks the distinction between xngenvr ousness and ingenw^ty as then recognized, and it is not prob- able that scholars could ever have been insensible to the dif- ferences between all of them.* They must first have been confounded by typographical error. The confusion once introduced, educated men became involved in it, and it was * Though men understood imperfectly in this life, yet if all understood egually imperfectly, upon the supposition of equal ingenuoKsness to their inge- nuity, (that is, that they would readily embrace what appears true unto them,) all would be of the same judgment. Infant's Advocate, Part 11,, p. 8. Does Trench, in treating of desynonymised words, (Study of Words, Lec- ture V.,) mean to say that ingemous, (Latin ingeniosus, proximately from in genium,) and ingenwous, (Latin ingenuus, directly from the verbal root,) were ever really the same word ? CONFUSION OF SPELLING. 429 long before the -n'ords and tlie ideas they expressed were dis- entangled from it. Printed books, however incorrect, wonld, from their greater legibility, always be preferred to manuscript, and their wide circulation would make them at once popular standards of authority in all matters of orthography and grammatical inflection. The confusion and irregularity of their spelling would accordingly powerfully tend to increase the uncertainty of orthography, especially at a period when the usage of the learned even was discordant, and the lan- guage still in process of formation. It is, no doubt, in these circumstances that we are to find the explanation of the otherwise paradoxical fact, that the spelling of the English language, as practised by educated persons in the fifteenth, and even the latter part of the fourteenth century, more nearly resembles that of the present day, than do the printed books of the sixteenth century. The foreign printers igno- rantly corrupted the spelling of their copy, and their books again the orthography of the nation.* lujCarefuUy executed recent editions, printed directly from very early manuscripts, we find a surprisingly close resemblance to the spelling of modem periods. In the best manuscripts of Chaucer, and more especially of Gower, and in some of the Paston letters, as, for example, in a letter of Lord Hastyngs written before the year 1480, we find indeed obsolete words, but the orthog- * Et si, huic non absimile incommodum etiam accederet, ut praelo corrigendo non doctua prseeaset sed aliquis de grege mercatorum qui Germanic& et Anglic^ loqui posset, corrumpi necesse erat ortliographiam nostram ; et quia torapestiy* medela adhibita non esaet, in hominum usum corruptam transire. Atque hane sane existimo unicam fuisse causam corruptelse. A. Gil. Logonomia Anglica, 2nd edition, 1621. Prsefatio ad Lectorem. 430 CONFUSION OF SPELLING. raphy of those whicH are still employed conforms more closely to the present standard than does that of the English Bible of 1611.* The original edition of that translation fur- nishes abundant illustrations of a practice to which I referred in the last lecture, that, namely, of clipping or lengthening words according to the space which it was convenient to give them in arranging the printed lines. Thus in Deuteronomy ix. 19, hot is spelt whot, because a long word was required to fill out the space ; in Joshua ix. 12, Judges ii. 14, iii. 20, it is spelt hote, there being a smaller space to occupy, and in other passages, where the ordinary form hot was long enough, that spelling is employed. In verse 13, of chapter xiii. of Judges, ye and we are both printed with a single e, but in verse 15, of the same chapter, each with two ee. In verse 2 of chapter xv., the second person singular, imperfect tense of the verb to have, is spelt haddest, in Genesis xxx. 30, hadst. In Genesis xxxi. 8, the future of the substan- tive verb to he is printed shall hee, with two II and two ee, but in chapter xxx., vprse 33, it is printed in one word, shaTbe, * See letter from Lord Hastyngs, Paston Letters, II., 296. Pauli, in the iDtroductory Essay to his edition of Gower's Confessio Amautis, London, 1857, states, that he has adopted the "judicious and consistent orthography" of a manuscript probably of the end of the fourteenth century, " as the basis for the spelling in this new edition.'' He also describes the orthography of a manu- script of the same author, of the fifteenth century, as having been " carried through almost rigorously according to simple and reasonable principles." Pauli's text is founded on an edition by Berthelette, of the year 1532, but con- formed in its orthography to the first manuscript above mentioned. Berthelette printed from an edition by Caxton, but substituted the dialect and spelling of his own time, and carried the process of modernization still farther in a subse- quent edition. In that from which Pauli printed, the "orthography and metre had been disturbed in innumerable places by Berthelette," and he observes that in the oldest manuscripts, tlie promiscuous use of y and j, u and t), so common in all old English printed books, does not occur. The spelling of Pauli's edi- tion, thus restored to its original integrity, is, in a very large proportion of the words, identical with that of the present day. CONFUSION OF SPELLING. 431 and botli these forms occur in verse 17 of chapter xlii. of Isaiah.* So in the life of Eeynolds in Abel Redivivus, in one sentence college and l-noioledge are spelt -without the e final, but in the next period, both Avords with it. These, and many more among the thousand similar variations in which early printed English books abound, were occasioned by the necessity of conforming the length of the words to the space that could be spared for them. The double forms toward and towards, which occur in King James's Bible, are explained in the same way, as also the employment or omission of the final s in other words of the same ending in other English books of that century. It should, however, be here observed, that, in all the words ending in -ivard, which are used in the first edi- tions of that translation, with the exception of towards and afterwards, the s is constantly omitted, according to what seems to be the fashionable modern usage ; though, as I think, the s final ought to be retained in employing words with this ending as adverbs or prepositions, and dropped when they serve as adjectives. One of the most remarkable typograph- ical licenses I have observed, occurs in the life of Abbot in Abel Eedivivus, printed in 1651. At that period, our com- mon title of address. Mister, was spelt, and doubtless pro- nounced. Master, and hence, though the same abbreviation was used for the address as at present, namely Mr., the two significations of the word were liable to be confounded. The author of the life in question speaks of a particular work, as ' Abbot's master-piece,' but the printer, for want of space, *■ The following fac-simile from one of the editions of 1611, shows the ap tangement of two lines of the verse referred to, and the reason for it : 17 € Wc)t^ sljatl bc£ *tant£iJ bacb, tl)qi aljalbe gv^atln asl)ain£^, tl]at trust 432 CONFUSION OP SPELLING. has printed the abbreviation Mr., instead of the whole word master. A like example occurs in a letter from Harrington to Prince Henry in the Nugse Antiquse. In printing poetry, where the verses are seldom long enough to extend across the whole breadth of the page, the same necessity of adapt- ing the words to the space did not exist, and hence it is, that the spelling in old printed poems is sometimes more nniform than in contemporaneous prose. In old editions of Chaucei', we find the orthography of the versified portions less irreg- ular than that of the Tale of Melibceus, and of the Persones Tale, both of which are in prose. It should, however, be remembered, that, in poetry, there existed a totally different cause of irregularity, not connected with the mechanical laws of the press. I refer to the necessities of metre. The final 6 of words with that termination was in Chaucer's time usually pronounced, at least in verse, as it still is in French poetry, and accordingly where not strictly inflectional, it was employed or dropped according to metrical convenience. Besides this, at that period, the Saxon inflections had not become wholly obsolete, and early English writers used the e final, as a sign of the plural in adjectives, and verb^ of the strong conjugation, which in our modem dialect admit no change of form in different numbers. The near coincidence in time, between the Protestant Eef- ormation and the general diffusion of the art of printing in Europe, together with the close analogy between the intel- ectual influences of both, makes it a matter of great difiS- culty in many cases to determine which of these two causes was most active in the production of particular effects ; and especially, how far the change which the sixteenth century produced in all the European languages is to be ascribed to PKINTING AND THE EEFOEMATION. 433 tlie one or the other of them. The year 1500 found the Eng- lish language much as Chaucer and "Wycliife had left it ; in the year 1600, it had nearly reached the point where it now stands, so far as concerns the dialects of the knowledges then cultivated, except in the vocabulary of the physical sciences. The Tale of Meliboeus and the Persones Tale differ from the ITorte d 'Arthur, in Caxton's edition, only as English orig- inals, suggested and modified by the study of moral and theo- logical treatises in Latin, would be expected to differ fl-om a translation of a French romantic fiction, but, independently of the coloring which each receives from these influences, and, fi-om the nature of the si^bjects, the language will be found to be very nearly the same. But if we compare either of them with Hooker or Shakespeare, and again, the latter writers with the pui-est authors of the present day, we shall observe that the century between Caston and Hooker ef- fected as great changes as the two hundred and fifty years that have elapsed since that great writer flourished. Al- though printing was introduced into England about 1470, yet the productions of the press were not sufficiently nu- merous to exert much influence on the national mind or speech, until half a century later. During the sixteenth cen- tury, printing and the Reformation promoted each other, and their action upon thought and language was a concur- rent one. Without attempting to define the relative weight of each, I may say that I think the most important single element, in producing the general effect of both upon the English language, was the diffusion of a knowledge of clas- sical literature, which printing made possible, and the Ref- ormation made more desirable. The increased number and the reduced price of books in the Greek and Latin languages 28 434 DIALECT OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTUET. released classical literature from the confinement of tlie clois- ter, and private individuals of moderate means were now able to enjoy intellectual luxuries, whicli before had been accessible only to the wealth of monastic corporations. Man uscripts of the classics had been multiplied only for the ex- clusive use of those establishments, by monkish scribes who occupied their leisure hours in the copying, or calligraphic and pictorial embellishment, of writings which had survived the wreck of yet more barbarous ages. The first tendency of this secularization of classic lore was undoubtedly unfavor- able to the cultivation of the popular literature and the ver- nacular speech, but a reaction soon commenced, and a new literature sprung up in the vulgar languages, though fash- ioned upon ancient models, aifecting a classical structure, and marked by a Latinized phraseology. Until the end of the fifteenth century, it was only in the theological and moral departments, that Latin had much direct influence upon English, most of the Latin roots intro- duced into it up to that time having been borrowed from the French ; but as soon as the profane literature of Greece and Rome became known to English scholars through the press, a considerable influx of words drawn directly from the clas- sics took place. The introduction of this element produced a sort of fermentation in the English language, a strife between the new and the old, and both vocabulary and structure con- tinued in a very unstable state until the end of the sixteenth century, when English became settled in nearly its present form. In the productions of Caxtoii's press, and indeed in the literature of the period down to and including the time of Lord Berners, whose translation of Froissart, perhaps the best English prose that had yet been written, and certainly FEEEUOM OK Till' PEESS. 435 the most deliglitfal narrative work in the laLguage, first ap- peared in 1523, it is scarcely possible to find a single word of Latin origin, belonging to the general vocabulary of English, whose form does not render it most probable that we received it thi-ough the French. A hundred years later, on the contrary, we meet on every printed page, words either taken directly from the Latin, or, which is a very important point, if before existing in our literatm-e, reformed in orthog- raphy so as to suggest their classical origiu. There is even in Hooker an evident struggle between the two great ele- ments of English, and in his hesitation between the Latin and the Saxon, or older English, he not unfrequently uses both, as for instance, " nocive or hurtful things," " unreason- able cecity and hlindness" "rectitude or straightness," "sense and meaning y " and so, in Cotta, " heartened and encour- aged." The influence of printing upon the English language has been much extended and strengthened by two important cir- cumstances, common to the two great countries of which it is the vernacular. The one is, that in neither does there exist, nor for two centuries has there existed, a censorship of the press, a previous authoritative examination of manuscript matter intended for the public ; the other is, that public dis- cussion of all questions in the departments of religion, of intellectual and moral philosophy, of politics, iadeed of all topics aifecting the great and permanent interests of man, is free and unrestricted. Hence the popular mind, the popular speech, iu both countries are open to a class of influences, which, in most continental states, are confined to the privi- leged and the professional alone. For the same reason, the dialects appropriated to the elucidation of all these great sub- 436 FEEEDOM OF THE PEESS. jects have been very widely cultivated, and their vocabu- laries enlarged, so that our language has acquired a compass and an adaptability to an unlimited variety of uses which nothing but free speech and a free press could give to it. Late journals have stated that dramatic pieces designed for representation on the French stage were to be submitted to a censoi'ship before acting, in order that slang phrases and other violations of the purity of language likely to offend academic ears might be struck out. We may easily imagine that the objects of such a censorship are rather political than literary, but in either case it could not fail to have a preju- dicial influence on the character of speech, with which change and progress are as essentially connected as motion with the due performance of the organic functions of animal life. The effect which the miizzling of the press and the conse- quent stifling of the free and public expression of opinion on theological questions has exerted on speech, may be seen by comparing the language of our English Eible and of English writings of a devotional character generally, with that of sim- ilar works in the tongues of central and Southern Europe. In none of these latter does there exist a special and well- defined religious dialect. Technical words for theological ideas, indeed, they have, but no phraseology so marked in its composition and structure as to constitute an appropriate religious diction. The same thing is true, to nearly the same extent, of the general political vocabulary of the continent, though, on the other hand, the comparatively little occasion for the employment of English in diplomacy has left our lan- guage more undeveloped and incomplete in that special de- partment than in almost any other. Although the letters of Junius, and some of -the writings CHAItiCTEK OF PUBLIC. 437 Of Cobbett, subjected their publishers to erimina prosecution m England, yet the press was nevertheless substantially free, and it was only by means of a free press, that productions so bold in their political character, and so important in their literaiy influence, could have been given to the public. I speak without any reference to their moral or political merits or demerits, but it must be allowed that Junius did much to limit, Cobbett something to overthrow, the influence of the stilted Latinism of Johnson and his school, and to bring back the language, if not to a Saxon vocabulary, at least to an idiomatic grammatical structure. The influence of printing on the English language has been modified and determined by the peculiar character and circumstances of the people, by whom and for whom the lit- erature of England has been created. The deliberate expression of human thought will always assume a form supposed to be adapted to the intelligence the temper, the tastes, and the aims of those to whom it is addressed. He who speaks to an audience composed of men of one class, of one profession, of one party, or of one sect, will use a narrower vocabulary, a more restricted, or a more select dialect, than he who expects to be heard by a more various and comprehensive circle ; and a writer who appeals to a whole people, who seeks to convince the understanding, or enlist the sympathies of a nation, must adopt a diction, employ arguments, and resort to illustrations, which shall, in their turn, suit the comprehension and awaken the interest, of men of every class and every calling. Whatever, there- fore, is designed for the ear, or the perusal of what we call ' the enlightened public,' must be as miscellaneous in its composition as that public itself, and it can come home to the bosoms of all, only by using botli the speech which is 438 SPKKAD OF ENGLISH. common to all, and somewhat of tlie special vocaLulary Avliich is peculiar to each. English, in its one dialect, for its literature knows but one, is the vernacular, not merely of a greater number, but of a greater variety of persons than any tongue ever used by man. It is spoken from tlie equator to near the ultimate limit of human habitation in either hem isphere, and, starting from the British capital, the geograph- ical centre of the solid surface of the globe, it has followed a thousand radii to the utmost circumference. Especially is it found established upon all great lines of traffic and communi- cation, at all great points of agricultural or mechanical pro- duction, and wherever human life exists in its most energetic, most restless, intensest forms, there it is the organ for the expression of all that belongs to man's dearest interests, widest sympathies, highest aspirations. It is, moreover, emi- nently the language of liberty, for, of those to whom it is native, by far the largest portion enjoy a degree of personal, social, political, and religious freedom never before possessed by humanity, upon a great scale. From all these circum- stances, there are to be found among those who habitually use the English tongue, and are familiar with written language, if not a greater diversity of character, at least greater differ- ences of interest and external condition, a more generally diffused culture, and a wider range of thought, than have ever before been united by one medium of communication. The press furnishes to every English writer the means, and suggests to him a motive, for bringing this vast and diversi- fied assemblage, the representatives of every human interest, the embodiment of all human intelligence, all human pas- sion, within the reach of his voice, and in him, who, with even moderate abilities, writes from the heart, and to the heart, it is no extravagant aspiration to hope, that he shall MULTITUDE OF AUTHOES. 439 be read ainid tlie sliivering frosts of tlie polar circle and the sweltering lieat of the tropics, in lonely deserts and thick peopled cities, npon silent prairies and by the shore of the loud-voiced ocean. The wings of British and American com- merce scatter the productions of Anglo-Saxon genius over the habitable globe. The thunder of the great London jour- nal reverberates through every clime, and the opinions of the New York press are quoted in every commercial port, in every political capital. Thus, for the living author, English is what Latin and Greek are for the dead, a cosmopolite speech, whose range in comprehensiveness of space corresponds to the duration of the classical tongues in time ; and if the voice of Athens and of Rome enjoys the longer echo, the words of the Anglican speaker are heard over the wider theatre. Every man, therefore, who, in furtherance of the aims of generous scholarship, or in advocacy of any right or inter- est of humanity, addresses himself to the boundless audi- ence reached through the medium of the Anglican press, is naturally inclined to use a comprehensive dialect, a wide variety of illustration, and clear and unequivocal forms of expression. Hence, the art of printing demands from its English and American patrons, not a multiplicity of words merely, but a style combining simplicity and catholicity of structure, conformity to the principles of universal grammar, and consequently a freedom from provincialisms and arbitrary idioms, intelligibility, in short, to a degree not required in the literature of any other age or race. There is another circum- stance connected with the operations of the press, of a coun- teracting character, so far as purity of expression is con- cerned, which much affects the habitual style of composition in our language. The general diffusion of intelligence among MO POPTJLAE LITEEATUEE. the English-speaking people has created not only a great multitude of readers, but, at the same time that it brings with it a wider diffusion of ability to produce, it encourages the efforts of a more than proportionate number of literary artisans. Tlie rewards of authorship flowing through the press are now seductive beyond those won in any other field of human effort. A successful English writer enjoys a contemporaneous fame coextensive with civilization. His renown surpasses that of the soldier whose exploits he immortalizes, his influence is greater than that of a premier, and he reaps a harvest of solid gains more certain and scarcely less abundant than that of the thriftiest merchant. The London Times divides among its managers and its con- tributors the revenues of a principality, parliamentary ma- jorities and ministers shrink before its censures, and the potent Governor-General of British India bows to its untitled correspondent. Prizes so rich, so tempting, and seemingly so easy of attainment, will be eagerly sought by thousands of competitors. The harvest of fame and profit, praise and power, depends upon the extent of the circle in which it is to be reaped, the number, not the character, of the consumers, for whose use the commodity is prepared. ISTone seek the audience ' fit though few,' that contented the ambition of Milton, and all writers for the press now measure their glory by their gains. Popular literature in all its forms is conse- quently in the ascendant. The novel of society, the maga- zine story, the poetic tale, of easy rhyme and easy reading, the daily sheet, and especially the illustrated gazette, these are the bazaars where genius now offers itself for sale. Tlie aim of a numerous class of popular writers is to reproduce, in permanent forms, the tone of light and easy conversation, to make books and journals speak the dialect of the saloon, POPULAR Ln'EEATUEE. 441 and hence pungency of expression, innuendo, verbal wit, irony, banter and raillery, trifling with serious interests, are the characteristics of what we call popular literature, and our language must have a vocabulary which accommodates itself to the taste of those whom such qualities of diction alone attract. In the periodical and fugitive department, scandal and personality are eminently acceptable, and noth- ing gives a pamphlet or a newspaper greater currency, than the dexterity M'ith which, not fashionable vices, but private character, is anatomized and held \ip to scorn or ridicule. The point of satire lies in its individuality. Its victims must have a local habitation and a name. Sly allusion, semi-equiv- ocal expression, and pointed insinuation, too well defined to leave its personal application doubtful, therefore, form a large part of the diction of journalistic articles relating to social life, while in political warfare, the boldest libels, the most undisguised grossness of abuse, alone suit the palate of heated partisanship. Hence, the dialect of personal vituper- ation, the rhetoric of malice in all its modifications, the art of damning with faint praise, the sneer of contemptuous irony, the billingsgate of vulgar hate, all these have been sedulously cultivated, and, combined with a certain flippancy of expres- sion and ready command of a tolerably extensive vocabulary, they are enough to make the fortune of any sharp, shallow, unprincipled journalist, who is content with the fame and the pelf, which the unscrupulous use of such accomplish- luents can hardly fail to secure. The periodical press is unquestionably the channel, through which the art of printing puts forth its most powerful influence on language, and it seems remarkable, that period- icals, which have existed in England since the reign of James I., should scarcely have produced an appreciable effect upon 442 PEEIODICALS. the Englisli tongue, until they had been a liundred years iii operation. The establishment of daily newspapers and of literary journals was nearly contemporaneous, and dates from an early period in the eighteenth century, but though the Tattler, the Spectator and the Guardian had a compara- tively large circulation, and exerted a great influence upon the dialect of their time, yet the newspaper can scarcely be said to have had a place in literature until the success of the letters of Junius, which appeared in the Morning Advertiser from 1769 to 1YY2, gave to that class of periodicals an ascen- dency which it has ever since maintained. It may now fairly be said, that there is no agency through which man acts more powerfully upon the mind of his fellow-man, and the influence of the art of printing upon language and thought has reached its acme in the daily newspaper. The influence of the periodical press upon the purity of language must be admitted to have proved hitherto, upon the whole, a deleterious one, and countries, where, as in Eng- land and America, the press is free, and periodicals conse- quently numerous, are particularly exposed to this source of corruption. The newspaper press has indeed rendered some service to language, by giving to it a greater flexibility of structure, from the necessity of finding popular and intelligi- ble forms of expression for every class of subjects, and it has now and then preserved, for the permanent vocabulary of our speech, a happy and forcible popular word or phrase, which would otherwise have been forgotten with the occasion that gave it birth. But these advantages are a very inade- quate compensation for the mischiefs resulting from the slov- enliness and inaccuracy inseparable from the necessity of hasty composition upon a great variety of subjects, them- selves often very imperfectly understood by the writer. NEWSPAPERS. 443 Editgrs naturally seek to accommodate their style to the capacity and taste of the largest circle of i taders, and in theii estimate of their public, they are very apt to aim below the mark, and thus gradually to deprave, rather than elevate and refine the taste of those whom tliey address. Hence arise the inflated diction, the straining after effect, the use of cant phrases, and of such expressions as not only fall in with, but tend to aggravate the prevalent evil humors and proclivities of the time, the hyperbolical tone in which they commend their patrons or the candidates of their party, and, in short, all the vices of exaggeration of style and language. There is, however, of late years, a great improvement in the lit- erary character of the English and American newspaper. The London Times, whatever may be thought of its moral or political tendencies, has long employed writers of sui"passing ability, and its example has done much to elevate the tone of editorial journalship in both the countries which employ its language. Tlie pet phrases of hack journalists, the euphemism that but lately characterized the American news- papers, are fast giving place to less affected and more appro- priate forms of expression. It is only the lowest class of dailies that still regard ' woman ' as not an honorable or respectful designation of the sex, and it is in their columns alone, that, in place of ' well-dressed or handsome women,' we read of ' elegantly attired females,' and of ' beautiful ladies.' The Anglican newspaper is now — wh£,t the French journal long has been — an intellectual organ, an authority for cultivated circles in politics, in letters, in aesthetics. Be- sides this, it is the popular guide and instructor for evil and for good, and it may truly be said to be the feature most characteristic of the life and literature of Anglo-Saxon hu- manity in the present age. LECTURE XXI. THE ENGLISU LANGUAGE AS AFFECTED BY THE ART OF PRINTING. III. • On a former occasion, I spoke of the diffusion of classical literature in modern Europe — tlie first great result of the in- vention of printing — as having much enlarged the English and other European vocabularies, by the introduction of new words derived from G-reek and Latin roots. But the revival of learning was not unaccompanied with effects prejudicial to the cultivation of the modern languages, and their employ- ment for the higher purposes of literature. At that period, most of them were poor in vocabulary, rude and equivocal in syntax, unsettled in orthography, distracted with variety of dialect, and unmelodious in articulation. Under such cir- cumstances, nothing could be more natural than that scholars imbued with the elegance, the power, the majesty of tlie ancient tongues and of the immortal works Avhich adorned them, should have preferred to employ, as a vehicle for their own thoughts, a language which the church had everywhere diffused, and which was already fitted to express the highest conceptions of the human intellect, the most splendid images of the human fancy. He who wrote in Latin had the civilized trSB OF LATIN. 445 world for his public ; he who used a modern tongue could only count as readers the people of his province, or at most of a comparatively narrow sovereignty. Until, therefore, by a slow and gradual process, the necessity of sympathy and intellectual communication between the learned and the ig- norant, had enriched the vernacular tongues with numerous words from the dialects of theology, and ethics, and law, and literature, but few scholars ventured to employ so humble a medium. To write in the vulgar speech was a humilia- tion, a degradation of the thought and its author, and literary works in the modern tongues were generally prefaced with an apology for appearing in so mean a dress. The close analogy between the Latin and its Eomance descendants much facilitated the enrichment of the dialects of Southern Europe, but in England and the Continental Gothic nations, the stimulus of the Reformation was neces- sary to furnish an adequate motive and a sufficient impulse for a corresponding improvement in the respective languages of those peoples. Even so late as 1544, after, so many great names had en- nobled the speech of England, Ascham, wi-iting on the fa- miliar and popular subject of Archery, says, that it " would have been both more profitable for his study, and also more honest for his name, to have written in another tongue." " As for the Latine or Greeke tongue," continues he, " everye thinge is so excellentlye done in them, that none can do better. In the Englishe tongue, contrary, everye thinge in a maner so meanlye both for the matter and hande- Hnge, that no man can do worse. For therein the least learned, for the most part, have bene alwayes most readye to write. And they which had least hope in Latine, have 446 DIFFUSION OF BOOKS. been most bould in Englishe; when surely e everye man that is most readye to talke, is not most able to write." * One of the most obvious modes in which the art of print- ing has affected language, is, that by the cheapness and con- sequent multiplication of books, and by the greater uniformi- ty and legibility of its characters, it has made reading much easier of acquisition, and thus allowed to a larger proportion of those who use a given language access to its highest stand- ards of propriety and elegance. Of course, the effects of thus bringing books within the reach of a larger class will be measured, as between different countries, by the comparative extent to which literature is really diffused in them, and where the press is most active and least restricted, there the greatest number of the people will learn to comprehend and use the language of books, and there the average standard of correctness of speech will be relatively highest. The same circumstances, independently of the superior in- ducements to authorship of which I have already spoken, will tend to increase the number of aspirants for literary fame, for where all read, many will. feel and obey the impulse to write. The abundant rivalries thus created in every field of intellectual effort are doubtless a great incentive to the attain- ment of superior excellence in composition, hut, on the other hand, the fear of anticipation, and the haste to reap the soHd rewards of successful authorship, concur to promote a rapidity of production, which is inevitably associated M'ith some negli- gence in point of form. I cannot but think that a perhaps unconscious sense (if that phrase docs not involve a contra- diction) of the necessity of rapid production, had some in- fluence in prompting the advice given to young writers by * Preface to Toxophilus. RAPID COMPOSITION. 4'1:7 authors so unlike as Cobbett and Niebubr. '• JS'over tbink of mending wbat you -na-ite ; let it go ; no patcbing ; " says Cobbett, in his strong English. " Endeavor," says Niebuhr, " never to strike out any thing of what you have once Avritten dowTi. Punish yourself by allowing once or twice some thing to pass, though you see you might give it better." And even Gibbon habitually conformed to the same rule, however little trace of it his highly artificial style betrays.* That this method has its advantages as a means of enforcing caution in the use of words is doubtless true, and perhaps he, who, like most modern writers, aims only to influence the opinion of the hour, may advantageously use the popular dialect, which will usually most readily suggest itself to him who writes for popular effect. But, nevertheless, whatever may be the influence of the practice on the writer himself, however it may affect his position with his contemporaries, it cannot but have a prejudicial result as respects the idiom of the language, and the permanence of the works which are composed in it. Upon these points, the experience and judg- ment of all literature are to the contrary of the rule. The revamping of our own writings, indeed, after an interval so long that the mental status in which we composed them is forgotten, and cannot be conjured up and revivified, is a dangerous experiment, but literary biography furnishes the most abundant proofs, that, in all ages, the works which stand as types of language and composition, have been of slow and laborious production, and have undergone the most * It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my worli. — Gibbon, Memoirs, Chap. ix. And in chapter x., speaking of his history, he says , " My first rough manu- script, without any intermediate copy, has been sent to the press." 448 RAPID COMPOSITION. careful and repeated revision and emendation.* Especially is this true with regard to tlie oratorical dialect. Great practice, strong passion,- and a fervid imagination may con- fer the gift of unstudied eloquence, but the orations which after-ages read with applause are almost never the result of unpremeditated eifort. Celebrated speakers prepare their impromptus beforehand, to an extent incredible to those who are not familiar with their habits, or, at the least, they make them, by subsequent revision, very different in diction from the volley of winged words which the excitement of debate may have shot forth. Demosthenes, the greatest master of eloquence whose works remain in a written form, never ventured to address an audience without laborious prepara- tion, and we know from the younger Pliny, that the Roman advocates of his time carefully studied their speeches before delivery, and scrupulously corrected and amplified them, in writing them out afterwards. In recent times, the press has become what the Senate and the Forum were in the old republics, but the rapid move- ment of modern, society is unfavorable to the leisurely execu- tion, the finish and completeness of literary works, and, of * Not to speak of tlie endless Umca labor of ancient classic literature, per- fection of manner has been attained by modern writers only by similar methods. The stylistic ability of an author must always be estimated with reference to the innate power of expression possessed by the language he uses. Thus tried, Pascal and Paul Louis Courier arc by far the greatest stylists of modern times, and we have no English writer who can compare with either, in perfect adapta- tion of the expression to the thought, or in flowing ease and gracefulness of diction. This excellence in both cases was the fruit of the most ceaseless and persevering labor in revision and correction. Marvellous as is the perfection of Goethe's style, he does not always impress you with the conviction that he has exhausted the utmost resources of his native tongue, and it is remarkable that one of his most felicitously expressed productions is a translation from the French— the Rameau's Nephew of Diderot— in which the fluent beauty of the original is admirably rendered,witli little sacrifice of the German idiom. COMMUNITY F THOUGHT. 449 com-se, to polish and accuracy of language. He who writes for a fickle, a restless, or a progressive public, must take the tide at its flow, and if he follows the Horatian precept, and spends nine years in the elaboration and recension of his hook, or in pausing to allow himself time for cool criticism, he will find that he comes too late. The world, in its swift advancement, has already passed far beyond him. The universality of literature, its general popularization by the press, has not only given birth to a more numerous class of producers, but has made it much more truly an ex- pression or exponent of the mind and tendencies of the time and people, than in the ages which preceded the invention of printing. In every country of the civilized world, there is a manifest drift in some particular direction, and lil erary efi'ort of all sorts feels the impulse of the current. The perpetual, all-embracing inter-communication between mind and mind, through the press, stamps upon all the same tendencies, the same course of thought, the same proximate conclusions. Society is more intensely social. Men are become more deeply imbued with the spirit of a common humanity, and know and participate in each other's intellectual condition. There is a remarkable proof of this in the perpetually repeat- ed instances of concurrent mental action between unconnected individuals. Not only does almost every new mechanical contrivance originate with half a dozen different inventors at the same moment, but the same thing is true of literary creation. If you conceive a striking thought, a beautiful image, an apposite illustration, which you know to bo original with yourself, and delay for a twelvemonth to vindicate your priority of claim by putting it on record, you will find a dozen scattered authors simultaneously uttering the samo thing. Tliere are in the human mind unfathomable depths, 29 450 LAW OF COPYEIGHT. out of wliich gush, unbidden, the well-springs of poesy and of thought ; there are mines unilluminated even by the lamp of consciousness, where the intellect toils in silent, sleepless seclusion, and sends up, by invisible machinery, the ore of hidden veins, to be smelted and refined in the light of open day. The press, which has done so much to reveal man to man, and thereby to promote the reciprocal action of each upon his fellow, has established new sympathies be- tween even these mysterious abysses of our wonderful and fearful being, and thus contributed to bring about a oneness of character, which unmistakably manifests itself in oneness of thought and oneness of speech. The law of copyright, though we have evidence in Mar- tial and other writers, that ancient authors were sometimes paid by booksellers for their works, is a result of the art of printing, and could be of little value without it. It has ren- dered no other service to literature than the very doubtful one of furnishing a pecuniary inducement to literary effort. The privilege of copyright was not originally granted as a reward and stimulus to authorship, but as a protection to the printer against a dangerous competition, for it extended as well to editions of the classics as to contemporaneous pro- ductions, and of course the benefit to authors was but inciden- tal. In fact, it is but lately that it could have operated at all as a reward to English writers, for until the last century, the price of the copyright of original English works was in general hardly as much as the cost of the paper on which they were written. The continental booksellers seem to have paid more liberally a century previous.* At this day, it maybe doubt- * He took nothing of Printers for his copies, as he writeth, saying : " I have no plenty of money, and thus yet I deale with the Printers ; I receive C0PTBI6HT. 451 ed whether a single work of permanent value, in the literature of any living language, owes its existence to the protection afforded by law. Boohs, which are composed only because they will sell, are swiftly written, swiftly read, and, as they deserve, swiftly forgotten, while those which are destined to produce a deep and lasting impression, scarcely win their way to popular favor and an authoritative position, until the privilege of copyright has expired by legal limitation. There arc abuses connected with this privilege, which are high- ly detrimental to the interests of literature. The exclusive right of printing a particular book is, in the hands of wealthy publishers, a means of preventing the publication of other and perhaps better books on the same subject, and thus that which ouo-ht to be an encouragement to effort, is made to operate so as to discoimtenance the attempts of rivals in the same fiejd. The proprietor of a book, which, from its nature, as a dictionary or a school-book, is largely in demand, will supply booksellers with his wares only upon condition that they will sell no rival work. A combination between thi-ee or four large publishing houses, each having its own copy- rights, may thus exclude from sale one set of books, and force another upon the market with very httle regard to the opinion of competent judges as to the merits of either. Besides this, most of the Reviews, and to some extent the newspapers, are controlled by book-publishers, and thus criticism is forestall- ed, and an artificial public opinion created, which not only gives currency to inferior productions, and bestows upon theii- authors the rewards which excellence alone ought to nothing from them for recompeuse of ray many copies. Sometimes I receive of them one copy. This I thinke is due to me, whereas other writers, yea transla- tors, for every eight leaves, have an angel." — Life of Luther, Abel Kediviv. p. 48. 452 PEIDE OF IGNOEAlSrCE. secure, but vitiates tlie taste of tiie age, and lowers the stand ard of composition, by holding up as models for imitation, writings which deserve only to be pointed at as examples to be shunned. Southey, in his Colloquies, makes the remarkable state ment, that " one of the first effects of printing was to make proud men look upon learning as disgraced, by being thus brought within reach of the common people." " When lay- men in humble life," continues he, " were enabled to procure books, the pride of aristocracy took an absurd course, inso- much that at one time it was deemed derogatory to a noble- man if he could read or write. Even scholars themselves complained that the reputation of learning, and the respect due to it, and its rewards, were lowered when it was thrown open to all men. Even in this island, ignorance was for some generations considered to be a mark of distinction, by which a man of gentle birth chose, not unfrequently, to make it apparent that he was no more obliged to live by the toil of his brain, than by the sweat of his brow." The feeling which Southey ascribes to the " pride of the aristocracy," was really an effect of ecclesiastical jealousy. There is little evidence to show that the aristocracy were more deplorably ignorant after the introduction of printing than before, but there is abundant proof that the new art was regarded with dislike by the church, when employed for any purpose but the multiplication and cheapenuig of the Latin books required for the use of the clergy themselves. To the same cause we are to ascribe the fact, often noticed as a singular one, that Caxton printed very few religious books. Sir Thomas More expressly declares, that Caxton reframed from printing the Bible in English, because he feared that the penalties, ordained by Archbishop Arundel for copying IGNOEAIJCE OF CLEEGT. 453 or usiug Wycliffe's Bible, would be corruptly and liiegally enforced against any Englisli translation of the sacred volume. For such religious books in Latin as would liave been allowed to be printed, there was fortunately little de- mand in England, and to tbe great benefit of tbe English language and literature, Caston was not only left free, but obliged, to confine the operations of his press almost wholly to the publishing of English books. The English priests, them- selves, were at that period as ignorant as are those of the Oriental churches at the present moment. "We learn from Fuller, that early in Queen Elizabeth's reign the clergy were ordered to con over the lessons by themselves once or twice before every service, in order that they might be able to read them fluently to the congregation. The art of printing, and especially the periodical press, has been a most influential agency in extirpating local pe- culiarities of dialect, and producing the general uniformity with which the English language is spoken and written wher- ever it is used at all. Persons who study our American speech cannot fail to notice, that there is among us a tenden- cy to pronounce words, and especially proper names, more in accordance with their orthography, and to make fewer excep- tions to general rules, than in England. The most obvious, though not the only cause of this, is the universality of the ability to read and write, which modern society in free coun- tries owes to the art of printing. Where all read, most per- sons first become acquainted with the names of distant lo- calities, of eminent persons, and of new objects, through the press, and not by the ear. Names so learned will of course be pronounced according to the regular orthoepy of the lan- guage, and thus a general pronunciation, often very discord- ant from the local one, becomes established. In the case of 454 PKONUNCIATION. foreign words, proper or common, we are prepared to find, among persons acquainted only with English, as the mass of those to whom that language is vernacular necessarily must be, a pronunciation of such names widely diiferent from the native articulation. However repulsive, therefore, such dis- tortions of names may be to those familiar with them in their original orthoepy, we are not surprised to hear the name of the great bankers of Europe popularly pronounced Rbih- child, or American artists, of foreign extraction, spoken of respectively, as Eoth-ermel, and Gotts-chalk. Indeed, a strict conformity to the native pronunciation of names, belonging to languages whose orthographical system differs much from our own, is generally considered an offensive affectation, and a great British orator, who was as familiar with French as with English, is said' to have been so scrupulous on this point, that, in his parliamentary speeches, he habitually spoke of an important French port as the city of Bordeauaj. In England, the names of families and of towns are often very strangely corrupted, not in vulgar pronunciation alone, but by the general usage of the highest classes. Thus the originally French name, now naturalized in England and America, which is spelt (and with us pronounced) Beauchamp, is in England called Beecham ; Belvoir is Beever ; Saint John, Sinjon ; Cholmondeley, C/iw?i%; Cirencester, Siseter, &ni Alexander Gil tells us that in his time Daubridge-court was pronounced Bahscot. Some of these corruptions, at least, are old ones, for Froissart, who, as a foreigner, spelt Enghsh names by the ear, writing about the year 1400, uses Sussetour for Cirencester, and Beachame for Beauchamp. Even as late as 1651, I find Montgomery spelt in Abel Kedivivus Mungumry. The original orthography of all these names is now recovered, and strangers, finding them in books of travel PEONITNCIATIOK-. 