lease England from her allegiance to the Papal see; for the mighty intellectual struggle, which shook Christendom in the sixteenth century, had a powerful influence in rousing the English mind to vigorous action, throwing it back on its own resources, and compelling it to bring out whatever of strength and efficiency was inherent in the national mind and the national speech. Tyndale's Testament was, for its time, as important a gift to the English people, as was King James's translation, of which indeed Tyndale's forms the staple, fourscore years later, and in the theological controversies of that century our mother-tongue acquired and put forth a compass of vocabulary, a force and beauty of diction, and a power of precise logical expression, of which scarce any other European tongue was then capable, and which the best English writers of later centuries can hardly be said to have surpassed.

LECTURE VIII.

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

I.

THE Anglo-Saxon represents at once the material substratum and the formative principle of the English language. You may eliminate all the other ingredients, and there still subsists a speech, of itself sufficient for all the great purposes of temporal and spiritual life, and capable of such growth and development from its own native sources, and by its own inherent strength, as to fit it also for all the factitious wants and new-found conveniences of the most artificial stages of human society. If, on the other hand, you strike out the Saxon element, there remains but a jumble of articulate sounds without coherence, syntactic relation, or intelligible significance. But though possessed of this inexhaustible mine of native metal, we have rifled the whole orbis verborum, the world of words, to augment our overflowing stores, so that every speech and nation under heaven has contributed some jewels to enrich our cabinet, or, at the least, some humble implement to facilitate the communication essential to the proper discharge of the duties, and the performance of the labors, of moral and material life. These foreign conquests,

indeed, have not been achieved, these foreign treasures won, without some shedding of Saxon blood, some sacrifice of domestic coin, and if we have gained largely in vocabulary, we have, for the time at least, lost no small portion of that original constructive power, whereby we could have fabricated a nomenclature scarcely less wide and diversified than that which we have borrowed from so distant and multiplied sources. English no longer exercises, though we may hope it still possesses, the protean gift of transformation, which could at pleasure verbalize a noun, whether substantive or adjective, and the contrary; we have dropped the variety of significant endings, which indicated not only the grammatical character, but the grammatical relations, of the words of the period, and with them sacrificed the power of varying the arrangement of the sentence according to the emphasis, so as always to use the right word in the right place; we have suffered to perish a great multitude of forcible descriptive terms; and finally we no longer enjoy the convenience of framing at pleasure new words out of old and familiar material, by known rules of derivation and composition, but are able to increase our vocabulary only by borrowing from foreign and, for the most part, unallied sources. Nevertheless, in the opinion of able judges, our gains, upon the whole, so far at least as the vocabulary is concerned, more than balance our losses. Our language has become more copious, more flexible, more refined, and capable of greater philosophical precision, and a wider variety of expression.

The introduction of foreign words and foreign idioms has made English less casy of complete mastery to ourselves, and its mixed character is one reason why, in general, even educated English and Americans speak less well than Continental

scholars; but, on the other hand, the same composite structure renders it less difficult for foreigners, and thus it is eminently fitted to be the speech of two nations, one of which counts among its subjects, the other among its citizens, people of every language and every clime.

Our losses are greatest in the poetic dialect, nor have they, in this department, except for didactic and epic verse, been at all balanced by our acquisitions from the Latin and the French, or rather from the former through the latter. We have suffered in the vocabulary suited to idyllic and to rural poetry, in the language of the domestic affections, and the sensibilities of every-day social life. In short, while the nomenclature of art has been enriched, the voice of nature has grown thin and poor, and at the same time, in the loss of the soft inflections of the Saxon grammar, English prosody has sustained an injury which no variety of foreign terminations can compensate. The recovery and restoration of very many half-forgotten and wholly unsupplied Saxon words, and of some of the melodious endings which gave such variety and charm to rhyme, is yet possible, and it is here that I look for one of the greatest benefits to our literature from the study of our ancient mother-tongue. Even Chaucer, whom a week's labor will make almost as intelligible as Dryden, might furnish our bards an ample harvest, and a knowledge of the existing remains of Anglo-Saxon literature would enable us to give to our poetic vocabulary and our rhythm a compass and a beauty surpassed by that of no modern. tongue. It is remarkable that Ben Jonson, in lamenting the disappearance of the old verbal plural ending -en, as, they loven, they complainen, instead of they love, they complain, a form which he says he "dares not presume to set afoot

again, though the lack thereof, well considered, will be found a great blemish to our tongue," should confine the expression of his regret solely to the loss of a grammatical sign, without adverting to the superior rhythmical beauty and convenience of the obsolete form. Early English inherited from the Saxon numerous terminations of case, number and person, with an obscure vowel or liquid final, constituting trochaic feet, and the loss of these has compelled us to substitute spondaic measures to an extent which singularly interferes with the melody of our versification. Thus in Chaucer's time, the adjectives all, small, and the like, and the preterite of the strong verbs, had a form in e obscure, which served as a sign of the plural. The e final in these and other words was articulated as it now is in French poetry, except before words beginning with a vowel or with h, and thus what we should write and pronounce, prosaically,

And small fowls make melody

That sleep all the night with open eye,

becomes metrical as written by Chaucer, and pronounced by his contemporaries:

And smalě fōwles mākĕn melodie,

That slēpen al the night with open ŷhe.

But this point will be more properly considered in a subsequent part of our course.

It has been observed in all literatures, that the poetry and the prose which take the strongest hold of the heart of a nation are usually somewhat archaic in diction; behind, rather than in advance of, the fashionable language of the time. The reason of this is that the great mass of every people is slow to adopt changes in its vocabulary. New words are