their nature translatable, scarce seven words in the hundred are derived from any foreign source.

In fact, so complete is the Anglo-Saxon in itself, and so much of its original independence is still inherited by the modern English, that if we could but recover its primitive flexibility and plastic power, we might discard the adventitious aids and ornaments which we have borrowed from the heritage of Greece and Rome, supply the place of foreign by domestic compounds, and clothe again our thoughts and our feelings exclusively in a garb of living, organic, native growth.

Such then being the relations between Anglo-Saxon and modern English, it can need no argument to show that the study of our ancient mother-tongue is an important, I may say an essential, part of a complete English education, and though it is neither possible, nor in any way desirable, to reject the alien constituents of the language, and, in a spirit of unenlightened and fanatical purism, thoroughly to Anglicize our speech, yet there is abundant reason to hope that we may recover and reincorporate into our common Anglican dialect many a gem of rich poetic wealth, that now lies buried in more forgotten depths than even those of Chaucer's "well of English undefiled.”

The value of Anglo-Saxon as a branch of English philology is most familiar in its relations to our etymology, and its importance as an auxiliary in the study of English syntax is far less obvious, though not less real. But the structure of the language is too inartificial to be of much use as an instrument of grammatical discipline.

So far as respects English or any other uninflected speech, a knowledge of grammar is rather a matter of convenience as a nomenclature, a medium of thought and discussion about

language, than a guide to the actual use of it, and it is as impossible to acquire the complete command of our own tongue by the study of grammatical precept, as to learn to walk or swim by attending a course of lectures on anatomy. I shall show more fully on another occasion,* that when language had been, to use an expressive Napoleonism, once regimented, and instruction had grown into an art, grammar was held with the Greeks, and probably also with the Romans, so elementary a discipline, that a certain amount of knowledge of it was considered a necessary preliminary step towards learning to read and write; but in English, grammar has little use except to systematize, and make matter of objective consideration, the knowledge we have acquired by a very different process. It has not been observed in any modern literature, that persons devoted chiefly to grammatical studies are remarkable for any peculiar excellence, or even accuracy, of style, and the true method of attaining perfection in the use of English is the careful study of the actual practice of the best writers in the English tongue.

"Another will say," argues Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie, "that English wanteth grammar. Nay, truly, it hath that praise that it wants not grammar; for grammar it might have, but needs it not, being so easie in itselfe, and so void of those cumbersome differences of cases, genders, moods and tenses, which I think was a piece of the tower of Babylon's curse, that a man should be put to schoole to learne his mother-tongue. But for the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the minde, which is the ende of speech, that it hath equally with any other tongue in the world."

See post, Lecture xx.

The forms of English are so few, its syntax so simple, that they are learned by use before the age of commencing scholastic study, and what remains to be acquired belongs rather to the department of rhetoric than of grammar. "Undoubtedly I have found," observes Sidney further, "in divers smal learned courtiers a more sound stile than in some possessors of learning; of which I can ghesse no other cause, but that the courtier, following that which by practice he findeth fittest to nature, therein (though he know it not) doth according to art, though not by art; where the other using art to shew art, and not hide art, (as in these cases he should doe), flieth from nature, and indeed abuseth art."

Upon questions of construction in inflected languages, where every thing depends on simple verbal form, appeal is made to the sense of sight if the period is written, to that of hearing if pronounced, and the meaning is often determined by no higher faculties than those concerned in the comparison of mere material and sensuous objects. In English, on the contrary, although we have fixed laws of position, yet as position does by no means necessarily conform to the order of thought, and nothing in the forms indicates the grammatical connection of the words, there is a constant intellectual effort to detect the purely logical relations of the constituents of the period, to consider the words in their essence not in their accidents, to divine the syntax from the sense, not infer it from casual endings, and hence it may be fairly said that the construction and comprehension of an English sentence demand and suppose the exercise of higher mental powers than are required for the framing or understanding of a proposition in Latin.

Nevertheless, a clear objective conception and compre

hension of the general principles of syntax is very desirable, and this can hardly be obtained except by the presentation of them in a materialized, and, so to speak, visible shape. To the knowledge of grammar as a science, and therefore to a scientific comprehension of English grammar, as well as of the general principles of language, the study of some tongue organized with a gross and palpable machinery is requisite, and the laws of syntax must be illustrated by exhibiting their application in a more tangible form than can be exemplified in a language so destitute of inflections, and so simple, and consequently so subtle, in its combinations as the English.

This advantage, or, for it is very doubtful whether it is an advantage to those who use the language possessing it, this convenience, rather, as an educational engine, is eminently characteristic of the Latin. The vocabulary of the Latin is neither copious nor precise, its forms are intricate and inflexible, and its literature, as compared with that of Greece, exhibits the inferiority which belongs to all imitative composition. But in the regularity, precision, and distinctness of its inflections and structure, it atones for much of the indefinite mistiness of its vocables, and it is an admirable linguistic machine for the manufacture of the coarser wares of intellectual produce and consumption. For the expression of technicalities, the narration of marches and battles, the description of sieges and slaughters, the enunciation of positive rules of pecuniary right, the promulgation of dictatorial ordinances and pontifical bulls, the Latin is eminently fitted. Its words are always

Sic volo, sic jubeo, stet pro ratione voluntas;

and it is almost as much by the imperatorial character of the

language itself--the speech of masters, not of men—as by the commanding position of the people to whom it was vernacular, and of the church which sagaciously adopted it, that it has so powerfully influenced the development and the existing tendencies of all modern European tongues, even of those which have borrowed the fewest words from it.*

The Latin grammar has become a general standard, wherewith to compare that of all other languages, the medium through which all the nations of Christendom have become acquainted with the structure and the philosophy of their own; and technical grammar, the mechanical combinations of language, can be nowhere else so advantageously studied. While then the study of Anglo-Saxon and of the older

*The power of Rome was a more widely diffused, pervading, and all-informing element in the ancient world, than written history alone would authorize us to infer, and we find traces of her language, as well as amazing evidences of her material greatness and splendor in provinces which we should scarcely otherwise know that her legions had overrun. Not Roman coins only, which commerce might have borne farther than her eagles ever flew, but fortified camps, forums, roads, temples, inscriptions, throughout almost the whole Mediterranean basin as well as the Atlantic slope of the Eastern continent, everywhere attest her power, while palaces, theatres, aqueducts, baths, buried statues and scattered gems, prove that her taste and luxury had spread from the banks of the Elbe to the sands of the Libyan Desert. The presence, however, of remains of the Latin language and of Roman art is not always to be regarded as proof of the actual subjugation of the countries where such relics are found. With the view partly of familiarizing those whose conquest she meditated with her laws, institutions, and manners, and thus preparing them for the yoke they were destined to wear, and partly of facilitating such conquests by demoralizing the scions of royal and noble families, whose claim upon the loyal attachment of their people was one of the great barriers against the extension of her sway, it was the policy of Rome to train up at the capital, either as hostages or as national guests, as many foreign princes and other high-born youths as could be gathered from dependent and allied countries. Returning to their fatherland, they carried with them the speech, the arts, and often the artisans of their proud nurse, and thus many existing remains, of apparently Roman architecture, are doubtless imitations of Roman buildings, erected by native potentates who had ac quired a taste for Roman life on the banks of the Tiber.