Fourthly: While Englishmen have dealt with the verb much in the same way as their kindred on the continent, they stand very differently in regard to the Nouns and Articles. The Modern Continental Languages of the Teutonic stock retain, in one shape or another, the inflected forms, which, as was lately noted, our Language has dropped; and they have retained with them the old susceptibility of inversion and composition. These differences are, in themselves, sufficient to give to the English a structural character very unlike that of such tongues as the German. Through them, indeed, we are, even in respect of the structure of our sentences, less purely Gothic than any other modern Goths. We bear, by means of them, no inconsiderable resemblance to the French. They cause us, in short, to occupy among the nations of Europe a philological station which is somewhat anomalous.

Fifthly: We are brought still nearer to our nearest continental neighbours, by the large amount of our Glossarial borrowings from the French and Latin. Nor is it unworthy of remark that these importations have, in all likelihood, acted reflexly on our Grammatical Structure. Our acquisitions in diction are foreign, both in place and in pedigree. If they had come from any tongue belonging to our own Gothic stock, not only would our speech have been more harmonious in character, but it would not improbably have been also more flexible in use, especially in respect of compounding, than it can be with words so distinctly alien in origin as are the Latin and French. No other European race has made similar appropriations to an extent at all parallel to ours. The Spaniards seem to stand next to us, but are very far distant.

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

5. The Dictionary of the English Language will now be opened. We must learn, more precisely than we have hitherto been able to do, the character and origin of the words it contains.

Our task would soon be over, if we were to be content with knowing how many of our words are Anglo-Saxon and how many come from foreign roots. But the question of Number, although we will put it by and by, is really more curious than useful. The answer to it tends, indeed, to deceive us as to the comparative value belonging to the several elements of a language. Words which are very numerous in the dictionary, may be of secondary consequence, and occur infrequently: words which are much fewer may be so essential to ordinary communication, as to be coming up incessantly.

The extent to which a tongue really depends on its various roots, is known only when we have discovered, what the Classes of Words are that each has furnished. The roots are important, in the ratio of the importance which belongs to the classes of words arising out of them.

When our vocabulary is scrutinized in this way, its obligations to the Anglo-Saxon appear in a much more striking light, than that which they wear when we look only to the proportional numbers, large as we shall find that proportion to be.

Let us see, then, in entering on this inquiry, what kinds of words we derive from our Mother-Tongue.

First: We have from it almost all those words, and parts of words, which import Relations. This is merely repeating in another shape the assertion already made, that our grammatical forms and idioms are Anglo-Saxon: the vocabulary and the grammar react on each other. The fact, that our words of this class are chiefly Teutonic, cannot be too earnestly impressed on us. It is the most widely-reaching of all the circumstances affecting the character of our speech; it does more than any thing else in making the Teutonic to be the preponderating element.

Secondly: We owe to the same source not only, as has been seen already, all the adjectives, but also all the other words, both nouns and verbs, which the grammarians are accustomed to call Irregular. Such words are in all languages very old, indeed among the very oldest they express ideas which occur to all of us continually in the business of life; and, for these reasons, they are oftener in our mouths than any others of their class. This fact, again, brings up Anglo-Saxon words continually.

Thirdly: The Saxon gives us in most instances our only names, and in all instances the names that are aptest and suggest themselves most readily, for the greater number of the Objects Perceived through the Senses, and for all of them that are most impressive and of the greatest consequence to us. Such are the most striking things which we see; as, sun, moon, and stars, land and water, wood and stream, hill and dale: to which may be added the most common animals and plants. Such are the great changes which take place in nature, and the causes of the changes; as the divisions of time (all except autumn*); with light and darkness, heat and cold, rain and snow, thunder and lightning; and also the sounds, and postures, and motions of ani

*We have the Anglo-Saxon in harvest, which meant the season ra well as the work,

mal life. Here is another class of words remarkably numerous: and it is a class peculiarly energetic and vivid in impression.

Fourthly Although we usually borrow from Latin or French such words as involve a wide abstraction, and are very extensive and general in meaning, yet those whose Signification is Specific are, with few exceptions, Anglo-Saxon. We use a foreign term naturalized, when we speak of colour universally: but we fall back on our home stores, if we have to tell what the colour is, calling it red, yellow, or blue, white or black, green or brown. Thus, also, we are Romans when we speak, in a general way, of moving: but we are Teutons if we leap or spring, if we stagger, slip, slide, glide, or fall, if we walk or run, swim or ride, if we creep, crawl, or fly. Now, not only are such precise words by far the most frequent: it is also a law of style, that, by how much a term is more specific, by so much is it the more animated and suggestive.

