ment. The Greek language abounds with expletives." So far as the word answers no other purpose than to "fill a vacancy," it is properly expletive, but if it be appropriate and graceful enough to deserve the name of an "ornament," it is not superfluous, and therefore is not an expletive. In most cases, indeed, the vacancy filled by words of this class is not merely a defect of continuity in the syntax, but it indicates a positive want of thought, and ignorant and illogical persons are naturally very prone to interlard their discourse with these fragmentary expressions. The frequent use of interjections, expletives, and vague or unmeaning phrases of all kinds, is therefore inadmissible in a really elegant and graceful conversational style;* and though I hope the caution is superfluous, I should not do justice to my subject, were I to omit to express my full concurrence in the condemnation which, for intellectual as well as social and moral reasons alike, persons of culture award to the employment of profane language, a vice eminently ungraceful in itself, and vulgarizing in its influence. "Othes," says King James, "are but a use, and a sinne clothed with no delight nor gaine, and therefore the more inexcusable in the sight of men."

The remark with which Webster accompanies his definition of the word expletive, namely, that the Greek language abounds in such, is in my opinion as erroneous as the definition is defective. The Greeks, like the modern Italians, were an exceedingly excitable and impressible people, and like them, they used a great number of interjections. We certainly are far from being able to discover the precise force of these; still less can we find equivalents for them in a language which, like ours, is spoken by a graver and more reserved people, and therefore possesses fewer words of this class; but with regard to the numerous particles and other words which Webster apparently classes among expletives, we are not authorized to infer that they were superfluous to the sense of the passages where they occur, barely because we

* I believe our English cousins more frequently offend against this rule of good taste than do we Americans. I know many even of the higher classes who rarely utter the simplest sentence without interjecting at least one don't you know, or you know. I have known an eloquent Vaudois pastor, who often astonished me by strengthening his affirmations with an adjuration of the god of wine-per Bacco !

do not see the necessity of them. The supposition is contrary to all we know of the habits of the Greek mind, and it is much safer to presume that they had a meaning and a force, which our imperfect knowledge of the niceties of the language forbids us to appreciate, than to believe that Plato, and Aristotle, and Xenophon thought so inconsecutively as to be obliged to fill the interstices of their mental structures with insignificant rubbish.

In commencing the study of foreign languages, we meet with many words, to which dictionaries assign no distinct meaning, and which appear superfluous to the sense of the period, and therefore to be expletives. But further study generally shows us that they, however difficult to define in themselves, have, nevertheless, an important influence on the sense of the period, by strengthening, moderating, or otherwise qualifying, the signification of leading words. The German, as well as the Greek, is rich in these particles, and the existence of German as a living speech enables foreigners to acquire a much clearer comprehension of these, at first sight insignificant, elements than is possible in the case of a language, which, like the Greek, survives only as a written tongue.

The Greek and Latin languages are remarkably distinguished from each other in the number and the character of the interjections; and it will in general be found that the use and signification of the interjections employed in any language furnish a very tolerable key to the character of the people who speak it. The modern Italians have inherited from their Roman ancestors a great number of elliptical passionate phrases, which are employed in this way, and the frequent introduction of the names of the heathen deities, together with those of the Virgin Mary and the saints in their ejaculatory exclamations, produces a ludicrous effect upon a stranger. One of these has even found its way into German and English. In the comedies and other light literature of both, in the last century, it is of frequent occurrence, and if we can judge from them, it was very current in fashionable society, though probably few of the fine ladies, who so often ex claimed, O, gemini! (jiminy or jemini,) knew that the phrase was a Latin invocation of the divine brothers, Castor and Pollux.*

*The Italian diamine! is a different word, in diaboli nomine!

LECTURE XIV.

THE NOUN, ADJECTIVE, AND VERB.