455 and newspapers, will of course pronotinee tliem as they are spelled. So strong, indeed, is the tendency in this country to conform orthography and speech, that in some instances the spelling of English names has been altered to suit the family and neighborhood pronunciation. An example of this is found in a name which is written and pronounced differently, Kirldand, Cartlaud, and Catlin, by different branches of the family and in different localities, though Ifirk- land is doubtless the original form of all of them. So the name Worcester has in some of the families that bear it been conformed to a loose pronunciation, and is spelt Wooster. These changes in spelling American family names, were made at an early day, when, though the ability to read was as general as now, yet books and newspapers, and of course the opportunities, for reading, were much -fewer. At present, the tendency is in the opposite direction, and many corrupt- ed names have been restored both to the original spelling and orthoepy. In England, changes of either sort are made with somewhat greater difficulty, but there too, since the multiplication of railroads, and since names, formerly less frequently seen in a written form, are constantly recurring in newspapers, railroad tables and the like, and of course oftener used by strangers to the local orthoepy, and by them pro- nounced as written, there is observed an evident tendency, even in the natives of towns hitherto so oddly miscalled, to accommodate the spoken form to the orthography, and re- store the names to their ancient fulness of articulation. Thus, in the case of names widely disseminated by printing, the distant popular majority, who know the word only by its spelling, are carrying the day over the neighboring few who have learned it by the ear, and the letter is likely at last to triumph, and bring back the tongue to the primitive 456 PEONUNCIATION. or an approximate pronunciation. A reform of this nature, supported as it is by the constantly increasing influence of the press, cannot stop with mere names, and a few years will probably free spoken English from some of that clipping, crowding, and confusion of syllables, which three centuries ago led Charles Y. to compare it to the whistling of birds, and which, in its modern exaggerated form, is a still more dis- agreeable peculiarity of its pronunciation. The same causes have produced similar effects in other countries, and persons familiar with Continental phonology cannot but observe a growing inclination to give a fuller ut- terance to obscure sounds, and to articulate letters hitherto unpronounced, or, if sounds have been in-ecoverably lost, to omit the letters which once expressed them. This is most readily noticeable in French, because the nurnber of silent letters is greater in that than in any other European language, and a comparison of recent and older works on French pro- nunciation will show that final and radical consonants are now, according to the best usage, articulated in many cases where they M'ere formerly silent. Palsgrave, whose French Grammar was printed in 1530, speaking of French pronun- ciation, says, " What consonantes soever they write in any worde for the kepynge of trewe orthographic, yet so moche covyt they in redyng or spekyng to have all theyr vowelles and dipthongues clerly herde^ that betwene two vowelles, whether they chaunce in one worde alone, or as one worde fortuneth to folowe after another, they never sounde but one consonant at ones, in so moche that, if two diflferent conso- nantes, that is to say, not beyng both of one sorte, come to- gether betweene two vowelles, they leve the fyrst of them unsounded." He then gives a list of one hundred and nine words, where s preceding another consonant is pronounced, PEONCTNCIATION. 457 as exceptions to the general rule. It appears from Beza, tliat there were some other exceptions, but he also recognizes the rule. Printing, and the consequent diffusion of a grammati- cal knowledge of the language, have had the effect, first, of expelling from the orthographj- a portion of these silent con- sonants, and secondly, of changing the pronunciation and bx'inging it more into accordance with the spelling, by intro- ducing the articulation of consonants formerly ' unsounded.' This double process is still going on, and we may venture to predict, that the spelling and the orthoepy of French will be much less irreconcilable a century hence than they are at present.* ' Palsgrave gives the figured pronuQciation of a few sentences and single words by way of illustrating his rules. In these examples the following words occur : dicton, figured pronunciation, diton. a(/juger, " " ajuger. muZtitude, " " moutitude. suistance, " " sustance. scouZpture (sculpture), " scouture morte/, " " morte. destiner, '■ " detiner leque?, " '' leke. election, " " elesion. celeste, " " c^lete. Palsgrave, 23, 60, 62. Ge'nin, a very high authority in French philology, observes : " Aujourd'hui il n'est pas un petit commis de magasin qui ne se pique de faire sonner les liaisons quaud il raisoiine sur Var t-antigue, ou se plaint d'avoir froi t-aux pieds, ou s'accuse avec fatuite de ses tor z-enver z-elle." The tendency to pronounce the final consonants (which is but a single case of the rehabilitation of disfranchised letters in French phonology) is ascribed by Genin to the influence of the theatre, where the articulation of consonants in liaisons, partly for metrical reasons and partly for the sake of distinctness, has always been practised in versified dramas. Ge'nin Edc. Phil. II. 425, 427. Doubtless in Paris, and in France at large, the influence of the theatre on such questions is very great ; but, as the corresponding change in English articulation is clearly traceable, not to theatrical practice, but to the diffusion of letters, I cannot but suppose that like effects in France may be, in great part at least, ascribed to the same cause. 458 PEEMANENCE OF VVOEDS. I have shown in a former lecture that tlib mechanical difSctilties of the art of printing at first tended to increase the existing confusion and uncertainty of English orthogra- phy, but after these difficulties were overcome, as they seem to have been soon after the publication of the first editions of King James's Bible, the influence of printing was in the contrary direction, and our spelling has within two hundred years undergone far fewer and less important changes than our vocabulary. In both these particulars, the art is now eminently conservative ; in the former, merely sustaining that which has once become established, but in the latter both preserving the old and freely admitting the new. With so large a number of public libraries usually well secured against destruction by negligence or violence, scarcely any book can become absolutely extinct ; and every word, once introduced into our printed literature, may fairly be said to have become imperishable. "We find in old authors many words now dis- used, and others which are wholly unintelligible. These, in some instances, turn out to be typographical errors, but the industry of etymologists is continually discovering the mean- ing of old words not hitherto understood, and reviving obso- lete or obsolescent expressions, which the revolutions of time and circumstance have again made needful or convenient. Thus the boast of printing, that it is the art which is the general conservator of all arts, proves eminently true with respect to speech, which may be considered as an art, in so far as it is an acquired, not a purely spontaneous, self-devel- oping faculty. Printing has conferred an important benefit on language, by multiplying and putting within the reach of every man books of a class which, when literature existed only in a written form, were rarer than those of almost any other DICTIONAKIES. 459 character. I refer to dictionaries, and other works of the comprehensive and encyeloiDtedic class, whicli, although they cannot be said to owe their existence to printing, yet could never have obtained a general circulation without it. We know that ancient literature possessed works of this kind, but they were so little multiplied, that scarcely any of them have come down to us ; nor did lexicography make a progress cor- respondent with that of other departments of knowledge, until after the art of printing had been long employed in the diffusion of general literature. The multiplication and improvement of dictionaries is a matter especially important to the general comprehension of English, both because of its great copiousness, and more particularly on account of the multifarious character of its sources, and its little facility of derivation and composition. Languages which, like Greek and German, are derived by simple and easily understood rules from a comparatively sma;ll number of roots, contaia few words not intelligible to those acquainted with their familiar and constantly recm'ring rudiments. For instance, the common German-English dic- tionaries contain about two hundred words compounded of halb, the equivalent of our English half, and some other equally familiar root, the meaning of every one of which compounds is immediately obvious to every German. In Webster, I find fewer than fifty compounds into which our half enters, its place being taken in other words by the Greek he mi, the Latin, semi, the French demi, and the Italian mezzo, all of which are unmeaning to the English- man, and their explanations must be sought in dictionaries. Although, therefore, from the fonner low state of philologi- cal learning in England and America, our lexicography is far behind that of most Continental nations, yet no modern Ian- 460 INDEXES. guage so essentially reqiiires the aid c ' dictionaries as the English. Printinff has also introduced a multitude of other facili- ties for the convenient use of books, such, for example, as indexes. Two copies of the same manuscript, especially if written by different persons, would never correspond, line for line, or even page for page, and, of course, an index prepared for one copy would not answer as a guide to a given passage in another. To prepare a separate index for each manuscript would be a work of hardly less labor and cost than to rewrite the whole copy, and the consequence was that indexes scarcely existed at all, and learned men were obliged to rely upon their memories alone, when they wished to refer to a particu- lar passage in the works of an author.* Accordingly, the ancients introduced quotations, with no other indication of * Pliny's Natural History is one of the few ancient books which have come down to us with even a Table of Contents. The author concludes his Dedication to Vespasian with this reference to his Table, as translated by Holland, London, 1601 : " Now to conclude and knit up mine epistle : knowing as I doe, thatfor the good of the commonweale, you should be spared and not empeached by any privat businesse of your owne, and namely in perusing these long volumes of mine ; to prevent this trouble, therefore, I have adioyned immediately to this epistle and prefixed before these books, the sumraarie or contents of everie one : and verie carefully have I endeavoured that you should not need to read them throughout, whereby all others also, after your example, may ease them- selves of the like labour ; and as any man is desirous to know this or that, he may seeke and readily find in what place to meet with the same. This learned I of Valerius Sorranus, one of our owne Latin writers, who hath done the like before me and set an Index to those Books which he entituled enowrlSiup.'" The Table begins with a statement of the general subject of each book ; and as a ready method of finding the books, the initial words of each are given, nothing being referred to hy number of ^ajre. Then follows a specific list of the subjects discussed in the several books, an estimate of the number of particular facts recorded, and the names of the authors cited as authorities. Of course, verbal indexes and concordances, which modern critical scholars find so useful, must have been much rarer than Tables of Contents, and even these, it is evident from the remarks of Pliny, were little known in his time. LEGIBILITT OF PRINT. 461 theii- source than tlie name of the author, or at most the ook, from which they were taken. But the very want of these facilities had its advantages, for writers would be more likely to accustom themselves to a natural and logical arrangement of the divisions and subdivisions of their subject, when they knew that a reader could have no mere mechanical means of obtaining a general view of it. Books were anciently written to be read, studied, to be, as Thucydides has it, " a possession forever," not to amuse an idle hour, or at best to be consulted upon special occasion, as one looks out a word in a dictionary. There are other facilities of research and of criticism con- nected with the legibility of letter-press, which are of no trifling advantage to the scholar. Suppose he wishes to find in a particular author, a passage to which he has not an exact reference, or that he is seeking exemplifications of the use of a given word or phrase, in order to determine its meaning or syntactical character, by the authority of good writers ; the eye, which takes in a page at a glance, will run through a printed volume, and discover the passage or the word sought for, in the time which would be required to decipher half a dozen columns of manuscript. Again, let an author who has carefully elaborated his composition, and given it the finish- ing touches, revise it in letter-press, and how will the errors, the repetitions, the negligences, which a dozen perusals in manuscript had failed to detect, stare him in the face, as monstrous and palpable delinquencies ! So, the compression of matter, which printing allows, is a thing of very great convenience. Tme it is, that in the days of ancient calli- graphy, minute writing was brought to such perfection that, as is easily shown by calculation, Cicero's story of the Iliad, which could be carried in a nutshell, is not in the slightest 462 coMPEESSic^r of feint. degree improbable ; and I have myself seen the entire Arabic Koran in a parchment roll four inches wide and half an inch in diameter.* But these are exceptional cases. Printed let- ter is, generally, much smaller than manuscript, and as man- uscripts in the volume, or roll-form, were usually written oq one side only, the bulk of a printed book is yery much less than that of the same matter written by the hand. Hence we have, within the compass of a hand-volume, a dictionary or * Cicero hath recorded, that the whole Poeme of Homer called 7?ios, ivaa written in a peace of parchmin, which was able to be couched within a nut-shell. Holland's Pliny, i. le"?. Lalaune, Curiositds Bibliographiques, describes an edition of Kochefoucault's Maxims, published by Didot in 1829, as printed typographically in pages meas- uring 951 square millimetres, and containing 26 lines, with 44 letters to the line. ' A page one inch and twenty-one hundredths square, would be about equal to 951 square millimetres, or one square inch and forty-six hundredths, which would give 783 letters to the inch. This falls far short of what has been accomplished by the pen, and very greatly below the performances of the graver. Mr. Charles Toppan, an eminent engraver of New York, has engraved the Lord's Prayer with its title, and the Ten Commandments with title and numbers, and his own initials, within a circle of less than 41-hundredths of an inch in diameter. The number of letters and iigures on this plate is 1550, and as its area is a trifle over an eighth of a square inch, the number of letters to the square inch would be 12,000. According to Lalanne, the Iliad contains 501,930 letters, and of course, if engraved with equal minuteness, the whole Iliad would be contained within the compass of less than forty-two square inches, or, in other words, on a slip of paper one inch wide and twenty-one inches long, printed on both sides. The title of Mr. Toppan's engraving can be made out, and, in a very strong light, much more of it read, without a magnifier, at least by the microscopic vision of a near-sighted person, but the height of the letters does not exceed the 150th part of an inch, and it cannot bo said to be legible to the naked eye. Lalanne says, that Huet proved by experiment, that a thin parchment, measuring 27 by 1\\ centimetres, which would give an area of 89 square inches, written on both sides, wor)ld contain the Iliad, and such ii, parchment, he observes, would readily go into a common-sized nut. Mr. Toppan might double the height and width of his letters and spaces, and still print the whole Iliad on one side of such a leaf Among the impudent forgeries of the notorious Simonides, there were manu- scripts of wonderful beauty of execution, and written in characters almost as minute as those of Mr. Toppan's engraving. MULTIPLICATION OF BOOKS. 463 other book of reference, which, in an ancient iibraiy, would have filled a compartment ; and the convenience of consult- ing it is increased in much the same proportion as its com- pression. On the other hand, the facilities of production have mul- tiplied the mass of books out of all proportion to the needs of literature. The cost of a book lies mainly in what printers call composition, that is, the arrangement of the type and pages to receive the impression. The amount of this item is the same for one copy as for a hundred thousand, and the typographical composition of a volume is scarcely more ex- pensive than the execution of a single copy carefully written by hand. Every successive repetition of a manuscript costs as much as the first, and each, of course, as much as the type-setting for a whole edition of a printed book. Hence, an ancient author, who desired a wide and permanent circu- lation for his book, would study to confine it within such limits of bulk and price, that it could be repeated and mul- tiplied without an extravagant tax on the purses of his public. But when the cost of books was so reduced by printing that the price of one ancient volume would buy a library, and a publisher could circulate a hundred copies for a less sum than was formerly expended in producing one, the necessity of conciseness and compression was no longer felt. "While, therefore, the immortal history of Thucydides, which, after three and twenty centuries, numbers hardly fewer readers than in the days of its greatest domestic glory, is contained ia two pocket volumes, Thuanus in the sixteenth century ex- tends his narrative of the events of a few years, on a narrow theatre, to seven folios, the weight of which has already smothered the fame of their author. So numerous have 4:64 EXTENT OF LIBEAKIES. books become, bj modern facilities of production and re- production, that men of varied tastes and multifarious read- ing can find time to peruse nothing. They skim over books, or as the French expressively say, they parcourent les 1 i V r e s , run through them, study them by tables of contents and indexes. " "What, read books ! " said one of the gi-eat lights of European physiological science to a not less emiaent American scholar, " I never read a book in my life, except the Bible." He had time only to glance over the thousands of volumes which lay around him, to consult them occasion- ally, to excerpt the particular facts or illustrations which he needed to aid him in his own researches. The elder Pliny, the most indefatigable laborer, the most voracious literary glutton of ancient times, in that remarka- ble dedication of his ISfatural History which I have just cited, says, that he had collected his encyclopedia out of two thou- sand volumes, written by one hundred approved authors, all of which he had diligently read.* Ifow, to judge from the Herculanensian manuscripts, these two thousand rolls would hardly have made two hundred fair octavos, and this was probably the entire library of the most learned of the, Ro- mans. In modern times, scholars by no means millionaires, as Thott in Denmark and Murr in Germany, have collected libraries of more than one hundred thousand volumes, each of which was equivalent to many of Pliny's, though we may * In 36 Books I have comprised 20,000 things, all worthie of regard and consideration, which I have collected out of 2000 volumes or thereabout, that I have diligently read, (and yet verie few of thorn there be, that men learned otherivise, and studious, dare meddle withall, for the deepe matter and hidden secrets therein contained,) and those written by 100 several elect and approved authors. Holland's Pliny. Dedication. STEEEOTYPE. 465 well doubt wlietlier the relative value was proportioned to tlie bulk.* The art of stereotyping has greatly increased the ease of multiplication, and, in books much in demand, lessened the cost of production, and of course augmented the pecuniary profits of the publisher and the author, though without a cor- responding reduction of price to the consumer, and with some detriment to the interests of literature. True it is, that a writer who designs to stereotype his work, has strong induce- ments to carry it to the highest pitch of completeness and finish, and if it belongs to any department of progressive knowledge, to bring it down to the latest moment in the his- tory of his subject. But a book once stereotyped is substan- tially immutable. To every suggestion of improvement, to every exposure of error, every announcement of advance- ment by other inquirers in the same field, and even to new thoughts growing out of his own researches or riper reflec- tions, the author must reply, with Pilate, " What I have written, I have written ! " and the criticisms of friends and foes alike are but arguments after judgment. The possession * The largest libraries which royal "munificence founded in ancient times, admitting that the number of volumes has not been exaggerated, were, doubt- less, much inferior in quantity of matter to very many existing collections of printed books. The most extensive library before the invention of printing, of which we have credible accounts, was that of Tripoli in Syria, composed chiefly of Arabic books, and destroyed by the crusaders. Christian zealots have declaimed much against the barbarism of Omar, who is accused of the wanton destruction of the Alexandrian library, but how many of them have stigmatized the equally bUnd and culpable fanaticism which led the champions of the cross to burn the far larger collection at Tripoli, Cardinal Cisneros to destroy eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts, and even Flechier to applaud Cardinal Ximenes for having made an auto-da-fe of five thousand Koraus ? See Viardot, Histoire des Arabes et des Mores d'Espagne, vol. i. chap. 1, and vol. ii. chap. 2. Also, Revue Orientale 11, 495. 30 466 INFLUENCES OF PKINTING. of a set of stereotype plates enables a capitalist to defy com- petition. What printer will bring out a new edition of a book wbicli he can afford at a dollar a volume, when he knows that his next-door neighbor, by means of his stereotype plates, can produce the same book in a form, which, in the uncritical judgment of the public, is little inferior, at half the price ? Hence the art of stereotyping is one of the means which strengthen the tyrannical monopoly of litera- ture to which I have before alluded ; and though it may serve to diffuse knowledge more widely, it tends to retard its real progress.* To strike the exact balance between the various influences of the art of printing, with its mechanical conditions, for good and for evil, is to earthly faculties impossible ; but * In England and the United States, where every book, for which a large circulation is expected, is stereotyped, the last edition differs from the first only in the title page, which is renewed every year as regularly as the Almanac, In Germany, where stereotyping is little practised, the small editions usually printed rapidly succeed each other, and almost always with considerable changes. A German scholar, in his first edition, generally examines and refutes all that has been advanced by other writers of all times and countries upon the same subject, and those who buy the first edition are fortunate if they do not soon find that the author has made that worthless, by refuting himself in the second. There is never an end to the "Last Words" and "More Last Words" of a German Baxter, so long as he lives, and you are safe in quoting his authority only from Ostcrn to Michaelis, and from Michaolis to Ostern, because every new M e s s e brings with it either a recantation of his former views, or an advance upon them. To speak seriously, the intellectual independence and moral courage of Germany, and those habits of persevering and continued research, which forbid the scholars of that country to settle down upon the results of even their own investigations as final stereotyped conclusions, have been of infinite service in promoting the increase of knowledge and extending the sphere of human thought. I would gladly have added some speculations on the infiuence of the Tele- graph, and its inexorable "ten words," on language, but I have already perhaps devoted too much space to the consideration of the mechanical conditions "'hich operate on human speech. mTTLtrENCES OF PEINTING. 467 there can be no doubt that to the improvement of language, as a means of intercommunication between all the ranks of himianity, and therefore to the general elevation of humanity itself in the scale of beiag, it is the most important, the most beneficent of the inventions of man. LECTURE XXII. ORTHOEPICAL CHANGES IN ENGLISH. Few subjects belonging to the study of languages are more difficult of investigation than the successive changes in their pronunciation. They are difficult, because the memory of a man or a generation, which almost alone preserves the record of such changes, is not long enough to admit of mutations greater than the transposition of an accent, the lengthening or shortening of a vowel, and the like, and our vocal notation is so incomplete and irregular, that we are always doubtful what sound is represented by any given combination of letters, unless in the case of known words, which habit has rendered familiar to the ear. The obsolete words which occur in Chaucer and in Spenser are almost as uncertain in their sounds as if they belonged to an unknown tongue. We are, therefore, much in the dark as to the fact of a change in any given case, and it is seldom that we can say positively how any one word was pronounced a century ago. But in the few cases where the change is established, we are generally wholly unable to account for it. Ti-ue, there are observed in all nations, all languages, tendencies to this or that revolution in pronunciation ; but whence these CAUSES OF OETHOEX'IC CHANGE. 469 tendencies, what are their laws, and what co: ncction have they with changes in the signification of words, or their com- bination in periods?* In the case of a people like that of * The following remarks -n-ill illustrate what I mean by the connection between orthoepical and syntactical changes. In all languages, and especially in those where there is a. marked tendency to the coalescence of successive articulations, as in Greek and in English, the pronunciation of consonants ia much affected by the character of the sounds which precede or which follow them. In modern Greek, k preceded by y or by v, takes the sound of our g hard, and &u xSirra is pronounced ang-gdptoh ; if ir is preceded by f, the v assumes the sound of ^u, and the ir of the English h ; consequently (!\>v irovif is pronounced seem-ldh-noh ; t following v generally sounds d, and ivTouSsa is articulated en-ddf-thah ; ir preceded by n is sounded as the European 6. The consonantal sounds i and d begin no Greek word, and in writing foreign names, and borrowed words in which those sounds occur, the Greeks use for 6 the combination ;U7r ; for <^ the combination vt, so that Byron is spelled Miraipwi/ ; Boh would be Mtto/utt ; dead, vnvT ; and double, vT6fi.Tri\. It is conceivable, that foreign influence or other causes may so modify the inflections and syntax, that those finals and initials, which never occur in succession in one stage of a lan- guage, may very frequently be brought together in another, and, by their reciprocal influence, much modify the general articulation of the speech. Other interesting illustrations of the influence of articulations on each other will be found in the learned and curious History of the Greek alphabet by Professor Sophocles, second edition, Cambridge, 1854. On page 322, and in a note on page 323, I mentioned instances where the gr.imma'tical use of words had been changed for orthoepical reasons. Another example, where the form of a word has been affected by the confusion of sounds, is in the phrase ' God Hid you,' which occurs in As Tou Like It, III. 3, and V. 4. In Sylvester's Dubartas, edition of 1611, IIII Book, IIII Day of the II week, we have the form ' God dild you.' Speaking of the lover, who discovers that his mistress owes her fine complexion to art, he says : His cake is dough ; God dild you, he will none ; He leaves his suit, and thus he saith anon, &c. Gabriel Harvey, in a letter to Spenser, Hazlewood II. 300, writes the phrase, ' Goidilge y6^.' " Youre Latine Farewell is a goodly braue yonkerly peece of work, and Goddilge yee, I am always maruellously beholding vnto you, for your bountifull titles." These three forms are evidently one word. Where a conso- nant is repeated, we generally articulate it but once, and therefore ' God 'ild' and 'God dild' are hardly distinguishable by the car. Dilge, again, is explained by the coalescence of the consonant d with the consonantal y of the following pronoun. The English g soft or _; is generally considered as a compound consonant con- sisting of d and sh, but it may, with greater accuracy, be resolved into d and y 470 ENGLISH AND THE GOTHIC LANu PAGES. early England, or of the modern United States, made up of a hundred elements, exposed to a thousand external influ- ences, we may see obvious causes of fluctuation in pronun- ciation ; but in sedentary, homogeneous races secured by po- sition from foreign contact, it is often impossible to suggest any explanation of orthoepic mutations. The people of Ice- land have been less exposed to external influences than any other civili2;ed and cultivated nation of Europe, yet, while their grammar and their vocabulary have remained essen- tially unaltered, their pronunciation appears to have under- gone considerable changes. In Norway, a country also em- inently exempt from the action of extraneous forces, and which, seven centuries since, used the same language as that of Iceland, there has been a great revolution in the pronun- ciation of those words which remain the same in the dialects of both ; and this observation applies with no less force to Sweden, which is almost equally secluded from foreign in fluences. I speak now wholly with reference to the pronua- ciation of words which have remained in use, in forms substantially the same, not of lexical or grammatical changes.* consonant. If to the word year we prefix a d, we obtain ^/eer, and d\year more truly represents this sound than d-\-shem\ which is, very nearly, d-\-s-\^tar. Hence, Qod dilge ye is, in sound, almost exactly equivalent to God Hid ye. * Basl£ says that in ancient Icelandic, /, when not initial, had in all cases the sound of i;, so that nafn, name, was pronounced navn. In modern Icelandic, the same word is pronounced nabbn; the verb n e f na , (infinitive,) nebna, but the past tense, n e f n d i, as if written nemndi, and the participle n e f n t like nemnt. In the same words as used in the modern Scandinavian, the Danish has an orthogcaphy which doubtless once represented the original pronunciation, though now differently articulated. N a f n is in Danish written Navn, but the the a v is pronounced like the German a u or nearly our ou, so that Navn and noun are much the same in sound. But in Sweden, the spelling and pron'.mci- ation correspond to the modern Icelandic articulation of the past tense and participle. Nafn is, in Swedish, namn; nefna, namna. ENGLISH AND THE GOTHIC LANGUAGES. 471 Many of our English words vary mucli in prontincia tion from their cognates in the other Gothic dialects, and while, on the one hand, it is difficult to suppose that their present articulation can be as widely distinct from their own primitive utterance, as it is from that of the same words in living Continental languages, it is, on the other, scarcely less so to imagine that the orthoepy of Anglo-Saxon diifered from that of its Continental sisters as much as English pronuncia tion now does.* The pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon is a matter of very great uncertainty. The opinions of grammarians on this subject, however positively expressed, are little better than conjectures, and the explanation of the changes which are known to have occurred, is very obscure. With respect to the fluctuations in modern English, the difficulty is hardly * This discrepancy between the English (and probably Anglo-Saxon) and the Teutonic pronunciation of words identical in etymology and spelling, appears to me to add some weight to the opinions I have expressed concerning the essen- tially composite character of the Anglo-Saxon language, and its distinctness from the comparatively homogeneous dialects of the Teutonic stock. All these latter agree in rejecting the two sounds of the th ({) and 3) which we have inherited from the Anglo-Saxon ; they pronounce, approximately, i like our e, and e like our a ; they have the softened o and il and the guttural and palatal ch and g, which are wanting in English ; and they have not the English ch and _;, or the Anglo-Saxon and English combination hw (wh). Our articulation, though very far from coinciding with that of the Scandinavian languages, nevertheless, on the whole, agrees with it more nearly than with that of the German. The vulgar New England pronunciation of the diphthong ou or ow, generally represented in writing it as provincial, by eow, prevails in several English local districts, as well as in some, at least, of the Frisian patois, and very possibly was once a normal sound in English, as it now is in Danish, where it is written ffi v, or e v, as in K e v 1 e, r e v n e, r e v s e, in which words it -corresponds to the ou or ow in cow, rounds house, in the Eastern pronunciation. Almost every sound which is characteristic of English orthoepy is met with in one or other of the Scandinavian languages, and almost all their peculiarities, except those of intonation, are found in English, while between our articulation and that of the German dialects most nearly related to Anglo-Saxon, there are many irreconcilable discrepancies. 472 ENGLISH OETHOEPT. less, and it is increased by the notorious fact, that the differ- ences of local pronunciation were, until within a very recent period, much greater than at present, so that when we have ascertained that a particular author pronounced in a particu- lar way, we are not always authorized to infer that he fol- lowed any generally recognized standard. The sources of information on the history of our pronun- ciation are, old treatises, expressly on English grammar and orthoepy, or on foreign languages in which comparisons are given between English and foreign sounds ; casual remarks of authors not writing professedly on this subject ; and, lastly and chiefly, poetical compositions. This last standard of comparison is not a sure guide, except in regard to accentua- tion, where, as the metre determines the quantity of each word, the only source of uncertainty is the doubt whether the author may not have displaced the accent by poetic license. In reference to rhymes, there is, first, the great dif- ficulty of determining the sound of either of the words in the pair, whereby to test the pronunciation of the other, and then, the possibility that the rhymes, in a particular case, were of that imperfect class which necessity renders allowa- ble. Tlie word heaven, for instance, has few perfect rhymes in English, and of these few, most are, like leaven, seven, eleven, words not likely to be used in the same couplet with heaven. Tlie consequence is, that it is more frequently made to rhyme with given, driven, 7'iven, striven, than with words, exactly coincident with it in sound. A foreigner, knowing as little of the orthoepy of modern English as we do of that of the sixteenth century, would probably infer from a compar- ison of the examples where heaven is used in English poetry, that the combination ea was, in English orthography, equiv- alent to short *. Natives are of course liable to the same ACCENTUATION. 473 error in arguing former identity of sound from former use in rhyme. In tlie Gothic and Eomance languages, with the remarka blc exception of the French, the accentual system is perhaps the most marked characteristic of their articiilation. It is that which the foreigner first becomes aware of, because, in the main, the accented syllable is the one most distinctly heard in listening to a strange language. Our means of knowing the ancient accentuation of English are, so far as they go, capable of a good deal of certainty, and the law of change on this subject is evidently that of throwing the stress of voice more and more back towards the initial syllables, in accordance with the general rule in the cognate tongues, so that English accentuation is becoming more and more An- glicized, so to speak, while the Tocabulary is becoming Eo- manized. There are certain exceptions to this i-ule in this country, but I postpone the consideration of them until I ex- amine the tendencies of the language in America as con- trasted with those it manifests in England. The pronunciation of primitive English is a subject of much interest in many points of view, biit most obviously with reference to the character of early versification, and especially to the question whether old English poems, as those of Chaucer and Gower, are strictly metrical, or merely, Kke the verses of Langland in Piers Ploughman, rhythmical. It is also linguistically important, because we cannot com- pare our etymology and our inflections with those of lan- guages nearly or remotely related, without knowing whether given sounds are expressed by the same signs in both. This uncertainty is a constant source of error in etymological re- search, and especially in the attempts to deduce native words from Oriental and other remote roots as written in European 474 OicTHOGEAPHT OF ENGLISH. characters ; for the imperfection of our alphabet often obligea travellers and scholars, in recording foreign words, to nse one letter to express two sounds very different to a trained ear, bnt for which our notation furnishes but a single sign. The collision between the Anglo-Saxon and the Norman- French orthographical and orthoepical systems, and the necessity of effecting a compromise between them, naturally drew the attention of. English scholars, at a very early period, to the relation between sounds and the signs which represent them. The extract from the Ormulum given at the conclusion of Lecture XIX., shows that the writer had very carefully considered the subject ; and many of the man- uscript copies of Gower and Chaucer exhibit, in the uniform- ity and consistency of their orthography, like evidence that it had received thoughtful and thorough investigation. Sev- eral attempts were made in the sixteenth century to reform the spelling of English, which had been much corrupted by causes already described in previous lectures. Among these attempts, the system employed by Churchy arde in some of his poetical works, and ridiculed by Southey, under the name of " Churcliyarde's Uglyography," is certainly not very in- viting to the eye, but it is by no means without merit. The orthography proposed by Alexander Gil, in his Logonomia Anglica, first published in 1619, is still better adapted to the expression of the sounds of the language, and has the further advantage of suggesting the etymology of aU native words more clearly than most other efforts in the way of phono graphic writing. It should be added, that the general conclu- sion to be drawn from the Logonomia is, that the change which has taken place in English pronunciation within two 'jcnturies and a half is, with one or two marked exceptions, EEFOEMS IN ENGLISH SPELLING. 475 less tlian we should infer from our other sourcte of informa- tion on the subject. All the old English writers on orthography and pronun- ciation fail alike, in the want of clear descriptive analysis of sounds, and of illustration by comparison with the orthoepy of other languages more stable and uniform in articulation. For this reason, and probably also on account of real dialec- tic differences of pronunciation between them,* they pppear often to stand in very direct contradiction to each other, and it is quite impossible to reconcile or explain their discrepan- cies. Under these circumstances, no very precise and certain results can be arrived at, and I do not propound the opinions I am about to express, as generally supported by any thing- more than a balance of probabilities. "Whether the vowel a had ia Anglo-Saxon the same gen- eral sound as in English, or if not, when the change in its force took place, cannot now be positively ascertained. The most important direct authority I am aware of with respect to the early pronunciation of this vowel in modern English, is that of Palsgi-ave, who, in his chapter on the French vowel, says : " The soundyng of a, which is most generally used throughout the Frenche tonge, is such as we use with us * Gil, who was a native of Lincolnshire, but resided in London as head- master of St. Paul's school, speaks of six dialects ; the common, the Northern, the Southern, the Eastern, the Western, and the poetic, but the exemplifications he gives point as often to differences in grammar and vocabulary, as in orthoepy. As instances of fluctuations in pronunciation, evidently with reference to what he calls the common dialect, he says that you was pronounced both yow and yu , toil, broil, soil, often tuil, bruil, sail ; shall either shal or shawl ; and buildeth, indifferently, huldeth, blledeth, beeldeth, and blldeth. This latter confusion must have arisen, not in popular speech, but from the embarrassment occasioned by a foreign orthography ; for though build is English, the vowel combination ui is not, except in a very few native words beginning with g and q, iu which latter case, u takes the place of w. 4:76 THE ENGLISH A. where the best English is spoken, which is lyke as the Itai ians sound a." There is no doubt that the Italian pronunci- ation of a was the same in the sixteenth century as at pres- ent, and hence it would appear that in Palsgrave's time, the normal English sound of a was as it is heard in father^ or what orthoepists generally call the Italian a. Palsgrave gives no English example, but though his statement cannot be accepted in its full extent, there seems to be no good reason for doubting that this sound was much more common in older than in more recent English. French words, introduced col- loqiiially, would bring with them the French pronunciation, and in words derived from that source, some time would elapse before the vowels would take the sounds belonging to them in English orthography. But the orthography of Churchyarde shows that in words of Saxon etymology, as well as in many of French origin, the a was in his time pro- nounced as at present. He expresses this sound by cb, and writes mak, teem; ncBni', mmd, for make, tame, name, made, and ficem, dmm, f(Bm, for iiame, dame, fame. It is a famil- iarly known fact that a had, until within a comparatively short period, the broad sound, as in wall, in many cases where we now pronounce it either as in father or as in hat. Ben Jonson lays down the rule that this vowel before I, fol- lowed by another consonant, has always the broad sound, and he gives as examples the words salt, malt, halm, calm, in all of which he says the a sounds as in all, call, small, gall, fall and tall. Bawm is still the popiilar pronunciation of halm in many English and American locaities, but calm is seldom or never heard with the broad a. Gil says that lalm, fault and half were popularly pronounced lawm, fawt and hawf, (or in his phonographic system. Mm, fat and hdf) but THE ENGLISH E. 477 that many scholars articulated the I, and He writes them hdlm, fault and half* The French nasal a would very nat- urally be changed in English into the broad a, to which it more nearly approximates than to the shorter sounds of this vowel, with which English writers on French pronunciation usually compare it, and accordingly Gil informs us that in ad- vance^ chance, France, dematid, the a was sounded broad, as in tall ; and in dance, short or broad, indifferently. f In all the Em-opean languages, the pronunciation of e is a subject of much diificulty, for, by almost imperceptible gradations, it runs through the whole scale between a va.fate, and ee in see, the latter sound being the equivalent of the Continental long i. Gil, in describing the vowels, says e is short in net, and long in neat. The short sound he represents by simple e, the long by e, and this vowel he distinguishes from the sound of ee in seen, Tceen, whether in words ordina- rily spelled with one e, as in he, with two, as in the words just quoted, or with ie, as in believe, shield. He also distin- guishes long e (e) from long a, which he represents by a. His standards for this latter sound are tale and male, and he employs the character a before the liquid r, as well as before other consonants, as, for example, in care, careful, which he uniformly spells car, earful. The long e (e) of Gil, then, was neither our a in fate, nor our e in ie, and he discriminates between them all, not only in the * Mulcaster, p. 128, says calm, balm, calf, calves, salves, were pronounced in his time, cawm, hawm, cawlf, cawves, sawves. t French-English pronouncing dictionaries generally give the a in the English gaiid as a near approximation to the French a nasalized in sans ; the o in the English bond as nearly the equivalent of o nasal in the French bon. The French nasal a is much better represented by Gil's a, and the nasal o is a more close sound than our short o, and in fact approximates nearer to the English long u. 478 THE EHGLISH E. examples I have cited, but in express and imequiToca. terms.