II. English benefited by the Conquest.

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These are manifest gains; but for all this I would not affirm that everything is gain. Thus if our Saxon had never been disturbed, there would certainly have been in the language a smaller number of what our ancestors called, 'inkhorn terms,' the peculiar property of the scholar, not used and not understood by the poor and the illiterate. More words would be what all words ought to be, and once were, 'thoughtpictures,' transparent with their own meaning, telling their own story to everybody. Thus if I say that Christ'sympathizes' with his people, or even if I say, 'has compassion,' I am not sure that every one follows me; but if I were to say, He 'fellow-feels,' and the word existed not long ago, as ' fellow-feeling' does still, all would understand. 'Redemption' conveys to our poor the vague impression of some great benefit;

results of the large importation of French and Latin words into the language -The evils resulting from these importations have, I think, been generally underrated in this country. When a language must draw upon its own wealth for a new term, its forms and analogies are kept fresh in the minds of those who so often use them. But with the introduction of foreign terms, not only is the symmetry-the science of the language injured, but its laws are brought less frequently under notice, and are the less used, as their application becomes more difficult. If a new word were added to any of the purer languages, such as the Sanscrit, the Greek, or the Welsh, it would soon be the root of numerous offshoots, substantives, adjectives, verbs, &c., all formed according to rule, and modifying the meaning of their root according to well-known analogies. But in a mixed and broken language few or no such consequences follow. The word remains barren and the language is "enriched" like a tree covered over with wreaths taken from the boughs of its neighbour; which carries a goodly show of foliage and withers beneath the shade.'

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but 'againbuying' would have conveyed a far more distinct one. 'Middler '-this word also is to be found in Wiclif-would have the same advantage over mediator. Even our Authorized Version, comparatively little as we have to complain of there, would itself not have lost, but gained, if its authors had been absolutely compelled to use the store of Saxon vocables at their command, if sometimes they had been shut in, so to speak, to these; for instance, if instead of 'celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial,' they had had no choice but to write 'heavenly bodies and bodies earthly' (1 Cor. xv. 40). All would have understood them then ; very much doubt whether all understand them now. Other advantages too might have followed, if the language had continued all of one piece. Thus in the matter of style, it would not have been so fatally easy to write bad English, and to fancy this bad to be good, as now it is. That worst and most offensive kind of bad English, which disguises poverty of thought, and lack of any real command over the language, by the use of big, hollow, lumbering Latin words, would not have been possible. It is true that on the other hand the opportunities of writing a grand, sustained, stately English would not have been nearly so great, but for the incoming of that multitude of noble words which Latin, the stateliest of all languages, has lent us. Something not very different indeed, not immeasurably remote from Swift's or Dryden's prose might have existed; but nothing in the least resembling the stately march of Hooker's, of Milton's, or of Jeremy Taylor's. A good style would have been a much simpler, less complex matter than now it is; the language would have been an instrument with not so many strings, an

II. English benefited by the Conquest. 81

organ with fewer pipes and stops, of less compass, with a more limited diapason, wanting many of the grander resonances which it now possesses; but easier to play on, requiring infinitely less skill; not so likely to betray into gross absurdities, nor to make an open show of the incapacity of such as handled it badly.

On the whole, then, while that Norman Conquest, in the disturbing forces which it has exerted on the English language, has no doubt brought with it losses no less than gains, we may boldly affirm that the gains very far transcend the losses. As so many things have wrought together to make England what she is, as we may trace in our 'rough island-story' so many wonderful ways in which good has been educed from evil, and events the most unpromising have left their blessing behind them, not otherwise has it been here. That which brought down our English tongue from its pride of place, stript it of so much in which it gloried, condemned it, as might have seemed, if not to absolute extinction, yet to serve henceforward as the mere patois of an illiterate race of subject bondsmen and hinds, it was even that very event which in its ultimate consequences wrought out for it a completeness and a perfection which it would never else have obtained. So strange in their ultimate issues are the ways of Providence with men.

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LECTURE III.

GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

T is with good right that we speak of some languages as living, of others as dead. All spoken languages may be ranged in the first class; for as men will never consent to use a language without more or less modifying it in their use, will never so far forgo their own activity as to leave it exactly where they found it, there follows from this that so long as it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, it will inevitably show itself alive, and that by many infallible proofs, by growth and misgrowth, by acquisition and loss, by progress and decay. This title therefore of living, a spoken language abundantly deserves; for it is one in which, spoken as it is by living men, vital energies are still in operation. It is one which is in course of actual evolution; which, if the life that animates it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it finds no use, rejecting by a reactive energy the foreign and heterogeneous, which may for a while have forced themselves upon it. In the process of all this it may easily make mistakes; in the desire to simplify, it

It we

III.

Vital Energy of Languages.

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may let go distinctions which were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it sometimes rejects as worthless, and suffers to die out, words which were most worthy to have lived. So far as it commits any of these faults its life is not healthy; it is not growing richer but poorer; there are here tokens, however remote, of disorganization, decay, and ultimate death. But still it lives, and even these misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this good, the taking up into itself of that bad, even these errors are themselves the utterances and evidences of life. A dead language knows nothing of all this. It is dead, because books, and not now any generation of living men, are the guardians of it, and what they guard, they guard without change. Its course has been completely run, and it is now equally incapable of gaining and of losing. We may come to know it better; but in itself it is not, and never can be, other than it was before it ceased from the lips of men. In one sense it is dead, though in another it may be more true to say of it that it has put on immortality.

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 circulating yet; and as this works, new leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping away. I propose to consider some of the evidences of this life at work in it still. In my present lecture and in that which follows I shall take for my subject, the sources from which the English language has enriched its vocabulary, the periods at which it has made the chief additions to