that the English Church, being in like manner doublefronted, looking on the one side toward Rome, being herself truly Catholic, looking on the other toward the Protestant communions, being herself also protesting and reformed, may yet have a great part in the Providence of God to play for the reconciling of a divided Christendom. And if this ever should be so, if, in spite of our sins and unworthiness, so blessed a task should be in store for us, it will not be a small help and assistance thereunto, that. the language in which her mediation will have to be effected is one wherein both parties may claim their own, in which neither will feel that it is receiving the adjudication of a stranger, of one who must be an alien from its deeper thoughts and habits, because an alien from its words, but a language in which both recognize very much of that which is deepest and most precious of their own.

Nor is this merit which I have just claimed for our English the mere dream and fancy of patriotic vanity. The scholar who in our days is most profoundly acquainted with the great group of the Gothic languages in Europe, and a passionate lover, if ever there were such, of his native German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself very nearly to the same effect, has given the palm over all to our English in words which you will not grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring this lecture to a close. After ascribing to it "a veritable power of expression, such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other language of men," he goes on to say, "Its highly spiritual genius, and wonderfully happy development and condition,

JACOB GRIMM ON ENGLISH.

39

have been the result of a surprisingly intimate union of the two noblest languages in modern Europe, the Teutonic and the Romance. It is well known in what relation these two stand to one another in the English tongue; the former supplying in far larger proportion the material groundwork, the latter the spiritual conceptions. In truth the English language, which by no mere accident has produced and upborne the greatest and most predominant poet of modern times, as distinguished from the ancient classical poetry (I can, of course, only mean Shakespeare), may with all right be called a world-language; and like the English people appears destined hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive even than its present over all the portions of the globe. For in wealth, good sense, and closeness of structure no other of the languages at this day spoken deserves to be compared with it-not even our German, which is torn, even as we are torn, and must first shake off many defects, before it can enter boldly into competition with the English.*

* Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache, Berlin, 1851, p. 135.

40

LECTURE II.

GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Ir is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as living, of others as dead. These epithets are not severally mere synonyms for 'spoken' and 'unspoken,' however we very often esteem them no more. Some languages are living, or alive, in quite a different and in a much higher sense than this; showing themselves to be so by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay. A living language is one in which a vital formative energy is still at work; a dead language is one in which this has ceased. A living language is one which is in the course of actual evolution; which is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth; which at the same time is casting off useless and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign and heteroge neous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which were not useless, and which

SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH.

41

it would have been better to retain; its acquisitions are not all gains; it sometimes 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 beginning; but still it lives, and even these misgrowths and misformations are themselves the ut terances 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 language 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 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 for some time 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 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 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 present miseries which it entailed on the Saxon race, that it was really the making of England. God never showed more plainly that He had great things in store for the people which should occupy this English soil, than when he brought that aspiring Norman race among us. At the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon 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.