* It is not easy to reconcile all Gil's examples with each other, or to determine what precise soimd he indicates by the vowel e, for he employs it alike in words now pronounced with the sounds of e in he, e in let, and a infate, and in others again where the present pronunciation is intermediate. In describing the vowels, he cites neat as an example of the sound of e, but in his table, the standard for it is heast, and the combination ea is almost always represented in his or- thography by e. Thus he writes dead, death, head, lead, (noun) pleasure, sweat, (present tense,) ded, deth, hed, led, plezur, swet. In all these the vowel is now short e. Olea/ve, grease, leaf, leaves, sea, mean, meat, weak, wheat, in all which the vowel, as now pronounced, is the long e, he spells clev, * Irrxi'oTT)!' autem illam magnopere affectaut TrvyoirT6\ol nostras Mopsse, quae quidem ita omnia attenuant, ut a et o non aliter perhorrescere videantur quam Appius Claudius 2, sic etiam nostrae non emunt laun et kdmbrik, sindonis species, sed I'm et kemhrik ; nee edunt kcipn, caponem, sed kepn, et fere k'ipn; nee unquam liguriunt bucherz met, butchers meate, i, carnem a laniis, sed biccherz mXt. Et quum sint omnes gintUmin, non genilwimen, i, matronse nobiles, ancillas non voeant maidz sed medz, Logonomia Anglica, Second Edition, 1621, p. 17. The only instances in which Gil seems to confound the sound of ea and of long e with long i (ee) are in the words appear, which he spells appier, near spell nier, and dear spelt d'ier, upon which last word he remarks, " I cum e in diph- thongum coalesoit in d'ier daraa vel earns." Logonomia, p. 15. But the confusion is apparent only, not real. Dear and near certainly, and appear probably, were pronounced with the sound of long ee, and did not rhyme with fear, in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and doubtless in Gil's time. At that period, almost the only orthoepical sign commonly employed in English was an acute accent, to indicate the long sound of e or ee, as may be seen in the old editions of Holinshed, and very many other authors of that time. Dear was then usually spelt deere ; near, neere ; whereas fear and most other words now written with that ending were spelt as at present, and without the accent. Numerous e-templifications of this will be found in Holinshed, as, for instance, on pp. 368, 369, 370, 371, vol. III., reprint of 1808. See App. 66. THE ENGLISH E. 4:79 gres, lef, levz, se, men, met, wek, whet. Break and great, at present sounded as if written hrake and grate, are brek and gret in Gil's system, and forhear, earth, learned, swear, are tbrber, ertli, lerned, swer. Heaven he spells sometimes hevn, and sometimes hevn. He also uses the same character to ex- press the vowel sound of e in Grecian, these, were, there, perch, theirs and they, writing Grecian, 8ez, wer, 8er, perch, Serz, and 6ei, though in one instance he spells this last word '■ thei or thai." Palsgrave, speaking of the French e, says : " Sometyme they sounde him lyke as we do in our tonge in heere, ieest, peere, ieene, but e in Frenche hath never such a sounde as we use to gyve him in a heere [bier] to lay a dead corpse on ; peere, a mate or fellow ; a hee, such as maketh honny, and as we sound our pronoims we, me, he, she." In Palsgrave's time, then, ieast and iean, were pronounced, nearly at least, haste and iane, as they still are in Ireland, and provincially in England. Taking this statement in connection with the fact that Gil distiguishes e from both a and 'i, and comparing the words which he spells with e, I think we are authorized to conclude that he intended to indicate by it a sound cor- responding to that of e in the French fete, which, the An- glo-French dictionaries to the contrary notwithstanding, is not the sound of a in fate, but much more nearly that of e in t/iere, as usually pronounced in New England. The e in there, in the ISTew England pronunciation, is the long vowel corresponding to the shoi't a in inan, so that hair and hat, or, better still, pare and parry, care and carry, respectively exemplify the long and short sounds of the vowel.* » A passage in Harvey's Letter to Spenser, Haslcwood II. 281, though written for another purpose, shows that/ajV and other words of lilahn, calm, ^nd the like, is to be ascribed, if not to the reason assigned in a note to a previous page, to Norman influence.* In many woEds of Saxon origin, as for instance in could and would, it was generally pronounced until a recent period. The old New- England pronunciation of these words was coold, woold, and Ben Jonson writes Pld for Pd, the popular contraction of I would. In Gil's phonographic system, the I is always writ- ten in such words, and it was of course articulated. "We have, on the other hand, in conformity to the corrected or- thography of many words of French origin, recently intro- duced it in some cases where it was formerly silent. In the sixteenth century Englishmen wrote and pronounced soud- yours, assaut. At a later period, they spelt and articulated the I in both, and it is worth noticing that the French have done the same thing with respect to the former word, the * Laneham, in 1573, wrote sTcro for scroll. This pronunciation suggests a probable etymology for a word which has much embarrassed lexicographers. The Icelandic noun skra means sMn or parchment, whence the verbs skr4, and skrasetja, to write or record. From slcra comes the old Danish Skraa, (pronounced skro,) a written ordinance or law, and I think also our sa-oll, and the Norman English escrow. Scroms occurs in Wycliffc, Matth. XXIII, 5. 496 THE ENGLISH B. soudard of older writers, itself a corruption of a still ear- lier form, souldard, having become the soldat of recent times. There are many instances in the English poetry of the sixteenth, and earlier centuries, where the liquid I stands for a syllable of itself. For example, the preterites or par- ticiples dazzled and humlled must have been pronounced as trisyllables, dazzeled, htmibeled. Traces of this pronuncia- tion yet remain in both England and this country. Ignorant persons call the elm tree ellum, and helium is the regular nautical pronunciation of helm.* The former Enghsh pronunciation of the letter r was probably much the same as in the modern Erench. " E" says Ben Jonson, " is the dog's letter and hurreth in the sound, the tongue striking the inner palate with a trembling about the teeth. It is sounded firm in the beginning of words, and more liquid in the middle and end, as ra/rer, rijperP The Anglo-Saxon alphabet, as I have more than once had occasion to observe, had two characters corresponding to those of the Icelandic, to express the two sounds of th, which are absurdly distinguished by many grammarians as respectively the^a^ and sharp articulations. According to analogy with the Old-Northern, the character f) should represent th in thin, or the Greek ; 8, th in this, or the modem Greek A, and there is little doubt that this was their original force. But in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the two are often con- founded or interchangeably employed, and some grammari- ans have even supposed that in that orthography, their sounds were precisely the reverse of those appropriated to them in the Scandinavian alphabet. In any event it seems quite ccr^ * See note at page 488. THE ENGLISH "WH. 497 tain that we liave in many cases substituted the hard sound for the soft, and the contrary, though we cannot determine when the change took place. The recent introduction of the w, in the combination wh in several words, is remarkahle. Whole, in the Saxon root, and the corresponding word in the cognate languages, were without the w, and whole and its derivatives were usually wi-itten without it in English, until the latter part of the six- teenth century.* So hot, which in Anglo-Saxon was spelt with h only, occasionally received a ■?« at the same period. Whortleberry is an instance of the same sort. "Whether the w was ever articulated in whole, wholesoTne or hot, we cannot determine, but it is difficult to account for its introduction on any other supposition. On the other hand, this semi-vowel has been rejected from the orthography of many words where it was once written and pronounced, and it is silent in pro- nunciation in many words where it is still written. Several Saxon words began with wl. These are all, I believe, obso- lete, though we have derivatives of two of them in luhe- warm, and loth, loathe and loathsome. These last words, as well as one or two others, retained the initial w until the fif- teenth century, and it doubtless had some orthoepical force, though we cannot pronounce upon its precise character. It was unquestionably anciently articulated before r, in such words as write, wrong, wrench, &c. What its precise force was cannot now be ascertained, but it appears to have had a distinct sound in such combinations, to near the end of the sixteenth century and even later, if the aiithority of Mul- * Whole may possibly be from tha Anglo-Saxon walg; but the etymological analogies of the sister-tonguea are to the contrary ; and as w never entered into the orthography of whole, until Anglo-Saxon was forgotten, the derivation from h al is more probable. 32 4:98 THE ENGLISH WH. caster and Gil is to be relied on. The former says in express terms, that w ia a. consonant in the word wrong, and Gil, whose phonography rejects all silent letters, retains the w in wrath, wrathful, wretch and wretched. From these remarks it will be evident that our present subject is involved in great obscurity, but, nevertheless, it seems a safe conclusion, that the pronunciation of our lan- guage has been upon the whole considerably softened, per- haps it would be more accurate to say, has become more con- fused, within the last two or three centuries, and is less clear, distinct and sonorous than it was in earlier ages. I have en- deavored to show, in a previous lecture, that the art of print- ing is exerting a restorative influence on English pronuncia- tion. The study of Anglo-Saxon and Old-English grammar will be attended with like results. We may, therefore, hope that the further corruption of our orthoepy will be arrested, and that we may recover something of the fulness and dis- tinctness of articulation, which appear to have characterized the ancient Anglican tongue. LECTURE XXIII. RHYME. An important difference between tlie gi-eat classes of lan- guages which we have considered in former lectures — those, namely, abounding in grammatical inflections, and those com- paratively destitute of them — is the more ready adaptability of the inflected tongues to the conventional forms of poetical composition. In other words, they more easily accommodate themselves to those laws of arrangement, sequence, and re- currence of soimd — of rhythm, metre and rhyme — by which verse addi'csses itself to the sensuous ear, and enables that organ, without reference to the subject, purport, or rhetorical character of a given writing, to determine whether it is poetry or prose. An obvious element in this facility of ap- plication to poetical use is the independence of the laws of position in syntax which belongs especially to inflected lan- guages, for it is evidently much easier to give a prosodical form to a period, if we are unrestricted in the arrangement ' of the words which compose it, than if the parts of speech are bound to a certain inflexible order of succession. Met- rical convenience has introduced inversion among the allow- 500 ENGLISH POOE IN EHYMES. able licenses of English poetry, and some modern writers have indulged iu it to a very questionable extent ; but at all events its use is necessarily very limited, and it cannot be employed at all without some loss of perspicuity. A more important poetical advantage of a flectional grammar, is the abundance of consonances which necessarily characterizes it. Wherever there are unifoi-m terminations for number, gen- der, case, conjugation and other grammatical accidents, where there are augmentative, diminutive and frequentative forms, there of course there must be a corresponding copiousness of rhymes. English, possessing few inflections, has no large classes of similar endings. On the contrary, it is rich in variety of terminations, and for that reason poor in conso- nances. The number of English words which have no rhyme in the language, and which, of course, cannot be placed at the end of a line, is very great. Of the words in "Walker's Ehyming Dictionary, five or six thousand at least are with- out rhymes, and consequently can be employed at the end of a verse only by transposing the accent, coupling them with an imperfect consonance, or constructing an artificial rhyme out of two words. Of this class are very many important words well adapted for poetic use, such as warmth, month, wolf, gulf, sylph, music, hreadth, width, depth, silver, honor, virtue, worship, circle, epic, earthborn, iron, citron, author, echo ; others, like courage, hero, which rhyme only with words that cannot be used in serious poetry ; others again which have but a single consonance, as lahe astrolabe, length strength. Our poverty of rhyme is perhaps the greatest for- mal difiiculty in English poetical composition. In the in- fancy of our literature, it was felt by Chaucer, who concludes the Complaint of Mars and Yenas with this lamentation : ENGLISH POOR IN RHYMES. 501 And eke to me it is a great penaunoe, Sith rime in English hath sooh scarcite, To folow word by word the curiosite, Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. The successors of Chaucer hrfve felt the burden of the em- barrassment, if they have not echoed the complaint. Walker's Ehyming Dictionary contains about thii'ty thousand words, including the different inflected forms of the same word. In this list, th« number of different endings is not less than fourteen or fifteen thousand, and inasmuch as there are in the same list five or six thousand words or end- ings without rhyme, as I have already stated, there remain about nine thousand rhymed endings to twenty-five thou- sand words, so that the average number of words to an end- ing, or, which comes to the same thing, the number of rhymes to the words capable of rhyming, would be less than, thi-ee. The Ehyming Dictionary indeed contains scarcely half the English words admissible in poetry, and of those that form its vocabulary, many are wholly un-English and unauthorized, but there is no reason to suppose that the pro- portions would be changed by extending the list. If we compare our own with some of the Romance lan- guages, we shall find a surprising difference in the relative abundance and scarcity of rhymes. The Spanish poet Yriarte, in a note to his poem La Musi- ca, states the number of endings in that language at three thousand nine hundred only, among which are a large num- ber that occur only in a single'word. ISTow as the Spanish vocabulary is a copious one, we shall be safe in saying that there are probably more than thirty thousand Spanish words capable of being employed in poetty. The inflections are very numerous, and while our verb love admits of but seven 502 EHYMES m SPANISH AND ITALIAN. forms, namely, love, loves, lovest, lovetli, lovedest, loving and loved, the corresponding Spanish verb amar has more than fifty. ISTouns distinguish the numbers ; pronouns and adjec- tives generally, and articles always, both genders and num- bers, and we may assume that the words, upon an average, admit of at least three forms. This would give about one hundred thousand forms with less than four thousand end- ings, or twenty-five rhymes to eveiy word. This is but a rough estimate, and it must be observed that, from the strict- ness of the laws of Castilian prosody, as compared with the Italian, many rhymes, which Tasso would have used without scruple, would be disapproved in Spanish, except in ballads and other popular poetry. "Words of the same class, whose consonance depends wholly on grammatical ending, are sparingly coupled, and absolute coincidence of sound is dis- allowed, as in most other languages. Hence, while am aba and callaba would be regarded as a license, hallaba and call aba would be inadmissible. For this reason, and be- cause also the article and other unimportant words cannot well be used at the end of a verse, the number of Spanish rhymes available in practice is considerably less than the cal- culation I have just given would make it. I am inclined to believe that the endings are more numer- ous, and consequently the rhymes fewer, in Italian than in Spanish, although still very abundant as compared with the poverty of English consonances ; and this may explain the greater freedom of the Italian poets in the use of them. Tasso even employs identical rhymes almost as liberally as Gower ; and in the second canto of the Gerusalemme Libe- rata I find the following pairs: Viene conviene, face verb and face noun, voti devoti, immago mago, impone appone, irresolute solute, riveli veli; ITAUAK TEESIFICATION. 503 esecutrice vendieatrice, volto participle and volto noun, spiri sospiri, lamenti rammenti tormenti, sole console, compiacque piacque, and nearly twen- ty more equally objectionable on the score of too perfect con sonance. Poverty in rhyme is one of the reasons why the tal ent of improvisation, so common and so astonishingly devel oped in degree in Italy, is almost unknown in England and among ourselves.* Besides the ease of rhyming, the gen- eral flexibility of the Italian language, and its great freedom of syntactical movement, as compared with the rigidity of most other European tongues, adapt it to the rhythmical structure of verse as remarkably as the abundance of similar inflectional endings facilitates the search for rhymes. It is this quality of flexibility of arrangement which gives it so great an advantage over the Spanish in ease of versification. * To those who hare not witnessed the readiness and dexterity of Italian improvisatori, their performances are incredible, and they are perhaps even more inexplicable to those who have listened to them. The following is an in- stance which fell under my own observation : An eminent improvisatore, in spending an evening in a private circle, was invited to give some specimens of his art. He composed and declaimed several short poems on subjects suggested by us, with scarcely a moment's preparation. They were in a great variety of metres, and very often accommodated to bouts rimes, or blank rhymes, furnished by the party, and purposely made as disparate as possible. In one instance, he communicated to me privately the general scope of thought to be woven into a sonnet, and proposed that the party should furnish the blank rhymes, a subject, and two lines from any Italian poet which might occur to ug. He was then to accommodate the proposed train of thought to the rhymes and the subject, and to introduce the two verses which should be suggested. The rhymes were pre- pared, and the subject given was the Penknife. I remember but one of the lines which he was required to interweave. It was, Vattene in pace, alma beata e bella ! CDepart in peace, fair and blessed sou! !) The sonnet, really a very spirited one, was composed and ready for delivery in less time than we had spent in collecting and arranging the rhymes. 504 CLASSICAL POETEY TINEHYMEU. notwithstanding the greater number of like terminations in the latter. The structure of the Spanish period, whether in poetry or in prose, is comparatively cumbrous and formal ; there are fewer dactylic feet, and less variety of accentuation ; and hence it does not so readily accommodate itself to a met- rical disposition of words as the Italian, which has the addi- tional convenience of dropping or retaining the final vowel in many cases at pleasure. It has been thought singular that with the multitude of like terminations, and the great sensibility of the Greek and Latin ear, neither rhyme, alliteration nor accent should have become metrical elements, but that, on the contrary, repetition of sound in all its forms should have been sedulously avoided. But the very abundance of similar endings suggests the reason why they were not used as a formal ingi'edient in the structure of verse. That which constantly forces itself upon us we do not seek after, but ratlier aim to avoid. It would, therefore, have been a departure from the principles of a taste so fastidious as that of the classic ages, artificially to multiply and emphasize coincidences of sound which, by the laws of the language, were continually presenting themselves unso- licited. The freqiient recurrence of like sounds in those lan- guages was unavoidable ; it was a grammatical necessity, and if such sounds had been designedly introduced as rhymes, and thus made still more conspicuous, they could not but have been as ofi'ensive to the delicacy of ancient ears as ex- cessive alliteration is to oiir own. To them such obvious co- incidences appeared too gross to be regarded as proper in- strumentalities in so etherial an art as poetry, and they con- structed a prosody depending simply upon the subtilest element of articulation, the qtiantity or relative length of the vowels. \NCIENT VEESIFICATION. 506 The fastidiousness of taste increases witli its refinement, and indeed, in many cases, the one is but another name far the other. When the poetic forms of classic Greece and Eome became more multifarious, and the rules of prosody and metrical structure more and more distinctly defined, we observe greater care in the avoidance, not merely of end- rhymes, but of all repetitions of sound, both in poetry and prose. There are some traces of the employment of rhyme and assonance in mere popular literature at a very remote period ; and though none of the great poets of an- tiquity are supposed to have intentionally introduced either, yet their comparatively frequent occurrence in the works of Hesiod seems to show that in his time no very great pains were taken to exclude them. The extant works of Hesiod comprise about twenty-three hundred lines or verses, and I find in these poems thirty pairs of consecutive rhymes, and about twenty instances where the same termination occurs with one or two intervening verses. In twice that number of verses in the Iliad and the Odyssey, I observe but twenty pairs of consecutive rhymes, generally repetitions of the same words, and about thirty recurrences of rhymes separated by one or two lines. The diiference between the two poets is not likely to have been accidental, and it is not improba- ble that the more numerous critical revisions which the works of Homer passed through, eliminated some instances of what to the Greek ear was oftensive. Tlie rhymes in Hesiod in many cases occur in catalogues of proper names, and it is possible that they were designedly employed as helps to tlie memory, which would be more needed in a mere list of names than in a connected narrative. It should be observed with reference to both Hesiod and Homer, that the ancient accent- uation in many instances doubtless made the rhymes much 506 EEPETITION OF SOUUl'S. less conspicuous to the ear tlian they are by the modern modes of scanning, but still they could hardly have failed to be noticed. The ancients in general aroided resemblances of sound in prose with almost equal solicitude, though they were perhaps even less scrupulous with regard to the repetition of the same word than we are in English ; but there are passages iu some of the more primitive prose writers where coincidence of syllable seem almost sought for. There is an example of this in Herodotus, familiar to every school-boy : Toicrt irapa (7fpiF SOtTNDS. 507 was certainly a rule of both Greek and Latin composition, that all coincidences of sound, except those of quantity in vei-se, were to be avoided. Notwithstanding the naodern love of consonance, we in general abstain from it where it is not essential to the form of composition employed, and a rhyming couplet in blank verse, except occasionally at the end of a paragraph in dra- matic or dithyrambic poetry, is felt at once as an unwarrant- able license. Rhyme strikes us no less disagreeably, if it happens to occur between two emphatic words in prose, as does also a metrical structure, which, unless it is whoUy ac- cidental, has much the same effect as a dancing step in the walk of a reverend senior. Those who are acquainted with the admirably told German tales of Musseus, will remember the comic, mock-heroic air thrown over the narrative by the occasional introduction of a succession of iambics, and our newspapers often contain prose articles rendered equally lu- dicrous by interspersing rhyming words now and then. There are indeed instances in rhetoric, both ancient and modern, of the happy employment of like sounds, but the attempt to introduce them artificially into oratory, generally serves no other purpose than to exemplify the proverb, and to prove ex- perimentally that " there is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous." It is remarkable that neither the fine ear of Fisher Amies, nor the taste of his dignified audience, wer& offended by the repetitions of sound in a passage of his cele- brated speech on the British Treaty : " This day we un- dertone to render account to the widows and oi-phans whom our decision will make ; to the wretches that will be roasted at the stake; to our country, &c., &c." Here, of course, the consonance could not have been other than an accidental one, but it does not appear to have been noticed as a blemish, 608 ANCIENT POEMS CHANTED. though ill general such coincidences are peculiarly lisagree able. The Spanish ear is so nice on this point, according to an eminent writer of that nation, that the asonarde, or im- perfect rhyme, where the vowels are the same, with different consonants, as fame, state, male, cane, though it is employed as an element of verse in certain poetic forms, is offensive in prose, if the asonantes happen to terminate two or three phrases or members of a period in near succession.* There is perhaps a further reason why coincidence of sound should have been unsought on the one hand, and dis- regarded on the other, if it chanced to occur in Greek poetry. The bardic lays of ancient Greece were probably not com- mitted to writing, and they were chanted or sung at enter- tainments, public or private. Now, though persons taught the modern school-boy sing-song way of reading poetry strongly emphasize the rhyme, yet in singing, or in modu- lated recitation, we scarcely observe it when it occurs, or miss it when it does not. "We cannot indeed positively say that a like difference existed between ancient reading and chanting, but it is not violently improbable that when the Theogony or the Works and Days of Hesiod were sung by the author or his successors, his rhymes may have passed unnoticed ; and with respect to Homer, whose immortal poems were handed down from age to age by oral delivery and transmission, it may be supposed, as already hinted, that when they were wi'itten down, and edited, as we know they were, by a long succes- sion of copyists and scholiasts, original peculiarities, now felt to be unpleasant departures from the received canons of poetry, were struck out. * Aun en la prosa les ofcnde el mero asonante quando se halla en palabras que terminan el sentido de frases poco distantes unas de otras. — Tiiarte, notes to La Musiea. OEIGnf OF EHYME. 509 To discuss the historical origin of rhyming versification would lead me too far from my subject. The word rhyme is not derived from the Grseco-Latin rhythmus. It is of original Gothic stock, and ought to cast off the Greek garb, in which the pedantic affectation of classical partialities, and the desire to help the theory that ascribes to the thing, as well as to the name, a Latin origin, have dressed it. The proper spelling is simply rime, and though rhyming cannot be shown to have been practised among the Gothic tribes earlier than elsewhere in Em-ope and the East, yet it proba- bly sprung up among them spontaneously, as the natural poetical form of the language, just as it did among some of the Oriental nations. In any event, the current supposition that its first invention belongs to the monkish poetry of the middle ages, and that other modern theory which traces it to the Celtic bards, rest alike on a very insufficient founda- tion. But whether it was indigenous to the Gothic nations or not, it fell in so naturally with the love of alliteration and other coincidence of sound which characterizes all the branches of that great family, that it found ready acceptance among them as soon as models of rhyming versification were presented to them. The passionate admirers of classical literature in the six- teenth century stoutly opposed the employment of rhyme, as a barbarous innovation on the consecrated forms of the art. Roger Ascham says, that Cheke and Watson held our " rude beggarly rhyming to have been first brought into Italy by Gothes and Hunnes," and that to " follow rather the Gothes in rhyming than the Greekes in trew versifying, were even to eate acornes with swyne, when we may freely eate wheate bread amonges men." Sir Philip Sidney complains of con- temporaneous English poetry that " one verse did but beget 510 BEN JONSON ON EHTME. another ; " and so the whole became " a confused masse of words with a tinkling sound of ryme barely accompanied with reason."* But this is probably to be regarded less as a censure of the use than of the abuse of rhyme, for though he himself composed in almost all known ancient metres, yet he wrote by preference in rhymed verse, and used double, triple and compounded rhymes with great freedom. He moreover formally defends rhyme in the following passage : " Now of versifying there are two sorts, the one ancient the other moderne : the ancient marked the quantitie of each syllable, and according to that framed his verse : the moderne observing only number, with some regard of the accent, the chief life of it standeth in that like sounding of the words, which we call ryme. Whether of these be the more excellent, would beare many speeches, the ancient, no doubt, more fit for musicke, both words and time observing quantity, and more fit lively to expresse divers passions, by the low or lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable. The latter likewise with his ryme striketh a certain musicke to the ear, and in fine, since it doth delight, though by another way, it obtaineth the same purpose, there being in either sweetnesse, and wanting in neither. Majestic, and truly the English, be- fore any vulgar language I know, is fit for both sorts." Ben Jonson's opinion of rhyming verse was more unfa« vorable, and he thus expresses his dislike of it : Rime, the rivck of finest wits, That expresscth but by fits True conceits, Spoiling senses of their treasure, Cosening judgment with a measure, But false weight, * Defence of Poesie, ninth edition, p. 661. MILTON ON EHYME. 511 Wresting words from their true callinj^, Propping verse for fear of falling To the ground, Joining syllables, drowning letters. Fasting vowels, as with fetters. They were bound, He that first invented thee. May his joints tormented be, Cramp'd forever ! Still may syllables jarre with time, Still may reason warre with rime Resting never, &c., &e. Milton condemns rhyme as " the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off "wretched matter and lame metre ; grac't in- deed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by custom, but much to their own vexation hindrance and constraint, to express many things otherwise and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them ***** a thing of itself to all judicious eares triveal and of no true musical delight ; " and he congratulates himself on having in Paradise Lost set the first example in English epic of avoiding " the jingling sound of like endings," and thus restored " to Heroic Poem ancient liberty from the troublesome and modern bondage of rimeing." It can hardly be said that Milton's experiment was a suc- cessful one, for the slowness with which his great poem won its way to public favor is doubtless in some measure to be ascribed to its rejection of what the English ear demanded as an essential constituent of the poetic form. Milton has had many imitators, but blank verse has as yet established itself as a legitimate mode of English versification only in the he- roic metre. The final rejection of, rhyme from the metrical system of our language is as improbable, indeed as impossible we may say, as the abandonment of accentual rhythm and the return to prosodical quantity. 612 PEEDOMINANCE OF EHTME. Until the seventeenth century, the ear of modern Europe was so little wearied with rhyme, that in spite of the protes- tations of the classical school, it fairly revelled in this new element of metrical sweetness. The same rhyme was often carried through a great number of verses, and in many poems all the stanzas haA^e the same set of terminations, a sufficient variety to satisfy the taste of the times being obtained by diJfferently arranging the i-hymes in consecutive stanzas. Sa- tiety at last produced a reaction which concurred with other influences in restricting the use of like endings, and we often meet with evidences of a disposition to avoid the use of repe- titions of sound in prose. Thus, the Germans say Auf- und Niedergangfor Aiifgang und Niedergang, the Span- iards facil-y subitamente for facilmente y subita- mente, and we fair- and softly, for fairly/ and softly. The Tuscan Canzone, in which the consonances are " few and far between," shows that even the rhyme-loving Italian feels the necessity of making the recurrence of this ornament less fre- quent, and its regularity less palpable, in the highest order of lyric poetry, than in lighter compositions. The modern license in the use of rhymes has grown, in great measure, out of a wearinesss of perpetual repetition, but it is partly founded on the example of earlier poets, Avho are mistaken- ly supposed often to have used imperfect rhymes, when in fact, in the orthoepy of their times, the consonance was complete. The articulation, and, consequently, the prosody of lan- guages is much affected by the character of their grammatical inflections. Where inflections exist, the syntactical relations of the words, and the intelligibility of the period depend upon them, and they must consequently be pronounced with a certain distinctness. ITie orthoepy of most languages in- INFLECTION AND AETICULATION. 513 clines to make the inflectional element conspicuous. If it consists in the addition of syllables to the radical, then a principal, or at least a secondary accent will fall upon some of the variable syllables. The vowels, though few in num- ber, will be of frequent occui-rence, open in articulation, and broadly distinguished from each other. The consonants will be clear and detached in their pronunciation. If inflection is made by vowel-change, the vowels will be numerous and subtilely distinguished, and the consonants, though more nu- merous, will become relatively less prominent. Examples of this may be found on the one hand in the small number of vowel-sounds and the clear, staccato articulation of the consonants in Italian and Spanish, and on the other in the obscurity of the consonants, and the multiplied shades of vowel-sound in the Danish. So long as the predominant mode of inflection in English was by the letter-change, the attention was constantly drawn to the essential quality of the vowel, and even a slight difference in this respect struck the ear more forcibly than at present, when inflection by termi- nal augment is so common. Hence, a departure from the law of strict consonance was .much less likely to be tolerated, and I am persuaded that the number of imperfect rhymes in old English authors will be found to be constantly fewer as we advance in the knowledge of their orthoepy. After the introduction of Worman words, with their aug- mentative inflections, the system of letter-change fell into great confusion, and all well-grounded principle of declension and conjugation seems to have been lost sight of. The de- rangement of .the strong inflections continued for centuries, and the poets took advantage of this to vary the characteris- tic vowel in almost any way that suited the convenience of 33 514 lOETIC LICENSES. their rhymes. Guest sneers at the ignorance of those who suppose that Spenser's licenses in this respect were unauthor ized innovations of his own, but I cannot assent to this view of the subject. For though Spenser may have found in bal- lads and other popular literature precedents for most of his inflectional extravagances, yet some of them, at least, were violations of the analogies of the language, and without the sanction of any real authoritative example. But the licenses of Spenser were by no means limited to anomalous vowel- changes, for he abbreviated or elongated words for the sake of rhythm or consonance as unscrapuloiisly as he substituted an open vowel for a close, or the contrary. We have already seen that he resolved the diphthongal i into its elements, and made UJce a dissyllable rhyming with seeJc, and with equal boldness he cuts down cherish to cherry, that he may pair it off with merry, evohathe to embay, for the sake of a rhyme to zfuoa/y, and converts contrary into a verb by dropping the final vowel ; on the other hand he lengthens nobless into no- teless, and dazzled into dazzeled. Thomas Heywood uses double and triple rhymes with much grace and dexterity, and it is the more remarkable that so expert a versifier should have allowed himself to disguise so important a word as Deity for the sake of a consonance : By the reflex of lustice and true Piety, It drawes to contemplation of a Diety. This, however, is but a tame license compared to that by which, in the third book of the Hierarchie, he reduces the goodly polysyllable intoxicated to the humble form of Hoxt.* * On the same page (edition of 1635, p. 134) tliere is a catachresis in the employment of inde.nturing, -which makes it very enigmatical to all readers ex- cept those -who know how legal indentures were anciently drawn up and cm apart. REPETITION OF RHYMES. 515 But Heywood, like many old English writers, was of opinion that man is the lord, not the slave of language, and he often proved a hard master to the words that served him. The great number of English words which are incapable of rhyme, and the few which agree in any one of our numer- ous endings, reduce the poet to a very limited variety of choice, and there are many pairs of words which are found as invariably together as length and strength, ireath and d^ath, or icealth and stealth, gold and cold. "When you see frivolity at the end of a line, you do not need your eyes to tell you that Jollify cannot be far off; mountains and foun- tains are as indissolubly united in rhyme as they are in phys- ical geography, and if a poet qualifies an object as frigid, he never fails to inform you in the next line that it is also rigid. The consequence of this perpetual repetition is a weari- ness of all exactness in rhymes, and a tendency to great license in the use of imperfect consonances. The proper re- lief is to be found, not in a self-indulgent laxity, a repudia- tion of the fetters of verse, but in a bold retm-n to the poeti- cal wealth, both of form and substance, of our ancient tongue ; and the certainty that we shall there find unex- hausted, though long neglected, mines of ores and gems, should be, for poetic natures, an argument of no small force for the study of primitive English. There are, in both the Gothic and the Eomance languages, equivalents or substitutes for rhyme, some of which have not been employed at all, others not systematically, in English poetry. The introduction of them well deserves inquiry, and the character of these devices, and the possibility of their restoration as metrical elements will be considered and illus- trated in other lectures. LECTURE XXIV. ACCENTUATION AND DOUBLE RHYMES. The modes of consonance wMcli may be, and . j different nations have been, employed as essential elements of the poet- ical form, are very various. The prosody or metrical system of the classical languages is founded on quantity, that of modern literature on accentuation. Each system necessarily excludes the characteristic element of the other, not indeed from accidental coincidence, or altogether, from consideration in practice, bat from theoretical importance as an ingredient in poetic measure. Quantity, as employed by the ancients, has been generally supposed to consist simply in the length or relative duration of different syllables in time of utter- ance.* To us, mere quantity is so inappreciable, that we * The terms long and short, employed in popular English orthoepy, are usually wholly misapplied. Most of our vowels have two long sounds, and the corresponding short sounds are often expressed not by the same, but by differ- ent letters. The propriety of the terms long and short, as truly descriptive ap- pellations, expressive, simply, of relative duration in time, is, to say the least, very questionable, even when applied to cases where the same character is em- ployed for both. It is not true that short sounds, simply by a more leisurely utterance, necessarily pass into long ones, and vice versa, for if so, the short vowels of a slow delivery would be the long ones of a rapid pronunciation, which is by no means the fact. An attentive examination of the position of the organs ANCIENT METRES. 517 cannot compreliend how it could be made the basis of a met- rical system. It is difficult to believe that, with any suppos- able sensibility of ear to the flow of time, a prosody could have been founded on that single accident of sound, and we cannot resist the persuasion that there entered iato ancient prosody some yet imdiscovered element, some peculiarity of articulation or intonation, that was as influential as the mere temporal length of vowels ia giving a rhythmical character to a succession of syllables which, with the supposed an- cient accentuation, is, to our ears, undistinguishable from prose. Although, for want of appropriate native terms, we em- ploy Latin and Greek designations of feet and measui-es, yet our modern accentual rhythm is in no sense an equivalent of the ancient temporal prosody, as it has sometimes been con- sidered, but it is its representative, and, like some other rep- resentatives, very far fi-om being a truthful expression of the primary constituency for which it answers. It is for this reason that every attempt to naturalize the classical metres in English verse, except in the very disputable case of the hex- ameter, has proved a palpable failure, and is in fact a delu- sion, because, from the want of parity between accent and quantity, they cannot strike the ear alike, and therefore the eye alone, or the fingers which coimt off the feet, can find any resemblance between the ancient metre and the modern. of speech will show that between longs and shorts there is, generally at least, a difference in quality as well as in time. Syllables long by position, indeed, re. quire more time for their utterance than ordinary short syllables, because they contain a greater number of successive articulations, but here, in modern ortho- epy, the length is a property of the syllable, not of the vowel alone. How far, 4nd in what way, position actually modified the pronunciation of the vowel itself, 11 ancient prosody, cannot now be determined, and of course we do not know ■rhether in that case prosodical length belonged to the vatt witt hafenn takenn ba An reghellboc to foUghenn, Unnderr kanunnkess had & lif, Swa summ Sannt Awwstin sette ; Ice hafe don swa summ {)U badd, & for|)edd te {> in wille, Ice hafe wennd inntill Ennglissh Goddspelless hallghe lare, Afflerr |)att little witt tatt me Min Drihhtin hafe{){) lenedd. f>u Jjohhtest tatt itt mihhte wel Till mikell frame turrnenn, Yiff Ennglissh foUk, forr lufe off Crist, Itt woUde yerne lernenn, & follghenn itt, and fiUenn itt Wi{){> j)ohht, wif)^) word, wif)f) dede. For want of the proper type, I am obliged to use in this extract, as well aa 524 THE OEMULDM. The metrical construction of this poem is so skilful, and its accentual rhythm so perfectly preserved, that though we are constantly expecting the rhyme, we scarcely observe that it is wanting', and it seems to me one of the most dex- terous compromises between the classical and modern pro- sodical systems which occur in the early poetry of any recent literature. There exists but a single manuscript, a mutilated fragment, of this remarkable poem, and there is strong reason to suppose that this is from the hand of the author himself. The lines are written continuously, like prose, but they are so marked by points as to show that they consist of fifteen syllables divided by a pause after the eighth, the first hemi- stich containing four iambic feet, the latter two iambics and an amphibrach. Theoretically, we may consider the prosody of the Ormulum as composed of verses of six iambics and an amphibrach, thus : And follow it and it fulfil ] in thought, in word, in doing ; or of couplets consisting alternately of eight and seven sylla- bled lines divided into feet, like the hemistichs of the long lines, thus : In that we-two have taken up One priestly rule to follow. Upon the former view, the versification would be closely as- similated to that of many Latin poems of the middle ages, as well as to certaui still earlier poetic forms, and the want of rhymes and of alliteration favors this theory. By the latter division, it would nearly resemble metres very extensively diffused through all modern literature, and then the differ- in that in Lecture xix., sometimes y and sometimes g, when the original employs a Saxon character. NEW POETIC FORMS. 525 ence in the length of the lines, and the alternate single and double endings, would be Tery noticeable and important particulars. The Ormulum was probably never put in circulation. The author hints that he was subject to the persecutions to which all who attempted to clothe the mysteries of religion in the vulgar tongue were exposed during the sway of the Eomish church, and the mutilated condition of the manuscript may perhaps be ascribed to ecclesiastical hostility. Although, therefore, there were other early English poems in forms par- taking of the characteristics of both ancient and modern prosody, we cannot ascribe to the Ormulum any influence upon the structure of later English verse, and it stands as a unique example uf greater skill in versification than had yet been attained in the Anglican tongue. The poets of the present day are striving to invent new forms and combinations, to emancipate themselves from some of the conventional restraints of verse, to loosen the fetters which they cannot wholly throw off, and to infuse fresh life and spirit into movements of the muses which perpetual rep- etition has made wearisome and ungraceful. As the ballet- master has revived the dances of the chivalric ages, and bor- rowed from rural districts and distant provinces complicated figures, giddy whirls and bold saltations, so the bard has evoked from forgetfolness and obscurity antiquated forms, abrupt changes and quaint devices, sometimes, no doubt, to give appropriate expression to an inspiration which finds no fit utterance in the moulds of stereotyped verse ; but not less frequently to hide poverty of thought beneath the ill-sorted coloring and dazzling glitter of a strange and gaudy raiment. It is for such reasons, good and bad, that recent poets have 526 DOUBLE BHTMES. re-introduced double and tri-syllabic rhyme, wliiali had be- come nearly obsolete, into serious verse, and thus denational- ized our poetry by employing an ornament for the most part foreign in both form and material. The use of double rhymes is not well suited to the Saxon constituent of our language, since the dropping of so many of the unaccented and less conspicuous inflections, for double rhymes seldom occur in words of Saxon origin, except in the past tense and participle of the weak verbs, and in the pres- ent participle with its disagreeable, unmelodious ending in-inff. Chaucer seems to affect monosyllabic rhymes in his verse, and indeed seldom employs double ones, imless we count as such words in e final, which perhaps we should do, for there is no doubt but this letter was sounded in Chaucer's time, as it is now in the cognate languages, and in French verse. In the reign of Elizabeth, the study of Spanish and Italian lit- erature led to the very frequent employment of polysyllabic I'hymes ; and though not miich used by Spenser, they con- tinued in fashion down to the era of the Restoration. At that period, French influence became predominant ; many, not only of the original characteristics of English literature, but of the forms of verse which English poets had borrowed from the bards of Southern Europe, disappeared for a time, and double rhymes ceased to be used in serious compositions, until the necessities of the present century revived them. French verse, indeed, not only admits but requires the alternate use of double rhymes, but as the last syllable in this case is only the obscure and roar, but merely the English form of the cognate German Aufruhr. Landor believes Wordsworth to have been instrumental in promoting the modem disposition to carry back the accent, but I think he overrates "Wordsworth's infiuence in this respect. The * Puttenham (Haslewood, I., 87) says, " Sometimes it sounds better to say rSvocablg than rgyocablfi, rScovgrable than recovgrable." This shows that the accent in this termination was fluctuating, and that in revocable, it had not yet been carried farther back than the antepenult. 