LECTURE III.

DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

I TOOK occasion to observe, at the commencement of my last lecture, that it is the essential character of a living language to be in flux and flow, to be gaining and losing; the words which constitute it as little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to one another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies remain for ever without alteration. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own language has made, I shall dedicate the present to a consideration of some of the losses, or at any rate diminutions, which during the same period it has endured. It will, however, be expedient here, by one or two preliminary observations, to avert any possible misapprehensions of my meaning.

It is certain that all languages must, or at least all languages do in the end, perish. They run their course; not all at the same rate, for the tendency to change is different in different languages, both from internal causes (mechanism, etc.), and also from causes external to the language, laid in the varying velocities of social progress and social decline; but so it is, that whether of shorter or longer life, they have their youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepi

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tude, their final dissolution. Not indeed that, even when this last hour has arrived, they disappear, leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary, out of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into new forms, the materials of which they were composed more or less survive, but these now organized in new shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus, for example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but a great part of the words that composed it live on in the four daughter-languages, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; not a few in our own. Still, in their own proper being, languages perish and pass away; no nations, that is, continue to speak them any more. Seeing, then, that they thus die, they must have had the germs of death, the possibilities of decay, in them from the very first.

Nor is this all; but in such mighty, strong-built fabrics as these, the causes which thus bring about their final dissolution must have been actually at work very long before the results began to be visible. Indeed, very often it is with them as with states, which, while in some respects they are knitting and strengthening, in others are already unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and languages, it would be a serious mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and period is growth and gain, and all after, decay and loss. On the contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions is going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud

changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. There is, indeed, a moment when the growth and gains cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; when these ever become more, those ever fewer; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than those of life and order. It is from this moment the decline of a language may properly be dated. But until that crisis and turning point has arrived, we may be quite justified in speaking of the losses, the real losses of a language, without in the least thereby implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun; it may yet be far distant; and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and diminutions which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you will not conclude that I am seeking to present it to you as now travelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my intention. In some respects it is losing, but in others gaining. Nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this, too, the parting with a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of a cumbrous or superfluous form, may itself be sometimes a most real gain. It is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the fruit is dif ferent from the flower, and the flower from the bud; having changed its merits, but not having renounced them; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, but more of usefulness; not serving the poet so well, but serving the historian, and philosopher, and theologian, better than of old.

One thing more let me say, before entering on the

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special details of my subject. It is this: the losses and diminutions which a language endures differ in one respect from its gains and acquisitions—namely, that they are of two kinds, while its gains are only of one. Its gains are only in words; it never puts forth in the course of its later evolution a new power; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative. But its losses are both in words and in powers-in words, of course, but in powers also it leaves behind it, as it travels onward, cases which it once possessed, renounces the employment of tenses which it once used; is content with one termination for both masculine and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a peculiar feature of one language, but the universal law of all. "In all languages," as has been well said, "there is a constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion." For example, a vast number of languages had at an early period of their development, besides the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I mean by a language renouncing its powers will, I trust, be more clear to you before my lecture is concluded. I just say this much about it now, to explain and justify a division which I shall make: considering first the losses of the English language in the region of words, and then in the region of powers.

And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in our language-as, indeed, in ev

ery other. When I speak of this the dying out of words, I do not allude to mere tentative, experimental words, such as I spoke of in my last lecture-words offered to the language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or, if not so, which had been domiciled in it long, and had appeared to have found a lasting home in it. Thus, not a few pure AngloSaxon words lived on into the formation of our early English, and yet have since dropped out of our vocabulary, while their places have been filled by others. Not to mention those of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are very numerous, many have lived on to far later periods, and yet have finally given way. That beautiful word 'wanhope' for despair, hope which has so waned that now there is an entire want of it, was in use down to the reign of Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of Gascoigne. That not very graceful word 'skinker' for 'cupbearer' is used by Shakespeare, and lasted to Dryden's times and beyond. Spenser uses often to welk' (welken) in the sense of to fade, to sty' for to mount, to hery' as to glorify or praise, to halse' as to embrace, 'teene' as vexation or grief: Shakespeare to tarre' as to provoke, 'to sperr' as to enclose or bar in; 'to sag' for to droop, or hang the head downward. Holland em

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* It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII.; see the State Papers, vol. viii., p. 247. It was the latest survivor of a whole group or family of words which continued much longer in Scotland than with us, of which some perhaps continue there still; these are but a few of them: 'wanthrift' for extravagance; 'wanluck,' misfortune; 'wanlust,' languor; 'wanwit,' folly; 'wangrace,' wickedness; 'wantrust' (Chaucer), distrust.