difficult to determine whether they mean relatively to, or by reason of, or in point of; and the vague use of the phrase, of course, tends to embarrass the reader by confounding in expression things logically very distinct.*

The two changes which I have now been considering are not of popular, but of scholastic origin, and they are wholly the fruit of an affectation of superior correctness. But there is, among the novelties I have referred to, one which origi、 nated with the multitude, and has a psychological foundation, though it is too much at variance with the general analogy of the language to deserve countenance. I refer to the use of the word community without the article, when not employed in the sense of in common; as, for example, ' Community is interested in the question;''the policy is injurious to community.' So far as I am aware, no respectable writer has sanctioned this form of speech, and it is justly regarded as a very gross vulgarism; but I could name persons of some position in the literary world, who employ it colloquially. The general rule is, that common nouns employed in a definite sense in the singular number, must take the article. Thus, in the first of the instances just given, though ignorant people, and some who are not ignorant, except in this partic ular, say Community is interested in the question,' no one would say, 'Public is interested in the question.' The philological instinct of every English-speaking man would be shocked at the omission of the article, and would correct tle

* Nobody ever thinks of saying, "in reference of;" but if these phrases are to be governed by the rules of English construction of nouns, there is as good ground for this expression as for "in respect of." The Latin etymology of respect has nothing to do with the question, for the Latin primitive was not used for any such purpose, or in any such construction; and the phrase in question is strictly an English idiotism.

phrase by supplying it, The public is interested.' Now, the grammatical category of the words community and public in these examples is the same. Why, then, do some ears demand the article in one case, and reject it in the other? The explanation is this. When we personify common nouns used definitely in the singular number, we may omit the article. Thus Holy Church, not the Holy Church, was constantly used by old writers, because the church was invested with personality, regarded as a thinking, acting, authoritative entity. For the same reason, Parliament, and in England, Ministers, used instead of the ministry, do not take the article; nor, according to present usage, does Congress, as applied to our National Legislature; and in the ecclesiastical proceedings of some religious denominations, Convention and Synod are employed in the same way, on the same principle. With respect to Congress, the omission of the article is recent, for during the Revolution, while the Federal Government was a body of doubtful authority and permanence, and not yet familiar to the people as a great continuing, constitutive, and ordaining power, the phrase used was commonly the Congress,' and such is the form of expression in the Constitution itself. But when the Government became consolidated, and Congress was recognized as the paramount legislative power of the Union, the embodiment of the national will, it was personified, and the article dropped, and in like manner, the word Government is often used in the same way. Now in our time, as I have often had occasion to remark, society has become more intensely social; the feeling of union, and of mutual interest, the consciousness of reciprocal right and duty, are strengthened, and the body of the nation is more habitually regarded as a homo

geneous self-conscious agent. Hence, what we call 'the community' is conceived of as a being, not as a thing; as an organic combination, a person in short, not as an assemblage of unrelated individuals. Accordingly, the word community is beginning to take the syntax of personal and personified nouns, and to reject the article, while public, which we employ in a sense implying less of common feeling and common interest than Latin usage ascribed to it, is uniformly construed with the article. The omission of the article before this noun, though not defensible, is not without a show of reason, and deserves less condemnation than is being built ' and in respect of,' which are, with most of those who use them, at best but philological coxcombries.

The history of the classical languages and literature affords little encouragement to those who hope for further substantial improvement in the English speech, or even to those who are striving to arrest its degeneracy and decay. The tongues of Hellas and Rome had each but a single era of vigor and perfection; and the creative literature of Greece extends over a period but a hundred years longer than that which has elapsed since Chaucer sang. Six centuries comprise all that has made the Grecian intellect immortal. Roman literature, essentially borrowed, or at least imitative, and commencing only after the oracles of Hellenic genius had ceased to give responses, flourished but half as long. So, in modern times, Italy was but three hundred years a power in the world of letters, and Spain had scarcely a longer age of intellectual activity. Germany, on the contrary, has an old literature, and a new, a Nibelungenlied, and after six centuries, again a Faust; and the present century affords evidence that the mind of the Anglican race is rousing itself to

win new prizes in the arena of letters. There was one cause of decadence in the classical languages, which does not exist in those of the modern Gothic stock. Greece and Rome had no foreign fountains from which to draw, when their own were waxing turbid and dry, no old literature, no record of a primitive, half-forgotten language, no long-neglected but rich mine of linguistic wealth, whence the unwrought ores of speech could yet be extracted: and hence their literature died, because their tongues were consumed, their material exhausted. If such a fate awaits the genius and the language of the Anglican people, it is but the common lot of all things human; but we are nevertheless far from the day when the resources of our maternal speech will all have been made available, and when nothing but stereotyped repetition will be left for our writers. The Saxon legions which the Norman irruption drove from the field may yet be rallied; and, with the renovation of our language, we may still hope for a blessing which was denied to Hellas and Latium: the revival of the glories of a national literature.

LECTURE XXX.

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN AMERICA.

THE English language in America is necessarily much affected by the multitude of new objects, processes, and habits of life that qualify our material existence in this new world, which, with sometimes incongruous architecture, we are building up out of the raw stock that nature has given us; by the great influx of foreigners speaking different languages or dialects, who, in adopting our speech, cannot fail to communicate to it some of the peculiarities of their own; by climatic and other merely material causes which affect the action of the organs of articulation, and of course the form of spoken words; by the generally diffused habit of reading, which makes pronunciation and phrase more formal and also more uniform; and doubtless by other more obscure and yet undetected causes.

Thus far, it can by no means be said that any distinct dialectic difference has established itself between England and the United States; and it is a trite observation, that, though very few Americans speak as well as the educated classes of Englishmen, yet not only is the average of English