632 CHANGE OF ACCENT. tendency to this general change manifestel itself a century before the time of that poet, nor have his writings ever b& come sufficiently popular to have awakened it, had it been dormant. The same critic mentions aristocrat, concordance, contrary, industry, inimical, contemplate, conculcate, (detail, ^Zexander, sonorous, swSlunary, (desultory, peremptory, as words which have in very recent times transfen-ed the accent to the initial syllable.* This list might have been very much enlarged, but the changes indicated by Landor have not all become established in this country, and some of them are to be regretted, because they tend to obscure the etymology and classical quantity of the words where they occur. There are, on the other hand, cases where the change of accent has brought back a word to its proper form. A strik- ing instance of this sort occurs in the word hospital. This was formerly accented on the second syllable, hospital, and in popular speech, and at last in writing, the initial ho was dropped and the word become s;pital, and was so spelt both in poetry and prose. This accentuation has so disguised the word that Landor believes even Ben Jonson to have been ig- norant of its etymology, though the passage he cites from Jonson by no means sustains the opinion. The strong accen- tuation which characterizes the English articulation makes us so sensible to that element of speech that we habitually conceive of it as a significant element of itself, and no mis- pronunciation of English by foreigners so effectually con- founds us as the transposition of an accent. It has with us * Smart, writing in 1836, observes, that the accent in balcony has shifted from the second to the first syllable, within twenty years. Rogers complained of this displacement of accent, and said, "contemplate b bad enough, but b&Icony makes me sick." PEOSODT OF GOTmO LANGUAGES. 533 taken the place both of ancient quantity, and of the subtUty in the discrimination of the quality of vowels, which belongs to the cognate tongues. An anecdote current at our national metropolis will illustrate the importance which persons of nice ear habitually give to accentuation. There were, a few years since, two Senators from the South-west, one of whom pronounced the name of the State they represented Ai-kan- sas, the other Ar'kansas, both of them making the accented syllable so emphatic, as to leave the rest of the word almost inaudible. The accomplished officer who then presided in the Senate, in recognizing the Senators in question as they rose to speak, adopted their own accentuation, and always an- nounced one of them as " the Senator from Ar'kansas," the other as " the Senator from Arkansas." There are, indeed, examples of a transposition of the ac- cent in the contrary direction. The Latia disoiple is a case in point. It was formerly accented on the first syllable, dis- ciple, and in conformity with this accentuation, it was some- times spelt disple y but the instances of this character are too few to be considered as any thing but exceptions to the well- established general tendency of the English speech. The inclination to throw back the accent, though less prevalent in this country, as I shall show hereafter, is carried to an extravagant length in England, and hence such dis- torted pronunciations as diocesan, Chry'sostom, which are not only without any etymological foundation, but in a high degree unmelodious and unrhythmical. The prosody of the Gothic languages, and of English more perhaps than any other, is much affected by the mono- syllabic form of so many of our most important words. The short words in the Romance tongues are, not always indeed. 534 DOUBLE EHTMES. but very generally, particles or other words usually not em phatic, whereas, in English, monosyllables, especially if of Saxon origin, are very often the most emphatic words in a period. Besides this, the majority of our monosyllables end with a consonant, often with two, and as the following word in most cases begins with a consonant, monoysUabic words generally have, in spite of our insensibility to mere quantity, if not a technical prosodical length, at least an environment of consonantal sounds, which makes them rhythmically long in comparison with the unaccented syllables of longer words, and of course unfits them for elements of the dactylic measures. The frequency of double and triple rhymes in the works of Sidney and other admirers of Italian and Spanish poetry, contrasts remarkably with their comparative rarity in their cotemporary, Spenser, who, though infliienced by romantic models in the plan of his story, followed native English pre- cedents, or forms long naturalized, in the structure of his verse. While Spenser very generally uses monosyllabic con- sonances, we find in Sidney such rhymes as, signify, dignify ; mutable, suitable ; notability, possibility ; carefulness, ware- fulness; delightfulness, rightfulness, sightfulness, spiteful- ness ; disdainfulness, painfulness ; besides many compound ones, as hideaway, hideaway ; pleasure doth, treasure doth ; number not, cumber not ; framed is, blamed is ; and even among the few poetic licenses of Chaucer, we find this coup- let in the Sompn cures Tale : Refreshed more than in an hundred places, Sike lay the husbond man whos that the place 's.* * Gower has some singularly constructed double rhymes, which serve to DOUBLE EHYMES. 535 The resuscitation of polysyllabic rhyme and its more fre- quent introduction into serious poetry, is partly the effect of our satiety -svith the endless repetition of particular mono- syllabic rhymes into which English poetry had run, and a consequent craving for novelty in sound, and partly to the attempts at a more strict conformity of translations to their original, which is a natural result of our increasing familiar- ity with foreign literatures. To say nothing of the almost exclusive employment of double rhymes in Italian, it will be remembered that in French poetry, the use of couplets with rhymes ending alternately monosyllabically and with the mute f, or what are called masculine and feminine rhynaes, is obligatory ; and many German writers, not only needlessly, but very unwisely, as I think, have imposed upon themselves the same inconvenient rule. In making English versions of poems in those languages, where the metre of the original is retained, translators often endeavor to follow the rhymes of the text also, and the pedantic exactness with which this rule is adhered to, so far from producing an exact conformity, very often leads to a much wider disparity than would follow from the use of monosyllabic rhymes alone. The French mute or feminine e, which in poetry nearly corre- sponds to the German e final, scarcely has an equivalent in English orthoepy. Our short unaccented y final is much proTe that the e final of words now monosyllabic was articulated in his time. On p. 282, VoL I., PauU's edition, is this couplet : To speke a goodly word unto me, For all the gold that is in Rome. And, p. 370, So woU I nought, that any time Be lost of that thou hast do hyme, (by me.) There are several similar examples in Hoccleve. In La male Kegle, he rhymes hye me with tyme, and ny me (nigh me) with pryme, tyme, and cryms. 636 OBSCDKE ENDINGS. more distinctly articulated, and the English sounds nearest to it are those of the common pronunciation of a final and unaccented in such words as America, China, and the ter minal er in father, and the like, where our very inaudible utterance of the r leaves almost nothing for the ear but the obscure vowel sound preceding it, which is closely analogous in quality, and very nearly equal in prosodical quantity, to the French and German e final. But these sounds are of so rare occurrence in English, that they by no means answer the demands of the translator, and he accordingly resorts to our antiquated verbal forms in -est or -eth, as lovest, loveth, and to the participial foi-m in -ing, as loving. These syllabic aug- ments are very far from being the prosodical equivalents of the syllables they are forced to stand for, and in fact do less truly represent those syllables than a monosyllabic rhyme, with the usual pause, would do. To exemplify : In Goethe's magnificent Archangelic Trio in the Prologue to Faust, the alternate double rhymes are all in the unaccented e final, ex- cept in two instances, where the liquid n, which is almost as soft as the e alone, is made the termination. Yet in the best English translation, that of Mr. Brooks, these double rhymes are uniformly represented by active participles in -ing, except in one instance, where the translator finds a double rhyme in ocean, motion, and another where he employs the old third person singular of the verbs lendeth, comprehendeth. The poem in question contains twenty-eight lines, ten of which end in e obscure, four in the liquid n. In Mr. Brooks's trans- lation, otherwise admirable, ten of the corresponding lines of the version terminate with the active participle in -ing, one of the most unmelodious sounds of the language, and the "Weise Reise, Starke "Werke, schnelle Helle, of the original, where the final vowel constitutes the entire syl- OBSCITEB ENDINGS. 637 lable, (the consonants belonging to the first syllable,) are rep' resented in English by sounding rounding, lending compre- hending, fleeting alUrnatiiig, that is, syllables quantitatively short by syllables quantitatively long, which is in my judg- ment a wider departure from the prosody of the original than the employment of monosyllabic rhymes, with the inevitable pause after them, would have been.* The Latins used trochees for spondees at the end of hex- ameters, the pause at the close of the measure serving to lengthen the short final syllable ; but they apparently pre- ferred not to employ trochees ending in a vowel, unless the sense required or permitted a formal suspension of the voice : and it will be found that most of the trochaic terminations of the Latin hexameters end in a consonant, or with a logical interruption in the syntax. The Greeks practised the same reserve, and helped the short vowel when practicable by the V i a s h ing, flash ing onward, jSingingsongs unending, fi^weet, replete with gladness, i) r a p e with drip ping mosses -Dell and fell o'erhanging; Xave with living water Jowlygrow ing sedges, nil thy ioil-worn current Turneth, yearning, sea-ward. In another of the very numerous forms of Icelandic * The following is the example of this metre given by Snorri. HAttatal^ 132:— Hilmir hjAlma skdrir herSir sverSi ro3nu, hrj6ta hvitir askar, hrynja brynja spdngir; hnykkja Hlakkar eldar harSa svarSar landi, remma rimmu gloSir randa grand of jarlL AIXrrEKATION AND LINE-KnTME, 55Y poetry, the feet containing the full-rhyme are placed last in the verse, as in this imitation : * He a r the torrent A u r ry ! Seadlongrashly dash ing J? w n, In (deafening than der, i)epths eye hath not fath omed ! Mighty rocka uprooting, — iJudely shattering, scattering ^11 its own bright silver /nto shapeless vapor. Stay, 0/lood, that /liest i^st toward night unsightly! TF"ait, ye waves, a little — TFisdom's speech would teach you! iight and fife are sweeter, Xovelierfar, than are the (71 u d , the cold, the s h a d ow (Tlosing round the boundless! Although Une-rhyme might have been occasionally em- ployed with advantage in Anglo-Saxon verse, as I think it may still be in some departments of English poetry, yet it is fortunate for the interests of our old literature that it did not assume all the fetters of Scandinavian prosody. The Old-Northern mythologic poems, as those of the elder Edda, are much simpler in their structure than those of the later * Snorri, Hdttatal, 135, gives, in the following hemistrophe, an example of the form imitated in the text : — A'lmdrosar skylr isa ar flest megin b&ra sara ; ksenn laetr hres d hronnum hj&lmsvell jofurr gella fella; In another variation still, in addition to the half-rhyme of the first line, thera is a full rhyme in the third and fourth feet, thus : — Hraelj6ma fellr hrimi, timi hir vex of gram sara Sra, frost nemr, of hlyn Hristar, Mistar herkaldan {)rom skjaldar aldar. 558 ALLITEEATION AND LIKE-EHTME. rcelandic bards, and, like Beowulf and the poems ascribed to Csedmon, they are visually without line-rhyme, and often with but a single alliterative syllable in the first verse of the coup- let. In point of poetic excellence, the simplest measures generally rank highest, while the excessively intricate and artificial forms of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have seldom any merit but that which belongs to the skilful exe- cution of nugcB diffioiles. A conformity to rules so difficult could be purchased only by the frequent sacrifice of the rhe- torical beauties of poetry, and the heroic rhymes of the Ice- landers are crowded with frigid conceits, and as inferior to the grand simplicity and the elevated inspiration of Anglo- Saxon poetry, as their narrative prose is superior to the com- paratively barren, unphilosophieal, and even puerile histori- cal literature of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. There are also remarkable instances both of alliteration and of line-rhyme where we should least expect to find them, namely, in the literature of Italy and Greece. Take as an example of half-rhyme a stanza of ottava rima in the twenty- third canto of the Morgante Maggiore of Pulci : La casa cosa parea bretta e brutta, Vinta dal rento ; e la natta e la notte Stilla le stelle, oh'a tetto era tutta. Del pane appena ne dette ta' dotte, Pere avea pure e qualche fratta frutta ; E svina e svena di botto una botte ; Poscia per pesci lasche prese a 1' esca ; Ma il letto allotta a la frasca fil fresca. The following sonnet in the Pisan dialect, from a note to the works of Eedi, abounds in full line-rhyme : Similemente . gente • criatura . La portatura . pura . ed ayenente • Faite plagente . mente per natura . Siochen altura . cura . vola gente . ALLITEEATION AND LINB-EHTSIE. 559 Callor parvente . nente . altra figura . Non a fattura . dura . certamente • Pero neente . sente . di ventura . Chissua pintura . seusa . no prezente . Tanto doblata . data . t6 bellessa E addoressa . messa . con plagensa . Cogna chei pensa . sensa . permirata . Pero amata . fatta . Tunnaltessa . Che la fermessa . dessa conoscensa . In sua sentensa . bensa . onorata . Mullach, in his Grammatik der Griechisclien Vulgar- spraclie, cites several lines of alliterative line-rhyming Greek verse, from a hymn " by a Christian "writer belonging to the school of the later Orphic poets," but withont any indication of the probable date of the composition, which, however, cannot be by any means recent. The following are the first five verses : Trap^eV* i(p7ifJt.epiois oiipaviois re (pL\Tj. XoLpe K6pri Trat'Tecj' fL^ya x^Pl^'^'^^ X^Pf^^ Ka0ov(ra, X^pf^a fieyatT^evfccv x'^Pf^"- T* acpavpoTipaii', Xa7pe TTovuf re KvTstptij So^uv puretpd t' avaKTOty. The poem is referred to by Mullach for other purposes, and he makes no remarks upon the character of its versification. It is, however, like the Italian examples just cited, a mere jeu d'esprit, and there is not the slightest probability that the authors of any of them knew that they were introducing into their verses the characteristic features of a poetic literature so alien to that of Southern Europe as the songs of the Scan- dinavian bards. But they are the more interesting for that very reason, as instances of the spontaneous origination of similar poetic forms, in nations whose languages and whose literary culture have little or nothing in common. 560 LINE-EHTMB IK ENGLISH. Altliougli half-rhyine may be said to be peculiar to Ice- landic poetry, if indeed it did not exist in Anglo-Saxon, yet there are examples of tlie employment of both full and im- perfect line-rhyme in modern English. The mere introduc- tion of a full rhyme in the middle of a verse, as when Cole- ridge says : And ice, ma,st-hig!i, came floating by, is not a case in point, for this is only writing in one line what properly should be counted two ; but Byrons' verse — Light\y and brightly breaks away The morning from her mantle grey, is a true specimen of line-rhyme,' as is also Burns's line — Her looTc was lilce the morning star ; looTc and Uhe forming a half-rhyme. These and some of the many other similar examples, are probably accidental, but there are cases where we inust suppose the introduction of such coincidences of sound to be intentional, though they have certainly never been regarded as regular constituents of any form of English verse.* In Longfellow's Miles Standish, containing about one thousand verses, there occur not less than forty instances of marked, as well as others of less conspicuous, line-rhyme. These may have been undesigned, but, with Mr. Longfellow's trained ear, and his familiarity with Old-Northern literature, * Among the verses prefixed to Sylvester's Du Bartas, 1611, there is a. pyra- midal piece, with the heading, Lectoribus, which concludes with a couplet, con- taining a quaint half-rhyme. Not daring meddle with Apelles table, This have I muddled, as my Mvse was able. LINE-KHTME IN ENGLISH. 561 I should rather suppose them purposely, or at least not un- consciously, introduced into such lines as the following : Here ia front you can see the very dint of the bullet ; Long at the window be stood and wistfully gazed on the landscape ; Washed with a cold gray mist, the vapory breath of the east wind, Forest and meadow and hill, and the siee^blue rim of the ocean. Tou are a tcriter, and I am a. fighter, but here is a fellow Who could both write ani fight, and in both was equally skilful. Sudden and loud as the sound of a soldier grorundm^ his musket. In this last line, the alliteration is very ohservable, as also in the following : 5, wliicli v:eve formerly distlnguislied in use, as the two affirmatives still are in our sister-tongues, the Danish and Swedish. The distinction Avas that yea and nay were an- swers to questions framed in the affirmative; as, Will he go I Yea, or JVaiJ. But if the question was framed in the negative, Will he not go ? the answer was Yes, or Wo. In Danish and Swedish the distinction is limited to the affii-m- ative particles, and the negative form shows no trace of it. Thus to the question Will lie go ? the affirmative answer is Ja ? to the question Will he not go ? the affirmative answer is Jo, while JS'ei or in the Swedish orthography, Nej, is the negative answer to both.* * Although there are traces of these distinctions in Anglo-Saxon, I find no evidence that they were observed in Moeso-Gothic, and they were certainly un- known in 01d-N"orthern, though modern Icelandic has recently borrowed from the Danish the particle jo, (j u,) as the affirmative answer to a negative question. In Mceso-Gothic, there are two forms of the afiirmative particle. In Matthew, V. 3Y, in the command, " But let your communication be. Tea, yea ; Nay, nay ; " TJlphilas has Ja, j a, N e , n e: but in llatth. ix. 28, Matth. xi. 9, John xi. 27, and Luke vii. 26, where the query is in the affirmative form, and in Mark, vii. 28, where the particle is intensive merely, no question preceding, j ai is used. The only form of the negative particle no found in Ulphilas is ne, (ni and nih, signifying, not, neitlier, nor,) but in the existing remains of the Moeso-Gothio ecriptures, but one case, John xviii. 25, occurs of a direct affirmative or nega- tive reply to a negative question. The other passages of the Gospels which contain such forms, as, Matth. xviii. 23, and John viii. 10, are wanting. In the Anglo-Saxon Gospels, John xxi. 16, 16, where the questions are put affirmatively, the answer is g o a ; in Matth. xvii. 25, to a negative question the answer is gy se. In Luke xii. 51, xiii. 5, to affirmative questions, the negative answer is n e ; in John xxi. 5, and Matth. xiii. 29, the answer is n e s e ; in John i, 21, and John xviii. 17, again n i c. In John viii. 10, a negative question is answered negatively n a, in John ix. 0, nese; and in Luke xiii. S, an affirmative question is answered negatively, Ne, secge ic, na, two forms being employed. In Aelfric's' Homily on Pentecost day, (Homilies of Aelfric i. 316,) in the reply of Sapphira, quoted from Acts v. 8, g e a, is the affirmative answer to an affirmative question. In the Saxon chronicle, An. MLXVII., Ingram's edition, p. 267, i a (gea)is the reply to an earnestly repeated request. In Alfred's Boethius, c. xvi. g iv., and in c. xxxiv. § vi. gyse is the affirmative answer to negative ques- 580 APFIEMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PAETICLES. These distinctions seem to be refinements belonging tc the period when all the modern European languages showed a living nisus formativus, a tendency to the development of new and original forms. The etymological ground of this subtlety has not been satisfactorily made out, and though there is no doubt that it originally rested, if not on a logical, yet at least on a grammatical foundation, it had, at the earliest period to which we can trace it back, become a mere tions; and in six cases in c. xiv. § 1, xxiv. § 4, u. xxTi. § 1, c. xxvii. § 2, n e s e, the negative reply to affirmative questions ; but in u. xxiv. § 4, d e s e answers negatively a question iuTolving a negative. In Aelfrici Colloquium, Klipstein's Analecta, A.S.I, pp. 197, 198, and 203, we find affirmative questions affirmatively answered by gea, but on p. 199, gea is used for the same purpose with a question put negatively ; and on p. 202, nic occurs as the negative reply to an affirmative question. So far as these examples go, they, with a single exception, tend to prove that the distinction was made in the affirmative particle, but they show some vacillation in the use of the negative. I have examined Alfred's Orosius, the texts published by the Aelfrio Society, all the poems in Greln's Bibliothek der Angel- Sachsischen Poesie, all the selections in Klipstein's Analecta, and many minor pieces, besides the volumes above referred to, without finding any other examples of the use of the particles as replies to direct questions, though there are many instances of the employment of both as intensives. Further search might probably lead to more decisive results, but the difficulty of investigating such points, without verbal indexes to the authors consulted, justifies me in leaving the question to grammatical inquirers. It may here be observed, that the want of complete verbal indexes to our classic authors is a very serious inconvenience in all investigations in English philology. Even Cruden often omits the minor words which, in purely grammatical questions, are as important as any. Mrs. Cowden Clarke's laborious Concordance to Shaks- peare is even more imperfect ; for instance, she cites several passages where sith is used, but since is not a word of reference in the Concordance, which therefore, does not furnish the means of ascertaining whether Shakspeare, like his contemporaries, distinguished between these forms. Gil, who lived in Shakspeare's age, informs us that soon had lately acquired a peculiar sense. " QuiMi cit6, siiner citior aut citiis, sunest citissimus aut citissim^, nam stj» hodieapud plurimossignificat adprimamvesperam, olim, cit6." Log. Ang. 2d Ed. p. 34. Soon is not in Mrs. Clarke's Concordance, and there- fore it docs not help us In the inquiry, whether Shakespeare ever gave this meaning to that adverb. Is soon, in this sense, the same word, or of another etymology? Miushew, under soo«e, refers to ewenin^. SceApp.lS. AFFIEMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 581 verbal nicety wholly independent of the point of view from which the question was regarded by the speaker, and there- fore adding nothing to the force or clearness of expression. A subtlety like this, a distinction in words which suggests no difference of thought, was repugnant to the linguistic sense of an intellectiTal, and at the same time a practical people, and it, therefore, did not long survive after the gen- eral diffusion of literary culture among the English nation. It may be doubted whether modern scholars would have de- tected the former existence of this obsolete nicety, if it had not been revealed to us by Sir Thomas More's criticism upon Tyndale, for neglecting it in his translation of the New Tes- tament. That it was in truth too subtle a distinction for practice is shown by Sir Thomas More himself, for he mis- . states the rule when condemning Tyndale for the violation of it, and what is not less remarkable is the fact, that Home Tooke, Latham, (Eng. Lang., 2d ed., p. 528,) and Trench, (Study of "Words, 156,) have all referred to or quoted More's observations, without appearing to have noticed the dis- crepancy between the rule, as he states it, and his exemplifi- cation of it. The question is so curious in itself, and More's works are so rare in this country, that I shall be pardoned for quoting the whole passage relating to it. It will be foimd in "The Confutacyon of Tyndales Aunswere made anno 1532, by Syr Thomas More," page 448 of the collected edition of More's works printed in 1557. The text criticized is John i. 21, as translated by Tyndale, which More quotes as follows ; " And thei asked him, what then, art thou He- lias ? And he sayd I am not. Arte thou a prophete ? And he aimswered, ~So^" Upon this our author remarks : " I woulde here note by the way, that Tyndal here tras- 582 AFFIEMATIVE AND' NEGATIVE PARTICLES. latetL 110 for nay, for it is but a trifle and mistaking of ye Englishe worde ; sailing that ye slioulde see yt lie whycli in two so plaine englishe wordes, and so commen as is naye and no, can not tell when he should take the tone and whe the tother, is not for traslating into englishe a man very meete. For the use of these two wordes in aunswering a question is this. No aunswereth the question framed by the afSrmative. As for ensample, if a manne should should aske Tindall hym- self : ys an heretike mete to translate holy scripture into englishe ? Lo to thys question if he will aunswere trew englishe he must aunswere naye and not no. But and if the question be asked hym thus, lo ; Is not an heretyque mete to translate holy scripture into Englishe ? To thys questio lo if he wil auswere true englishe he must auswere no and not nay. And a lyke difference is there betwene these two aduerbes ye and yes. For if the question be framed unto Tindall by the affirmative in thys fashion ; If an heretique falsely translate the newe testament into englishe, to make hys false heresyes seeme ye worde of Godde, be hys books worthy to be burned ? To this question asked in thys wyse yf he will aunswere true englishe he must aunswere ye and not yes. But nowe if the question be asked hym thus lo by the negative ; If an heretike falsely translate the newe testa- ment into Englishe, to make hys false heresyes seme the word of God, be not his bokes well worthy to be burned ? To thys question in thys fashion framed : if he wyll aunswere trew englyshe he may not aunswere ye, but he must aun- swere yes, and say, yes mary be they botlie the translation and the translatour, and al that wyll holde wyth them." The first question supposed is in the affirmative form ; " Ys an heretike mete to translate holy scripture into Eng- lishe ? " and if Sir Thomas is right in answering it by nay AFFIKMATIVE AND NEGATIVE PARTICLES. 583 as lie unquestionably is, then his first rule, " No aunswereth the question framed by the affirmative," Is wrong. Tooke calls tliis " a ridiculous distinction," and evidently supposes that it was an inventioa of Sir Thomas himself. Later writers, also, have doubted whether there is any ground for believing that such a rule ever existed. It is, however, cer- tain that the distinction was made, and very generally ob- served, from the end of the fourteenth century to about the time of Tyndale and Sir Thomas More, soon after which it became obsolete.* * Tcs (yuse) occurs iu Layamon, (ii. 297,) in answer to a question affirma- tively framed, but still in a form implying disbelief, and thus may be considered zs following the rule. I believe yea. and no are not found in that work, but nay is twice used as an intensive. In the Ormulum, I think there is no instance of a direct question with an answer by either particle. Yea and nay are the only forms given in Coleridge's Glossarial Index to the Literature of the thirteenth century, but I have not the means of consulting the authorities referred to. Yea is used by Robert of Gloucester, in answer to an affirmative question, and nay\i-j him and Robert of Brunne, but I believe as an intensive only. I have not met with either yes or no, or indeed a proper case for the use of them, that is, a question put negatively and admitting a direct answer, in any English author earlier than Wye- liffe and his contemporaries. In Piers Ploughman, yea and nay are found several times as answers to affirmative questions, and as intensives in other cases. No occurs in verse 8977 of the Vision, without a question preceding, and yes in verse 6750, under similar circumstances. Yes is used inverses 2721 and 11963, in both cases according to the rule ; in verse 3776, as an intensive, in reply to a negative assertion; and in verse 2937, contrary to the rule, as an answer to a query put affirmatively. Gower employs yea and yes, nay and no, almost indiscriminately, and of course without regard to the rule. Wycliffe, according to the Oxford edition of 1850, in Matthew xvii. 25, uses yea, contrary to the rule, but the later text of the same passage has yes in con- formity to it. In Romans iii. 29, in both texts, yes conforms to the rule. In James v. 12, Wyclilfe has yes, the later version yea. In Matth. v. 37, ix. 28, xi. 9, xiii. 29, 51, xv. 27, xxi. 16, Luke xii. 57, John i. 21, xi. 27, xxi. 5, 15, 16, Acts v. 8, xxii. 27, Romans iii. 9, 28, yea and nay answer questions affirmatively framed. I believe no does not occur in the Wycliffite versions of the New Tes- tament as an adverb, the answer to the negative question in John viii. 10 being "no man." In John ix. 9, nay is used in both texts, apparently as an answer to a negative question, but this is a doubtful case, for the particle may perhaps 584 SITU AND SITHENCB. Yes and no were usually, though not with absolute uni formity, limited to the ofHce of answering a question nega- tively framed, while yea and nay served both as answers to affirmative questions, and as intensives in reply to remarks not made interrogatively. As this idle refinement was passing away, there arose a real, substantial distinction between two particles, or rather between two forms of the same particle, which had pre- viously been used indiscriminately in two different senses. Down to the middle of the sixteenth century, and indeed somewhat later, sith, seththe, syth, sithe, sythe, sithen, sitJimi, sythan, sithence, since, syns, and sens were indifferently em- ployed, both in the signification of seeing that, inasmuch as, considering, and of after or afterwards. AboiTt that period good authors established a distinction between the forms, be regarded as a contradiction to tlie affirmative answer of " othere men." Hence it will be seen that though Wycliife occasionally departs from the rule, the later, or Purvey's, text, with the doubtful exception just cited, uniformly adheres to it. In Chaucer, I find, upon a cursory examination, fifty instances of the occur- rence of j/ea, yes, nay and no, and in these there is but a single case of disregaid of the rule. In this example, nay answers an affirmative question, and there are two or three cases where yes is employed as an intensive, generally however in reply to remarks involving a negative. In a like number of examples in Mallorye's Morte d' Arthur, Southey's reprint, I find the distinction made with equal uniformity, and the observance of the rule is very nearly constant in Lord Berners' Arthur of Little Britain, and in the Froissart of the same translator. It is in most cases followed in the works of Skeltou, though in this latter writer's time, usage had begun to vacillate. I have examined many other authors with the like result, and think we may say that from the time of Chaucer to that of Tyndale, the distinction in question was as well established as any rule of English grammar whatever. Sir Thomas More's criticism on Tyndale was not universally acquiesced in, for Coverdale, whose translation was printed in 1635, Cranmer in 1539, the Geneva in 1557, and the Rhemish in 1582, as well as the authorized version in 1611, all have Jfo, in the text John i. 21. Indeed, I think Sir Thomas himsv/lf was the last important author who followed the rule, though in the early pan oi his life, as is sufficiently shown by the works of Lord Berners, it was still in full vigor. See App. 76. SrrH AND SITHENCE. 585 and used slth only as a logical Avord, an illative, while sithence and since, whether as prepositions or as adverbs, remained mere naiTative words, confined to the signification of time after. It is evident, that although the former of these notions is a derivative, the latter a primitive sense, they are neverthe- less distinct, and it is very desirable to be able to discrimi- nate between them by appropriate words. The radical is lound in a great number of forms in Anglo-Saxon and the related languages, and in all of them has primarily the sense of time after. But the conclusion is always posterior to the reason, and^os^ hoc, ergo propter hoc is the universal expression of all that the human intellect knows concerning the relation of cause and effect. Hence, it was very natural that a word implying historical sequence should acquire the sense of log- ical consequence. The discrimination between the two meanings, and the approi^riation of a separate form to each, originated in the subtle, metaphysical turn of mind which characterized the fathers of the Eeformation in England, nor have I, upon an examination of the works of numerous writers of earlier periods, been able to find one, who clearly distinguishes the two senses by the use of different forms. Some authors employ for both purposes sith alone, some sithen or sithence, others sens or syns, and others, again, two or more of these modes of spelling. The fullest, most uni- form, and most satisfactory exemplifications of the discrimi- nation will be found in Spenser, who seldom neglects it, Syl- vester the translator of Du Bartas, and Hooker. All these writers belong to the later half of the sixteenth century, immediately ai'ter which all the forms of the word except nince went out of use, and of course the distinction, which 586 BITH i-ND SITHENCE. seemed to have become -well established, perished with them. The English Bible of 1611 generally employs since for both purposes, but it is a curious fact that in the book of Jeremiah both forms are used, and m every instance accurately dis- criminated. The disappearance of the double form and double sense of the word was very sudden, for though the distinction was observed, by writers as popular as any in the literature, down to the very end of the sixteenth century, yet in Minsheu's Guide into the Tongues, an English polyglot dictionary, first published in 1617, since is the only form given for both senses, and sythan is simply referred to as " Old English."* In , speaking of the introduction of the neuter possessive its, on a former occasion, I observed that in the embarrass- ment between the new word and the incongruous use of his as a neuter, many writers for a considerable period employed neither form. There was a similar state of things with re- gard to sith and since at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and there are important English authors who sys- tematically avoid them both. * I have not cited Shakespeare aa an authority for the distinction in ques- tion, because, for want of an entirely satisfactory text, I find it impossible to determine whether he constantly observed it or not. Mrs. Clarke's Concordance does not inform us what edition was made the basis of her labors, but as she occasionally cites different texts, I presume all those consulted by her agree upon this particular point. The Concordance gives sixteen examples of the use of sith, in all cases as an illative, but sithence occurs in All's Well that Ends Well, i. 3, in the same sense, as, according to Knight's text, does since, also, in Ham- let V. 2, Twelfth Night v. 1, twice. King Richard II. ii. 1, twice, do. so. 2. Part I. K. Henry IV. v. 5, and Henry V. i. 1. Since is used for time after in Twelfth Night V. 1, twice in All's Well that Ends Well, iii. "7, in Romeo and Julief i. 2, twice, and in As You Like It v. 2. Many other examples of the use of since in both senses might be given ; and therefore it would appear that while Sha];e- speare usad sith only as an illative, he employed since indifferently to express sequence and consequence. Perhaps a critical examination of the first editions might determine the question, and I think it highly probable that the double use of since is chargeable to the editors or printers, not to the author. EQUIVOCAL PAKTICLES. 587 It is mucli to be regretted that later writers have disre- garded a distinction logically so important. The restoration of sith, and with it of the distinction between sith and since, wonld be a substantial benefit to the English language, and I have little doubt that a popular writer who should revive it would find himself sustained by the good sense of the Anglican people. Many of oiir particles, the conjunctions especially, are very equivocal in their signification, and we much need a new alternative and a new conjunctive. The particle or is said by grammarians to be used both as a conjunctive and as a disjunctive. The double sense of this word, which may imply in one peri6d that two objects or propositions are equivalent, if not identical, in another, that they are unlike, diverse, incongruous, is a fertile source of equivocation in language, and it is very singular that the urgent want of two alternatives has not developed a new one, and restricted our uncertain or to a single meaning. The conjunction and is almost equally vague in signification. We find an exempli- fication of this in the case of " Stradling versus Stiles," where Pope, or Swift, or Arbuthnot, or perhaps all three, have ilhistrated the uncertainty of the law and of language by supposing a will, in which a testator, possessed of six black horses, six white horses and six pied, or \>\&^-and- white, horses, bequeathed to A B " all my black and white horses," and thereupon raising the question, whether the be- quest carried the black horses, and the white horses, or the black-and-white horses only. The equivocation here does not, indeed, lie wholly in the conjunction, but, nevertheless, the use of a proper disjunctive particle, had such a one ex- isted, would have prevented it. Tlie loss of the short-lived distinction between sith and 588 METAPHYSICAL DISTINCTIONS. sitlieiice or since, is an exception to the general tendencv of English, which is towards the discrimination of similai shades of thought in logical, metaphysical, argumentative, and sesthetical language, and to the rejection of needless sub- tleties in the designation of material things. In proportion as we multiply distinctions between intellectual functions, ajid between moral states or their manifestations, and conse- quently the words to express them, as we enlarge the nomen- clature of criticism, and subtilize the vocabulary of ethics and metaphysics, we incline to discard nice differences be- tween terms properly belonging to material acts and objects, and to suffer words expressive of them to perish. An indi- vidual or a people earnestly occupied with serious studies, or other pursuits making large demands on the intellect, will habitually neglect the vocabulary of arts and occupations of a lower grade, and will disregard distinctions between the names of acts and things too trivial and insignificant to be susceptible of important differences. Few city counsellors, indeed, would now boast, with Lord Erskine, that they could not distinguish a field of lavender from a field of wheat ; * but every man familiar with country-life is aware that even farmers now confound in name many of the operations of I'ural economy, which were formerly distinguished by appro- priate terms. The vocabulary of the field and the kitchen, except as it is enlarged by the introduction of new processes, new objects, and new subjects of thought and conversation, grows poor, as the dialect of the intellect and the conscience becomes more copious, comprehensive, and refined. I may exemplify what I mean by the word fetch, which, though still in ase in England, is becoming less common in that * Cobbett. Treatise on Cobbetts Corn, p. 1. DISAVPEAEANCE OF SLUTILTIES, 589 country, and has grown almost wholly obsolete in many parts of the United States. Fetch properly includes the going in search of the object, and go, when used with it, is redundant, because it only expresses what fetch implies. Fetch is almost exactly equivalent to the German hoi en, and, as is said of the latter word, he only can fetch a thing who goes purposely after it. ]S"ow the distinction between fetching that which we go expressly to seek, and hringing that which we have at hand or procure incidentally, is com. paratively vmimportant, and may well be disregarded as a thing of inferior moment. Hence it is not often heard among us. The distinction between cai-rying and bringing is more simple and obvious, and both words are accordingly retained, but there is a tendency to confound even these, and it is not improbable that one of them may go out of use. Thus far the disappearance of words indicative of insig- nificant distinctions, and which only tend to burden the memory with useless lumber, is not an evil to be deplored, but there were in Anglo-Saxon and in the Scandinavian sister- tongues, numerous words expressive of slight differences of structure or outline in the features of natural scenery, the decay of which is a loss both to poetical imagery, and to pre- cision of geographical nomenclature, though their places have been more or less adequately supplied by new terms of for- eign importation. Some of these words still exist as proper names of particular localities, though no longer current as common nouns. The admirers of Wordsworth will remem- ber two of them, which occur more than once in his poems, as parts of local names, gil a rocky ravine, and fors or force a cascade or water-fall. It is a curious circumstance with regard to both of these words, that they are Old-Northern, and not met with in the extant remains of Anglo-Saxon lit- 690 STNONYMS OF THE CHASE. erature, and hence they were probably applied to particular localities by the Danish invaders of England, and never imderstood as descriptive terms by the natives who adopted them. The' largest class of duplicates of common words which has become obsolete is perhaps that of the technical terms of the chase. In the days of feudal power and splendor, hawk- ing and hunting constituted the favorite recreation of the higher classes, and the importance attached to these sports, both as healthful amusements and as a half-military training, naturally led to the cultivation and enlargement of the vocab- ulary belonging to their exercise. The early English press teemed with treatises on the chase, and the Book of St. Albans first printed in 1486, is very full on the subject of the nomenclature of the gentle craft. From this and other works on the same subject, we learn that the nobler beasts and fowls of chase took different names for every year of their lives, until full maturity, as domestic animals still do to some extent in this country, but more especially in Eng- land, and that all the important parts, products, and func- tions of each of these animals had its peculiar designation not common to the corresponding part or act of other quad- rupeds or birds. The habits of different creatures, and all the operations of the chase connected with each, had terms exclusively appropriated to the species, and even the art of carving changed its name with the game upon which it was exercised. Tims Dame Juliana Berners, the reputed author of the book of St. Albans, informs us that in gentle speech it is said " the hauke joulcyth, not slepeth ; she refourmeth her feders, and not pyckyth her feders ; she rowsith, and not shaketh herselfe ; she mantellyth, and not stretchyth, when she puttyth her legges from her, one after a nother, and hei SYNONYMS OF THE CHASE. 591 wynges folowe her legges ; and when she hath mantylled her and bryngetli both her wynges togyder over her bache ; ,ye shall save yonre hawkye warhellyth her wynges." So, to designate companies, we must not use names of multitudes promiscuously, but we are to say a congregaeyon of people, a hoost of men, a fdyslujppynge of yomen, and a levy of ladyes ; we must speak of a lierdc of dere, swannys, cranys, or wrenys, a sege of herons or bytourys, a muster of pecockes, a u-atche of nyghtyngales, a flyghte of doves, a claterynge of choughes, a, pryde of lyous, a sJcwthe of beeres. a gagle of geys, a sTcidl'e of foxes, a scidlc of frerys, a pontificalitye of prestys, and a superiluyte of nonnes, and so of other human and brute assemblages. In like manner, in dividing game for the table, the animals were not carved, but a dere was hroken, a gose reryd, a ehekyn frusshed, a cony unlaced, a crane dysplayed, a curlewe unioyiifed, a quayle tvgnggyd, a swanne l^t£, a lambe sJioldered, a heron dysmemlryd., a pe- cocke dysfygurcd, a samon chynyd, a hadoke sydyd, a sole loynyd and a breme splayed. The characteristic habits, traces, and other physical peculiarities of animals were dis- criminated in the language of the chase with equal precision, and a strict observance of all these niceties of speech was more important as an indication of breeding, or in the words of Dame Juliana Berners, as a means of distinguishiug " gen- tylmen from ungentylmen," than a rigorous conformity to the rules of grammar, or even to the moral law. The old romances ascribe the invention of the vocabulary of the chase to the famous Sir Tristram of the Kouud Table, and the Morte d' Arthur says : " Me semeth alle gentylmen that beren old armes oughts of lyght to honoure syre Trystram for the goodly termes that gentilmen have and use, and shalle to the daye of dome, that 592 STUDY OF STtTONTMS. there by in a maner alle men of worsMp maye disscover a gentylman fro a yoman, and from a yoman a vylayne. For he that gentyl is wylle drawe hym unto gentil tatches, and to folowe the custommes of noble gentylmen." That most of these words pointed originally to a real dif- ference between the objects or the processes indicated by them, there is little doubt, but the etymology of many of them is lost, and those not now retained in different, or, if similar, more general applications, have become wholly obso- lete, though some which have disappeared from literature still exist in popular or provincial usage. The study of synonyms has always been regarded as one of the most valuable of intellectual disciplines, independently of its great importance as a guide to the right practical use of words. The habit of thorough investigation into the mean- ing of words, and of exact discrimination in the use of them, is indispensable to precision and accuracy of thought, and it is surprising how soon the process becomes spontaneous, and almost mechanical and unconscious, so that one often finds himself making nice and yet sound distinctions between par- ticular words Y/hich he is not aware that he has ever made the subject of critical analysis. The subtle intellect of the Greeks was alive to the importance of this study, and we not only observe just discrimination in the employment of lan- guage in their best writers, but we not unfrequently meet with discussions as to the precise signification of words, which show that their exact import had become a subject of thoughtful consideration, before much attention had been be- stowed upon grammatical forms. In a tongue in the main homogeneous, and full of compounds and derivatives, the source of the word would naturally be first appealed to as the key to its interpretation. Etymology is still an indis- ENGLISH SYNONYMS. 