PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.

In this edition, numerous errors of the copyists of my manuscript and of the press, which through inexperience in proof-reading I had failed to detect, as well as many inadvertences of my own, are corrected, and the appendix is much enlarged. The additions consist principally of citations and proofs in illustration of statements and opinions not suffi ciently supported before.

It is with some reluctance that I have multiplied my excerpts and references, because I know that though, in a country new to him, the true angler is thankful to be told where lie the clear lakelets and the fishy brooks, yet he desires no man to catch his trout for him.

But the wealth of English literature is such, that I need not fear to exhaust its stores by twenty pages

of quotation; and he who patiently explores its abundant waters, will not fail to find, that, after all that I and other laborers have extracted, there are still as good fish in the sea as ever were caught.

I entitle this volume, First Series, because I am about to publish a second, consisting of a course of Lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute upon the history of the English language, and particularly of its lexical and grammatical changes, with special reference to its literary capabilities and adaptations.

BURLINGTON, VT., January 1, 1861.

Sources, Composition, and Etymological proportions of English-..

117

LECTURES

ON

THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE severe Roman bestowed upon the language of his country the appellation of patrius sermo, the paternal or national speech; but we, deriving from the domesticity of Saxon life a truer and tenderer appreciation of the best and purest source of linguistic instruction, more happily name our home-born English the mother-tongue. The tones of the native language are the medium through which the affections and the intellect are first addressed, and they are to the heart and the head of infancy what the nutriment drawn from the maternal breast is to the physical frame. "Speech," in the words of Heyse, "is the earliest organic act of free self-consciousness, and the sense of our personality is first developed in the exercise of the faculty of speech." Without entering upon the speculations of the Nominalists and the Realists, we must admit that, in the process of ratiocination, properly called thought, the mind acts only by words. "Cogito, ergo sum, I think, there