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 gentlemen 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 admirable but improved

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

* Villano non è chi in villa stà

Ma villan' è chi villanie fà.

FLORIO, Giard. di Ricreat, 1591, p. 216.

To the same purpose is the English proverb: Handsome is that handsome

does.

per

injury in language and in ethics. The light ironical tone of siflage, 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.

10*

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 as they remain unmixed in descent, and subject to the same climatic and nutritive influences. But in the progress of centuries, man's laws, his institutions and modes of life, all, in short, that is essentially of his invention or voluntary adoption, and especially his language,* undergo such radical revolutions that little apparently remains to attest his relationship to his remote progenitors.

* One of the most important changes in any language historically known, is that by which English rid itself of grammatical gender, and was thus transferred to a new class not before known in European philology. This freedom from grammatical gender is now perhaps its most striking characteristic.

But the law of adherence and return to original type, if not confined to lower organisms, is greatly restricted in its application to more elevated races and forms. Man himself, the most exalted of earthly existences, seems almost wholly exempt from its operation, and the varieties of his external structure, once established, perpetuate themselves with little discoverable inclination to revert to any known common and primitive model of the species. Man's language is higher than himself, more spiritual, more ethereal, and still less subject than his physical frame to the jurisdiction of the laws of material nature. We have therefore no right to expect to find speech returning to primeval unity, until the realization of those dreams which predict the complete subjugation of material nature, the consequent equalization, or at least compensation, of her gifts to different portions of the earth's surface, the perfectibility of man, and his union in one great universal commonwealth. There are, however, well-ascertained facts which seem to show that words, with all their mutability, are still subject to a law of reversion like other products of material life, and if the distinction which many grammarians make between technically modern and ancient languages is well founded, and if the common tendencies ascribed to the former are inherent and not accidental, we must refer them to the operation of a principle as general and as imperative as that by which the doubleflowers of our gardens are brought back to their original simplicity of structure, by neglect and self-propagation.* But it is as yet too early to pronounce upon the ultimate form of language, and we are hardly better able to foresee what centuries may bring forth in the character of speech, than to prophesy what configuration of surface and what forms of animal life will mark our earth in future geological periods. Modes of verbal modification, mutations of form, indeed, we can readily trace back so far as written memorials exist, and the course of change is sometimes so constant for a certain period, that we can predict, with some confidence, what phase a given living language will next present. These observations, however, respect more particularly the syntax, the inflections, the proportions of native and foreign roots, and other general characteristics of speech. Special changes of vo

*See Lecture xvii.