593 pensable auxiliary to the study of synonyms ; jut in a com- posite language like English, where the root-fc rms are inac- cessible to the majority of tliose who use it, the primary sig- nification of the radical does not operate as a conservative influence, as it did in Greece, by continually suggesting the meaning, and thus keeping the derivative or compound true to its first vocation. "Words with us incline to diverge from the radical meaning ; and therefore etymology, though a very useful clew to the signification, is, at the same time, a very uncertain guide to the actual use, of words. And this is especially true of what may be called secondary derivatives, or words formed by derivation or composition from forms, themselves derivative or compound, or borrowed from for- eign sources. The study of words of this class is one of the most difficult points of our synonymy ; and it is often a very puzzling question to decide why, for example, two substan- tives allied in meaning should be distinguished by one shade of signification, and the corresponding adjectives, which we have formed from them, by a totally different one. I ob- jected to the latter part of "Webster's definition of synonym, because, by applying that name to all words " containing the same idea," it makes different parts of speech synonyms, which is contrary to established usage. "We have no term to designate words diffeiing in etymology, and in grammat- ical character, but otherwise agreeing in meaning; but to pairs of words, derived from the same root, and differenced in meaning only by grammatical class, we apply the epithet conjugate, or, more rarely, that of paronymous. Strictly speaking, the ideas expressed by the two must be identical ; but, as they are more generally distinguished by some slight difference of meaning, the term conjugate is loosely used to 38 594. ENGLISH SYNONTMSi express identity in etymology, with only general likeness of meaning, in words of different classes. Cost and costly, for example, are strictly conjugate ; faith and faithful, in some of their senses, are exactly so, in others not ; while grief and grievous, polish of manner and politeness of manner, grace and gracious, pity and pitiful, as ordinarily used, express fjiiite different ideas. The verb to affect has a number of dis- parate uses in its different inflected forms and its derivatives. When it means to produce an effect upon, to influence, or to like, to have a partiality for, it has no conjugate noun ; for affection, in neither sense, exactly corresponds to the verb. Affect, to simulate, to pretend, and affectation, are conjugate, although not generally considered so, because most persons are not aware that the unnatural airs, called affectation, are really founded in hypocrisy, or false assumption. The par- ticiples and participial adjective affecting, touching, or excit- ing to sympathy or sorrow, and the passive form affected, have still another meaning, in which the active verb is rarely employed. Few languages are richer than English in approximate synonyms and conjugates ; and it is much to be regretted that no competent scholar has yet devoted himself to the investigation of this branch of our philology. The little manual, edited by Archbishop WLately, containing scarcely more than four hundred words, is, so far as it goes, the most satisfactory treatise we have on the subject.* Crabbe's * The Saxon part of our vocabulary, partly from the inherent character of the class of ideas for the embodiment of which it is chiefly employed, and partly because of its superior expressiveness, is generally very free from equivocation, and its distinctions of meaning are usually clearly marked. The number of Anglo-Saxon words approximate to each other in signification is small, and the distinction between those liable to be confounded is grammatical, more frequently ENGLISH SYNONYMS. 695 Synonyms, mticli used in tMs country, is valuable chiefly for its exemplifications ; but the author's great ignorance of ety- mology has led him into many errors ;* and it cannot pretend to compare mth the many excellent works on the synonymy of the German, French,- Danish, and other European lan- guages. But in the increasing interest which the study of English is exciting, this, as well as other branches of lexico- graphy, will doubtless receive a degree of attention, which will contribute to give to the history of English a rank cor- responding to the importance of that tongue, as one of the most powerful instruments of thought and action assigned by Providence to the service of man. than logical. In the Treatise on Synonyms, edited by Whately, something more than four hundred and fifty words are examined and discriminated, and of these less than ninety are Anglo-Saxon. The relative proportions in Crabbe's much larger work are not widely different. * Exempli gratia, doze, (allied to the Anglo-Saxon, d w as s, and the Danish verb, dose,) we are informed, is a "variation from the French dors, and the Latin dormio, to sleep, which was anciently d e r m i o, and comes from the Greek S4pij.a, a skin, because people lay on skirts when they slept ! " Crabbe, Syn. under sleep. With equal learning and felicity, he derives davlb from " do and u b, fiber, over, signifying literally to do over with anything unseemly.'' LECTURE XXVII. TRANSLATION. The study of synonymy, or the discrimination between vernacular words allied in signification, and of etymology, or the comparison of derivative words with their primitives, naturally suggests the inquiry how far there is an exact cor- respondence of meaning between the native vocabulary, and that of foreign tongues, or, in other words, whether a poem, a narrative, or a discussion, composed in one language can be precisely rendered into another. If we may trust the dic- tionaries, almost every English word has synonyms in the speech to which it belongs, and equivalents in every other ; but a more critical study of language, as actually employed, teaches us, first, that true synonyms are everywhere of rare occurrence, and secondly that, with the exception of the names of material objects and of material acts, there is sel- dom a precise coincidence in meaning between any two words in different languages. The sensuous perceptions, even, of men are not absolutely identical, but they neverthe- less so far concur, that we may consider the names given in different countries to things cognizable by the senses as FliEQUENCY OF TEANSLATIONS. 597 equivalent to each 'other, though the epithets by which the objects are characterized, and the qualities ascribed to them, may differ. But the moment we step out of the domaia of the senses, and begin to apply to acts and objects belonging to the world of mind, names derived from the world of mat- ter, we diverge from each other, and every nation forms a vocabulary suited to its own moral and intellectual character, its circumstances, habits, tastes and opinions, but not pre- cisely adapted to the expression of the conceptions, emotions and passions of any other people. Hence the difficulty of making translations, which are absolutely faithful re-produc- tions of their originals. There are at the present day conflicting influences in operation, which tend, on the one hand, to individualize the languages of Europe, and mate them more idiomatic and discordant in structure, and on the other, to harmonize and assimilate them to each other ; and the same influences are acting respectively as hindrances and as helps to the making of translations between them. To the latter, the helps, be- long the increased facilities of communication, the general study, in every country, of the literature of several others, the influence of two or three cosmopolite languages, like Eng- lish, Erench and German, the extended cultivation of philo- logical science, and the universality of the practice of trans- lation, which has compelled scholars to find or fashion, in their own speech, equivalents, or at least exponents, of the idioms of all others. The Caledonian, indeed, does not believe that the novels of Scott can be adequately translated into any foreign tongue ; the German affirms that Richter is to be understood and enjoyed only in the original Teutonic ; and the American doubts whether the Libyan EngHsh of Uncle 598 FKEE JOSD LITERAL TRANSLATION. Tom's Cabin can be rendered into any other dialect. Never theless, eacb of tbese has had numerous translations, whose success proves that they are tolerable representatives, if not exact counterparts, of their originals. The opposing influence is the spirit of nationality and linguistic purism, which has revived so many dying, and purged and renovated so many decayed and corrupted Euro- pean languages within the last century. In almost every Continental country, foreign words and phrases have been expelled, and their places supplied by native derivatives, com- pounds and constructions ; obsolete words have been restored, vague and anomalous orthography conformed to etymology or to orthoepy, and thus both the outward dress and the essential spirit of each made more national and idiomatic, and, therefore, to some extent, more diverse from all others, and less capable of being adequately rendered into any of them. At the same time, this purification and reconstruc- tion of languages has brought them all back to certain prin- ciples of universal or rather of Indo-European grammar com- mon to all, and in each, the revival of forgotten words and idioms has so enlarged their vocabulaiy, and increased their compass and flexibility, that it is easier to find equivalents for foreign terms and constructions, than when their stock of words and variety of expression was more restricted. Upon the whole, then, better translations are now practicable than at any former period of literary history ; and every popular author may hope to see his worjis repeated in many forms, none of which he need be ashamed to own as his offspring. The question between the relative merits of free and lit- eral translation, between paraphrastic liberty and servile fidelity, has been long discussed ; but, like many other abstract questions, it depends for its answer upon ever-varying condi- FREE AND LITEEAL TEANSLATKN. 599 tions, and there is no general formula to express its solution. The commentators on the famous Horatian precept : Nee Tcrbum verbo eurabis reddere fidus Interpres, might have saved themselves some trouble, if they had ob- served, what is plaia from the context, that Horace was not speaking of translations at all, bxit of theatrical adaptation, dramatization, as we now say, of epic or historical subjects, which had been already treated in narrative prose or verse by other writers ; and, therefore, the opinion of the great Eoman poet, were it otherwise binding, could not be cited as an authority on this question.* The rule of Hooker : " Of * Much of modern opinion on ancient literature and philosophy is founded on the criticism of familiar quotations, the examination of detached passages, which, standing alone, appear to contain a very different meaning from that which they express when taken in connection with their context, or the circum- stances under which they were uttered. An example of this is the sentiment in Cicero's Tusculan Questions, I. 17, so often quoted and moralized upon as an instance of excessive and almost idolatrous reverence for a majestic and impos- ing human intellect : " Errare mehercule malo cum Platone * * »« quam cum istis vera sentire." Even in the Guesses at Truth, second series, third edition, p. 235, this passage is treated as the expression of a humiliating general submission to the authority of Plato, and Cicero is in part exonerated from the disgrace of so unworthy a sentiment, by the remark that he puts the words into the mouth of " the young man whom he is instructing," though it is admitted that he approved and adopted them. But it is plain to any one who will take the trouble to read enough of the dialogue in which this passage occurs, to understand the bearing of it upon the subject under discussion, that the " young man" expressed, and Cicero approved, no such deference to the authority of the Greek philosopher as is, upon the strength of this quotation, so often imputed to Cicero himself. The immediate point then under discussion was the question of the immortality of the soul, which was maintained by Plato, but denied by the Epicureans, and it is, evidently, solely with reference to the conclusions of Plato on this one point, not the weight of his authority, that the disciple and his master agree in preferring to share with him the beneficent possible error of eternal life, rather than the fearful and pernicious truth, if it were a truth, of final annihilafion, with his opponents. And how comes it, that among the thousands of rhetorical critics, who, since 600 FEEE AND LrrEEAL TEANSLATION. translations, the better I acknowledge that, which cometh nearer to the very letter of the very original verity," i? equivocal, because it is not certain, whether " original ver- ity " means ' original sensed which most would approve, or ' original words^ which most would condemn, for the reason that the idiomatic differences between different languages would often make a literal translation of the several words of a foreign author unintelligible nonsense. Fuller, with his usual quaint felicity, has well expressed the common loose theory by a simile. Speaking of Sandys, whose admirable scriptural paraphrases ought to be better known than they are, he says, " He was a servant, but no slave, to his subject ; well knowing that a translator is a person in free custody ; custody, being bound to give the true sense of the author he translates ; free, left at liberty to clothe it in his own expres- Cicero and Quintilian, have speculated on the answer of Demosthenes, uiT6Kpif Tyndale -was occasioned partly by the change of the lan- guage in the course of two centuries, and partly by the dif- ference of the texts from which they translated ; and from these two causes, the discrepancies between the two versions are much greater than those between Tyndale's, which was completed in 1526, and the standard version which appeared only eighty-five years later. But, nevertheless, the influence of Wycliffe upon Tyndale is too palpable to be mistaken, and it cannot be disguised by the grammatical differences, which are the most important points of discrepancy between them. If we reduce the orthography of both to the same standard, conform the inflections of the fourteenth to those of the sixteenth century, and make the other changes which would suggest themselves to an Englishman translating from the Greek instead of from the Yulgate, we shall find a much greater resemblance between the two versions than a similar process would produce between secular authors of the periods to which they respectively belong. Tyndale is merely a full- grown "Wycliffe, and his recension of the New Testament is just what his great predecessor would have made it, had he awaked again to see the dawn of that glorious day, of which his own life and labors kindled the morning twilight, l^ot only does Tyndale retain the general grammatical structure of the older version, but most of its felicitous verbal combi- nations, and, what is more remarkable, he preserves even the rhythmic flow of its periods, which is again repeated in the recension of 1611. Wycliffe, then, must be considered as having originated the diction and phraseology, which for flve centuries has constituted the consecrated dialect of the Eng- lish speech ; and Tyndale as having given to it that finish and perfection, which have so admirably adapted it to the 628 ttndale's new testament. expression of religious doctrine and sentiment, and to the narration of thfe remarkable series of historical facts which are recorded in the Christian Scriptures.* If we compare Tyndale's New Testament with the works of his contempo- raries, Lord Berners and Sir Thomas JVTore, or the authorized version with the prose of Shakespeare, and Ealeigh, and Bacon, or other writers of the same date, we shall find very nearly, if not quite, as great a difference in all the essentials of their diction, as between the authorized version and the best written narratives or theological discussions of the pres- ent day. But, in spite of this diversity, the language of the authorized translation, as a religious dialect, is and always has been very familiar to the English people ; and I do not hesitate to avow my conviction that if any body of scholars, of competent Greek and Hebrew learning, were now to undertake, not a revision of the existing version, but a new translation founded on the principle of employing the current phraseology of the day, it would be found much less intelli- gible to the mass of English-speaking people than the stand- ard version at this moment is. If the Bible is less understood than it was at earlier periods, which I by no means believe, it is because it is less studied ; and the true remedy is, not to lower its tone to a debased standard of intelligence, but to educate the understandings of the Anglican people up to the * The first of the Kules prescribed to the revisers by King James was this : " The ordinary Bible read in the Church, commonly called the Bishops' Bible, to be followed, and as little altered as the original will permit." The fourteenth Rule was : " These Translations to be used, when they agree better with the text than the Bishops' Bible, viz., Tyndale's, Matthew's, Coverdale's, Whit- church, Geneva." Fuller, Church Hist., book x., sec. iii. § 1. But the Bishops' Bible, and, indeed, all the others named, were founded upon Tyndale ; and, especially in point of general diction, depart very little from his rendering. ENGLISH SACEED DIALECT. 629 eomprehension of tlie piirest and most idiomatic forms of expression which belong to their mother tongue. The general result of a comparison between the diction of the English Bible and that of the secular literature of Eng- land is, that we have had, from the Tery dawn of our litera- ture, a sacred and a profane dialect, the former eminently native, idiomatic, vernacular, and permanent, the latter com- posite, heterogeneous, irregular, and fluctuating ; the one pure, natural, and expressive, the other mixed, and compar- atively distorted and conventional. It is unfortunate that the unwise economy, which has been too often observed in reprinting the scriptures, should have, in the common editions, omitted the Translators' Ad- dress to the Header ; though it must be allowed that that address by no means acknowledges the full extent of the obligations which the revisers were under to earlier laborers in the same field. The reason of this silence was that the older translations were in every man's hands, and the fact that the new edition was but an adaptation of them was too notorious to need to be stated in detail ; but it is nevertheless singular, that not one of the former English versions should have been referred to by name. The revisers content them- selves with this general statement : " We never thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new transla- tion, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one, not j ustly to be excepted against ; that hath beene our endeavor, that our marke." And most successful were they in attaining to that mark, m embodying in their revision the result of the labors of many generations, and of hundreds of scholars, and in making it a summing up of the linguistic equations solved in three centuries of Biblical exposition, an 630 DIALECT OF BIBLE SPECLiLlTT. anthology of all the beauties developed in the lan^juage dur- ing its whole historical existence. Such is the general history and character of the received version. But what are its relations past and present to the language, of which it is the purest and most beautiful exam- ple ? I have said its diction was not the colloquial or lit- erary dialect of any period of the English language. It is even now scarcely further removed from the current phrase- ology of life and of books than it was two hundred years since. The subsequent movement of the English speech has not been in a right line of recession from the scriptural dia- lect. It has been rather a curve of revolution around it. "Were it not carrying the metaphor too far, I would say it is an elliptical curve, and that the speech of England has now been brought by it much nearer to that great solar centre, that focus of genial warmth and cheerful light, than it was a century ago, when hundreds of words in its vocabulary, now as familiar as the alphabet, were complained of as strange or obsolete.* In fact the English Bible sustains, and * In Lecture XII., p. 263, I remarked that scarcely two hundred words occurring in the English Bible were obsolete. In examining the vocabulary for the purpose of making that estimate, I used a Concordance which did not extend to the Apocrypha, and the remark should have been limited accordingly. Booker's Scripture and Prayer-book Glossary, which I was not able to consult before p. 263 was printed, contains, besides phraseological combinations, about three hundred and eighty-eight words and senses of words, alleged to be obsolete. Of these, more than one hundred belong to the Apocrypha and the Prayer-book, and among the remainder, there are not less than thirty, such as, loth, whit, stuff, fret, beeves, haft, with, maul, (as a noun,) summer, (as a verb,) &c., which in the United States are as familiarly understood, in their scriptural senses, as any words in the language. We may therefore, take the number of Bible words and special meanings now so far obsolete in this country that other words are habitually used instead of them, at about two hundred and fifty. But of these, many are of familiar etymology or composition, and therefore, though disused, readily intelligible, and others are well understood, because they are used in other books still very generally read, BO that the number which there is any sufficient reason to regard as really for gotten, does not probably exceed my estimate. rEEMANENOE OF SCKIPTrEE. 631 always Las sustained to the general Anglican tongi e, tlie position of a treatise upon a special knowledge requiring, like any branch of science, a special nomenclature and phraseology. The language of the law, for example, in both vocabulary and structure, differs widely from that of unpro- fessional life ; the language of medicine, of metaphysics, of astronomy, of chemistry, of mechanical art, all these have their appropriate idioms, very diverse from the speech which is the common heritage of all. Why, then, should theology, the highest of knowledges, alone be required to file her tongue to the vulgar utterance, when every other human interest has its own appropriate expression, which no man thinks of conforming to a standard, that, because it is too common, can hardly be other than unclean ? There is one important distinction between the dialect of the scriptures, considered as an exposition of a theology, and that of a science or profession. The sciences, all secular knowledges, in fact, are mutable and progressive, and of course, as they change and advance, their nomenclature must vary in the same proportion. The doctrine of the Bible, on the other hand, is a thing fixed and unchangeable, and when it has once found a fitting expression in the words of a given language, there is in general no reason why those words should not continue to be used, so long as the lan- guage of which they form a part continues to exist. There are many words in the English Bible which are strictly tech- nical, and never were employed as a part of the common dialect, or for any other pui-pose than the particular use to which they are consecrated in that volume ; there are others which belong both to the appropriate expression of religious doctrine, and to the speech of common life, and of these lat- ter, some very few have become obsolete, so far as their pop- 632 DIALECT OF BIBLE SPECIALITT. ular, every-day use is concerned; but they still retain in religious phraseology the signification they possessed when introduced into the English translation. ITow the same thing is true with reference to all other knowledges which possess special nomenclatures. There are in law, medicine, chemistry, the mechanic arts, many words always exclusively appropriated to the service of those arts ; others, once familiar and common, but which no longer form a part of the general vocabulary of the language, and which are at present restricted to scientific and professional use ; and here the phraseology of the scriptures, and that of other special studies, stand in precisely the same relations to the common language of the people. Each has, and always must have, a special dialect, because it is a speciality itself, and has numerous ideas not common to any other depart- raent of human thotight and action. And not only is this true of the language of science, and of art, but of the dialect which belongs to all the higher workings of the intellect. No man acquainted with both literature and life supposes that the speech of the personages of Shakespeare's tragedies, or of the actors in Milton's great epic, was the actual collo- quial phraseology of their times ; and it is as absurd to object to the language of the scriptures, because it is not the lan- guage of the street, as to criticise Shakespeare and Milton, because their human and superhuman heroes speak in the artificial dialect of poetry, and not in the tones of vulgar humanity. To attempt a new translation of the Bible, in the hope of finding within the compass of the English language a clearer, a more appropriate, or a more forcible diction than that of the standard version, is to betray an ignorance of the capabilities of our native speech, with which it would be in vain to rea- NEW TESTAMENT GEEEK AND ENGLISH. 633 son, and I suppose no scholars, whose opinions are entitled to respect, seriously propose any thing beyond a revision, which should limit itself to the correction of ascertained errors, the introduction of greater uniformity of expression, and the substitution of modern words for such as have be- come either obsolete, or so changed in meaning as to convey to the unlearned a mistaken impression. The most general objection to any present attempt at revision has been well stated by Trench, namely : that " we are not as yet in any respect prepared for it ; the Greek and the English which should enable us to bring this to a suc- cessful end, might, it is to be feared, be wanting alike." In fact I doubt whether any impartial scholar has ever examined any of the modern attempts at revision, without finding more changes for the worse than for the better, and there is one particular in which, so far as I have looked into them, they all sin alike. I refer to the use of the tenses. Revisers have attempted to establish a parity between the tenses of the Greek and English verbs which can hardly be made out, and so far is this carried in some of them, as for example, in the Gospel of John, as revised by five English clergymen, by far the most judicious modern recension known to me, that an American cannot help suspecting that the tenses are coming to have in England a force which they have not now in this country, and never heretofore have had in English literature. In a lecture on the principles of translation, I laid down the rule, that a translator ought to adopt a dialect belonging to that period in the history of his own language, when its vocabulary and its grammar were in the condition most nearly corresponding to those of his original. Now, when the version of Wyclifie appeared, English was in a state of 63i BIBLE DIALECT. growth aiid formation, and the same observation applies, though with less force, to the period of Tyndale. The Greek of the New Testament, on the other hand, was in a state of resolution. It had become less artificial in structure than the classical dialect, more approximated to modern syntacti- cal construction, and the two languages, by development on the one hand, decay on the other, had been brought in the sixteenth century to a certain similarity of condition. Be- sides, the New Testament Greek was under the same neces- sity as early English, of borrowing or inventing a considera- ble number of new terms and phrases to express the new ideas which Chiistianity had ingrafted on the Jewish theol- ogy ; of creating, in fact, a special sacred phraseology ; and hence there is very naturally a closer resemblance between the religious dialect of English, as framed by the Keformers, and that of the New Testament, than between the common literary style of England and the Greek of the classic ages. It will generally be found that the passages of the received version, whose diction is most purely Saxon, are not only most forcible in expression, but also the most faithful tran- scripts of the text, and that a Latinized style is seldom em- ployed without loss of beauty of language, and at the same time of exactness in correspondence.* Whatever questions may be raised respecting the accuracy with which particular passages are rendered, there seems to be no difference of opinion among scholars really learned in the English tongue, * The difference between a Latinized and an idiomatic English stj-le is rery instructively exemplified in the versions of Hereford and Purvey, and, in a less degree, in Wycliffe's New Testament as compared with the later text. There is a somewhat similar distinction between the Rhemish translation and the Protes- tant versions of the 16th century, the advantage in almost every instance being with the more idiomatic style, in point of both clearness of expression and accuracy of rendering. EAELT ENGLISH SPECIALLY APPE.PEIATE. 635 as to the exceeding appropriateness of the style of the author- ized Tersiou ; and the attempt to bring down that style to the standard of to-day is as great an absurdity, and implies as mistaken views of the true character and office of human lan- guage, and especially of our maternal speech, as would bo displayed by translating the comedies of Shakespeare into the dialect of the popular farces of the season. There is another consideration, the force of which can hardly be fully apparent except to persons familiar with phi- lological pursuits, and especially with the scriptural lan- guages, and with early English. The subjects of the Testa- ments, Old and !N"ew, are taken from very primitive and inartificial life. "With the exception of the writings of Paul, and in a less degree of Luke, there is little evidence of littrary culture, or of a wide and varied range of thought in their authors. They narrate plain facts, and they promulgate doc- trines, profound indeed, but addressed less to the speculative and discursive, than to the moral and spiritual faculties, and hence, whatever may have been the capabilities of Hebrew, and of classical Greek for other purposes, the vocabulary of the whole Bible is narrow in extent, and extremely simple in character. ]S"ow, in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the development of our religious dialect was completed, the English mind, and the English language, were generally in a state of culture much more analogous to that of the peo- ple and the tongues of Palestine, than they have been at any subsequent period. Two centuries later, the native speech had been greatly subtilized, if not refined. Good vernacular words had been supplanted by foreign intruders, comprehen- sive ideas and their vocabulary had been split up into artifi- cially discriminated thoughts, and a corresponding multitude 636 NO PEESENT CAUSE FOE EEVISION. and variety of terms. The language in fact had jecome too copious, and too specific, to have any true correspondences with so simple and inartificial a diction as that of the Chris- tian Scriptures. Had the Bible then, for the first time, ap- peared in an English dress, the translators would have been perplexed and confounded with the multitude of terms, each expressing a fragment, few the whole, of the meaning of the original words for which they must stand ; and, whereas, three hundred years ago, but one good translation was possible, the eighteenth century might have produced a dozen, none altogether good, but none much worse than another. "We may learn from a paragraph in Trench what a different vocabulary the Bible would have displayed, if it had been first executed or thoroughly revised at that period. One commentator, he says, thought the phrase " clean escaped " a very low expression ; another would reject " straightway, haply, twain, athirst, wax, (in the sense of grow,) lack, ensam- ple, jeopardy, garner, passion," as obsolete ; while the author of a new translation condemns as clownish, barbarous, base, hard, technical, misapplied or new-coined, such words as beguile, boisterous, lineage, perseverance, potentate, remit, shorn, swerved, vigilant, unloose, unction, vocation, and hun- dreds of others now altogether approved and familiar. From what I have said, it will of course be understood, that I see no s\ifiBcient present reasons for a new translation, or even for a revision of the authorized version of the Bible ; but there are certain considerations, distinct from the ques- tion of the merits of that version, which ought to be sug- gested. Tlie moral and intellectual nature of man has few more difiicult practical problems to resolve than that of trac- ing and following the golden mean between a passion foi DISTUEBAJifCE OF FOEMC.AS. 637 novelty and an ultra-conservative attaehment to tlie time- honored and the old. Both extremes are inherently, perhaps equally mischievous, but the love of innovation is the more dangeroTis, because the futm-e is more uncertain than the past, and because the irreverent and thoughtless wantonness of an hour, may destroy that which only the slow and pain- fiil labor of years or of centuries can rebuild. The elements which enter into the formation of public opinion on great questions of church and state are so very numerous, and their mutual relations and influences are so obscure, that it is difiScult to control and impossible to predict the course of that opinion. La free states, ecclesiastical and political insti- tutions are of themselves in so mutable a condition, that any voluntary infusion of disturbing ingredients is generally quite superfluous, and under most circumstances not a little haz- ardous. Intimately connected with the changes of opinion on these great subjects are the changes constantly going on in language, and which so many circumstances in modern society are accelerating with such startling rapidity. Fluc- tuations in language are not merely a consequence, they are yet more truly an indication, and a cause of corresponding fluctuations in moral and intellectual action. Whoever, therefore, uses an important word in a new sense, is contrib- uting to change the popular acceptation, and finally the set- tled meaning, of all formulas in which that word is an ele- ment. Whoever substitutes for an old word of well under- stood signification a new vocable or phrase, unsettles, with the formulas into which it enters, the opinions of those who have habitually clothed theii- convictions in those steico typed forms, and thus introduces, first, doubt, and then, departure from long received and acknowledged truth. Experience has taught jurists that in the revision or amendment of stat- 638 DISTUEBAK'GE OF EOEMTJLAS. utes, and in sanctioning and adopting by legisla ive enactment current principles of unwritten law, it is a matter of tlie first importance to employ a phraseology whose precise import has been fixed by a long course of judicial decisions, and it has been found impossible in practice to change the language of the law, for the purpose of either modernizing or making it otherwise more definite, familiar or intelligible, without at the same time changing the law itself. Words and ideas ai-e so inseparably connected, they become in a sense so connat- ural, that we cannot change the one without modifying the other. Every man who knows his own language finds the modernization of an old author, substantially a new book. It is not, as is often pretended, a putting of old thoiights into a new dress. It is the substitution of a new thought more or less divergent from the original type. Language is not the dress of thought ; it is its living expression, and it controls both the physiognomy and the organization of the idea it utters. A new translation of the Bible, therefore, or an essential modification of the existing version, is substantially a new book, a new Bible, another revelation ; and the authors of siich an entei-prise are assuming no less a responsibility than that of disturbing, not the formulas only, but the faith of centuries. Nothing but a solemn conviction of the absolute necessity of such a measure can justify a step involving con- sequences so serious, and there are but two grounds on which the attempt to change what millions regard as the very Words of Life, can be defended These grounds, of course, are, first, the incorrectness of the received version, and sec- ondly, such a change in the language of ordinary life, as re- moves it so far from the dialect of that version, that it is no longer intelligible without an amount of special philological INEXPEDIENCY OF KEYISION. 639 Study out of the reacli of tlie masses who p&rticipate in the universal instruction of the age. Upon this latter point, I can only recapitulate what I have already said, in expressing my decided opinion that the diction of the English Bible in general cannot be brought nearer the dialect of the present day, -without departing from the style of the original, in the same proportion as it is made to approximate to more modern forms, and a more diversi- fied vocabulary. At the same time, it is not to be denied, that modern criticism has established some better readings o( the original text, detected some unimportant misinterpre- tations of undisputed readings, and pointed out some devia- tions from idiomatic propriety of expression in the English of our version. ISTone will dispute that the removal of all such blemishes would be highly desirable, but there is little reason to suppose that such an improvement is practicable at the present moment, or that the attempt could now be made, without the hazard of incurring greater evils than those which, by any large body of competent judges, are now be- hoved to exist. That there is any special present necessity for a revision cannot be seriously pretended, and a strong, perhaps I should say, a decisive objection against a present attempt to revise, is the state of existing knowledge with respect both to the ancient and the modern languages con- cerned in the translation. There is no sufficient reason to doubt, that at the end of this century the knowledge of bib- lical Greek and Ilebre^v will be as much in advance of the present standard, as that standard is before the sa red pTii- lology of the beginning of the century ; and there are, on the other hand, the strongest grounds for believing that English in its history, its true significance, its power, will then be bet- ter understood, and more ably wielded than at this day it is, 640 mCEEASING KNOWLEDGE OF ENGLISH. or can be. Tlie critical study of Englisli lias but just com menced. "We are at the beginning of a new era ia its his- tory. Great as are its powers, men are beginning to fee] that its necessities are still greater. There is among its au- thors, an evident stretching out for additional facilities of expression, and as a means to this end, a deeper reaching down into the wells of its latent capabilities, and hence, as 1 have so often remarked, a more general and zealous study of those ancient forms of English, out of which was built up the consecrated dialect of our mother-tongue. A revision of the English Bible, then, is at the present time not merely unne- cessary, but, with reference to our knowledge of language, wholly premature, and whatever is now done ia this way will assuredly be thrown aside as worthless, whenever changes in the English speech, or the discovery of important errors in the received translation, shall make the want of a better a real want. The present is an unfavorable moment in some other re- spects. The acuteness of German criticism, the speculations of German philosophy and theology, have given rise to a great multitude and diversity of opinions, not on questions of verbal interpretation merely, but of doctrine also, which are but just now beginning to be openly and freely discussed in this country and in England, and the minds of men are now perhaps more unsettled on these topics than they have been at any time for three centuries. It is highly improba- ble, that, leaving the question of competency aside, a suffi- cient number of biblical scholars could be found even within the limits of any one Protestant denomination in either conn- try, whose theological views so far harmonize, that they would agree in new forms of expression upon points now under discussion ; and, of course, between them and scholars EVILS OF M^NT REVISIONS. 641 of other denominations, tlie discrepancy would je still wider, so that every sect, however few in numbers, which feels the want of a revision, would be under the necessity of framing one for itself. There seems, however, to be some reason for believing, that when the excitement growing out of the nov- elty of the discussions which are going on, in lay as well as clerical circles, shall have subsided, there will be a more gen- eral concurrence of opinion, both in denominations and ie- ticeen them ; and then there is room to hope that increased harmony and increased knowledge may conspire to give the English Bible a greater perfection in point of accuracy and of expression, and at the same time a catholic adaptation to both the future speech and the future opinion of English and American Protestant Christianity. The objections against a multitude of sectarian transla- tions are very serious. The dialect of the English Bible is also the dialect of devotion and of religious instruction wher- ever the English language is spoken, and all denominations substantially agi-ee in their sacred phraseology, with what- ever difference of interpretation. There are always possibil- ities of reconciliation, sympathies even, between men who, in matters of high concernment, habitually use the same words, and appeal to the same fonnulas ; whereas a difference of language and of symbols creates an almost impassable gulf between man and man. "When, therefore, we have, not dif- ferent churches only, but different Bibles, different religious dialects, different devotional expressions, the jealousies of sectarian division will be more hopelessly embittered, and the prospect of bringing about a greater harmony of opinion and of feeling among English-speaking Protestants propor- tionally darkened. At this day, there could be no harmony of action on this 41 642 SECTAEIANISM. subject between different churches. Even Trench, a man of a liberal spirit, seems to reject the plan of uniting for this purpose with those not embraced in the organization of his own church, though he admits, that, with the exception of the " so-called Baptists," they might advantageously be in- vited to offer suggestions — to be decided upon, apparently, by a body of which they are not to be members. Those who proclaim views of such narrow exclusiveness have no right to expect, that theologians who dissent from them on questions of ecclesiastical government will be more charitable than themselves, and it is not probable that scholars, who are not of the English church, will be very prompt to offer sugges- tions upon such terms. So long as this sectarian feeling — for it can be appropriately designated by no other term — prevails on either side, there can be no union upon conditions compatible with the self-respect of the parties ; and unless better counsels prevail, whenever revision comes, English and American Protestantism will have not one Bible, one standard of religious faith, but many. Besides the inconveniences of such a state of things, to which I have just alluded, there is the further evil, that each one of the new revisions will be greatly inferior to what the joint labors of scholars of different denominations might pro- duce. Whatever crude and hasty opinions * individuals may adopt with respect to the superior learning and ability of their own religious communions, it is very certain that neither the English church, nor any other Christian sect, possesses, within its own limits, so full a measure of knowledge and talent, that in such a work as the revision of the English * An old and just deflnition of opinio, is assensus rel non exploratse, and there is a vast deal of sectarian religious opinion in all Christian denomina- tions, which cannot lay claim to any higher logical ralue. KEVISION NOW INEXPEDIENT. 643 Bible, it can afford to dispense with the co-operation of other denominations ; and the ecclesiastical body which cuts itself off from other branches of the church, by attempting that work without at least an earnest effort to secure such co- operation upon equal and honorable terms, may justly be deemed schismatic. In a brief discourse like the present, the arguments on this question can be hinted only, not detailed ; but I think we may justify the general conclusion, that as there is no present necessity for a revision, so is there no possibility of executing a revision in a way that would be, or ought to be, satisfactory even to any one Protestant sect, stiK less to the whole body of English-speaking Protestants. To revise under present circumstances, is to sectf^rianize, to divide the one catholic English Bible, the common standard of author- ity in Protestant England and America, into a dozen differ- ent revelations, each authoritative for its own narrow circle, but, to all out of that circle, a counterfeit ; it is a practical surrender of that human excellence of form in the English Bible, which, next to the unspeakable value of its substance, is the greatest gift which God has bestowed on the British and American people. LECTURE XXIX. CORRUPTIONS OF LANGUAGE. In sttidyiDg the history of the successive changes in lan- guage, it is by no means easy to discriminate, at all times, between positive corruptions, which tend to the deterioration of a tongue in expressiveness or moral elevation of vocabulary, in distinctness of articulation, in logical precision, or in clear- ness of structure, and changes which belong to the character of speech, as a living semi-organism connatural with man or constitutive of him, and so participating in his mutations. By these latter changes, language continually adapts itself to the intellectual and material condition of those who use it, grows with their growth, shares in their revolutions, perishes in their decay. Its changes of this sort can be resisted by no limited special effort, and they can be checked only by the same conservative influences that retard the decline of the race to which it is vernacular. Mere corruptions, on the contrary, which arise from extraneous or accidental causes, may be detected, exposed, and if not healed, at least pre- vented from spreading beyond their source, and infecting a whole nation. To pillory such offences, to point out their VULGARISMS IN LANUOAGE. 