Ir is not disputed, that in the genesis of language the interjection, even if not technically a part of speech, and the onomatopoetic or imitative words, must be regarded as the primary linguistic utterances; but grammatical physiologists differ much with respect to the order of succession in the other principal parts of speech. Presented in the usual form of a historical problem, the inquiry is an idle one, for the noun, whether substantive or adjective, and the verb, can be conceived of as existing only as members of a period or proposition, and therefore the noun supposes the verb, and the verb the noun. With the exception of the Lautgeberden, or vocal-gestures, and the imitative sounds, words are as essentially and necessarily social as man himself, and a single word can no more spring into spontaneous life, or exist in isolation, than can the intelligent being who uses it. We know external objects only by their sensuous properties and their action, and we must necessarily suppose all names of objects to have been primarily descriptive, because we can imagine no possible ground of a name, but the ascription of a quality or an act as characteristic of the object named. It would seem, then, that before the name could be applied, the adjective or the verb expressive of the quality or act, the predicate, in short, must exist; and on the other hand, as concrete ideas must precede abstract ones, we cannot comprehend the origin of the adjective or the verb, independently of the noun, or name of some object possessing the quality, or habitually practising the act, predicated by the adjective or verb. But though words have no separate individual existence, though they live and move only in interdependence upon each other, yet in studying their forms and organization, each must be primarily investigated by itself, because the limited nature of our faculties, whether sensuous or intellectual, obliges us to ac

quire the knowledge of the whole by the successive study of its parts, of the complex, through an acquaintance with the simple elements of which it is conceived to be composed.

In order to comprehend the physiology of a given language, or the functions and relations of its organs, a knowledge of its anatomy, or the normal structure of these organs, is necessary, and we will therefore examine briefly the formal characteristics of English words. These we have already considered in their bearing upon etymology, and though we are now to look at them from a different point of view, the facts are still the same, and I must accordingly be pardoned for some repetition of what, indeed, I by no means suppose to have been new when I first presented it. I do not propose in the present course to attempt a formal examination of every class of vocables into which grammarians have divided language, and I shall only discuss the character and offices of the noun or substantive, the adjective and the verb. I begin with the noun or substantive, not as historically first, or logically pre-eminent, but because, in learning words by the process of domestic instruction called the natural method, we commence with names.

Before proceeding further, it will not be amiss to suggest an observation or two upon the names which grammarians have given to these parts of speech. The word noun is derived from the Latin nomen, a name, and is a very appropriate designation for the substantive, which is properly the name of an object. English grammarians generally include under the noun the adjective, and speak of nouns substantive and nouns adjective. The ground of this nomenclature is the theory, that the adjective is to be regarded as the name of an accident or quality existing not independently or abstractly, but only in the concrete, and that the term which designates an accident is not properly entitled to a separate grammatical position, but must be considered as a mere appendage or adjunct of the substantive. But this view is without any solid foundation. The verb is as truly the name of the act or status it represents, as the adjective of the quality it expresses, and there would be the same propriety in styling the former the noun verbal, as the latter the noun adjective. The designations noun substantive and noun adjective, even if logically accurate, are moreover objectionable for grammatical purposes,

as being awkward and unwieldy. I therefore discard them, and though I may occasionally employ substantive, to vary the phrase, yet I shall generally use noun as equivalent to noun substantive, and not as embracing the adjective, which I consider as included in it only by a misnomer.

The Roman grammarians applied to the member of the proposition which predicates of a subject being, state, volition, action or perception, the name of verbum, or the word, as emphatically the most important vocable in the period, or as the word which asserts, and in a sense embodies the proposition; and the term verb, commonly employed in most European languages, like other technical words of modern grammar, is derived from the Latin appellation. German philologists, however, commonly style the verb Zeitwort, time-word, because the verb, by its form or by the aid of auxiliaries, generally expresses the period of the act or status described, as past, present, or future, and of course involves the notion of time. But this nomenclature appears to me highly objectionable. Whenever we describe or name an object by a quality either unessential, or relatively unimportant, to our conception of its true character, we utter a philological untruth, and proclaim a philosophical error. We can as easily abstract the notion of an act or a condition from time, as we can that of color, or any other sensuous quality. We can as well imagine the act of running, or striking, without any reference to the period when the act takes place, as we can the property of redness, of weight, of sourness, or sweetness, and therefore, although the variable forms of verbs usually express time, yet to the primary notion conveyed by the verb, time is as unessential as it is to our conception of the taste of an orange. We may go further, and affirm that in strictness all verbs express present time, when they refer to time at all. In the process of ratiocination, we think by general terms alone, without reference to time, but it is certain that when we individualize an act or state, the image which it suggests is necessarily a present one. 1 have done, and like forms, were originally present or aorist, as for example, I have deposited ten pounds with the Barings meant I have, in deposit with the Barings, ten pounds; but, as in order to have it in deposit, a previous act of deposition was necessary, the past sense was gradually attributed to the phrase. Whether