FEMALE, FEMININE, ETC.

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masculine, feminine, and neuter, or even into masculine and feminine, as in the French; and with this, and as a necessary consequence of this, the dropping of any flexional modification in the adjectives connected with them. Natural sex of course remains, being inherent in all language; but grammatical gender, with the exception of 'he,'' she,' and 'it,' and perhaps one or two other fragmentary instances, the language has altogether foregone. An example will make clear the distinction between these. When I use the word 'poetess,' it is not the word 'poetess' which is feminine, but the person indicated by the word who is female. So, too, daughter,'' queen,' are in English not feminine nouns, but nouns designating female persons. Take, on the contrary, 'filia' orregina,'' fille' or 'reine,' there you have feminine nouns as well as female persons. I need hardly say to you that we did not inherit this simplicity from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have done the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether we turn to the Latin, or, which is for us more important, to the old Gothic, we find gender; and in the four daughter-languages which have descended from the Latin, in most of those which have descended from the ancient Gothic stock, it is fully established to the present day. The practical, business-like character of the English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a distinction which, in the great multitude of words that is, in all having to do with inanimate things, and as such incapable of sex-rested upon a fiction, and had no ground in the real nature of things. It is only by an act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be attributed to a table, a

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ship, or a tree; and there are aspects-this is onein which the English is among the least imaginative of all languages, even while it has been employed in some of the greatest works of imagination which the world has ever seen.

OBSOLETE WORDS, ETC.

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LECTURE IV.

CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS.

I PROPOSE, according to the plan which I sketched out in my first lecture, to take for the subject of my present one the changes which in the course of time have found place, or now are finding place, in the meaning of many among our English words; so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we employ them at this day in senses very different from those in which our forefathers employed them of old. You will observe that it is not obsolete words, words quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to considerwords, rather, which are still on the lips of men, but with meanings more or less removed from those which once they possessed. My subject is far more practical, you will feel it to have far more to do with your actual life, than if I had taken obsolete words, and considered them. These last have an interest indeed, but it is an interest of an antiquarian character. Such words were a part of the intellectual money with which our ancestors carried on their affairs, but now they are rather medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious than current money for the needs and pleasures of all. Their wings are clipped, so that they are "winged words" (sα Tregósvrα) no more; the spark of thought or feeling, kindling from mind to

mind, no longer runs along them, as along the electric wires of the soul.

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And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be misled by them. A reader lights for the first time on one of these obsolete English words, frampold,' or 'garboil,' or 'brangle.' He is at once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a glossary, or, if he guesses from the context at the word's signification, still his guess is as a guess to him, and no more, But words that have changed their meaning have often a deceivableness about them; a reader not once doubts but that he knows their intention, has no misgiving but that they possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer, and conveyed to his contemporaries, when indeed it is otherwise altogether.

Let me illustrate this by examples. A reader of our day lights upon such a passage as the following (it is in the Preface to Howell's Lexicon, 1660):

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Though the root of the English language be Dutch, yet it may be said to have been inoculated afterward on a French stock." He may know that the Dutch is a sister-language or dialect to our own; but this, that it is the mother or root of it, will certainly perplex him, and he will hardly know what to make of the assertion; perhaps he ascribes it to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered in his esteem. But presently in the course of his reading he meets with the following statement, this time in Fuller's Holy Wur, being a history of the Crusades: "The French, Dutch, Italian, and English, were the four elemental nations whereof this army [of the crusaders] was compounded." If the student has sufficient his

DUTCH AND GERMAN.

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torical knowledge to know that in the time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our use of the word, this statement would merely startle him; and probably before he had finished the chapter, having his attention once roused, he would perceive that Fuller, with the writers of his time, used Dutch' for German ; even as it was constantly so used up to the end of the seventeenth century; what we call now a Dutchman being then a Hollander. But a young student might very possibly want that amount of previous knowledge, which should cause him to receive this announcement with misgiving and surprise; and thus he might carry away altogether a wrong impression, and rise from a perusal of the book, persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no part in them at all.

And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it happen with the subtiler changes which words have undergone, conveying now much more blame and condemnation, or conveying now much less, than formerly; or of a different kind; and a reader not aware of the changes which have taken place, may be in continual danger of misreading his author, of misunderstanding his intention, while he has no doubt whatever that he is perfectly apprehending and taking it in. Thus, when Shakespeare, in 1 Henry VI., makes the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a miscreant,' how coarse a piece of invective this sounds! how unlike what the chivalrous soldier would have uttered; or what one might have supposed Shakespeare, even with his unworthy estimate of the holy warrior-maid, would have put