645 absurdity, to detect and expose the morai obliquity which too often lurks beneath them, is the sacred duty of every scholar, of every philosophic thinker, who knows how nearly purity of speech, like personal cleanliness, is allied with purity of thought and rectitude of action. When, then, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table ridicules the affectation of responding to a remark of your companion by an interroga- tive, T'es f when a journalist laughs at the Cockney use of immediatdy and directly in place of as soon as, or after / as for example, directly John came, I went away ; or the Americanism of employing community without the article, as in comm^unity, for in the community ; the vulgarism of such phi-ases as, in our midst, and, unbeknown to me ; the preciosity, if I may use an expressive Gallicism, of not merely pronouncing, but of exaggerating the t in often, as if it were ofttim or oftten; the provincial substitution of the obscure for the clear pronunciation of the final vowel, transforming Mississippi and Ohio into Mississippuh and Ohiiih ; in all these cases, a real service is rendered to the community, and to the language. Latham appears to me to confound the progress of natu- ral linguistic change, which is inevitable, and the deteriora- tion arising from accidental or local causes, which may be resisted, and he denies that there can be any such thing as the corruption of a language. All languages, he thinks, are equally intelligible, and consequently, equally what they ought to be, namely, mediums of intercourse between man and man, and hence, continues he, " in language whatever is is rightP In the concluding paragraph of the Preface to the second edition of his Treatise on the English Language, he observes : "I am not desirous of sacrificing truth to an an- 646 LATHAM OliT LANGtTAiJE. tithesis ; but so certain is language to change from logica. accuracy to logical license, and at the same time, so certain is language, when so changed, to be as intelligible as before, that I venture upon asserting that not only whatever is is right, but also that in many cases whatever was was wrongP There is in this passage a singular confusion of thought and of ex- pression. First, it maintains the paradox, that when lan- guages were spoken with logical accuracy, they were wrong, but now, when they have degenerated into logical license, they are right ; and, secondly, the final conclusion contra- dicts the premises from which it is deduced. The argument is, that language always adapts itself to the uses of those who employ it, that it changes only as they change, and that it is at all times equally well suited to the great purposes for which that faculty was given to man. If this is so, then that which was must have been right for the time when it was, upon the same principle that that which is is right for the present time. To afiirm, then, as a result from the general doctrine of the constant adaptation of language to man's nature and wants, that all that at any time is in language is right, but that something which at a past time was was wrong, is not an " antithesis," but a palpable inconsistency, a contradiction in terms. Either, then, our author means that whatever is is right, and, upon the same principle, what- ever was was right, but, by virtue of necessary changes in speech, much that was right is at present wrong, or he means nothing at all ; and his entire proposition is at war with itself, and, as lawyers say, repugnant. But in spite of the authority of Latham, I see no reason why, independently of the evidence of comparison between difi'erent stages of a given tongue, we may not as well speak of the corruption of COKETTPTION OF LANGITAGE. 647 a language, as of the deterioration of a race. 'So ii an doubts that certain species or families of animals, man himself in- cluded, become, by change of climate, or of other natural conditions, physically inferior to what they have been in former and different circumstances, and there is unhappily equally irresistible evidence of the moral and intellectual deterioration of nations. When, then, a people, once great in mind, great in vii-tue, powerful in material energy, be- comes enfeebled in intellect, depraved in heart, and effemi- nate in action, and their language drops the words belonging especially to the higher faculties and perceptions, or j^erverts them to sensuous, base, earthly uses, and is no longer capa- ble of the expression of lofty conceptions, generous emotions, or virtuous resolves, are we not to say that their language is corrupted ? So far as respects the needs and conveniences of material life, it may perhaps be true that one form of it is as expressive and appropriate as another, but the theory which I am combating, forgets that language is not a tool, or even a machine, but is of itself an informing vital agency, and that, so truly as language is what man has made it, just 60 truly ma?i is what language has made him. The deprava- tion of a language is not merely a token or an effect of the corruption of a people, but corruption is accelerated, if not caused by the perversion and degradation of its consecrated vocabulary ; for eveiy human speech has its hallowed dialect, its nomenclature appropriated to the service of sacred things, the conscience, the generous affections, the elevated aspira- tions, without which humanity is not a community of speak- ing men, but a herd of roaring brutes. When, therefore, pop- ular writers in vulgar irony apply to vicious and depraved objects, names or epithets set apart by the common consent 648 LOCAL COEETJPTIONS. of society to designate the qualities or the acts which consti- tute man's only claim to reverence and affection, they both corrupt the speech, and administer to the nation a poison more subtile and more dangerous, because less obvious, than the bitterest venom with which the destructive philosophy has ever assailed the moral or the spiritual interests of hu- manity. Besides the moral degradation of language, accidental circumstances, such as the affectations and caprices of fash- ionable society, the inaccuracies or the whim of a distin- guished and influential individual, and especially the ambi- tious ignorance of would-be reformers, often corrupt lan- guage philologically, by introducing violations of grammar, or of other proprieties of speech, which a servile spirit of imi- tation adopts, and which, at last, supersede proper and idio- matic forms of expression. Again, the usage of a great city or an important province, itself occasioned purely by local and temporary circumstances, may extend over a whole country, and thus words, phrases, syntactical combinations, not only ill-suited, but repugnant to the genius of a lan- guage, may force their way into it, to the exclusion of more appropriate terms, and become permanent, though inharmo- nious and ill-assimilated ingredients of the national speech. Changes of this sort are not exemplifications of the general laws of language, any more than the liability to be smitten with pestilence through infection is an exemplification of the normal principles of physiology ; and therefore a language thus affected is as properly said to be corrupted, as a person who has taken a contagious malady to be diseased. So with respect to pronunciation. Are not the emascu- lation of our once manly and sonorous tongue, by contract- IGNOEANCE OF BEFOEMEES. 649 ing long vowels into short and suppressing short vowels altogether, the crowding of half a dozen syllables into one explosive utterance, the thick indistinguishable articulation, the crazy confusion of the aspirate and silent h, all of which characterize the native dialect of London, and but for the influence of printing on pronunciation, which I have dis- cussed on a former occasion, would have spread over the whole island — -are not these corruptions of speech which should be exposed, stigmatized, and corrected, as well as moral delinquencies, or vulgarisms of manner ? To deny that language is susceptible of corruption, is to deny that races or nations are susceptible of depravation ; and to treat all its changes as normal, is to confound things as distinct as health and disease. I have spoken of the ignorance of grammarians as a fre- quent cause of the corruption of language. An instance of this is the clumsy and unidiomatic continuing present of the passive voice, which, originating not in the sound common sense of the people, but in the brain of some grammatical pretender, has widely spread, and threatens to establish itself as another solecism in addition to the many which our syntax already presents. The phrase ' the house is heing iuilt,' ?ox ' the house is liiiMing,^ is an awkward neologism, which neither convenience, intelligibility, nor syntactical con- gniity demands, and the use of which ought therefore to be discountenanced, as an attempt at the artiiicial improvement of the language in a point wliich needed no amendment. The English. active pi'csent, or rather aorist, participle in -ing is not an Anglo-Saxon, but a modern form, and did not make its appearance as a participle, until after the general characteristics which distinguish English from Saxon were 650 PASSIVE WITH "being." fixed. The Saxon active participle terminated in ende, as 1 ufig en de, loving; but there was a verbal noun with the ending -ung, sometimes written -ing, as cl sen sung or clsensing, cleaning or cleansing. The final vowel of the participle was soon dropped, and the termination -and or -end became the sign of that part of speech. The nominal form in -ung also disappeared, and -ing became the uniform ending of verbal nouns. Between the verbal noun of action and the active participle, there is a close grammatical as well as logical analogy, which is exemplified in such phrases in Frenchand English as I'appetit vient en mangeant, appetite comes with eating. Hence the participle ending in -and or -end and the verbal noun ending in -ing were con- founded, and at last the old participial sign, though long continued in Scotland, was dropped altogether in England, and the sign of the verbal noun employed for both pui-poses. I have observed on former occasions, that when new forms are superseding old ones, as for example, in the substitution of its for his as a neuter possessive, since for sith, there is often a period when good writers avoid the employment of either. This was the case with regard to the new and old forms of the active participle, for in the Ormulum, which contains more than twenty thousand lines, there is not a sin- gle instance of the use of the active participle in either form, though there arc four or five participial adjectives in -end, and twenty or twenty-five verbal nouns in -ing. The ancient termination in -end survived in popular speech long after it became extinct in literature, and the vulgar pronunciation, goii'C, livin", and the like, is a relic of that form, not a drop- ping of the nasal g final in the modern inflection. The earliest form in which the phrase we are considering PASSIVE WITH "BEINa." 651 occurs is, ' the house is in building, or a building,' a being probably a contraction of the Saxon o n, or the modern Eng- lish ^7l.'^ Ben Jonson, in his English grammar, states ex- pressly that before the participle present, a, and if before a vowel, an, give the participle the force of a gerund ; and he * The following examples show that the form "in building," or, "a build- ing," was in constant use from the very dawn of English literature to the seventeenth century. In III. (I.) Kings vi. 7, we have, in the older Wyolifiite version, was beeldid ; in the later, was in bildyng ; in a manuscript of the 14th century, quoted by Hearne, Langtoft's Chronicle I. cxcvii., whille the churche was in hyldynge ; in the old romance of Robert the Devyle, Thorn's edition, p. 8, as this chylde was a berynge to the ehirche, p. 32, whyle your penaunce be a doynge ; in the prose Morte D' Arthur, Lib. II. c. viii., the mene whyle as this was o doyng; in Skelton's Tales, Dyce's edition I. Ixiv., there shall you see my tombe a makynge ; in Lord Berners' Froissart 1. 143, had beene longe a makynge, p. 255, was longe adryvinge; in Palsgrave's French Grammar, pp. 380, 382, 383, 384, in doing, smi other similar constructions ; in Tyn dale's and Coverdale's translations, John ii. 20, this temple was abuyldynge; in Cranmer's and the Geneva versions of the same passage, was a byldynge ; in I. Peter iii. 20, in Tyndale's, Coverdale's, Cranmer's, and King James's translations, while the ark was a preparing; in the Rhemish version of the same verse, was a building; but in the Geneva, the modern form, the ark was preparing ; in Holingshed iii. 126, whilst these things were a dooing ; in I. Kings vi. 7, authorized version, while it was in building ; in Shakespeare, Macbeth iii. 4, while tis a making, Hamlet i. 3, as it is a making; in John Smith's Virginia, 230, their shallop, which was amending; in Howell's Dodona's Grove, 107, a doing, and inHawlcy's Preface to Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum, in doing, in both these last instances, as well as in all the others, in a passive sense. Thus, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, the verbal noun, with the preposition in or a, appears to have been constantly employed. The phrase, the ark was preparing, given from the Geneva New Testament, in Bagster's Hexapla, is probably a misprint for a preparing, as no other example of that form is known to occur until long after the date of that version. The only early instances of a construction bearing any analogy to the neologism, is being built, which I have been able to find, are in Fabyan's Chronicle, Ellis's reprint of Pynson's edition of 1516. These are, page 1, " The Cytie of Rome was begone to be buylded in the XI. yere of Esechias ; " and p. S're, " In this yere also was ye Guylde halle of Lodon begon to be newe edyfied; " but these have little direct bearing on the question. After the construction in, or, a building, making, &c., went out of use, the verbal noun was regularly employed with a passive signification, as in this expression in the XXIII. Letter of Junius , " the lines are dramng around him," until a very recent period. See App. 79. 652 cites as an example, " a great tempest was a brewing.'" Tlie obvious explanation of this form of speech is, that what gram- marians choose to call a present participle, is really a verbal noun ; and, if so, there is nothing more irregular or anomalous in the phrase ' the ship is in building,' than in saying ' be industrious in working, be moderate in drinking ; ' for the verbal noun may as well have a passive, as an active or a neuter signification. The preposition on or a was dropped about' the beginning of the eighteenth century, but it is still understood ; and in this construction, though the form is the same as that of the participle, the verbal noun is still as much a noun as it was when the preposition was expressed. But if this explanation be rejected, and it be insisted that, in the phrase in question, iuilding, making, <&c., are true par- ticiples, active in form, but passive in signification, the con- struction may be defended, both by long usage, which is the highest of all linguistic authorities, and by the analogy of numerous established forms of speech, the propriety of which no man thinks of questioning. The active form is passive in sense in the phrases, he is to llame, I give you this picture to examine, lie has books to sell, this fruit is good to eat. It is true that in these expressions, and others of similar construc- tion, what appears to be an infinitive active is not so, but a relic of the Anglo-Saxon corresponding phrase, consisting of a gerund preceded by the particle to, which in that language was not the sign of the infinitive, as it is in modern English ; but, nevertheless, the analogical argument from an author- ized use of an active form in a passive sense remains unaf- fected. The common expression, these books sell well, and many others similar in principle, admit of no such explana- PASSIVE wn'H "being." 653 tion ; and the verb, tliougli active in inflection, is as unequivo- cally passive in signification, as are the Latin vapulo and veneo. Upon what principle, but the passive use of an active participial form, can we explain such phrases as drinh- ing-watcr, a riding-horse, for water fit to be drunk, or a horse kept to be ridden ? It is no answer to say tliat these are to be considered as compound words, because the passive sense still remains with the active ending. So, in this ex- pression, ' considering the shortness and uncertainty of life, it is presumptuous in any man to expect to attain to the age of a hundred years,' considerijig is used in a passive sense, as is seen clearly by the French equivalent in this construction, which is the passive participle vu or attendu.* The expressions, the falling-sickness, a stepping-stone, a spinning-wheel, a stumbling-block, a drinking-glass, a work- ing-day, the latter two of which at least are true compounds, are not exactly analogous with any I have cited ; for though drinking-water is water that is or may be drunk, and a rid- ing-horse is a horse that is or may be ridden, yet we cannot so convert these last phrases. A drinking-glass is not a glass to be drimk; but neither is it the glass that drinks, the day that works, or the wheel that spins. But, though not gram- matically identical, these constructions are of the same anom- alous character as ' the house is building' — the resolution of which into ' the house is a building, or in building,' is as easy and as idiomatic as to translate ' drinking-glass ' into ' a glass for drinking.' * When the sentence contains a personal nominative with which the participle may agree, it may possibly be regarded as active ; as, for example, ' considering the feeble state of his health, lie ought not to undertake the journey;' which may be resolved into, ' he, considering the feeble state of his health, ought not, &c.' 654 PASSIVE WITH But, independently of these analogies, we have several combinations, ui which even the purists, who condemn tho phrase in question, employ precisely the same form, and that, too, not with a verbal noun, but with a true participle. To owe^ to miss, to want, are all transitive verbs ; but no Eng lishman scruples to speak of de})ts owing, to say that a paper is inissing, or that a sovereign is wanting,* to make up & speeiiied sum. The reformers who object to the phrase I am defending, must, in consistency, employ tho proposed substitute with all passive participles, and in other tenses, as well as the present. They must say therefore : The subscription-paper is heing missed, but I know that a considerable sum is heing wanted to make up the amount ; the great Victoria bridge has heen heing huilt more than two years ; when I reach London, the ship Leviathan will he heing built ; if my orders had been followed, the coat would home heen heing made yesterday ; if the house had then heen heing huilt, the mortar would ha/oe heen heing mixed. Besides these cases of active verbal forms with a passive sense, we have nouns of similar character. Confessoj', for example, analogically ought to mean one who confesses ; whereas it signifies a priest who is confessed to: prisoner should be a man who imprisons, but it signifies one who is imprisoned. There are even examples of passive participles * These expressions ure all old. The first occurs in a letter from Henry VII. to his mother, written ce.Ttainly as early as 1508: "Ye * * have graunted unto me * * such debts and duties which is oweing and dew to you, &c.'' Fisher's Sermon on Countess of Derby, Appendix, p. 38. Wanting is several times used by Palsgrave in a similar way ; as, " though any fewe wordes * * shall fortune * * * to be wantyng ; '' and, " which he * * shall suppose to be wantyng." Palsgrave, 803. ANALOGOUS FORMS. 655 with an active sense. A well-spoken^ or & fair-spoken man, is a man who speaks well oi" smoothly ; and well-seen ia a sci- ence not long since meant seeing far into, having a deep in- sight into, that science. All languages are full of these anomalies ; and he who resolves to utter or write nothing which he cannot parse, will find himself restricted to a beg- garly diction. The employment of active forms with a passive sense, and contrariwise, the attribution of an active force to passive inflections, are sanctioiied by the analogy of all the languages to which English is related. Not to mention exceptional cases, the Latins regularly employed the gerundial both actively and passively ; the Latin deponent and the Greek middle voice, passive in form, are active in sense ; the Ice- landic active participle is used gerundially as a passive ; as ecki er truanda, it is not to be believed; in some, at least, of the Frisic dialects, the same construction is used, tha drivanda and tha draganda, the driving, and the carrying, meaning live cattle which can ie driven, and life- less articles which can he carried / the Danes say, blsesende Instrumenter, blowing instruments, for instruments that are ilown, wind instruments ; and, in spite of the gramma- rians, few Germans would hesitate to say, with Liebig, eine zu begrhndende "Wissenschaft, a science founded, or to he founded, &c.;* or to speak of das zu beziehende Hans, the house to he occupied, eine vorhabende Eeise, a j oumey to he undertaken, while verdienter and B e d i e n- * E3 giebt in der That Aerzte und mediciuische Schriftsteller welche behaup- tcn dass eine auf exacte Keuntniss zu begriindende Wissenschaft der diatetischen und medicinischen Praxis unmSglich sei. Liebig Chem. Bricfe. 4te. Auflage, 1. 17. 656 NEW PARTICIPIAL CONSTEUCTIONS. ter, participial passive forms are constantly used actively the one as an adjective, the other as a noun. Upon the whole, then, we may say, that the construction ' the house is building ' is sustained by the authority of usage, and by many analogies in the English and cognate languages. Nor is it objectionable as an equivocal phrase, because it is very seldom used when the subject is of such a nature that it can be an agent, and always with a context, or under cir- cumstances which show that the participle must be taken in a passive sense. To reject it, therefore, is to violate the" laws of language by an arbitrary change ; and, in this particular case, the pro- posed substitute is at war with the genius of the English tongue. But if an innovation in the established phraseology of the last two centuries must be made, either for the sake of change, or with the view of harmonizing English syntax to the eye, let us at once cast off the fear of ignorant criticism and the sneers of precisian affectation, go back to the primitive con- struction, which the popular good sense and grammatical instincts of humble English life have still preserved, and say, with our fathers — ' the ark was a preparing,' ' the house was in building.' The participial form is, in most languages, a stumbling- block,* and the resemblance between that part of speech and the verbal adjective is a constant source of embarrassment. How subtle and difficult of application are the rules for de- termining when the active participle in French is to be treated as a form of the verb, and so not declined, and when * Query for the purists: Ought I rather to say, A block-that-is-being st»rabled-at ? NEW Pj^OtTICIPIAL CONSTRUCTIONS. 657 as au adjective, and accordingly to be varied for gender and number. And in French and Italian, how hard to know when the participle in the compound tenses is declinable, and when not ! We have not the same, but analogous, difScid- ties in our own words of the same class. There is a large number of both active or present, and past or passive parti- ciples, which use has converted into adjectives, and their syntax has been modified accordingly. To the employment of those to which the ear has been familiarized by practice, we are reconciled, but we instinctively shrink from every new attempt to confound words of these two classes. There is at present an inclination in England to increase the num- ber of active, in America, of passive participles, employed with the syntax of the adjective. Thus, in England it is common to hear : " such a thing is very damaging," and the phrase has been recently introduced into this country. Trench says : " "Words which had become uniatelligible or mislead- ing," and " the phrase could not have been other than more or less misleading ; " " these are the most serious and most recurring." Ifow, \ho\}i^\ plea^ng, gratifying, encouraging, and many other like words have long been established as adjectives, yet the cases cited from Trench strike us as un- pleasant novelties. The rale appears to be this : Where there exists an adjective of corresponding meaning, we cannot em- ploy the participle as an adjective ; but if there is no such adjective, the participle may take its place. To apply this : we ought not to say very damaging, because we have the adjective injurious ; or veiy recurring, because we have_/Ve- quent. But we may employ gratifying and encouraging as adjectives, because there are no English adjectives with the same meaning. Upon the same principle, we may justify the use of misleading with an adjectival syntax, though it 42 658 SHALL AND WILL. has a raw and unpleasant savor, and it is objecticnable only because it is new. Many past or rather passive participles have long been employed as adjectives, and it is difficult to lay down a rule for dictinguishing between them. A practical criterion is the application of the adverb very, which we use to qualify adjectives, not participles, except when the latter have be- come adjectives ; thus we say ' I am very happy, ^ but not ' I am very delighted j ' though very tired, very learned, and the like, are freely employed. Tlie inclination in this country is to enlarge the list of these words, and we not unfrequently hear such expressions as ' very satisfied,' ' very pleased.' It is not easy to see why we may say ' a tired man,' ' a leai-ned man,' 'he is very tired or very learned;' but, on the other hand, while we use the phrase ' a disappointed man,' we can- not say ' he is very disappointed,' though he is ' very much disappointed ' is an idiomatic phrase. The more frequent employment of both the participles with an adjectival syntax, is, in its origin, a Gallicism, but it also exemplifies the prevailing inclination to reject purely grammatical distinctions, and to simplify our grammar, by assimilating forms and phrases which suggest no substantial difference of sense, while we are at the same time increasing our power of expression by enlarging our vocabulary, and more nicely discriminating between words of like general meaning. It is doubtless an impovement in any language to increase the significance of its vocabulary, and make the meaning of a period depend more on the inherent force, and less on the form and arrangement, of the words that compose it; and therefore, though every man of taste will prefer to follow rather than to lead in linguistic changes, yet there is no SHALL AND WILL. 659 iound objeetiou to the tendencies of whicli I am speaking, except the repulsive eifect of all neologisms in syntax. The same observation will apply to another grammatical subtlety, which, whatever may be its origin, has at present no logical value or signiiicance whatever. I refer to the dis- tinction between will and shall, as used with different per- sonal pronouns, whether as signs of the future, or as forms of determination or authority. I sJiall, you loill, and he will, are generally simply futures, predictions ; and will and shall are true auxiliaries. I will, you shall, and he shall, are ex- pressions of determination ; and will and shall are not true auxiliaries. jSTo ^ery satisfactory explanation of a distinc- tion apparently so arbitrary has been given, though some ingenious suggestions as to the origin of it have been offered ; but, whatever foundation may once have existed for this nicety, it now answers no intellectual purpose. In Scotland, and in many parts of the United States, will and shall are confounded, or at least not employed according to the estab- lished English usage. There is little risk in predicting that at no very distant day, this verbal quibble will disappear, and that one of the auxiliaries will be employed with all per- sons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the other only as an expression of purjiose or authority. To persons accustomed to be scrupulous in tlie use of these words, the confusion or irregular employment of them is one of the most disagreeable of all departures from the English idiom ; but as the subtlety in question serves no end but to embarrass, the rejection of it, accompanied with a constant distinction in meaning between tlie two words, must be deemed not a corruption, but a rational improvement. It is impossible, in a single lecture, to notice in detail the thousand violations of grammatical propriety, which are C60 m EESPEOT OF. constantly springing np and threatening to pervert and de- naturalize our motlier tongue ; but the deliberate introduc- tion of incorrect forms, whether by the coinage of new, or the revival of obsolete and inexpressive syntactical combina- tions, ought to be resisted even in trifles, especially where it leads to the confusion of distinct ideas. An example of this is the recent use of the adverbial phrases in respect of, in regard of, for in or with respect or regard to. This innova- tion is without any syntactical ground, and ought to be con- demned and avoided as a mere grammatical crotchet. The writers of the seventeenth century used these expres- sions in three senses : First, for ' in comjpa/rison with ; ' as, the expenses of the government are small, in respect of its revenue ; secondly, for ' hy reason of or ' on account of ; ' as, in respect of our ignorance and frailty, we ought to be humble ; and finally, as a mode of introducing a subject, lim- iting a general proposition, or referring to a particular point, in which case it was eq^uivalent to the phrases ' as to^ ' in reference to^ ' respecting^ ' so far as concerns,^ &c.* The first use, that expressive of comparison, soon became obsolete, and has not been revived. The form, in respect or regard of, * First seuse, of " comparison : " The Warres of Latter Ages seeme to be made in tlie Darke, in respeot of the glory and honour which reflected upon men from the Wars in ancient Time. Bacon's Essays, 1639, Essay xxix. Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms. Second sense, " by reason," or, " on account of:" The Northern tract of the World is in nature the more martial Region ; be it in respect of the Stars of that Hemisphere, * * * or of the cold of the Northern parts, which * « * doth make the bodies hardest and the courage warmest. Do., do,. Essay Iviii. Of Vicissitudes of Things. Third sense, " relatively to," or, " with reference to : " Timing of the Sute is the principal; Timing, I say, not onely in respect of the Person that should grant it, but in respect of those which are like tc «rosse it. Do., do., Essay xlix. Of Suitors. m EESPECT DF. 661 was tlien confined to the meaning, by reason of, on account of ; and in or with respect or regard to was employed in the sense of in reference to, respecting. This employment of these latter two forms had become well settled, though the first of them was seldom employed except in the dialect of the law. Coleridge was the fii'st eminent writer of this century who returned to the practice of iisiug ' in respect of ' exclusively ; but his writings never had sufficient currency to produce much influence on the language. Since his time, however, some deservedly popular writers have employed this phrase ; and with Ti-ench it is a pet construction, and often introduced when a very difi'erent phrase would much better express its meaning. It rests, of course, on the theory that in this phrase, respect or regard is an independent noun, and there- fore should be followed by the preposition of. But this, I think, is a mistaken view of the subject. The word respect in this combination has none of the meanings known to it as an independent noun, in the English vocabulary. The ex- pression ' in or with respect ' is an idiotism, a phraseological construction of an adverbial character, and in its ordinary modem use, it is the equivalent of relatively. Old writers sometimes say ' respectively to.' This is now disused ; but ' relatively to ' is by no means unfrequent, and ' in respect of^ used in this sense, is just as gross a violation of English grammar as to write ' relatively of, or in reference of The mere violation of a grammatical rule would be a comparatively small evil ; but most of the writers who have adopted this innovation, are so anxious to parade it, as a badge of the style of a school, that they drag it in on all occasions, where they can, by any chance, contrive to intro- duce it, very often employing it in constructions that leave it 662 m EESPEOT OF. difficult to determine whether they mean relaUvely to, or hy reason of, or in point of; and the vague use of the phrase, of course, tends to embarrass the reader by confounding in ex- pression things logically very distinct.'-'" The two changes which I have now been considering are not of popular, but of scholastic origin, and they are wholly the fruit of an affectation of superior correctness. But there is, among the novelties I have referred to, one which origi- nated with the multitude, and has a psychological foundation, though it is too much at variance with the general analogy of the language to deserve countenance. I refer to the use of the word community without the article, when not em- ployed in the sense of in common ; as, for example, ' Com- mimity is interested in the question ; ' ' the policy is injurious to community.'' So far as I am aware, no respectable writer has sanctioned this form of speech, and it is justly regarded as a very gross vulgarism ; biit I could name persons of some position in the literary world, who employ it colloquially. The general rule is, that common nouns employed in a defi- nite sense in the singular number, must take the article. Thus, in the first of the instances just given, though ignorant people, and some who are not ignorant, except in this partic- ular, say ' Community is interested in the question,' no one would say, '■Piiblic is interested in the question.' The philo- logical instinct of every English-speaking man would be shocked at the omission of the article, and would correct the • Nobody ever thinks of saying, "in reference of;'' but if these phrases are to be governed by the rules of English construction of rumm, there is as good ground for this expression as for "in respect of." The Latin etymology of respect has nothing to do with the question, for the Latin primitive was noUised for any such purpose, or in any such constru»tion ; and the phrase in question is strictly an English idiotism. OMISSION OF AETICLE. 663 pnrase by supplying it, ' The public is interested.' iTow, tlie grammatical category of the words community and jjub- lic in tbese examples is the same. Wby, then, do some ears demand the article in one case, and reject it in the other? The explanation is this. "When 'v^e personify common nouns used definitely in the singular number, we may omit the article. Thus Holy Church, not the Holy Church, was constantly used by old writers, because the church was in- vested with personality, regarded as a thinking, acting, authoritatire entity. For the same reason. Parliament, and in England, Ministers, used instead of the ministry, do not take the article ; nor, according to present usage, does Con- gress, as applied to our Ifational Legislature ; and in the ecclesiastical proceedings of some religious denominations, Convention and Synod are employed in the same way, on the same principle. "With respect to Congress, the omission of the article is recent, for during the devolution, while the Federal Government was a body of doubtful authority and permanence, and not yet familiar to the people as a great continuing, constitutive, and ordaining power, the phrase used was commonly ' the Congress,' and such is the form of expression in the Constitution itself. But when the Govern- ment became consolidated, and Congress was recognized as the paramount legislative power of the Union, the embodi- ment of the national will, it was personified, and the article dropped, and in like manner, the word Government is often used in the same way. jSTow in our time, as I have often had occasion to remark, society has become more intensely social ; the feeling of union, and of mutual interest, the conscious- ness of reciprocal right and duty, are strengthened, and the body of the nation is more habitually regarded as a homo- 664 ANCIENT LITEEATUEE. geneous self-conscious agent. Hence, wliat we call ' the com munity ' is conceived of as a being, not as a thing ; as an organic combination, a person in short, not as an assemblage of unrelated individuals. Accordingly, the word community is beginning to take the syntax of personal and personified nouns, and to reject the article, while public, which we em- ploy in a sense implying less of common feeling and common interest than Latin usage ascribed to it, is uniformly con- strued with the article. Tlie omission of the article before this noun, though not defensible, is not without a show of reason, and deserves less condemnation than ' is being built ' and ' in respect o/",' which are, with most of those who use them, at best but philological coxcombries. The history of the classical languages and literature affords little encouragement to those who hope for farther substantial improvement in the English speech, or even to those who are striving to arrest its degeneracy and decay. The tongues of Hellas and Home had each but a single era of vigor and perfection ; and the creative literature of Greece extends over a period but a hundred years longer than that which has elajDsed since Chaucer sang. Six centuries com- prise all that has made the Grecian intellect immortal. Roman literature, essentially borrowed, or at least imitative, and commencing only after the oracles of Hellenic genius had ceased to give responses, flourished but half as long. So, in modern times, Italy was but three hundred years a power in the world of letters, and Spain had scarcely a longer age of intellectual activity. Germany, on the contrary, has an old literature, and a new, a Nibelungenlied, and after six centuries, again a Faust ; and the present century aifords evi- dence that the mind of the Anglican race is rousing itself to EEVIVAL OF LITEEATUEE. 665 win new prizes in the arena of letters. There ,vas one cause of decadence in the ch\ssical languages, which does not exist in those of the modern Gothic stock. Greece and Rome had no foreign fountains from which to draw, when their own were waxing turbid and dry, no old literature, no record of a primitive, half-forgotten language, no long-neglected but rich mine of linguistic wealth, whence the unwrought ores of speech could yet be extracted : and hence their literature died, because their tongues were consumed, their material exhausted. If such a fate awaits the genius and the language of the Anglican people, it is but the common lot of all things human ; but we are nevertheless far from the day when the resources of our maternal speech will all have been made available, and when nothing but stereotyped repetition will be left for our wi-iters. The Saxon legions which the ISTorman irruption drove from the field may yet be rallied ; and, with the renovation of om- language, we may still hope for a bless- ing which was denied to Hellas and Latium : the revival of the glories of a national literature. LECTURE XXX. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMEKICA. The Englisli language in America is necessarily much aifected by the multitude of new objects, processes, and habits of life that qualify our material existence in this new world, which, with sometimes incongruous architecture, we are building up out of the raw stock that nature has given us ; by the great influx of foreigners speaking different languages or dialects, who, in adopting our speech, cannot fail to com- municate to it some of the peculiarities of their own ; by climatic and other merely material causes which affect the action of the organs of articulation, and of course the form of spoken words ; by the generally diffused habit of reading, which makes pronunciation and phrase more formal and also more uniform ; and doubtless by other more obscure aud yet undetected causes. Thus far, it can by no means be said that any distinct dialectic difference has established itself between England and the United States ; and it is a trite observation, that, though very few Americans speak as well as the educated slasses of Englishmen, yet not only is the average of English LANGUAGE UNIFOKM IN AHEEIOA. 661 used liere, both in speaking and writing, better than that of the great mass of the English people ; but there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, Eng- lish is more emphatically 07i6 in America than in its native land ; and if we have engrafted on our mother-speech some wide-spread corruptions, we have very nearly freed the lan- guage, in our use of it, from some vulgar and disagreeable peculiarities exceedingly common in England. So far as any tendency to divergence between the two countries exists, it manifests itseK at present, rather in the spoken than in the written dialect, in pronunciation rather than in vocabulary and grammatical structure. It can hardly be denied that a marked difference of accent is already observable ; but, though a very few words current on one side the Atlantic are either obsolete, or not yet introduced, upon the other, it would be difficult to frame a written sentence, which would be pronounced good English by competent judges in America, and condemned as imidiomatic in Eng- land. Some noticeable local and general differences between American and British English may be explained by the fact, that considerable bodies of Englishmen sometimes emi- grated from the same vicinity, and that in their new home they and their multiplied descendants have kept together and continued to employ dialectic peculiarities of their native speech, or retained words of general usage which elsewhere pei-ished. Thus the inhabitants of Eastern Virginia were early settlers, and have intermixed little with the descend- ants of other colonists or strangers. Hence, they are said to COLLOQUIALISMS. retain some Shakespearean words not populady known m other American or even English districts ; and the dialect of South-Eastern Massachusetts, which is inhabited by the im- mixed progeny of the first immigrants, is marked by corre- sponding individualities. It is to the influence of such causes that we owe some excellent words, which have now become aniversal in the United States, as, for example, the verb to wilt, which has strangely been suffered to perish in England, without leaving any substitute or equivalent behind it. In the use of colloquialisms, not only tolerated but pre- ferred in conversation, though scarcely allowable in writing, the two nations differ considerably. What our own seK- indulgences are, in this res^Ject, it is difficult for an American to say, because he becomes conscious of them, as national peculiarities, only when his attention is called to them by criticisms which good-breeding seldom permits an English- man to make. In England, on the other hand, an educated American hears, in the best circles, familiar expressions and grammatical licenses, which he would hirdself not venture to employ in America. For instance, he will most frequently hear it is me, and even it is him, instead of it is I, it is he. Some English grammarians think the former of these expres- sions defensible ; and, in the analogy of the French and Dan- ish languages, where the corresponding forms are not merely allowable, but obligatory, there lies an argument of some weight ; but this apparent grammatical solecism is not sanc- tioned by Anglo-Saxon usage, or the authority of good writers. The most important peculiarity of American English is a laxity, irregularity, and confusion in the use of particles. The same thing is, indeed, observable in England, but not to GRAMMATICAL DIFFEEENCES. 669 the same extent, tliougli some gross departui'es from idio- matic propriety, sucli as different to, for different from, are common in England, ■whicli none but very ignorant persons wonld be guilty of in America. These may seem trifling matters, and in languages abounding in inflections, they might be so ; but in a syntax, depending, like ours, so much upon the right use of particles, strict accuracy in this partic- ular becomes seriously important. In the tenses of the verbs, I am inclined to think that well-educated Americans conform more closely to grammat- ical propriety than the corresponding class in England. At least, the proper use of the compound preterite is more gen- eral "with us. In English writers of some pretensions, we meet such phrases as ' this plate Kas 'been engraved by Albert Diirer,' ' this palace has been designed by Michael Angelo, for was engraved, was designed. Such an abuse of the proper office of the preterite is never heard in America. In general, I think we may say, that in point of naked syn- tactical accuracy, the English of America is not at all inferior to that of England ; but we do not discriminate so precisely in the meaning of words, nor do we habitually, in either con- versation or in writing, express ourselves so gracefully, or employ so classic a diction, as the English. Our taste in language is less fastidious, and our licenses and inaccuracies are more frequently of a character indicative of want of re- finement and elegant culture, than those we hear in educated society in KnglaiML The caasea. «£ fee-differences in pronunciation are partly physical, and therefore difficult, if not impossible, to resist ; and partly owing to a difference of circumstances. Of this latter class of influences, the universality of reading in Amer- 6Y0 PEONTTNCIATION. ica is the most obvious and importan: The most marked difference is, perhaps, in the length, or prosodical quantity, of the vowels ; and both the causes I have mentioned concur to produce this effect. We are said to drawl our words by protracting the vowels, and giving them a more diphthongal sound than the English. ]S"ow, an Englishman who reads, will habitually utter his vowels more fully and distinctly than his countryman who does not ; and, upon the same prin- ciple, a nation of readers, like the Americans, will pronounce more deliberately and clearly than a people, so large a pro- portion of- whom are unable to read, as in England. From our universal habit of reading, there results not only a greater distinctness of articulation, but a strong tendency to assimilate the spoken to the written language. Thus Amer- icans incline to give to every syllable of a written word a dis- tinct enunciation ; and the popular habit is to say dic-tion- ar-y, mil-it-ar-y, with a secondary accent on the penultimate, instead of sinking the third syllable, as is so common in Eng- land. There is no doubt something disagreeably stiff in an anxious and affected conformity to the very letter of orthog- raphy ; and to those accustomed to a more hurried utterance, we may seem to drawl, when we are only giving a full ex- pression to letters, which, though etymologically important, the English habitually slur over, sputtering out, as a Swedish satirist says, one-half of the word, and swallowing the other. The tendency to make the long vowels diphthongal is noticed by foreigners as a peculiarity of the orthoepy of our lan- guage ; and this tendency will, of course, be strengthened by any cause which produces greater slowness and fulness of articulation. Besides the influence of the habit of reading, there is some reason to think that climate is affecting ova PEONTTNCIATION. 