a more abstruse vein of argument, than can fitly find place in a series of unmethodical and unscientific discourses, and I shall content myself with offering a couple of familiar illustrations, which may of themselves suggest important principles of language in its relation to ethics, without attempting to expound them. Let us take the adjective respectable. Respectable was originally, and in French, to the honor of that nation, still is, a term of high commendation, and was scarcely inferior in force, though not precisely equivalent in signification, to admirable in our present use of that word. At a later period it implied an inferior degree of worth, little above mediocrity, and now, with reference to intellect and morality, it has come to mean barely not contemptible, while, popularly, it is applied to every man whose pecuniary means raise him above the necessity of manual drudgery. Thus, in a celebrated criminal trial in England, when a witness was asked why he applied the epithet to a person of whom he had spoken as a "respectable man," he said it was because he kept a horse and gig.

So the much abused term gentleman. This word originally meant, and still does in the French from which we borrowed it, not, as Webster supposes, a gentle or genteel man, but a man born of a noble family, or gens, as it was called in Latin. Persons of this rank usually possessed means to maintain an outward show of superior elegance, and leisure to cultivate the graces of social life, so that in general they were distinguished above the laboring classes by a more prepossessing exterior, greater refinement of manners, and a more tasteful dress. As their wealth and legal privileges diminished with the increasing power and affluence of the citizens of the trading towns, there was a gradual approximation, in

both social position and civil rights, between the poorer gentleman and the richer burgesses, until at last they were distinguished by nothing but family names, as indicative of higher or lower origin. The term gentleman was now applied indiscriminately to all persons who kept up the state and observed the social forms, which had once been the exclusive characteristics of elevated rank. Theoretically, elegance of manner and attainment in the liberal arts should imply refinement of taste, generosity of spirit, nobleness of character, and these were regarded as the moral attributes specially belonging to those possessed of the outward tokens by which the rank was recognized. The advancement of democratic principles in England and America, has made rapid progress in abolishing artificial distinctions of all sorts. Every man claims for himself, and popular society allows to him, the right of selecting his own position, and consequently in those countries every man of decent exterior and behavior assumes to be a gentleman, in manners and in character, and, in the ordinary language of life, is both addressed and described as such.

It is much to the credit of England, that popular opinion in a remote age attached higher importance to the moral than to the material possessions of the gentleman, and accordingly we find that as early as the reign of Edward III., the word had already acquired the meaning we now give it, when we apply to it the best and highest sense of which it is susceptible. In Chaucer's Romaunt of the Rose, there occurs a passage well illustrating this feeling, and it is worth remarking that the original Roman de la Rose, of which Chaucer's Romaunt is an imitation rather than a translation, contains no hint of the generous and noble sentiments expressed by

the English poet, respecting the superiority of moral worth

and the social virtues over ancestral rank.

But understond in thine entent
That this is not mine entendement,
To clepe no wight in no ages
Onely gentle for his linages;
But who so is vertuous

And in his port not outrageous,

When such one thou seest thee beforne,

Though he be not gentle borne,

Thou maiest well saine this in soth

That he is gentle, because he doth
As longeth to a gentleman.

To villaine speech in no degree
Let never thy lippe unbounden bee:
For I nought hold him, in good faith,
Curteis, that foule wordes saith;
And all women serve and preise,
And to thy power hir honour reise,
And if that any mis-sayere
Despise women, that thou maist here,
Blame him, and bid him hold him still.

Maintaine thy selfe after thy rent,
Of robe and eke of garment,
For many sithe, faire clothing
A man amendeth in much thing.
Of shoone and bootes, new and faire,
Looke at the least you have a paire,
And that they sit so fetously,
That these rude may utterly
Marvaile, sith that they sit so plaine,
How they come on or off againe.
Weare streight gloves, with aumere
Of silke and alway with good chere

Thou yeve, if thou have richesse,

And if thou have nought, spend the lesse.

The wanton abuse of words by writers in the department of popular imaginative literature has been productive of very serious injury in language and in ethics. The light ironical tone of persiflage, in which certain eminent authors of this

class habitually indulge, has debased our national speech, and proved more demoralizing in its tendency than the open attacks of some of them upon Christianity, its ministers, and its professors, or the fatuity with which others endow all their virtuous characters, and the vice, selfishness, and corruption which they ascribe to all their personages whom they do not make idiots. By such writers, a blackguardly boy is generally spoken of as a "promising young gentleman; an abandoned villain or a successful swindler, as a "respectable personage; a vulgar and ignorant woman, as a "graceful and accomplished lady." Had these authors contented themselves with pillorying the pet vulgarisms of the magazine and the newspaper, they would have rendered a great service to literature and to morals, but when the only words we possess to designate the personifications of honor, virtue, manhood, grace, generosity and truth, are systematically applied to all that is contemptible and all that is corrupt, there is no little danger that these high qualities will, in popular estimation, share in the debasement to which their proper appellations are subjected. It is difficult to suppose that the authors of works evincing great knowledge of the world, who habitually profane the name of every attribute that men have held. great and reverend, really believe in the existence of such attributes. A man, who accustoms himself to speak of a low-minded and grovelling person as a gentleman, either has no just conception of the character which this word professes to describe, or does not believe in the possibility of it; and the admiring readers of such a writer will end by adopting his incredulity, and renouncing the effort to develop and cultivate qualities, which, in every virtuous community, have formed the highest objects of a noble social ambition.

LECTURE XII.

THE VOCABULARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

V.

THE advocates of the theory which regards language as wholly arbitrary, artificial and conventional, as a thing of human invention, not of divine origin or of spontaneous growth, may find in its mutability a specious, though by no means a conclusive, argument in support of that doctrine. For things organic, products of the laws of nature, tend altogether to the repetition of their typical forms. If changed at all in sensible characteristics, the process of their transformation is extremely slow, and they exhibit a perpetual inclination to revert to the primitive type, as often as the disturbing or modifying influences are withdrawn, or even weakened in their action. Human contrivances, institutions, systems, on the contrary, are subject to incessant change, nor have they any inherent tendency to return to the original form, but as they recede from the starting point, they continually diverge more and more widely from the initial direction. The physical characteristics of animal races, and of the spontaneous vegetable products of the soil, are constant, so long