himself performed: "the fact is, you have no music in your soul."

We are aware that the English tongue,- our own cartilaginous tongue, as some one has quaintly styled it,— has been decried, even by poets who have made it discourse the sweetest music, for its lack of expressive terms, and for its excess in consonants,― guttural, sibilant, or mute. It was this latter peculiarity, doubtless, which led Charles V., three centuries ago, to compare it to the whistling of birds; and even Lord Byron, whose own burning verse, distinguished not less by its melody than by its incomparable energy, has signally revealed the hidden harmony that lies in our short Saxon words,- turns traitor to his native language, and in a moment of caprice denounces it as

"Our harsh, northern, grunting guttural,

Which we are obliged to hiss, and spit, and sputter all,"

not thinking that in this very selection of condemnatory words he has strikingly shown the wondrous expressiveness of the tongue. Even Addison, who wrote so musical English, contrasting our own tongue with the vocal beauty of the Greek, and forgetting that the latter is the very lowest merit of a language, being merely its sensuous merit, calls it brick as against marble. Waller, too, ungrateful to the noble tongue that has preserved his name, declares that

"Poets that lasting marble seek,
Must carve in Latin or in Greek."

Because smoothness is one of the requisites of verse, it has been hastily concluded that languages in which vowels and liquids predominate must be better adapted to poetry, and that the most mellifluous must also be the most melodious. But so far is this from being true, that, as Henry Taylor

has remarked, in dramatic verse our English combinations of consonants are invaluable, both in giving expression to the harsher passions, and in imparting keenness and significancy to the language of discrimination, and especially to that of scorn.

The truth is, our language, so far from being harsh, or poor and limited in its vocabulary, is the richest and most copious now spoken on the globe. As Sir Thomas More long ago declared: "It is plenteous enough to expresse our myndes in anythinge whereof one man hath used to speak with another." Owing to its composite character, it has a choice of terms expressive of every shade of difference in the idea, compared with which the vocabulary of many other modern tongues is poverty itself. But for the impiety of the act, those who speak it might well raise a monument to the madcaps who undertook the tower of Babel; for, as the mixture of many bloods has made them the most vigorous of modern races, so has the mingling of divers tongues given them a language which is the noblest vehicle of thought ever vouchsafed to man. This very mingling of tongues in our language has been made the ground of an accusation against it; and the Anglo-Saxon is sometimes told by foreigners that he "has been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps"; that his dialect is "the alms-basket of wit," made up of beggarly borrowings, and is wholly lacking in originality.

It is true that the Anglo-Saxon has pillaged largely from the speech of other peoples; that he has a craving desire to annex, not only states and provinces, even whole empires, to his own, but even the best parts of their languages; that there is scarce a tongue on the globe which his absorbing genius has not laid under contribution to

enrich the exchequer of his all-conquering speech. Strip him of his borrowings, or "annexations," if you will,— and he would neither have a foot of soil to stand upon, nor a rag of language in which to clothe his shivering ideas. To say nothing of the Greek, Latin and French which enter so largely into the woof of the tongue, we are indebted to the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindoo, and even the North American Indian dialects, for many words which we cannot do without. The word-barks of our language are daily increasing in size, and terms that sprang up at Delhi and Benares four thousand years ago are to-day scaling the cliffs of the Rocky Mountains. But while the English has thus borrowed largely from other tongues, and the multifarious etymology of "its Babylonish vocabulary," as its enemies are pleased to call it, renders it, of all modern languages, one of the most difficult to master in all its wealth and power, yet it makes up in eclecticism, vigor, and abundance, far more than it loses in apparent originality. Mosaic-like and heterogeneous as are its materials, it is yet no mingle-mangle or patchwork, but is as individual as the French or the German. Though the rough materials are gathered from a hundred sources, yet such is its digestive and assimilative energy that the most discordant aliments, passing through its anaconda-like stomach, are as speedily identified with its own independent existence as the beefsteak which yesterday gave roundness to the hinder symmetry of a prize ox, becomes to-morrow part and parcel of the proper substance, the breast,leg, or arm,- of an Illinois farmer.

In fact, the very caprices and irregularities of our idiom, orthography, and pronunciation, which make for

eigners "stare and gasp," and are ridiculed by our own philological ultraists, are the strongest proofs of the nobleness and perfection of our language. It is the very extent to which these caprices, peculiar idioms, and exceptions prevail in any tongue, that forms the true scale of its worth and beauty; and hence we find them more numerous in Greek than in Latin,-in French or Italian than in Irish or Indian. There is less symmetry in the rugged, gnarled oak, with the grotesque contortions of its branches, which has defied the storms of a thousand years, than in the smoothly clipped Dutch yew tree; but it is from the former that we hew out the knees of mighty line-of-battle ships, while a vessel built of the latter would go to pieces in the first storm. It was our own English that sustained him who soared" above all Greek, above all Roman fame"; and the same "well of English undefiled" did not fail the myriad-minded dramatist, when

"Each scene of many-colored life he drew,

Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new."

Nor have even these great writers, marvellous and varied as is their excellence, fathomed the powers of the language for grand and harmonious expression, or used them to the full. It has "combinations of sound grander than ever rolled through the mind of Milton; more awful than the mad gasps of Lear; sweeter than the sighs of Desdemona; more stirring than the speech of Antony; sadder than the plaints of Hamlet; merrier than the mocks of Falstaff." To those, therefore, who complain of the poverty or harshness of our tongue, we may say, in the words of George Herbert:

"Let foreign nations of their language boast,
What fine variety each tongue affords;

I like our language, as our men and coast;-
Who cannot dress it well, want wIT, not WORDS."

CHAPTER IV.

SMALL WORDS.

It is with words as with sunbeams,-the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.-SOUTHEY.

The pompous march of blank verse admits the accompaniment of rolling and diffusive expressions; but energy, and condensation, and tenderness, must be sought for in the pithy, monosyllabic Saxon of our fathers.-Rev. MATTHEW HARRISON.

MONG the various forms of ingratitude, one of the

which one has climbed the steeps of celebrity; and a good illustration of this is the conduct of the author of the following lines, who, though indebted in no small degree for his fame to the small words, the monosyllabic music, of our tongue, sneers at them as low:

"While feeble expletives their aid do join,

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

How ingenious! how felicitous! the reader exclaims; and, truly, Pope has shown himself wonderfully adroit in ridiculing the Saxon part of the language with words borrowed from its own vocabulary. But let no man despise little words, even though he echo the little wasp of Twickenham. Alexander Pope is a high authority in English literature; but it is long since he was regarded as having the infallibility of a Pope Alexander. The multitude of passages in his works, in which the small words form not only the bolts, pins, and hinges, but the chief material in the structure of his verse, show that he knew well enough their value; but it was hard to avoid the temptation of