671' articulation. In spite of the greater coldness of our winters, our flora shows that the climate of even our JSTorthein States belongs, upon the whole, to a more Southern type than that of England. Li Southern latitudes, at least within the tem- perate zone, articulation is generally much more distinct than in ]!Torthern regions. Witness the pronunciation of Spanish, Italian, Turkish, as compared with English, Danish, and German. Participating, then, in the physical influences of a Southern climate, we have contracted something of the more distinct articulation tliat belongs to a dry atmosphere, and a clear sky. And this view of the case is conflrmed by the fact that the inhabitants of the Southern States incline, like the people of Southern Europe, to throw the accent towards the end of the word ; and thus, like all nations that use that accentuation, bring out all the syllables. This we observe very commonly in the comparative Northern and Southern pronunciation of proper names. I might exemplify by citing familiar instances ; \nit, lest that should be invidious, it may suflice to say that, not to mention more important changes, many a iS"orthern member of Congress goes to "Washington a dactyl or a trochee, and comes home an ampM- hrach, or an iambus. Why or how external physical causes, as climate and modes of life, should affect pronunciation, we cannot say ; but it is evident that material influences of some sort are producing a change in our bodily constitution, and we are fast acquiring a distinct national Anglo-American type. That the delicate organs of ai'ticulation should partici- pate in such tendencies, is altogether natural ; and the opera- tion of the causes which give rise to them, is palpable even in our hand-writing, which, if not uniform with itself, is gen- 672 PEONUNCIATION. erally, Bevertheless, so unlike common Englisli script as to be readily distinguished from it. To the joint operation, then, of these two causes, universal reading and climatic influences, we must ascribe our habit of dwelling upon vowel and diphthongal sounds, or drawling, if that term be insisted upon. This peculiarity, it must be admitted, is suificiently disagreeable, particularly to a deli- cate and fastidious native ear, to which natural sensitiveness and intimate familiarity have rendered the language intelli- gible enough, even when not pronounced with marked dis- tinctness ; but it is often noticed by foreigners as both making us more readily imderstood by them in speaking our own tongue, and as connected with a flexibility of organ, which enables us to acquire a better pronunciation of other languages than is usual with Englishmen.* In any case, as, in spite of the old adage, speech is given us that we may make our- selves understood, our drawling, however prolonged, is pre- ferable to the nauseous, foggy, mumbling thiclcaess of articu- lation which characterizes the cockney, and is not unfre- quently affected by Englishmen of a better class. It is to the same tendency to a prolonged and conse- quently distinct pronunciation of the vowels, that we are to ascribe the general retention of some, and the partial preser- vation of other, vowel sounds in America, now pretty uni- * The influence of the habit of full and distinct articulation in the orthoepy of the native language upon our pronunciation of foreign tongues, is well exem- plified in the readiness with which Italians acquire a good English accent. None of the Romance, or even Gothic nations, learn to speak English so well as the Italians. The same remark applies with great force to the Turks. The articula- tion of the Turkish is so distinct, that upon fii-st hearing it, you follow the speaker, syllable by syllable. The Turks acquire the sounds of foreign tongues with great facility. The common seal-engravers of Constantinople, upon hearing a foreign name, will at once repeat it, and write it down for engraving, with as close a conformity to the true pronunciation as the Arabic alphabet admits of. PEONUNCIATION. 673 formly banished out of tlie orthoepy of English writers on pronunciation, though not yet quite out of the actual speech of the British people. One of these is the sound of o in none, intermediate between the participle known and the noun nmi. This is rather peculiar to New England, and is used in coat, which is not made to rhyme with quote or hoot, and in many other words. The other is the long e in there, which Walker and his sequela make identical with a in fate. Tliis latter soiuid, as I hare before remarked, is by most Continental phonologists justly regarded as distinct from the a in fate, and as properly the long vowel corresponding to the short a in carry J but it seems destined to extinction, and America is in this respect following the example of England. There is, in many parts of the United States, a strange confusion with regard to the use of the letter r. Indeed, scarcely any consonantal sound undergoes so many modifica- tions in pronunciation in different countries as this. In some languages it is pronoimced with a vibration of the uvula, and is at the same time distinctly guttural ; in others, it is articu- lated with a rapid vibration of the tongue, and a strong emis- sion of the breath ; in the Sandwich Islands it is scarcely distinguishable from I, and though marked by the rough breathing in some parts of the British islands, in others it is but an aspiration almost as inarticulate as h. The Romans called this consonant the lltera canina, the snarling letter, and the modem Italians pronounce it with a very forcible trill. I believe the pronunciation I mentioned as character- istic of some American districts, is not peculiar to the United States, but occurs also in England. It consists in suppress- ing the r where it should be heard, and adding it where it should not. One need not go a day's journey from New York to find educated persons who call the municipal rule 48 674: PEONtrNCIATIOJT. oP action the lor, and yet style the passage from cne room to another a doah. Analogous to this are two English vulgarisms, from which we are almost wholly free. IS.0 American young lady la- ments that she " never knows when to hexasperate the haitch) " nor is any cis-atlantic Weller embarrassed as to whether he shall spell veal with a we. To ears accustomed to discrimi- nate between the use and omission of the h, and between the letters v and w, it seems strange that they can ever be con- founded ; but I believe they are nowhere so clearly distin- guished as in the United States. The Greeks and Romans, as I have observed in a former lecture, had the same embar- rassment as the vulgar English with respect to the h ; and it finally disappeared from the articulation of the Southern Romance languages altogether. Were it not for the influence of printing, the rough breathing of the h would probably long before this have ceased to be heard in English ; and it is to the same cause alone that we are to ascribe the perpetua- tion of the distinction between the v and the w, one or the other of which has become obsolete in the pronunciation of most languages which originally possessed them both. But to return : there are other difierences between our American accent, and that of the English, which are as yet too fleeting and subtile to admit of definition ; and in fact we differ as widely among oiirselves in this particular as any of us do from the people of Great Britain. So far as these shades of articulation can be characterized, they seem to me to lie chiefly in the intonation ; and I think no Eastern man can hear a native of the Mississippi Valley use the voca- tive, or observe the Southern pronunciation of ejaculatory or other emphatic phrases, without perceiving a very marked TENDENCIES TO MYERGENCE. 675 though often indescribable, difference between their and our utterance of the same things. The integrity, and future harmonious development of our common Anglican speech in England and America, is threat- ened by a multitude of disturbing influences. Language, being a living organic thing, is, by the very condition of its vital existence, by the law of life itself, necessarily always in a progressive, or at least a fluctuating state. To fix it, there- fore, to petrify it into immutable forms, is impossible ; and, were it possible, would be fatal to it as a medimn of inter- communication suited to the ever-changeful life of man. But, at the same time, something can and should be done to check its propensity to wandering gi'owth, and especially the too rapid divergence of what may ultimately become the two great dialects of the English tongue. At present, the pre- dominance of the commercial and the political over the social relations of the two countries, makes the unity of our written speech especially important ; but the wonderful increase in the facilities of travel, destined perhaps to he superseded by other still swifter conveyances, is constantly multiplying the means and the occasions of personal communication between the two peoples ; and, indeed, we are already in time, almost in space, nearer to England than to the remoter borders of our own wide-spread empire. The sea is, even now, no longer what Horace found the Adriatic— a gulf of dissociation — but a bond of union, a pathway of rapid intercommunion, and, with increased frequency of individual intercourse, grows also the importance of the identity of our spoken tongue. Let me, therefore, express my entire dissent from the views of those who would imbitter the rivalries of commerce by the jealousies of a discordant dialect — who would hasten the process of sepa- ration betwopn the stock and the off-shoot, and cut off the sons 676 TENDENCIES TO DIVEEGENCE. of the Pilgrim and the Cavalier from their common inheritance in Chaucer and Spenser, and Bacon and Shakespeare, and Mil- ton and Fuller, bj Americanizing, and consequently denatural- izing, the language in which our forefathers have spoken, and prayed, and sung, for a thousand years. If we caimot pre- vent so sad a calamity, let us not voluntarily accelerate it. Let us not, with malice prepense, go about to republicanize our orthography and our syntax, our grammars and our dic- tionaries, our nursery hymns and our Bibles, until, by the force of irresistible influences, our language shall have revo- lutionized itself. When our own metaphysical inquirers shall establish a wiser philosophy than that of Bacon ; when a Columbian Shakespeare shall awake to create a new and transcendent genus of dramatic composition ; and when the necessities of a loftier inspiration shall impel our home-born bards to the framing of a nobler diction than the poetic dia- lect of Albion, it will be soon enough to repudiate that com- munity of speech, which, in spite of the keenly conflicting interests of politics and of commerce, makes us still one with the people of England. The inconveniences resulting from the existence of local dialects are very serious obstacles to national progress, to the growth of a comprehensive and enlightened patriotism, to the creation of a popular literature, and to the diffusion of general culture. In a state where the differences of speech are numerous and great, the community is divided into so many disjointed fragments, that the notion of a common- wealth can scarcely be developed ; for speech is the great medium of sympathy between man and man ; and even the animosities of rival religions are not more deep-seated and irreconcilable than the jealousies and repugnancies, which never fail to exist between neighboring peoples who have no DIALECTS. 677 common tongue. Where there are numerous dialects, but few can be so far cultivated as to possess a living literature, and many even will exist only in the form of unwritten speech. Poverty, want of opportunity, sectional pride, will prevent most of those who have no written language from acquiring the dialect of their more fortunate neighbors who possess a literatm-e ; and but few intelligent philanthropists will occupy themselves with the intellectual or the spiritual interests of those with whom, though of the same race, and the same commonwealth, they can communicate only through an interpreter. What we regard as distortions of our mother- tongue are more offensive to us than the widest diversities between it and unallied languages ; and we regard a fellow- citizen who speaks a marked provincial English with a con- tempt and aversion, which we do not bestow upon the foreigner who speaks no English at all. The unhappy jeal- ousies which have a hundred times defeated the hopes of Italian patriots, are very intimately connected with their dif- ferences of language. Every province, every great city has its dialect, often unintelligible, always ridiculous, to the na- tives of a different locality, and one finds in the popular literature of Italy — as, for instance, in the Seechia Kapita — frequent exhibitions of a mutual hate, apparently imbittered quite as much by differences of speech, as by rivalries of interest. Of course, aU educated persons know the Tuscan, which the great Florentines, Dante and Petrarch and Bocca- cio, made the language of literature ; but, as Byron says, " Few Italians speak the right Etruscan ; " and in Sicily, the people repudiate not only the Tuscan dia- lect, but the Italian name. Fifteen or twenty of the provin- cial dialects have been reduced to writing, and more or less 678 LINGUISTIC CHANGE. made known by tlie press ; but one only has become a me- dium of communication beyond its own native borders. Every Italian, then, lias two languages, one for his home, his fireside, his friends, the narrow plain or valley or mountain he calls his country ; another, for all the world without ; and he bestows the unkindly name of foreigner upon even his brother Italian, whose speech bewrays him as a native of an adjacent province. The inconveniences of local dialects are infinite to the people of a country divided by them ; and nothing but per- sonal observation can enable us to realize the annoyances of a traveller who, desiring to extend his observations beyond the sphere of the hotel and the museum, and to learn some- thing of the rural and domestic life of the people, finds his curiosity hourly bafB.ed by the impossibihty of free commu- nication with the humble classes, in many European coun- tries, where the dialect changes almost at every post. The philanthropist may extract some consolation out of this confusion, in the reflection that the want of a community of speech, in countries of ancient, deep-rooted and fixed insti- tutions, though a great, -is not an unmixed, evil. Like the corresponding peculiarities of local costume, occupation, and habits, it has its use in the scheme of Providence, as a means of checking the spread of popular excitements, and a too rapid movement of social changes, which, though ultimately beneficial, yet, like the rains of heaven, produce their best effect, when neither very hastily precipitated, nor very fre- quently repeated. We cannot, upon either side of the ocean, expect to be exempt from that general law of language, which, more than any thing else, argues it to be man's work, not his nature — the law of perpetual change. Man himself is immortal, DIAUECTS. 679 immutable. His passions, his appetites, his powers, are everywhere and at all times, in kind, almost in degree, sub- stantially the same ; but whatsoever he fashions is injBnite in variety of structure, frail in architecture, unstable in form, and transitory in duration. All this is eminently ti'ue of his language, and therefore, I repeat, to this law our speech miist bow. But Ave may still avail ourselves of a great va- riety of means and circumstances peculiar to modern society, to retard the decay of our tongue, and to prevent its dissipa- tion into a multitude of independent dialects. The original causes of dialectic difference are very ob- scure ; and, with the exception of those which depend on the physical influences of climate, they are usually very restricted in their territorial range. In countries naturally divided into numerous districts separated by mountains, rivers, marshes, or other obstacles to free intercommunication, every isolated locality has usually its own peculiarities of speech, more or less distinctly marked in proportion as the community is more or less cut off from intercourse with the nation at large. As the consti-uction of roads, canals, and other means of transport, opens new channels and increased facilities of com- merce, these peculiarities disappear ; and in all parts of the civilized world, such internal improvements are rapidly ex- tending, and numerous local dialects, and even some inde- pendent languages, seem doomed to a speedy extinction. The causes which tend to extirpate existing dialectic pe- culiarities are even more powerfully influential in prevent- ing the formation of diversities ; and the physical character of our own territory is such as to encourage the hope that our speech, which, if not absolutely homogeneous, is now employed by 25,000,000 of men, in one unbroken mass, with a uniformity of which there is perhaps no other example, will 680 • HAEMONIZING INFLUENCES. escape that division whicli has shattered some laagnagcs of the Old World into fragments like those of the confusion of Babel. The geography of the United States presents few localities suited to human habitation, that are at the same time inaccessible to modern improved modes of communication. The carriage-road, the railway, the telegraph, the mails, the newspaper, penetrate to every secluded nook, address them- selves to every free inhabitant, and speak everywhere one and the same dialect. Independently of the influences of physical improve- ment, or rather, perhaps, as a fruit of it, there are circum- stances in the condition of modern society which are con- stantly active in the eradication of its minor differences, and in producing a general amalgamation of all its con- stituents, and a harmony between all instrumentalities not inherently discordant. Men, though individually less sta- tionary, less attached to locality, are becoming more gre- garious in the mass ; the social element is more active, the notion of the solidarity and essential unity of particular na- tions, if not of the race, is more a matter of general conscious- ness ; the interests of different classes and districts are more closely interwoven, and the operations of governments are more comprehensive and diffused than at any former histor- ical epoch. Look, for instance, at the influence of the mone- tary corporations connected with finance, with internal im- provements, with fire-insurajice, and with manufactures. The negotiability of their capital diffuses their proprietorship through wide regions of territory, through all classes of society. Their administration requires frequent communica- tion between their shareholders, and between the direction and its numerous agents, as well as Avith the millions who in one way and another are affected by their operations, and INFLUENCE OF FEINTING. 681 thus every one of these corporations, mischievous as in many respects their influence is, serves as a bond of connection, a means and an occasion of more intimate communication be- tween city and country, rude and cultivated, rich and poor. Add to these our great charities, the crowning glory of this age, which combine the efforts, harmonize the sympathies, and bring together in free communion thousands, who, but for such attractions, had never been led to act or think or speak in unison ; and further, our political associations, which gather their annual nip-iads to listen to the living voice of eloquence from the mouth of one orator nursed on the banks of the Mississippi, of another who learned his English in the lumber camps of Maine, and of a third who dwells by the lakes of the great !N"orth-"\V"est — all speaking, and so all teaching, one dialect of one tongue. In like manner, our Government, acting through its army, its navy, its revenue- service, its post oflice, is continually mingling, in all its de- partments, the separate ingredients of our population, com- muning daily with the remotest corners, everywhere employ- ing, and forcing all ahke to employ one form of syntax, one standard of speech, one medium of thought. I believe the art of printing, and especially the periodical press, together with the general diffusion of education, which the press alone has made possible, is the most eflScient instru- mentality in producing uniformity of language and extir- pating distinctions of dialect. With modem facilities of transit and transport, and the present great tendency to cen- tralization, the leading city periodicals are sure of almost universal circulation. They are more read and more quoted than any other sources of information. The improved accu- racy of reporters makes the newspapers channels through 682 INFLUENCE OP FEINTING. which not the thoughts only, but almost the very accents of popular speakers, are published to the nation ; and so swift is our postal communication, that words uttered to-day by a great orator in New York, are repeated to-morrow in every hamlet of a territory as large as the Spanish peninsula. The influence of printing, and of a general ability to read, in first producing, and then maintaining, a uniformity of dia- lect, is remarkably and curiously exemplified in the Christian population of Hellas and Asia Minor. The modern Greeks, as they are called, for reasons of con- venience, and because of their commvmity of speech, are a people, or rather group of fragments of peoples, very diverse in their origin, and very much scattered in their abodes, ex- tending through the whole Turkish empire, as well as the Hellenic territory proper, living in small communities, often separated by wide distances or by impassable natural bar- riers, surrounded by tribes speaking very different languages, and therefore exposed to continual and discordant corruptions of speech ; and having, moreover, in general, little relation- ship to the old Hellenic race, no common political interests, and little social or commercial intercourse. Their only bond of real union is their creed, which among them supplies the same place that community of blood does in other nations. The ancient Greeks, occupying the same localities, much more nearly allied in blood, more closely connected politi- cally, possessing greater facilities and motives for personal intercommunication, often gathering from their remotest col- onies at the great metropolitan festivals of Athens, of Corinth, and other Hellenic cities, and, above all, possessed of a com- mon literature, whose choicest dainties were the daily bread of every Greek intellect, nevertheless, not only spoke, but INFLtJENCE OF FEINTING. 683 wrote, in dialects distinguished by palpable differences of articulation, inflection, syntax and vocabulary. The modern Greeks, on the other hand, both speak and write, not indeed with entire uniformity, but, saving some limited, though re- markable local exceptions, yet with a general similarity of dialect, that is very seldom found in languages whose terri- torial range is so great. Now, the influence which has been most active in pro- ducing this remarkable uniformity, is the circulation of printed books and journals employing the same vocabulary, and following the same orthography and the same syntax. Like effects have resulted from the same cause in Germany. The dialects are dying out, just in proportion as the more general dissemination of instruction multiplies readers, and encourages the diffusion of printed matter. If printing has not yet conferred the same benefit upon Italy, it is because the detestable tyramiies, under which the peninsula has groaned for centuries, have fettered the press and excluded the masses from the advantages of education. Where there are neither books nor jom-nals, there can be no readers ; and where language is not controlled and harmonized by litera- ture, the colloquial speech will be variable, irregular and dis- crepant. Of all countries known in history, the North American republic is most conspicuously marked by the fusion, or rather the absence of rank and social distinctions, by com- munity of interests, by incessant and all-pervading intercom- munication, by the universal diffusion of education, and the abundant facilities of access, not only to the periodical con- duits, but to the permanent reservoirs of knowledge. The condition of England is in all these respects closely assimi- lated to that of the United States ; and not only the methods, 684 INTLtnSNCE OF PEINTING. but the instruments, of popular instruction are fast becoming the same in both ; and there is a growing conviction among the wise of the two great empires, that the highest interests of both will be promoted by reciprocal good will and unre- stricted intercourse, perilled by jealousies and estrangement. Favored, then, by the mighty elective affinities, the pow- erful harmonic attractions, which subsist between the Amer- icans and the Englishmen as brothers of one blood, one speech, one faith, we may reasonably hope that the Anglican tongue on both sides of the Atlantic, as it grows in flexibil- ity, comprehensiveness, expression, wealth, will also more and more clearly manifest the organic unity of its branches, and that national jealousies, material rivalries, narrow inter- ests, will not disjoin and shatter that great instrument of social advancement, which God made one, as he made one the spirit of the nations that use it. 685 APPEInTDIX. 1. p. 30. L y d e n , a Saxon word for language. There is a confusion between the Saxon lyden, (Iseden or leden,) the Old English leden, and the national appellative Latin, a parallel to which is found also in modern Spanish. Lyden, (laeden or leden,) seems to be allied to the Anglo-Saxon hlyd, gehlyd, a sound, and hlud, loud, to the Danish L y d , the Swedish 1 j u d , and the German L a u t , (noun,) and 1 a u t , (adjective,) all involving the same idea ; and probably also to the Icelandic h Ij 6 S , a sound, a song, a trumpet ; which latter word also signifies, oddly, the absence of sound] namely, silence. The three Saxon forms of this word are employed also for Latin. Either this is a confusion of meaning arising from similarity of form, or lyden is a derivative oi Latin, as the language par excellence, and so not allied to the other Gothic words above cited, unless, indeed, we suppose Latin itself to be derived from a root meaning an articulate sound, or language. In Spanish, especially in the Spanish colonies, an African or Indian who has learned Spanish, and acquired some of the arts of civilization, so as to make him useful as a servant, is called ladino, and Old Castilian was sometimes styled Ladino. On the other hand, Latin was used in Catalan to signify a foreign language gen- erally. Thus in B. D'Esclot, cap. xxxv. : " vench denant lo rey, e agenollas a ell, e saludal en son 1 a t i ; " and cap. xxxvili. : "ecridarcn molt fortement en Uur I a t i ; " "en son 1 a t i , " and " en llur 1 a t i ," signifying respectively, in his lan- guage, in their language, which in this case was Arabic. Latin was also very commonly employed in the same sense in Old French and Italian. From this use of the word, muy ladino came to mean, in Spanish, a great linguist, one knowing many foreign languages. The Old English latiner, by corruption 686 APPENDIX. latimer, an interpreter or dragoman, is of similar derivation.. Thus, in Eicliard Coer de Lion, Weber ii. 97. Anon stoode up her latymer And auusweryd Aleyn Trenchemer. 2. P. 30. Etymology of Gospel. The phrases, godspell that guoda, the good gospel, Heliand, 1, 17, and spel godes, the word of God, H. 17, 13, 41, 15, 19 and 81, 8, seem to show that m the Continental Old-Saxon, god-spell was derived from go d, God, and spell. Schilter adapts the same etymology for the gotspellon of Tatian; gotspeUota thomo folke, evangelizabat populo, c. xlii. 25 ; zi gotspellone Gotes rihhi, evangelizare regnum Dei, c. xxii. 4, as also for gotspel, predigonti gotspel rihhes, prsedicans evangelium regni, xxii. 1. 3. P. 33. Sign of parity or brotherhood. Dampier, voyages, 1703, i. 359, says : " They (the people of Mindanao) would always be praising the Enghsh, as declaring that the Enghsh and the Mindanaians were all one. This they exprest by putting their two fore-fingers close together, and saying that the English and Mindanaians were samo, same, that is all one." In the carious Livre des Fails de Jean Bouciqiiaut, P. I. u. xxv., it is stated that when the French knights were taken prisoners by the Turks, at the battle of Nicopolis, the Count de Nevers saved Boucicaut from execution by claiming him as a brother, or near friend, by the same sign : " Si I'advisa Dieu tout soubdainement de joindre les deux doigts ensemble de ses deux mains en regardant le Basat, ct fit signe qu'il luy estoit comme son propre fr^re et qu'il le rcpitast ; lequel signe le Basat entendit tantot, et le fit laisser.'' 4. P. 45. Use of dative, plural or singular, as name of Scandinavian towns. In Old-Northern it was very common to use the dative in naming a place, in constructions where the idiom of other languages would require the nominative. Thus, instead of saying, ' that estate was called Steinn,' it was more usual to employ the dative ; skhsivh^Xd Stein i, that estate was called, at Steinn. So,{)ar er heitir i Ripum, at a place called Ripar. In Vatnsdffila Saga, k. 16, wo have, d SriitastiiSum het J)at er Hriiti bid, it was called ai Ilrutastatar, where Hruti lived ; in the Saga of Finnbogi hinn rami, k. 3, h ann bid |)ar sem heitir o< Toptum, he Uved where it is called ai 2b/»iar ; in Magndsar goSa S.iga, k. 52, bj 6 * * {> a r sem d StoTchum heitir. APPENDIX. 687 ma6r "* * er h&t {)rAndr, there lived, where it is called, at StoTchar, a man who hight Thraiid. Such examples might be multiplied by hundreds. 5. P. 58. Menage's etymologies. A French epigrammatist says, upon one of Menage's derivations: Alphana vient Seqmis, sans doute, Mais il faut avouer aussi Qu'en venant de la jusqu'ici II a bien changd sur la route. 6. P. 64. Portuguese word s a u d a d e . The Portuguese, as appears from a passage in the Leal Conselheiro of King Dom Duarte, prided themselves on this word as early as the fifteenth century. Se algua pessoa per meu service e mandado de raym se parte, e dclla sento s u y d a d e , certo e que de tal partyda nora ey sanha, nojo, pesar, desprazer, nem avorrecymento, ca prazme de seer, e pesarmya se nom fosse ; e por se partir alguas vezes vem tal s u y d a d e que faz chorar, e sospirar como se fosse de nojo. E porcm me parece este norae de suydade tarn proprio que latym, nem outra linguagem que eu saiba, nom ho pera tal scntido semelhante. Leal Conselheiro, Paris, 1842, p. 161. The editor of the Leal Conselheiro quotes a curious passage to the same effect from Dom Francisco Manoel. Epanaphoras, 1675, pp. 286, 287. The orthography, saudade, became established about the beginning of the sixteenth century. The forms, s o i d a d e and s o e d a d e , which occur in early Portuguese writers, countenance the derivation from Lat. solus, but the existence of a similar noun, as well as of cognate verbs of allied signification, in the Scandinavian languages, suggests the possibility that they all belong alike to some Gothic radical. Ihre thinks the Scandinavian words may be from the root of the verb to seek, in analogy with a figurative sense of the Latin q u iE r c r e , and cites this couplet from Horace, Carm. iii. 24. Virtutem incolumem odimus ; Sublatam ex oculis q u 83 rim us invidi. Here quEerimus means regret, misx, long for, and this use of tiie word is common in the classic writers. 7. P. 67. Etymology of Granada. This derivation of Granada was, I believe, first suggested by Calepin, and it is adopted by Facciolati, and by some Spanish authors, as, for example, by Pellicer, El Fenix, 34, E, but the name has been generally supposed to be of APPENDIX. Arabic origin. In the chroniolea of the Middle Ages, it is generally written Gernatha or Garnatha, and upon the supposition that this is the true orthography, various absurd Arabic etymologies have been suggested, but as it appears from the Espana Sagrada, new edition, vol. xxix., pp. 201, 209, that Granada in Catalonia was called Granatum in the tenth and eleventh centuries, I think that the form Garnatha is a Moorish corruption, and that Calepin's conjecture is probably well founded. 8. P. 69. Tyrian purple produced by shell-fish. Aelfric, Homilies, ii., 253-4, uses wolcn-read for scarlet in giving the narrative of the Passion, where Matth. xxvii. 28 has, in the Greek text, XAot/iiJSa ROKKivriv. Wolcn, wolcen, weoluc, weolc, the modern Eng. whelk, is a shell-fish, in this case, the Tyrian murex. This root is employed in Anglo-Saxon in many compounds denoting purple or scarlet, and the Anglo- Saxons must of course have been acquainted with the source from which the ancient purples were obtained. 9. P. "70. Various colors obtained from the murex. Many shades of Tyrian purple are enumerated in Pliny. Nat. Hist., ix. 62, 65, (Holland's Trans., ix. 38-41.) 10 • P. 70. SJcy in sense of cloud. * * * a certeine winde * That blewe so hidously and hie. That it ne left not a skie In all the welkin long and brode. Chattcer, Hat swa hwa swa sloge hcort oSde hind'e, |)at hine man sceolde blendian. * * Eac he s Ee 1 1 c be |)am haran, {)at hi mosten freo faran." I know not why we should question the etymological relationship between 1 se g d e and laga, and if these words are connected, there is no reason for going to the Latin for the derivation of law. IT. P. 131. Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons before the creation of a national literature. Beowulf, and some other Saxon poems, contain strong internal evidence of having been, in part at least, composed before the diffusion of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons. But in the form in which we have the poem of Beo- wulf, it is indisputably of a later date, nor is there any sufiScient ground for sup- posing that it was written down in the heathen period. Whether it previously existed otherwise than as a prose saga, we have no means of determining ; and, as a poetical composition, it is, primd facie at least, the work of a Christian bard. 18. P. 136. Comparison of adjectives. Even the names of the cardinal points were formerly sometimes compared by the augmentative method. Thus, in the curiously minute account of the comet APPENDIX. 691 of the eleventh year of Edward IV. in Warkworth's Chronicle, printed by the Cam. Sec., it is said : » * " and it arose enter and esier, till it arose full este, and rather and rather.'' P. 22. 19. P. 136. Comparison of adjectives. Gil lays down these rules for the compiirisou of adjectives: Per «r et est non comparantur verbalia activa in ing ; ut luving amans ; neo passiva ; ut luved amatus, taught doctus ; uti uec composita cum abl, fal, les, Ijk, * * ; neque etiam ilia quae per jv, {-ive,) ish, et multa quae per Ij, (-?y,) aut us * " *. Hue etiam refer materialia, ut goldn aureus, stoni lapideus : item quas tempus significant et ordinem * * ; ut wintrj hibernus, second, third. Et quam- vis aliquando audias stonier, aut fdmuser, tamen pro libertate loquendi tolera- bilius erit sermo, potius quam laudabilis scriptura. Per signa tamen omnia ferfi quse diximus comparantur ; ut mor luving^ most luving, &c. Alex. Gil, Logon. Ang. 1621, p. 85. It will be observed that with Gil the mode of comparison depended on the ending, not the length of the adjective. 20. P. 139. Insignificance of Celtic element. Comparative philologists draw inferences from the coincidence of parts of the Gothic and the Celtic vocabularies, which seem to me by no means warranted. Nobody doubts that both these classes of speech belong to the Indo-European family, and therefore very many words must be common to them all ; but the supposition, that in such cases the Goth borrowed from the Celt, is in most instances contrary to historical probability, and the converse is, most likely, quite as often the fact'. In the etymological research of the present day, the historical method of investigatioi* is unhappily much neglected, and ethnologists are constructing historical systems on the foundation of linguistic theory, instead of controlling and rectifying such theory by historical evidence. The comparative philology of the languages of Europe, in their actual de- velopment in the Middle Ages, will ultimately prove one of the most fertile sources of instruction upon the true theory and true history of human speech, and we shall find that many Gothic and many Romance words, which have hith- erto been referred to very distant sources, are really contributions which the one has borrowed from the other. Tacitus, De Mor. Ger. c. 26, observes : " Auctumni perindo nomen ac bona ignorantur," they have no names for autumn or for its fruits ; and Ihre, and many other etymologists, suppose that the Dutch oogst, the German ohst, the Danish and Swedish host, are from the Latin name of the harvest month 692 APPENDIX. August. So the G. frucht is in all probability the Latin fructus, and the Anglo-Saxon m u n t can hardly be other than the Latin m o n s. 21. F. 142. Etymology of the Portuguese feiti90. The Spanish etymological correlative of feiti^o is hechizo, A in mod. Sp. often corresponding to Port, f, ch to Port. t. Ihre points out the resem- blance of these words to the Swedish h e x a , a witch, and suggests that they may have been introduced into Spain by the Goths. 23. p. 143. Etymology of coco. Oviedo (Ramusio, III. 64, A., Purchas, III. 982) says : " This first was called coco for this cause, that when it is taken from the place where it cleaveth fast to the tree, there are seene two holes, and above them two other naturall holes, which altogether do represent the gesture and figure of the cattes called mam- mons, that is monkeys, when they cry, which [the cry] the Indians call coca." But De Barros is a higher authority than Oviedo, and his derivation is the more probable. 23. P.' 143. Etymology of coir. The derivation given in the text is erroneous. C a i r is, no doubt, an In- dian word, and it is the native term for the fibre of the coco-nut husk. 24. P. 164. Million, and other collective words denoting large numbers, wanting in Anglo-Saxon. In Aelfric's Homily on the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, Thorpe's edition, i. 348, we find a singular mode of expressing great numbers, by the multiplica- tion of 3 u s e n d , the highest collective numeral in the vocabulary : "Ten dusend siSan hundfealde Susenda himmid wunodon:" ten thousand times hundredfold thousands dwelt with him. 25. P. 155. Anglo-Saxon words in English., The reader will find the general relations of the Anglo-Saxon to the vocabu- lary of modern English ably discussed in an article in the Edinburgh Eeview for 1839. 36. P. 155, note. Furthest for first. Gower uses this form : And when he weneth have an ende. Than is he furthest to beginne. Conf. Am., Pauli, II. 2. 27. P. 158. Adverbs in -ly. In a dialogue on Free-Masonry, ascribed to Henry VI., and printed in the Lives of Leland, Hearne, and Wood, Oxford, 1772, vol. I. 97, headly is used for chiefly. APPENDIX, 693 Quest. What mote ytt [Free-masonry] be ? Ans. Ytt beeth the Skylle of Nature, the uuderstondynge of the myghte that ys herynne, and its sondrye worekynges ; sonderlychc, the Skylle of Keo- tenynges, of Waightes, and Metynges, and the treu miinere of Faconnynge al thynges for Mannes use, headlye, Dwellynges, and Buyldynges of alle iCmdes," &c. &c. 28. P. 180. Words and phrases, now vulgar, often in good use in old writers. Party, for person, now an oSfensivo vulgarism, occurs in the Memorials of the Empire of Japan, published by the Hakluyt Society, p. 55, and very fre- quently in Holland, and other authors of his time. " Apelles, not knowing the name of the partie who had brought him thither," &c. &c. * * " but the king presently tooke knowledge thereby of the partie that had played this pranke by him," &c &c. Holland's Pliny, 11. 539, E. 29. P. 181. Supposed Americanisms often old English. Dampier, 1703, I. 292, has " clear round," and II. 5, fix, apparently in the New England sense. "We went ashore and dried our deaths, cleaned our guns, dried our ammunition, and fixt ourselves against our enemies if we should be attacked." To feel of, occurs in Knox's Ceilon, 1681. "They usually gather them before they be full ripe, boreing an hole in them, hdA feeling of the kernel, they know if they be ripe enough for their purpose." P. 14. Tonguey (tungy), formerly common, and still sometimes used, in New England, in the sense of fluent in speech, eloquent, occurs in the older text of the Wycliffite version of Ecclus. viii. 4, ix. 25. The later text has janglere instead. 30. P. 18i; Number of words in English. In this estimate — one hundred thousand — I include technical terms only so far as they have become a part of the general vocabulary of all cultivated per- sons. If we add all the specud terms of every science and every art, the num- ber of English words would be far beyond one hundred thousand. 31. P. 184. Penny. Weidenfeld, Secrets of the Adepts, uses penny for duodecimal part : " Of the white likewise, one was to be of ten-penny, another of eleven, another of sterling silver," &c. &c. Address to Students, (15.) Here ten-penny silver is silver ten-twelfths fine. 32. Pp. 184, 185. Deficiencies of Dictionaries. To express the relation between an object and the material of which it is made, the French use the prepositions d e and en; as, uu pont de pierre, 694 APPENDIX. un palais en marbre, une statue en bronze. Doubtless, the pre- position d e is the more proper of the two ; but, nevertheless, c n is very fre- quently employed instead, both colloquially, and by many of the best writers in the language. But neither in the French-English Dictionary of Fleming and Tibbins, nor in the much more complete Dictionnaire National of Beschcrelle, is this use of the preposition e n noticed. 33. P. 185, note. Origin of phrase, pair of stairs. In the Supplement to the last edition of "Webster, it is suggested that this expression originated in the use of pair to designate, not a couple, but " any number of pares, or equal things that go together ;'' as " a pair (set) of chess- men, a pair (puck) of cards." This is a plausible, and perhaps the true expla- nation ; but nevertheless, as stairs did not mean steps, hut flights of steps, I think the theory I have proposed upon the whole more probable. The Gloss, of Arch., I. 242, gives this quotation from William of Worcester : * "a hygh grese called a steyr of xxxii. steppys," which corresponds to Milton's use of the words. 34. P. 204. Use of the pronoun in composition to mark sex ; as, he-goat. In Greek and Latin lexicons and grammars, the article i, ii, t6, and the demonstrative, hie, hsec, hoc, are sometimes employed to indicate the gender of nouns, as occupying less space than the usual abbreviations, masc, fern., and ncuf. Gil, Logon. Ang. p. 3, writing in Latin, uses h i c according to the Engliiih idiom : " Bucke, hio dama." Not less awkward than these compounds is the employment of the personal pronoun for male and female, as in Dampier, \10Z, I., 106 : * * " both He's and She's [the turtles] come ashoar in the day-time and lie in the sun." Grimm's Dictionary under Er, 11, gives very similar examples of the employ- ment of e r and s i e in German, and this is hardly worse than the common German use of the neuter diminutives, Mannchen and Weibchen, man- ling and wifeling, to designate, respectively, the male and the female of animals. 35. P. 204, note. Compounds with un-. In the Wycliffite versions, Prol. to Romans, 299, we find : "" The Jewis * « * bi broking of the lawe have vnmrshipid God;" and Kom. i. 13, "I nyl» you for to vnknowe.'" Lord Clarendon somewhere has, " untaken notice of." 36. P. 212. Nyctalopia, equivocal. NuHToA(i)ir(o est passio qua per diem visus patentibus oculis denegatur, et nocturnis irruentibus tenebris redditur, aut versa vice (ut pleriquo volunt) die redditur, noote negatur. Isidobus, Orig., IV. c. viii. 37. P. 215, note. Technical terms in Dutch. Staring, Voormals en Tbans, 44, has "scheikundige of werktuigs- APPENDIX. 695 k u n d i g e ," chemical or mechanical ; and on p. 78, "volkshuishoudkun- dig beschouwd," considered from-tlie-point-of-national-economy, v o 1 k s - huishoudkundig being used adverbially. The former two of these com- pounds are absurd and unmeaning, because, as used in the passage where they occur, they refer to chemical or mechanical action, and therefore the element k u n d e is worse than superfluous. So on p. 82, be uses e'vennachtslij n for equator, and on p. ST, gekor- vene for insects. But terms so formed are by no means confined to Dutch writers on physical science, for the grammarians use zclfklinker and medeklinker for vowel .-ind consonant, and gezichteinder, sight-ender, is employed for horizon by Van Lennep and other belles-lettres authors. 38. P. 226. Humility. I am perhaps mistaken in supposing that by " great apostle,'' Wesley meant the " apostle to the Gentiles." TaTreiyotppoa-iini occurs in Acts xx. 19 ; Col. ii. 18, 23 ; and 1 Pet. v. 5 ; and it is now impossible to say by whom the word was framed. See Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, S. xliii. 39. P. 231. Definition of hate. This is borrowed from Cicero. Odium ira inveterata. Tuse. Disp., IV. 9. 40. P. 246. Etymology of cattle. The derivation from caput, (capitale,) a, Jiead, as we say, "so many head of sheep, or oxen," though supported by high authorities, is improbable ; because, among other reasons, the words, chatel, catalla, (pi.) &c., were applied to what lawyers call chattels real, that is, certain rights in real estate distinct from the fee, or absolute title, and to personal property in general, long before cattle, or any other derivative from the same root, was used specially as a designation of domestic quadrupeds. This view of the subject is confirmed by the fact of the non-existence of a cognate word with the meaning of cattle in the Italian and Spanish languages, which could hardly have failed to possess it, had it been really of Latin etymology. Chatel has an apparent relationship both to the French acheter, to purchase, and to the Saxon ce apian, Icelandic kaupa, German kaufen, of the same signification. Celtic etymologists derive acheter from the Celtic achap, a word of the same radical meaning ; but as the Goths, in early ages, were a much more commercial and maritime people than the Celts, it is more probable that the root is Gothic than Celtic. Capitale, chatel, acheter, chattels and cattle, arc, therefore, in all probability, cognate with the Saxon c e d p i a n , and not with caput. Schmid, 696 APPENDIX. Gesetze der Angel-Sachsen, 2d edition, 1858, glossary, under captale, ap- pears to adopt this etymology. See Wedgwood, Etym. Diet, Art. Chattels. 41. P. 253. Species in the sense of visible form. * * havynge sothli the spiee [or licnesse] of pite, forsothe denyinge the vertu of it. Wycl., 2 Tim. iii. 6. 42. P. 273. Words suddenly made prominent. ' The progress of natural science, and the discussion of the theories of rital propagation and growth, have made develop and development, and the ideas they express, so familiar that it is hard to find a page of contemporaneous literature ■without them ; and their great currency is one of the many proofs of the extent to which conceptions derived from physical science have entered into the gene- ral culture of our times. In a recent report of a committee upon the vegetables exhibited at the fair of an agricultural society, I observe the award of a pre- mium to the grower of some " remarkably well developed squashes." 43. P. 277.- The Icelandic participle bdinn. B li i n n is also used as a sort of past auxiliary, much in the sense of the German adjective fertig; as, ek er biiinn at skrifa, I have done writing, I have just written. 44. P. 305, note. Change of grammatical class of words. Gower made a noun of the verb will. But yet is nought my fest all plain, But all of woldes and of wisshes, &c. Conf. Am., Pauli, III. 32. Several examples of the use of to out as a verb will be found in Eichardson. There is some confusion between this verb and the legal term to oust, which has been supposed to be from the French oter (oster), and oust may be but a Gallicized orthography of out. 45. P. 305. Dialect of children idionlatic. In old English and Scottish popular poetry, ballads especially, my lane, or, lone, her lone, are often used for / alone, she alone, &c. I lately heard a child of three years old say, on several different occasions : " Put me into the swing : 1 can't get up my lone." Alone, as well as the corresponding word in all the Gothic languages, is a compound of all and one, and it is altogether recent in origin, for it does not exist in Anglo-Saxon, Old-Northern, Mceso-Gothic, Old-High-German, or even Middle-High-German, though it is found in the modern representatives of all APPENDIX. 697 tbese dialects. Kobert of Gloucester has cd one, as, " The Vortiger was al one,'" and Robert de Brunne, alone, at least according to the printed copies ; but, in general, the words were written separately, and syntactically connected with the objective of a personal or sometimes a possessive pronoun, until near the close of the fourteenth century. Thus, Gower : But, for he may nought all him one In sundry places do justice, &c. Pauli's ed., 111. 