times rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this, its life is an unhealthy one; there are here signs of decay and death approaching; but still it lives, and even these misgrowths and malformations, these errors, are themselves the utterances and evidences of life. A dead language-the Latin, for instance is as incapable of losing as it is of gaining. We may know it better; but it can never be more nor less in itself than it has been for hundreds of years.

Our own is, of course, a living language still; it is therefore gaining and losing; it is a tree in which the vital sap is yet working, ascending from its roots into its branches; and, as this works, new leaves are being put forth by it, old are dropping away and dying. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some of the evidences of this its present life. As I took for the subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several elements of our composite English are now found in it, so I shall take, for the subject of this, the sources from which the English language has enriched its vocabulary, the periods at which it has made its chief additions, the character of the additions which at different periods it has made, and the motives which induced it to seek them.

I had occasion to mention in that lecture, and indeed I dwelt with some emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must freely be allowed to be, it is only such in respect of its words, not in respect of its construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms. These are

THE NORMAN CONQUEST.

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all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.

The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary was a consequence, although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the Norman domination which Duke William's victory established in our land. And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest acknowledgment of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true, but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that he had great things in store for the people who should occupy this English soil, than when he brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At the same time, the actual interpenetration of our AngloSaxon with any large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. Some French words we find very soon after; but in the main the two streams of language continued for a long while separate and apart, even as the two nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither forgetting the fact.

Time, however, softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme depression which had ensued on his

*

defeat, became every day a more important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet sing. At the same time, the Saxon, now passing into the English language, required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures, which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no utterance in Saxon words! All this it was sought to supply from the French.

We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the Norman nobility

* We may trace, I think, a permanent record of this depression in the fact that a vast number of Teutonic words, which have a noble sense in the kindred language of Germany, and evidently had once such in the Anglo-Saxon, have forfeited this in whole or in part, have been contented to take a lower place; while, in most instances, a word of the Latin moiety of the language has assumed the place which they have vacated. Thus, 'tapfer' is valiant, courageous, but 'dapper' is only spruce or smart; 'prächtig,' which means proud, magnificent, has dwindled into 'pretty;' 'taufen,' being to baptize, only appears with us as 'to dip;' 'weinen' is honest weeping in German, it is only 'whining' with us; 'dach' is any roof whatever, but 'thatch' is only a straw-roof for us; 'baum' is a living tree, while 'beam' is only a piece of dead timber; in 'horn-beam,' one of our trees, 'beam' still keeps its earlier use. 'Haut' is skin, but its English representative is 'hide' — skin, that is, of a beast; 'stuhl,' a seat or chair, is degraded into 'stool;' while 'graben' is no longer to dig, but 'to grub;' again, in 'rasch' there is nothing of the sense of too great haste, of temerity, which in our 'rash' there is. And this list might be very largely increased.

INCOMIMG OF FRENCH.

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were exchanging their own language for the English; and I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to one man's influ ence-namely, to Chaucer's.* Doubtless, he did much; he fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to suppose that the greater number of French vocables which he employed in his poems had never been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar to English ears, is to suppose that his poems must have presented to his contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves it impossible to explain how he should at once have become the popular poet of our nation.

That Chaucer largely developed the language in this direction is indeed plain. We have only to compare his English with that of another great master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much more his diction is saturated with French words than is that of the reformer. We may note, too, that a great many which he and others employed, and as it were proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and received; so that no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language, and were here in excess.† At

*Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul's school, in his book, Logonomia Anglica, 1621, preface: "Huc usque peregrinæ voces in linguâ Anglicâ inauditæ. Tandem circa annum 1400 Galfridus Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis poësin suam famosam reddidit." The whole passage, which is too long to quote, as indeed the whole book, is curious. Gil was an earnest advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it in all his English quotations in this book.

† We may observe exactly the same in Plautus; a multitude of Greek words are used by him, which the Latin language did not want, and therefore refused to take up. Thus, 'clepta,' 'zamia' (Šŋμía),

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the same time, this can be regarded as no condemnation of their attempt. It was only by actual experience that it could be proved whether the language wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb them into itself, and assimilate them with all that it already was and had; or did not require, and would therefore in due time reject and put them away. And what happened then will happen in every attempt to transplant on a large scale the words of one language into another. Some will take root; others will not, but after a longer or briefer period will wither and die. Thus, I observe in Chaucer such French words. as these misericorde,' 'malure' (malheur), 'penible,' 'tas,' 'gipon,' 'pierrie' (precious stones); none of which have been permanently incorporated in our tongue. As little has creansur,' which Wiclif (2 Kin. iv. 1) employs for creditor, held its place. For a long timeroy' struggled hard for a place in the language: it quite obtained one in Scotch. It is curious to mark some of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded: seeming to have taken firm root, they have yet withered away in the end. Thus has it been, for example, with 'egal' (Puttenham); with 'ouvert' (Holland); with rivage,' 'jouissance,' 'noblesse,' accoil' (accueillir), 'sell' (= saddle), all occurring in Spenser; with to serr' (serrer), with 'vive,' used both by Ba

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'danista,' 'harpagare,' 'apolactizare,' 'nauclerus,' 'strategus,' 'morologus,' 'phylaca,' 'malacus,' 'sycophantia,' 'euscheme' (ɛioxμws), 'dulice' (dovλikos), (so 'scymnus' by Lucretius), none of which, I believe, are employed except by him; 'mastigias' and 'techna' appear also in Terence. Yet only experience could show that they were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature in which Plautus lived, it was well done to put them on trial.