and intellectual stores of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that which may hereafter be of service to ourselves, may be of service to others-than which there can be no feeling more pleasurable, none more delightful. I shall be glad and thankful, if you can feel as much in regard of that lecture, which I now bring to its end.

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LECTURE V.

ON THE CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS.

WHEN I announce to you that the subject of my lecture to-day will be English orthography, or the spelling of words in our native language, with the alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a weightier, yet a more interesting, subject might have occupied this our concluding lecture. I cannot allow it to be wanting either in importance or in interest. Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage, as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far higher acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by faults in the manner of treating it; but I am sure it ought as little to be this; and would never prove so in competent hands. Let us then address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope that it may yield us both profit and pleasure.

Some one has said, "The invention of printing was very well; but, as compared to the invention of writing, it was no such great matter after all." Whoever it was who made this observation, it is clear that for him use and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased

to wonder at all-the power, namely, of representing sounds by written signs, of reproducing for the eye that which existed at first only for the ear: and the estimate which he formed of the relative value of these two inventions was a just one. Writing indeed stands more nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves rather to be compared with it, than with printing; which, with all its utility, is yet of altogether another and inferior type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway between the other two, and to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to the other.

The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first formation, the end whereunto it is a mean, is by aid of symbols agreed on before, to represent to the eye with the greatest accuracy which is possible the spoken word.

It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more imperfectly. Short as man's spoken word often falls of his thought, so short his written word falls often of his spoken. Several causes contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and infirmity cleave to writing, as to every other invention of man. All alphabets have been left incomplete. They have superfluous letters, letters, that is, which they do not want, because other letters already represent the sound which they represent; they have dubious letters, letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand for, because more than one sound is represented by them-our 'c,' for instance, which sometimes has the sound of 's,' as in 'city,'

THE SPOKEN AND WRITTEN WORD.

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sometimes of 'k,' as in 'cat;' they are deficient in letters, that is, the language has elementary sounds which have no corresponding letters appropriated to them, and can only be represented by combinations of letters. All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not a few of them have all, and more. This then is one reason of the imperfect reproduction of the spoken word by the written. But another is, that the human voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so infinitely to modify and vary these sounds, that were an alphabet complete as human art could make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four and twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it could only approximately give back.

But a further cause for the divergence which comes gradually to find place between men's spoken and their written words is this; what men do often, they will seek to do with the least possible trouble. There is nothing which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek here then to save themselves trouble; they will contract two syllables into one; they will slur over, and thus after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard letters they will substitute soft; for those which require a certain effort to pronounce, they will substitute those which require little or none.

And thus as the result of these causes a gulf between the written and spoken word will not merely exist; but it will be the tendency of it to grow ever wider and wider. This tendency indeed will be partially counter

worked by approximations which from time to time. will by silent consent be made of the written word to the spoken; here and there a letter dropped in speech will be dropped also in writing, as the 's' in so many French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new shape, contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the lips of men, will find its representation in their writing. Still for all this, and despite of these partial readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be infinite; there will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist in one shape upon our lips, and in quite another in our books.

It is inevitable that the question should arise-Shall these anomalies be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing and speech into harmony and consent-a harmony and consent which never indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which yet may be regarded as the idea of written speech, as that which it was intended to display? If the attempt is to be made, it is clear that it can only be made in one way. The question is not open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain, or the mountain to Mahomet. The spoken word is the mountain; it will not stir; it will resist all interference. It feels its own primary rights, that it existed the first, that it is, so to speak, the elder brother; and it will never be induced to change itself for the purpose of conforming and complying with the written word. Men will not be persuaded to pronounce 'would' and