178. The king, which made mochel mone. The stood as who saith cdl him one Withoute wife, &c. Ibid., III. 286. The forms, my lone, lur lone, &c., originated, no doubt, in a hasty pronun- ciation of tne all one, her all one, and became established by the ignorance of the ballad-mongers. In the Harrowing of Hell, a religious poem written not far from the year 1300, published by Halliwell, Bominus says to Sathan : Ant thou shalt wyte wel to day That mine woUe y have away. Wen thou bilevest al thyn one, Thenne myht thou grede and grone. Halliwell renders the verse, " 'Wen thou bilevest al thyn one," " When thou hast none but thine own left." This Garnett contemptuously cites as an instance of the way in which Halliwell " can pervert the sense of the very plainest pas- sages," and he explains the verse by ascribing to bilevest the sense of losest, renounccst, so that the meaning would be, " When thou losest all thine owwi,'' that is, all the souls of the patriarchs and prophets in the limbus patrum, who were released by Christ on his ascension, and whom Satan had claimed as his own. But Garnett's error is as gross as Halliwell's. Christ could not be supposed to admit that these souls were Satan's own, and the true meaning of the passage is, when thou remainest alone, the limbus being left vacant by the rescue of the souls whom Christ carried up to Paradise. It is true that not much importance can be attached to the orthography of one, but I know no instance in which own is spelled one ; and the sense of remain continued to be sometimes ascribed to bileve as late as the time of Chau- cer. See Cant. T., 10897. 46. P. 307. Termination, -ster, as sign of gender. 698 APPENDIX. The conclusion, that the ending, -ster, was never used as a, sign of sex, or gender in Englisli, is too strongly stated in the text. Among the various readings in the Wyoliffite versions, I find several instances of feminine nouns in -ster, which, being printed at the foot of the page, had escaped my observation. They are, daunstere, Ecclus. ix. 4 ; dwelstere, lev. xxi. 13 ; weihtere, Jer. ix. 17 ; sleestere, Tobit iii. 9 ; syngstere, II. Paral. xxxv. 26, and I. Esdras ii. 65, and, in one instance, in the text of Purvey's version, II. Kings xix. 35. With this last exception, the texts employ, daunseresse, dwel- leresse, weileresse, sleeresse, and ayngeresse, or vtoman-synger. Other remarkable feminines in these versions are, discipUsse, devouresse, servauntesse, and thrallesse. P. Ploughman, Vision, 3087, has " Betou the brewestere," where the context shows it to be feminine, and v. 8683, " As a shepsteres shere," feminine also, shepstere not meaning a sheep-shearer, as Wright supposes, but a seamstress, as appears from Palsgrave, v. schepstarre, and Nares, v. shepster. Shepster is shapesler, one who shapes, forms, or cuts out, linen garments. Tombestere, a female dancer, occurs more than once in Chaucer, and fruitestere. Cant. Tales, 12412, is apparently feminine. Minshew malves seam- ster feminine, and Ben Jonson, in the Sad Shepherd, II. 3, employs setv'ster as a feminine, but in a rustic dialect. On the other hand, we find in P. Plough- man, Vision, 4793, cahonistres masculine. There is, then, no doubt that this termination was sometimes regarded as a feminine, but such does not appear ever to have been the general English usage. 47. P. 316. Verbs from adjectives. Gower uses more and less as transitive verbs. What he woll make lasse, he lasseth, What he woU make mme, he moreth. PaulVs ed.. III. 147. So that it mighte nought be mored. Ibid., 254. The verbs to less and to honest are both found in the older Wycliflite version, • the former in Ecclus. xviii. 5, xix. 5, 7, where the later text has make lesse and made lesse ; the latter in Ecclus. xi. 23. 48. P. 322, note. Extract from Proclamation of Henry III. In this document, as printed after Pauli in Haupt's Zeitschrift, XI. 2, p. 298, the last clause quoted in this note reads : " rigt for to done and to foangen," 49. P. 332. Confusion of lie and lay. The old poem of Kyng Alisaunder has lie for lay : So on the schyngil lyth the haile. Every knyght so laidc on other. 2210-2211. APPENDIX. 699 50. p. S86. Inflections formed from compound tenses in tlie Eomnnce lan- guages. In the Chronicle of Don Pero Niuo, p. 56, we find the complicated combina- tion, facernos la han dejar, " they will make us abandon it." The compound tenses were sometimes used in Italian down to the end of the fifteenth century. SaTonarola generally employs the inflected future, but in a sermon delivered " adi VIII. di giugno m.cccc.lx.'cxxv." p. 12, he has: " e dicoti che so idio ha premiare huomini almondo ha premiare gli chris- tian!," etc. 51. P. 843. Corps, for living body. Southcy, who was very well read in early English literature, appears to have overlooked the fact that corps was, not unfrequently, used for body of a living .person in the seventeenth century. In a note on p. 407 of the Chronicle of the Cid, upon the word " carrion," he says : " In the translation of Eicheome's Pil- grim of Loretto by G. W., printed at Paris, 1C30, a similar word is employed, but not designedly, . . . the translator living in a foreign country, and speaking a foreign language, had forgotten the nicer distinctions of his own." " Women and maids," he says, " shall particularly examine themselves about the vanity of their apparell, * * * of their too much care of their corps" &c. Spenser uses this^word for living body : A comely corpse with beautie faire endowed. Hijmne in Honour of Beautie, 135. Fuller, in Andronicus, or, the Unfortunate Politician, iii. 18, uses corps, a dead body, as a plural : " As for the corps of Alexius * * * they were most unworthily handled," &c. And again, in his Church History of England, Book X. sec. i. § 12, speaking of the funeral of Queen Elizabeth, he says, "Her corps loere solemnly interred under a fair tomb," &c. But at the conclusion of Book XI. §§ 42, 45, 48, 49, and 50,.he employs corpse in the singular, according to the present orthography and syntax. Are we to charge the printers with the error, or to credit them with the correction ? 53. P. 346- Latinization of modern names. The Fardle of Facions gives us the converse of this practice, and calls the historian Tacitus, Cornelius the still. " For Cornelius the stylle, in his firste book of his yerely exploictes, called in Latine Annales," &c. &c., chap. iiii. S. iii. edition of 1555; reprint of 1812, p. 312. 53. P. 384. Plural of Norman-French nouns. The statement in the text is too loose. Norman masculine nouns regularly 700 APPENDIX. made the nominative singular, the accusative and the vocative plural, in s, but the nominative plural was without that termination. But there were many ex- ceptions, and in these instances the nominative plural was also in s, as were also the plural of all feminines derived from Latin nouns of the first aeclension, and many derived from other declensions. The consequence was that the plurals in s were very much more numerous than those without it, and a foreigner would naturally have taken s as the general plural sign. 54. P. 338. Coalescence of auxiliary and past participle. These forms occur even in the Life of Richard III., ascribed to More, as printed in Hardyng, p. 54Y, reprint of 1812. "Kichard might (as the fame went) asaued hymself if he would ajled awaie." But this passage is not in Eastell's edition of 1557, and More could hardly have adopted this colloquialism. 55. P. 396. The expression, " in our midst," &c. • In the passages where the later translations use among us, you, them, whom, the Wycliffite versions almost uniformly employ, "in the myddil or myddis ;" and, of course, the exemplifications of this form arc extremely numerous in those versions. In nine cases out of ten, certainly, the construction is, "in the myddil of us, you, them, or whom ;'' but there are u few instances, as, for ex- ample, in Exodus xxxiv. 10, Numbers xiv. 13, where "from or in whos myddil or myddis" is used in both texts ; and in the older translation of Jerome's Prologue to Romans, we find, " for myche merciful is God, the whiche wolde bringe you to omre foUowinge." Our is sometimes used in the same way elsewhere in Old English, as in 1 Cor. i. 3, Wye. Vers., older text : " alle that inclepyn the name of cure Lord Jhcsu Crist in ech place of hem and owe ;" later text, " ech place of horn and of oure ; where, in the older text, our is a genitive plural. So in the much earlier Legend of St. Brandan, Perc. Soc, p. 5, your is made a genitive plural ; " ac yourc an schal atta ende," and one of you shall at the end, &c. With respect to these last examples, as I remarked on p. 395, the employ- ment of our and your in this construction was contrary to both principle and usage in the English of that period. The use of whose, or even of their, in such phrases, would not have been so objectionable, (though I have not found their so employed in Wycliffe,) because there was no possessive pronoun for the relative, as we have seen there was not for the personal of the third person in Anglo-Saxon. In that language, hwsas, the genitive or possessive case of the relative, or rather, interrogative, hw^, hwcet, was used instead of a possessive pronoun for all genders and numbers. Where, therefore, the Anglo- Saxon did not distinguish the possessive case and the possessive pronoun, it was not strange that early English should confound them. At present, how- APPENDIX. 701 ever, tho distinction is established, and it is a corruption of speech to disre- gard it. \ 56. P. 399. Want of the neuter possessive Us, In the Fardle of Facions, 1555, p. 821, reprint of 1812, we have: "a cer- taine sede which groweth there of the owne accorde j " and in Holland's Pliny, I. 2-4, "hauingiire of iAeowne before." These forms are by no means un- common. 57* P. 403. Anomalous combinations in syntax. Ruskin's boldness as u writer is by no means confined to the expression of critical opinion, and he does not hesitate to employ familiar combinations from which more timid authors might shrink. Thus, vol. i., third ed., p. 63 : " Now the whole determination of this question depends 'upon whether the unusual fact be," &c. Ibid., p. 121, "but it depends upon wliether the energy of the mind which receives the instruction be sufficient," &c. Ibid., 390, " a confusion which you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf." 58. P. 403, note. Possessive pronoun as possessive sign. Besides the example quoted from Robert of Gloucester, in the note, I find in that writer two other instances of the separation of the syllable ys from the rooi In the possessive case : The kyng tok BnU ys owne body, in ostage as it were, p. 13. And after Brut ys owne nome he clepede it Bretagne, p. 22. In Gower, Conf. Am., Pauli, iii. 356, is a passage where his may be a posses- sive sign : To holde love his covenaunt ; but it is possible that love may here be used as a dative, to hold to love his covenant, his requirement or stipulation. There are many similar cases in the continuation of Robert of Gloucester printed in the appendix to Hearne's edition, and written apparently about the middle of the fifteenth century. Thus : " Sir John is tyme," p. 589, " In the V. Kyng Henry is tyme," p. 593, " through God is grace," p. 595 ; and the use of the pronoun his as a possessive sign is frequent in Hardyng, who is supposed to have finished his chronicle about 1465, though he most usually employs the regular possessive in s. Thus, reprint of 1S12, p. 156 : " In the year of Christ his incarnacion." P. 226 : " and putto hyra whole in Croi /«« high mercye." And in the continuation of 1543, p. 436, " Kynge Henry the VI. hys wife." 69. P. 413. Style of Thucydides, and other ancient writers. 702 . APPENDIX. It is often impossible to resolve the language of Thucydides and of other early writers into what are technically called periods, and we frequently observe the absence of a periodic structure in the conversation, not merely of unschooled persons, but of all who habitually speak in an inartificial style. I may illustrate the manner Of Thucydides, certainly not with a view of ridiculing the diction of that immortal author, but in a way iutelligible to persons not familiar with Greek, by an extract from a pugilistic challenge of about the year 1100, which I find in the New York Tribune, in a letter from a correspondent at Bufialo, dated October. 16th, 1858. It is said to have been taken from a paper in possession of Mr. Placide, and if not genuine, it is at least ben trovato. " I, Felix Maguike, first master of the fist in the Kingdom of Ireland, tutor to the noted Mr. Holmes, who has fought the celebrated Mr. Figg this season with general applause, the last of which battles I was engaged with him myself, whereas I hit the said Mr. Figg on the belly and gave him other convincing proof of my judgment therein, on Wednesday, the 11th instant, when, contrary to all expectation, Mrs. Stokes, styled the invincible, matchless, unconquerable city championess, took on her to condemn the method of Mr. Holmes' displaying his skill before a grand appearance assembled, which, with regret, I was obliged to hear, and in regard, though said gentleman was my pupil, I so far resent it that I hereby invite Mr. James Stokes, together with the said Elizabeth, his wife, at their own seat of valor, and at the time appointed, to face and fight me and a woman I have trained up to the science from her infancy, one of my own country, and who I doubt not will as far exceed Mrs. Stokes as she is said to have done those she has hitherto been concerned with." 60. P. 417. Eigidity of European characters. In the Malmantile Racquistato, Florence, 1688, and in the curious lying Life of the Jesuit Anchieta, Rome, 1738, the letters a, e, and n are elongated by a horizontal stroke at bottom, when necessary to fill a space. 61. P. 423. Errors in writing from dictation. The reader will find in Goethe's Naehgelassene Werke, B. v. S. 106, an amusing and instructive article on this subject, entitled Hor-, Schreib- und Druckfehler. 62. P. 424. But after my makine steem, Oner all {)at is or was, If men it sayd as made Thomas, &c. ; For |)is makyng I wille no mede, Bot gude prayere, when ye it rode. 704 APPENDIX. In Piers Ploughman, Vision, verse lilO, we have : and in verse 7483, And thow medlest with malcynges. And myghtest go saye thi Sauter ; To solacen hym some tyme, As I do whan I make. Make occurs, in the same sense, in the Confessio Amantis of Gower, Pauli'a edition, vol. iii. 384 — My muse doth me for to wite And saith, it shall be for my beste. Fro this day forth to take reste. That I no more of love make, &c. See also notes to vol. i. of Dyce's edition of Skelton, p. 186, and passages there cited. 63. P. 433. Tale of Meliboeus, and Persones Tale. The text is here in error. The former of these is a translation from the French, in which language it is still extant, and the latter is probably also a version of some Latin or French treatise now lost. 64. P. 456. Confusion of syllables in spoken English. There were current in English, as late as the seventeenth century, many synco- pated phrases, which have almost wholly disappeared since reading and writing became general. Two of these are mentioned in the French grammar prefixed to Cotgrave's French-English Dictionary, 1650, Section of Consonants, muskiditti, much good may it doe to you, and Oodigodin, God give you good evening. So, Godge, for God give you (or ye), dich, for do it you (or ye) ; both which, when the origin was forgotten, were followed by another pronoun, or other objective, as (xodge you good morrow. Much good dich thy good heart. Even in Italy,' clear as is the usual articulation, we hear such expressions as c i ik , for the complimentary phrase, schiavo suo. 65. P. 469. Phrase Ood 'ild you, or, God dild you. Although English articulation has long tended to insert the y consonant where it does not belong, rather than to suppress it where it does, yet the ex- amples collected in Nares under God ild, as well as the concurrent use of Ood yield in similar combinations, show almost conclusively that the latter is the original, the former a corrupted form. The etymology, God shield, is quite im- probable. Ealliwell, Glossary, gives dilde, to protect, as Anglo-Norman, but he APPENDIX. 7(35 cites no authority, and I and no eTidence of the existence of such an Anglo- Norman word. 66. P. 47 S, note. Old pronunciation of diphthongs ea and ei. In the rules for the pronunciation of English at the end of Sherwood's English and French Dictionary, London, 1650, the sound of <; French is ascribed to these diphthongs. ^a, & ei. Les dipthongues ea k ei se prononcent S, comme teach, deceive. Ee. Fe, dipthongue, on prononoe i, comme need, seed, breed, speed, creed. Hence it is evident that the vowel sound in teach, receive, was not that of ee in need, but was the continental e. 67. P. 4S9. Confusion of c and t. The interchange of these mutes explains the double form tind, whence tinder,) and kindle. 68. P. 495. L often silent in words of French extraction. Suckling, in the middle of the seventeenth century, as appears by a passage quoted by Alibone, under Carew, pronounced /aaZi with a silent I, for he rhymes it with laureate, Tom Carew was next, but he had & fault That would not well stand with a laureat. 69. P. 495, note. Scroll derived from scrow, leel. s k r a . In Kichard Cocr de Lion, Weber, ii. 133, we find: Locke every mannys name thou wryte Upon a scrowe of parcheyran, &c. And in Cupgrave, p. 260: "In this tyme the Lolardis set up scrowis at West- mmster and at Ponies, with abhominable accusaciones of hem that long to the cherch," &c. 70. P. 507. Consonances in ancient literature. Mullach, Grammatik der Griechischen Vulgarsprache, V'S, cites a passage of rhymed prose from Plato, Symp., p. 19*7, D., TrpdoTryra p.^v iropiCwv, ayptiTrjra S" l^opi^wv, etc., through several pairs of consonances, and two couplets of rhymed verse from a speech of Strepsiades in the Clouds of Aristophanes, YOT. Cicero, Tusc. Disp., I. 28, and IIL 19, quotes rhyming verses from Ennius, but the rule of Quintilian, whom Roger Ascham triumphantly appeals to in the Scholeniaster, is express in its condemnation of like endings, similiter desincntia. See Quint., IX. c. 4. 45 706 APPENDIX. In the literature of the Middle Ages, we sometimes meet with rhymes in prose, in works where we should least expect to find them. Thus, in the Saxon Chronicle, MLXXXVII., p. 296, Ingram's edition, there is a long passage with a great number of rhyming words at irregular intervals. The Old French Books of the Kings are full of passages where the frequent rhymes must have been intentional. Thus, p. 5 : " Del present out primes Deus sa part, puis al dvcsche fist bel reguard. Et si li dist : Sire, sire, entend h met ; jo sui la tue ancele kij^devantto' prei^res^s, E pur cest enfant dune Dcu reqm's; il me le dunad h sun plaisir, et je li rend pur lui sermr^ P. T, Par pii, par force, les dames violerent ; le poplc del sacrifice tresturnerent. Del sacrifise pristrent a sei, par rustic et par desrei, plus que n'cn out cumanded la lei." P. 8, "Vostre fame n'est mie sei7ie, kar h mal le pople meine ; ne faites mais tel uveraimie, dunt le sacrifise reinaigne. Si hom pSche vers altre, k Deu se purrad acorder, e s' il pfeche vers Deu ki purrad pur \ni preier? tant tendreraent les fols ama que reddement ne's chaslia; par bel les rcprist e par amur, nient par destrece no par reddur, cume aj)ent ii maistre e hpastury 9'!. P. ."iSO. Alliteration in ancient writers. In the phrase quoted from Cicero on p. 550, it is highly probable, as a friend suggests to me, that sine sensu is a gloss which has found its way into the text. In the Tuso. Disp. Cicero quotes some remarkable instances of alliterative verse from early Eoman poets. Thus, from Ennius : Qui alteri exitium ^arat Eum scire oportet sibi ^aratam pestem ut partici^et. Tusc. Disp., II. 17. From Accius : J/ajor ?7iihi moles, majus ?mscendumst malum Qui illius acerbum cor contundam et comprimam. Impius hortatnr me frater, ut meos mails miser Jfandarem natos. Tusc. Disp., TV. 36. 'VS. P. 550. Alliteration in the Gothic languages. Alliteration was a regular characteristic of Icelandic verse, and it often ap- pears to have been designedly introduced into prose. There is a long passage in alliterative prose in the Saga Olafs konungs hins helga, K. 60, and a still longer near the close of App. EE, to that Saga in Forn. Sog. Y. The following is an extract from the former, a* * * " kallaSu hann ?inan ok Zitill&tan, /jasgan ok AuggoSan, mildan ok mj\lklyndan, vitran ok «ing63an, iryggvan ok iriilyndan /orsjaiau ok /astorSan, ^joflan ok (coSgjarnan, /rsegan ok /tilyndan, ^oSan ok APPENDIX. 707 5'laspavaran, sij'rtrnsaman ok saltan vel, jreyminn at guts logum ok gotra manna, etc. 73. P. 553. Alliterative quotations. Byron's objections to the octosyllabic verse have no better foundation than the alliteration in the phrase, " fatal facility," and many a shallow critic has con- demned fine poetry in this beautiful metre, upon the strength of that unWcky expression. 74. P. 55S. Half-rhyme in Pulei. There is a very similar instance in the hundredth and hundred and first stan- zas of the sixth canto of the Malmantile Racquistato. The editor, Puccio Lamoni, (Paulo Miuucci,) remarks on the word bisticcio in St. 101: "Ela figura che i Grcci dicono Parechesi, ed e quando si dicono due parole che hanno lo stesso, o poco differente suono, e diverso significato," and he refers to a canzone of Guittone d'Arezzo, made up of " queste allusioni di parole," the con- clusion of which is as follows : llovi canzone adessa, E vauue a Rezzo ad essa, Da cui eo tegno ed o Se n' alcun ben mi do, E di, che presto so, Se vuol, di tornar so. Other examples are stated to occur in Bindo Bonichi, and Francesco da Barberino. 75. P. 578. Vagueness of terms of abuse. H m'appelle jacobin, revolutionnaire, plagiaire, voleur, empoisonneur, faus- saire, pestiferiS ou pestifere, enrage, imposteur, calomniateur, libelliste, homme horrible, ordurier, grimacier, chiffonnier, * * * Je vois ce qu'il veut dire ; il entend que lui et mol sommes d'avis diiferent. Paul Louis Courier. Seconde Lettre Particulifere. 76. P. 680, note. Special moaning of soon. In the Romaunt of the Rose, v. 21-24, we find this passage : ■Within my twentie yeare of age. When that love taketh his corage Of younge folke, I wente soonc To bed, as I was wont to doone. Here soon evidently means early. Y08 APPENDIX. The foUowiDg examples have been furnished me by a friend : We'll have a posset for't soon at night. Merry Wives of Windsor, I. 4. Come to me soon at night. Ibid., II. 2. Soon, at five o'clock Please you, I will meet you upon the mart. Comedy of Errors, I. 2. And soon at supper time I'll visit you. Ibid., III. 2. But as you make your soon-at-nighfs relation, &c. B. JoNSON, David is an Ass, I. 1. In all these cases, soon has the same meaning as in that cited from Chaucer. 77. P. 584, note. AfBrmative particle. A curious form of yes occurs in Wycliife, N. T., 2 Cor. i. 18 : " Ther is not in it is and nay, but in it is js," [Gloss, that is, treuthe,J and verse 19 : " Ther was not in him is and nay, but in hym is was," [Gloss, that is, stedefast treuthe.'\ In the later text, these passages read : " is and is not is not ther ynne, but is is in it ;'' and, " ther was not in hym is and is not, but is was in hym.'' So in James, V. 12 : " Forsothe be your word. Is, is, Nay, nay,'' &c. The Wycliffite trans- lators, or at least Purvey, seem to have supposed that the aflBrmative particle was a form of the substantive verb. 7§. P. 587. The conjunction or, equivocal. In modern Enghsh, either, used as a conjunction, is always a disjunctive, and is only grammatically distinguished from one of the senses of or; but in some early English writers, as, for example, in the Wycliffite school of translators, there are traces of a logical distinction between these particles. Either was very commonly employed to indicate difference, alternation, opposition, and or to marls identity of meaning. Thus, in both texts. Col. i. 20, " tho thingis that ben in erthis, ether that ben in hcuenes." In the numerous glosses of the older, or Wycliffe's version of the New Testament, or is employed as the sign of identity, or of likeness, as in v. 21 of the chapter just cited, " aliened, or maad straunge ;'' in v. 26, " mynistre, oj- seruaunt;" in v. 26, "the mysterie, or priuete." This distinction is not uniformly observed by Wycliffe, but still so generally as to show that he recognized it. 79. P. 637. Influence of words. "Words are great powers in this world; not only telling what things are, but making them what else they would not be.'' Maktineac's Sermon, Tlie Sphere of Maris Silence. APPENDIX 709 80. r. 6Jl, noie. Participial noun used passively. Other examples of the use of the participial noun in a passive sense, are : " We have a wyndowe in werchynge,^' Piers Ploughman, Vision, 1451 ; " Ther the man lith an helyng,'" Ibid., 11599 ; "Whils Vetii Creator Spiritus is a sing- iiiQ," Rutland Papers, 13 ; " In great adueuture of taTcynge with the Sarazins," Froissart, I. 657 ; " In dout of betrayinge," Ibid., 734 ; " Whyle every thyng was a preparynge," Ibid., II. 746 ; " Whyle these wordes were in speakynge," Sir T. More, Life of Edw. T., reprint of Hardyng, 507 ; "I went to their places where they malie their anchors, and saw some making; also I saw great peeces of ordinance making," Coryat's Crudities, reprint, I. 282 ; " While these prelimi- nary steps were taking,''^ Robertson, Charles V., B. XII. ; " The illustrations preparing for the third volume," Ruskin, Mod. P., vol. II., Advertisement ; " The extent of ravage continually committing," Ibid., p. 5, note; but, "it is being swept away," Ibid., same page, text ; " the palaces are being restored," " the mar- bles are being scraped'^ Ibid., p. 7, note. 81. P. 655. Active forms in passive sense in French and German. Other examples of the use of active forms with a passive sense, in French and German, are the Fr. v o y a n t , as applied to colors, in the signification of showy, conspicuous, "le teste n'est par encore fini d'imprimer," Lettre de Clavier i P. L. Courier, 3 Sept. 1809 ; Diese Stadt ****istzubaueii angefangen. BERGHitrs, Was man von der Erde weias, I. 876. INDEX. A, pronunciation of, 475. Abandon and abate^ obsolescent in ITth. cen- tury, 278. -a£/e, termination, force of, 135, AbuBO, terms of, vague in meaniner, 578, 092. Accent and quantity, relation of, 616. Accent, strong in EngUsb, 52S. Accents ancient, introduction of, 2S6. Accentual system, cbaracteristio of lan- guages, 473. Accentuation as affected by inflection, 373 ; change of in English, 528. Accusative before infinitive, 349. Adjective, English and Latin, 311, 327 ; com- parison of, 136, 312, App. 17. Affectation, universality of, 291. Agglutination, what, 196. AUiteratiou in poetry, 545 ; significance of, 551. American accent, 674 ; dialect, Lecture XXX. ; pronunciation, 670 ; student of English, want of facilities of, 14. Americmii^ name for cottons in Levant, 146. Ancients studied aloud, 411. Angles in England, 45. A n gl i and A n g 1 i a, names given by Rom- ish mlBsionaries, 46. Anglo-Saxon, first use of term, 46 ; Gospels, vocabulary of, 199; elements in English, 163, 172 ; language, grammatical structure of, 48, 356, 377, 380, 381 ; importance of to English studeut, 86, 105 ; mixed in cbarac- ter, 42 ; embodies formafivo principle of English, 160, 172 ; influenced by Latin, 131; relationsof to Anglo-Norman, 132; to Icelandic, 94 ; to modern English, 123, 160, 162, 172, 382 ; pronunciation of, obscure, 471 ; Teutonic rather than Scandinavian, 44 ; literature, Christian, 131, App. 16. Annomination, what, 566. Anomalous constructions in English, 403. Arabic in Spain and Sicily, 141, 142. Archaism in English, 176. Archery, vocabulary of, 267. Articulation of different languages, 283, 374, 672. Aflcham, Roger, on English, 445. Assonance in Spanish poetry, 508, 564. Augment, temporal, in Greek, 563. Authors overruled by printers, 418. Authorship, rewards of, 440, 450. Auxiliaries generally invariable in Ejglish, 322. B, pronunciation of, 489. Baaingj used by Sidney and Keats, 36. Bacon's Essays, vocabulary of, 265. Becker, grammatical nomenclature of, 192. Beowulf, Anglo-Saxon poem, 6, App. 16. Bcrners', Lord, translation of Froissart, 112, 603. Betterment^ 309. Bible English, see Tyndale, "Wycliffe, and generally Lecture SXVIIL ; why Caxton did not print, 452; of 1611, dialect of, 86, 622, 634 ; ortho£?raphy of, 430 ; revision not re-translation, 629; principles adopted by re- visers, 622, 624 ; vocabulary of, 86, 123, 263, 630 ; compared with dialect of Shakespeare, &c., 628 ; must have special dialect, 631 ; new revision of, impracticable at present, 640 ; not needed, 639 ; inexpediency of, 636. Books, ancient, compared with modern, 407, 463. Both, how used by Coleridge, 116. Bow-wow way, Johnson's, 36. Bready figurative use of, 247. Bribe, no word for in French, 228; ancient and modern meanings of, 249. British people, relations of, to civilization and liberty, 24. Bronchitis, why common among clergymen 292. Browne, Sir Thomas, works of, 115 ; his com- parison of Anglo-Saxon and English, 48. Browning, Mrs., diction of, 126, 538. B u i n n , Icelandic participial adjective, 277, App. 42. C, pronunciation of, 490. Campbell's " angels' visits," 552. Cant of parties and professions, 238, Carving, nomenclature of, 691. Castle of Indolence, diction and vfirsification of, 177, 640. Catalan language, 99, 370. 712 INDEX, Caxton printed few reiigiouB bonke, 462. Celtic, whether affected by Latin. 138 ; insig- nificance of in English Etym. .■og>.l36. Chaucer, literary character o* 22, 27, 111, 168 ; description of the " gentiemaii;" 258 ; vocabulary of, 111, 124, 167 -, versitication of, 2P to his copjist, 424. Chemistry, nomenclature of, 213. Children, dialect of, 305, App. 44. Christianity taught to Gothic tribes in ver- nacular, 371 ; introduced foreign words into Anglo-Saxon, 132. Church, l^apal, hostile to cultivation of mod- ern languagea, 102, 452. Churcbyarde's phonology, 474. Cicero's supposed deference for Plato, 599. Cimbric dialect in Italy, 140. Classical languages and. literature, value of, 77, 95. Classification, principles of, 191 ; of lan- guages, 192. Cobbett's rules of composition, 447 ; vocabu- lary and style, 126, 437. Coccus and co ccum, what, 67. Cockeram's Dictionary, 278. Coincidence, more frequent use of, 272. Coleridge, philological value of his works, 116. Comeling, good English word, 275. Come-outer, introduction of, 275. Comfort^ peculiarly English word, 613. Commence, syntax of, 183. Composition, rapid, 447. Composition of words, 195. Compounds, when better than arbitrary words, 211; resolution of, 392; clumsy in English, 204; Greek ana in other lan- guages, 201 ; scientific, 186. Concurrent mental action of different indi- viduals, 449. Conjugate words, 593. Consonances la prose writers, 507. Consonants, coaleBcence of, 488 ; stability of, 487 ; confusion of, 489. Continental languages and literature older than English, 100, Copies of books how multiplied in ancient times, 423. Copyists, licenses of, 421, 423. Copy-right, influence of, 450. GoTn, use of in different countries, 246. Cornewaile, John, introduced study of Eng- lish in schools, 102. Corps aid corpse, use and syntax of, App. 50 Corruptions of language. Lecture XXlX. ; Latham's views on, 645. Courier, P. L., on knowledge of French in France, 99 ; vagueness of terms of abuse, App. 74; style of, 448. Crabbe's Synonyms, 594. D, pronunciation of, 491. Diuiish BcholarB, services of, to Anglo-Saxon literature, 6. Deaf mutes, memory of, 2 ; natural signs of, 33. Definite form of nouns, traces of in English, 388. Demosthenes on delivery, 600 ; his use of ejaculation, 290 ; style of, 80, 354 ; wrote out his speeches, 448 ; derivation of words, 193. Dialects, ancient, classical and vulgar, 362 *, Greek, ancient and modern, 682 ; Italian, 677 j modern Romance, 369; local, incon- veniences of, 676 ; how extirpated, 679. Dictionaries, imteriections of, 66, 62, 184 App. 31; especially modern, 460. Diphthongs, 487. Directli'j vulgar use of, 645. Dra^Taatists, minor, importance or", li4. Drawling in American pronunciation, 670. Dutch, scientific nomenclature, 215. E, pronunciation of, 477. Elephant called by Arabic name in Ice landic, 145. Elizabeth, Queen, education of, 615. England, completely protestantized in 16th century, 617 ; why this name applied to country, 41. English, appellation bestowed by foreign missionaries, 41 ; language, composite but "radically Baxon, 86, 118; epochs in, 48; awkward forms in, 402 ; changes in, 49, 166, 262; late formation of, 101 ; compara- tively difficult, 98 ; gains and loeeea o:^ 128, 174, 200, 267, 274 ; relation of elements in, 86, 203 ; etymological proportions o^ 118, 126 : general sources of, Lectures VI, and VII. ; how far cosmopolite, 438 ; inflections of, 382, 385 ; new inflections of, 386 ; saved by loss of French provinces, 170 ; double vocabulary of, 160 ; future fortunes of, 26 ; colloquialisms in, 263; in America, Lec- ture XXX. ; literature, late origin of, Iffl ; old, not specially difla.cult, 21, 109 ; author's value of, 17 ; modernization of, 20, 104 ; philology, revival of and causes, 6 ; scien- tific nomenclatui'C, 213 ; words in other languages, 147. Engraving, minute, 462. Enlightenment, not yet received, 168, 276. Equivocal language, 216. Etymologists, extravagances of, 58. Etymologica] proportions of style of Englisli authors, 124. Etymology, oflSces of, 66 ; mistaken, influence of, 63 ; no guide to meaning of scientific terms, 84 ; familiar, eflect of, 81 ; compara- tive, uses ofj 64. Etymology of abominable^ 63 ; aneal-^ 231 ; argosy 1 145 ; atonement^ 230 ; bound^ in navi- gation, etc., 277 ; carmine and crimson^ 73 ; cashj 143 ; caste^ 143 ; cattle and chattel, 246, App. 8 ; cochineal, 74 ; coco-nut, 143 ; coir, 143 ; commodore^ 143 ; copy, 421 ; demijohn, 144 ; drake, 61 ; dungeon, 144 ; exorbitant, 187 ;/alse, 231 -fjetish andfeticism, 142 ; first, 164 ; ^esk, 247 ; gemini ! 295 ; gentlmian^ 256 ; go^el, 30 ; ^rain, as a dye, 66 ; houael, 231 ; the humanttiesj 55 ; hunt, 392 ; isle and island, 129 ; issue, 63 ; law, 1^ : lyden, leden, App. 1 ; mast-ery, mister and mystery, 261 ; meat, 257 ; metier , 262 ; precipitate, 65 ; right, 123 ; scroll, 495 ; sense and sen- tence, 601 ; soldier, 250 ; specie, species and spice, 263 ; tenpenny na.n, etc., 184 ; umpire, 389 ; vermilion, 74 ; world, 59 ; year, 246 ; ywis, or iwis, 333. Euphemism, 576. Euphuism, what, 567. Expletives, what, 293. Extemporary composition, 446 ; translation 615. F, pronunciation of, 492. Family relations, names of, 156. FefcA becoming obsolete, 588. Fire-arms, vocabulary of, 268. Flesh, etymology and use of, 248, INDEX. 713 Foreign philology not indispensable to study of English, 76; new in modern poetry, 525. Formulas, religious, 619, 637. Franklin ignorant of foreign philology, 83 : stylo of, how formed, 614. French, better spoken than English, 99 ; ele- ment in English, 435 ; important to student of English, 94; poor in inflections, 13: Kormim influonce of, 384. Friends, " plain hmguage" of, 392. Frisic dialects, 43, 37S. FpoisBart»s Chronicle, 434. Fuller, Thomas, euphuism of, 568 ; on words, 5S ; licenses in word-making, 203 : works, value of, 115. Future tense, why wanting in some lan- guages, 314. G, pronunciation of, 492. Gallicisms in Old English, 112. Gander, grammatical, no relation to sex, 338. General propositions, liable to misinterpreta- tion, 76. Genin overruled by printer, 418; on French pronunciation, 457. Gentleman, meaning and use of, 256, 612. German language, character and importance of, 13 ; borrows foreign words, 612 ; litera- ture, 207 ; philologists, superiority of, 12 ; services of to English, 11; purism, 206; scientific nomenclature, 205, 208 ; high, re- ligious dialect of all Germany, 623. Gibbon, style of, 447. Gill's phonographic system, 474. Gtobe^ sphere, and orb compared, 575. God, used as verb by Sylvester, 304. Goethe, not linguist, 78 ; opinions of, on study of languages, 77 ; style of, 78, 448. Gooden, old verb, 316. Gothic languages, inflect by letter-change, 562; early culture of, 131 : derivation and composition in, 201; philological impor- tance of, 96 ; influence on Spanish, 141. G^ths, Crimaean, 93. Gower, works of, 49. Grain, as a dye, etymology and history of, 66. Grammar, want of in English, 88. Granunatical structure as test of linguistic affinity, 360. Greek language, etymology of, 80 : modem, vocabulary of, 242 ; literature, value of, 95. Greeks, ancient, little grammatical training, 4; no foreign philological training, 80; studied grammar before reading, 88, 412. Grundtvig, services of to Anglo-Saxon phi- lology, 6. H, pronunciation of in English, 492, 674 ; in Latin, 493 ; disappearance of in Romance languages, 674. Hakluyt, value of, 114. Half-rhyme, 562. Halliwell's dictionary, 104. Hand, in etymology, 303. Havelessj used by Gower, 135. He-bear and she-bear, clumsy forms, 204. Hcngist and Horsa, names still common, 45. Heywod, T., verbal licenses of, 514. Heyae on language, 1. HieroglyphicSjEgyptian, number of, 182. Higden on study of English, 102. High, as verb, 316. Hi3, maactiline and neuter possessive, 395, 397 ; sign of posseasiTe case, 40Q. Holiushed's Chronicle, fl2 Home, English use of, 313. Hooker, works of, 113 ; his use oi plurai ad jective, 312. Humanities, as designation of classical stu- dies, 56. Humility, no word for in classic Greek, 226. Hunting and hawking, nomenclature of, 690. I, pronunciation of, 481. Icelandic language and literature, 94, 100 ; sagas, character of, 18 ; versification, 554. Idioms and idiotisms, distinguished, 606, 609 Ignis faUtus translated by Fuller, 152. Imitative words, 36, 569. Immigrant, why American, 274. Improvisator!, Italian and Icelandic, 503, 561 Income, use of, 279. Indexes, modern, 460. Infinitive past becoming obsolete, 317. Inflections, generally, Lectures XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII. Inflections, grammatical, origin of, 196, 335, 338, 389 ; oflaces of, 319 ; modes of, 331, 334; Latham on, 364 ; favor continuity of thought, 358 ; suited to poetical form, 372, 499 ; influence pronunciation, 373, 512 : structure of period, 354 ; of unwritten lan- guages, 366 ; of Latin, 325, 329, 341 ; of modern languages, 330, 337, 360, 365, 386 ; English, 385, 386. Inscriptions, dialect of, 422. Interjection, generally, Lwture XIIT. Interjections, inherently expressive, 288. Intonation in pronunciation, 284 ; in Chinese, Danish, and Swedish, 284. Inversion in syntax, 355. Irving, "W., vocabulary of, 130. Italian language, 224. 7(s, possessive pronoun, origin of, 397. Johnson, Samuel on sufficiency of English, 127 ; vocabulary of, 127. Jonson Ben, on language, 223 ; English grammar, 108 ; pronunciation, 484. Keats, diction of, 23. Knox, John, orthography of, 483. L, pronunciation of, 495. Language, origin of. Lecture II., 31, 38 ; as mental discipline, 216 ; of animals, 31 ; so- cial, not individual, faculty, 44, 297 ; local tenacity of, 25, 139. Language, relation of to character, 222, 224, 227 ; foreign, study of, 76 : native and foreign, comparison of, 98 ; how aftected by foreign influence, 367 ; confusion of, in middle ages, 369 ; classification of, 192, 197 ; corruption of, Lecture XXIX. ; changes of, 260, 364 ; of Roman Empire, changes in, 369 ; of superior race prevails, 140 ; revival of primitive forms in, 261, 363 ; modern, simplified in inflection, 360 : first employ- ment of in literature, 371, 441 ; written and unwritten, 366, 389 ; violent, evil influence of, 234 ; how affected by emigration, 241. Latham on corruption of languages, 645. Latin, value of as grammatical discipline, 86, 90, 347 ; character of, 90, 413 ; influence of, on Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, etc., 123, 131, 138; relations of to English, 138, 434 ; words and ?hrases in English, 151* as language oi 'apal church, 370 : extension of, 90, 13P. Lautgeborden. 289. 7U INDEX. Lavoisier, nomenclature of, 217. Libraries, extent of, 465. Line-rhyme in poetry, 554. Linguistics and philolcp:y, 52, Luther's translation of Bible, 623. Make and maker, poetic use of, App. 61. Manufactures, domestic, vocabulary of, 269. M a 1 6 , to kill, in Tonga ielands, 38. Meatj etymology and use of, 247. Mechanical art, noraenclature of, 184. Melancholy in II Penseroso, costume of, 66. Metaphrase, what, 614. Metaphysics, dialect of, 188. Metres, ancient in modern verse, 619, 520. Midst, in our, incorrect, 396, App. 54. Miller, Hugh, style of, 83. Milton, vocabulary of, 124, 128, 2G4. Modes, musical, of dinerent languages, 285. Mceso-Gothic, importance of, 92. Montaigne, introduction of new "words, 148. More, Sir Tbomas, works of, 113, 124. Muchj^eople, in English Bible, 263. Muicaster, on English, 51. Muntaner, K,ainon, quoted, 99, 370. Names, modern. Latinized, 346. Negative forms in Anglo-Saxon, 391. N e r 1 n g , used by Dutch for fishery, 251. Neuter, gram, significance of^338. New Testament, Greek, diction of, 227, 634. Newman's Homer, 520. Newspapers, literary character of, 442. N j a 1 a or Niall's Saga, 81. Norman-French, relation to English, 132, 384. Norway, dialects in, 133. " Nothing to Wear," diction of, 177. Noun, English, Lecture XIV., 301, 304, 305, 310. Numbers used to indicate grammatical rela- tions, 342. Numerals, Anglo-Saxon, 154, App. 23. O, pronunciation of, 4S4. Ofcom^y in early English, 279. Opera, Italian, vocabulary of, 182. Or, conjunction, equivocal, 587, App. 77. Order, logical, of words in period, 352,358. Ormulnm, orthography of, 110, 424; metre of, 520, 524 ; vocabulary of, 110, 123. Orthography, Old-English, 21, 430. Ought and owe, etymology and use of, 320. Outcept and outtake, for except, 134. Outsider, introduction of, 274. Pail and pale, distinguished in sound by Rask, 285. Paleario, English translation of, 104. Palsgrave, French grammar, character of, 107. Paraphrase, as exercise, 614. Parker Society, publications of, 104. Participle, use of in English, 649, 656. Particles, Greek and German, 294; insepar- able Anglo-Saxon and EngUsh, 197, 203. Pascal, style of, 265, 448. PasBive voice in Scandinavian languages, 337 ■, forms active in signification, 652. Pebersvend, pepper-boy. Danisli for old bachelor, 251. Penny, as denomination of sizes of nails, 184. Periodicals, place of in -philology, 441. Philology, modern, origin of, 5 ; now distin- euishcd from linguistics, 52. Piere Ploughman, vocabulary of, 111, 124, 168. Pliny tl-fo jlder, library of, 464. Poetry, conservative in language, 175, 372, corruptions introduced by, 106, 112. Popular literature, style of, 440. Portuguese words in Enghsh, 142. Position of words in period, 354; not con- formed to order of thought, 352. Possessive case, old use of, 393 ', and plural sign, 108. Possessive pronoun as sign of case, 400, 401, 402. Precision of language not promoted by in flections, 351. Press, free, influence of on language, 436. Priesthood, English, ignorance of, 453. Printers, orthography of, 418. Printers, early English, ignorance of, 426, 428. Printing, influence of on language, Lectures XIX., XX., XXI. ; on pronunciation, 454, 681 ; diffusion of knowledge, 446 ; extir- pates dialects, 681 ; relations of to Refor- mation, 432. Proclivity, old word revived, 278. Pronoun, personal, as sign of sex, 204, App. 33;posee6sive, see Possessive pronoun. Pronunciation, changes in. Lecture XXII., 527 ; of Northern and Southern languages, 373, 512, 671 ; in the United States, 669 ; oi proper names, 464 ; of Englisli and allied tongues, 471 ; foreign .difficulty of, 283. Prosody, ancient, 516 : English impaired "by loss of inflections, 175, 539 ; of mondsylla- bic languages, 633 ; of Gothic languages, 533. Protestantism, no common dialect, 620. Punctuation, uses and eflects of, 413. Purchas, Pilgrims, 116. Purism in language, 204. Purple, Tyrian, 69. Quantity in prosody, 516 ; and accent In Italian, 518. R, pronunciation of, 496, 673. Radical forms recovered in modern Ian guagcs, 364. Rask, services of, to Anglo-Saxon philology, 6. Reading, general, influence of on language, 446. Reckless, obsolescent in Hooker's time, 277. Reformation, relations of to English, 171, 432, 443. Religious vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon, 199, 231 ; among heathen, 228. Respect of^ in, improjier use of, 660. Respectable, changed in meaning, 256. Rhyme generally, Lectures XXIII., XXIV. origin of, 509 ; as guide to pronunciation 472; why not used by ancients, 504; in EngUsh, 500, 510 ; Spanish and Italian, 502 • exhausted in English, 515, 535, 540, 570- leads to introduction of foreign words, 538 double, 526, 534, 535. Rhythm in verse, 543. Robert of Gloucester, vocabulary of, 123. Roman empire, extent of, 91. Ruskin, vocabulary and style of, 122, 127. • Sailors, dialect of, 240. Sall^ in chemistry, 211. Sanscrit, philological importance of, 96. Sarra, name of Tyre, 69. Saudade, Portuguese, similar word ii. Scandinavian languages, 64. INDEX. 715 Btixons in England, 42. Scaiidhiiivian laugu^es, importance of, 93 ; half-rhj-mes in, 562 ; changes in, 132, 368 ; prouuuciation of, 470, 471. Science, vocabulary of, 185, 187, 191, 207. Scott, Sir AV.. his character of Shafton, 567. Si? i'e7-er, used by Mulcaster for di1. S/iaii and iciU, use of, 659. Sidney, Sir P., his opinion of English, 88. Sy°■^^ for quantity or number, 181. Siguiticanc, natural, of articulate sounds, 37. Signs and symbols, language of, 32. Sigurd, Bishop, Sermon of, 602. Since, sith, and sithence, 584. Skelton, workB of, 23. Skothending in Icelandic poatry, 554. Skt/-tinctured, in Milton, 70. SlidCj let it, authority for phrase, ISO. Smith, John, history of Virginia, 343, 416. Snorri Sturlason, Edda of, 103. Society, caprices of, afiect language, 64S. Soon, special meaning of, 580. Spanish, no influence on English, 142 ; ele- ments of, 141. Spenser's archaisms and licenses, 514 ; ver- sification, 540. Spindle-side^ female line, 271. Stairs, pair of, proper expression, 1S4. Steam-engine, vocabulary of, 147. Stereotyping, influence of, 465. -s(er, termination in English, 306, App- 45. Smft, vocabulary of, 122. Sword-side, male line, 271. Synonyms, generally. Lecture XSVI. ; er- roneously defined by Webster, 571 ; in meaning difl'erenced in use, 57a ■. study of, 592; Crabbo's, 595; eiited by "SVhaielv, 595. 3\iitas, English, 89, 95. Technical words and phrases, use of, 238, 240. Telegram^ new word, 2S'J. ?/* sound in A:i^!o-Saxon and Old-English, 491, 496. Theological writers of 17th century, 115. Thuej-didLS, stvie of, 80. Translation, difficulti^'^ of, 610, 612 ; helps and hindrance;! to, 597 ■. principles of, 599, 601: source of new words, 272,616; uses of, 614. Traiislainrs, early Englisb, 114. Travellers, old, importance of, 114. Trench, work.=! of, 278. Turner, on etymological proportionp of Eng- lish, 119 Tyndale's Nct? feHtaraent, literary merlti and iniportanco of, 113, 171, 625, IT, pronunciation of, 486. Ulphilas, translation of Scriptures, 92. -um, ending In, etymology of, 44, App. 4. Uit^ayhair, used as verb by Fuller, 204. Uniter, used by Mulcaster for hyphen, 153. Un-, prefix, 204, 310. Use to, why not employed in present tense, 323. Vague language, 232. i'e7itilate, old word revived, 278. Verb, generally, Lecture XIV. ; English, fonns of, 314, App. 46 ; passive in Danish and Swedish, 337 ; not time-word, 299. Visible, as used by Milton, 135. Vocabulary, personal, 182, 616; as aflfected by subject, 129 ; of common lire, 269 ; Eng- lish, 181 ; of dinerent authors, 124. Volger's nomenclature of crystallography, 214. " Volumes paramount," importance of, 18, 264. Vowels, English long, diphthongal, 482. Vulgarization of words, 180. "W, pronunciation ofj 497. 'tcard or -wards, ending in, 431. Walton, education and style of, 83. Wesley, tried to revive niU, 391. Whately on gram, significance of gender, 338. Who and whose, use of, 397, App. 54. Wilde^s imitative verse, 570. Wilt, to, 668. Winter, why used for year, 244. Woodworth's " Old Oaken Bucket," 373. Words, changes in meaning of, 242 ; abuses of, 258 ; coincidences of, 64 ; confounded by printers, 428 ; coalescence of, 337, 389 decay and degradation of, 255, 258 ; dif- fusion of, 148- English, number of, 181; familiar, readily corrupted, 253 ; loss of, 266 ; necessary to thought and memory, 1, 2; natural significance of, 37; not equiva- lent in difl'erent languages, 596, 611 ; new, how introduced, 183, 274 ; suspended ani- mation of, 179, 276, 277. Worsen, verb, 316. Worthen, verb, 316, 317. Wyclifib, dialect of, 167, 168, 625 ; influence of, 168. Y, participial prefix, 202, 333. Yea and yes, nay and no, hew distinguished, 579. Year, Qu. g e - a r ! 245.