gender, can be attributed to a table, a ship, and tree; and there are aspects, this is an example, in which the English is one of 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.

LECTURE IV.

ON 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 observe, it is not obsolete words, it is not words which have quite fallen out of present use that I propose to consider— words rather, still on the lips of men, but with meanings more or less removed from those which once they had. 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 somewhat 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" (êπεà πTEρóεvτa) no more; the spark of thought, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs along them, as along the electric wires of the soul.

And then, besides this, there is little or no danger that any should be misled by these. 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 deceiveableness about them, so that he never doubts but that he knows their intention, that they possess for him the same force which they possessed for their writer, and conveyed to his contemporaries, when indeed it is altogether otherwise.

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): "Though the root of the English language be Dutch, yet it may be said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French stock." He may know that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to ours; but this that it is the mother or root of it will certainly perplex him, and he will hardly know what to make of it; 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 War: "The French, Dutch, Italian, and English were the four elemental nations, whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compound

DUTCH, MISCREANT.

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ed." If the student has sufficient historical 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 it would be very possible for a young student not to have 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 the perusal of the book, persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in the Crusades, while the Ger-mans had little or nothing to do with them.

And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more often will it happen with the subtler 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 Henry VI. makes the noble Talbot address Joan of Arc as a 'miscreant,' how coarse a piece of invective does this sound; how unlike to that which the chivalrous soldier would have uttered; or to that which Shakespeare, even with his

unworthy estimate of the noble warrior Maid, would have put into Talbot's mouth. But a 'miscreant' in Shakespeare's time had nothing of the meaning which now it has. A 'miscreant,' in agreement with its etymology, was a misbeliever, one who did not believe rightly the articles of the Catholic Faith. And I need not tell you that this was the constant charge which the English brought against Joan,—namely, that she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such, had fallen from the faith. It is this which Talbot means when he calls her a 'miscreant,' and not what we should intend by the name.

And in reading of poetry especially what forces through this ignorance are often lost, what emphasis passes unobserved, how often the poet may be wronged in our estimation; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, which at once would lose this character, did we know how to read into some word the power and peculiar force which it once had, but which now has departed from it. For example, Milton ascribes in Comus the 'tinsel-slippered feet' to Thetis, the goddess of the sea. 'Tinsel-slippered,' how comparatively poor an epithet it sounds for those who know of 'tinsel' only in its modern acceptation, as mean. and tawdry finery, affecting a splendor which it does not really possess. But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it back to the French "étincelle,' and the Latin 'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers of his time saw, 'the sparkling,' and how exquisitely beautiful a title does this become applied to a goddess of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our