Fifthly: We possess, without going abroad to seek for them, a rich fund of apt expressions for the ordinary kinds of Feeling and Affection, for the outward signs of these, for the persons who are the earliest and most natural objects of our attachment, and for those inanimate things whose names are figuratively significant of domestic union. Of this class are love and hate, hope and fear, gladness and sorrow; such are the smile and tear, the sigh and groan, weeping and laughter; such are father and mother, man and wife, child, son and daughter, kindred and friends; such are home, hearth, roof, fireside. These are instances of a multitude of words, which, even when they are not the only names for the things, are the first we learn to give to them. Therefore they not only occur to us more readily than others, but have the power, through association, of recalling a host of the most touching images and emotions.

Sixthly: "The Anglo-Saxon is, for the most part, the language of Business; of the counting-house, the shop, the market, the street, the farm." Among an eminently practical people, it is eminently the organ of practical action: it retains this prerogative, in defiance alike of the necessary innovations caused by scientific discovery, and of the corruptions smuggled in by ignorant and mercenary affectation.

Seventhly: "A very large proportion (and that always the strongest) of the language of Invective, humour, satire, and colloquial pleasantry, is Anglo-Saxon."*

*The whole substance of this section is borrowed from an essay already cited; Edinburgh Review, Vol. LXX; 1839. To the seven classes

It must surely be evident, that the Teutonic elements of our vocabulary are equally valuable in enabling us to speak and write perspicuously, and to speak and write with animation; in making what we say easy to be understood, and in making it impressive and persuasive. Our mother-tongue, besides dictating the laws by which our words are connected, and furnishing the cement which binds them together, yields all our aptest means of describing imagination, feeling, and every-day facts of life.

6. Next in the order of importance, and incalculably more extensive than all borrowings to be afterwards examined, stand those parts of our vocabulary which we take from the French and Latin.

The former tongue being itself the offspring of the latter, it is often difficult for us to know which of the two has been our immediate source. Many of our words exist in an ambiguous form, which does not determine the question: and some we have in two shapes, as if they had been imported twice over.

The parent may first be looked at; since our obligations to her began earliest. From the Latin we have. borrowed more or less for two thousand years, and freely for more than six centuries.

The first period was the Roman, to which we are but little indebted. It left a very few military terms, one or two of which have remained independent, while others have been incorporated in names of places. Examples, perhaps the only ones, are Street, the syllable Coln (from Colonia) in names like Colne and Lincoln, and Chester (from Castrum) alone or as part of a word.

Next, in the Anglo-Saxon period, the learning of the churchmen brought in a considerable number of terms, chiefly ecclesiastical. Such words, still in use, are monk, bishop, saint; minster, porch, cloister; mass, psalter, epistle; pall, chalice, and candle.

With the period after the Conquest, begins our difficulty in distinguishing our words of Latin origin from those of French. Importations which are plainly of the former kind make up nearly our whole nomenclature in theology and mental philosophy; while our most modern additions of the sort have embraced many miscellaneous terms. Our Latinisms have chiefly arisen in three epochs. The first was the thirteenth century, which, as we have

of words which it has suggested, there may be added one other at least. It consists of those idiomatic phrases, and words, and parts of words, which are condemned in most of our current books on style, because they are not understood: but which are genuine fragments of our ancient tongue, and abound in pith and expressiveness.

seen, followed an age devoted to classical studies. Both its theological writers and its poets coined freely in the Roman mint. The second period was that which is loosely spoken of as the Elizabethan, beginning with the last twenty years of the sixteenth century, and extending yet farther into the next. In this age, during the enthusiasm of a new revival of admiration for antiquity, the privilege of naturalization was used, chiefly by its latest prose writers, to an extent which threatened serious danger to purity and ease of speech. Thirdly came the latter part of the eighteenth century, the time when Johnson was the dictator of prose style. The pompous rotundity then prevalent has been permanently injurious. The number of new Latin words it has directly bequeathed to us, is really far from being large. But those it has given have come into very common use, instead of old Saxon words supposed to be less dignified; some of the words which were at first remonstrated against, are now heard in our most familiar sentences. Besides this, our ordinary forms of speech have received a Latin cast, quite alien from the old idiom; and the tendency seems to have been in no way diminished by the revived study of our early literature.

Our Latin words have done us, on the whole, very good than harm.

much more

They go greatly farther than those from the French, towards making up for the laming which the tongue had suffered through the retrenchment of its power of composition.

A large proportion of them are expressive of complex ideas, each of whose elements might be separately expressed by Teutonic words still retained, and the union of which is still so expressed in the other languages of the same stock. Many such words were imperatively needed, after our speech had acquired even that degree of rigidity which had infected it so early as the thirteenth century. But it seems plain, that the ease with which the Latin, after it had begun to be decently understood by literary men, was found to furnish substitutes for the native compounds, must have tended much to discourage even that limited use of compounding, which might have been practised till the fifteenth or sixteenth century.

Many Latin words, too, have been introduced without such necessity, yet not without advantage. To those who trode the

* Shakspeare marked the Latinisms in their earliest stage, and repeatedly ridiculed them. Desolation, Remuneration, and Accommodate, are among those which he puts into the mouths of persons who do not understand them.