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iT'orks by the REv. R. C. TRENCITn B..D, uniform with
"ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT."
I.
ON THE STUDY OF WORDS:
1 vol. 12mo. Price 75 cents.
II.
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1 vol. 12mo. Price 50 cents.
III.
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PUBLISHED BY J. S. REDFIELD, NEW YORK.




ENGLISH
PAST AND PRESENT
BY
RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, B.D.
AUTHOR OF "THE STUDY OF WORDS,"''THE LESSONS ON PROVERBS,"7 ETC., ETC.
It E D F I E L D
110 AND 112 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK
18 55.




EDWAtlI  O. JE"NKINS, PR'INTERI
114 Nassau Street, N. Y.




CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
PA G E
THE ENGTISHI A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE..                          13
LECTURE If.
GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE..40
LECTURE III
TEHE DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE... 85
LECTURE IV.
ON CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH WORDS...... 135
LECTURE V.
ON THE CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS,.. 1G69








PREFAC Ee
A  SERIES of four lecturnes which I delivered last
spring to the pupils of Kingls College School, London,
supplied the foundation to this present volume. These
lectures, which I was obliged to prepare in haste, on
a brief invitation, and undcer the pressure of other
engagements,  were subsequently enlarged and recast;
and delivered in the autumn somewhat more nearly
in their present shape to the pupils of the Training
School, Winchester; although of course with those
alterations, omissions and additions, which the difference in my hearers suggested as necessary or desirable.
I have found it convenient to k-eep the lectures, as
regards the persons presumed to be addressedcl, in that
earlier form which I had sketchled out at the first; and
as it helps much to keep lectures vivid and real that
one should have some well defined audience, if not




viii                PREFACE.
actually before one, yet before the mind's eye, to suppose myself throughout addressing my first hearers.
I' have supposed myself, that is, addressing a body of
young Englishmen, all with a fair amount of classical
knowledge (in my explanations I have sometimes had
others with less than theirs in my eye), not wholly
unacquainted with modern languages; but not yet with
any special designation as to their future work; having
only as yet marked out to them the duty in general of
living lives worthy of those who have England for
their native country, and English for their native
tongue. To lead such through a more intimate knowledge of this into a greater love of that, has been a
principal aim which I have set before myself throughout.
In a few places I have been obliged again to go
over ground which I had before gone over in a little
book, " 0n the Study of Words;" but I believe that I
have never merely repeated myself, nor given to the
readers of my former work and now of this any right
to complain that I am compelling them to travel a
second time by the same paths. At least it has been
my endeavour, whenever I have found myself at




PREFACE.                    ix
points where the two books come necessarily into
contact, that what was treated with any fulness before,
should be here touched on more lightly; and only
what there was slightly handled, should here be entered on more at large.
ITCHENSTOKE,.Feb. 7, 1855.








E  NGL I S H
PAST AND PRESENT








ENGLISH,
PAST AND PRESENT.
LECTURE  I.
THE ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
I HAVE chosen our English language, its past and
its present, as the subject of that short course of lectures,
which I have been invited to deliver to you in this
place. It is an argument, which I confidently trust
will find an answer and an echo in the hearts of all
who hear me; which would have found such at any
time; which will do so especially at the present. For
these are times which naturally rouse into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our birth.
It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of
all, for the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of
war, that it causes a people to know itself a people;
and leads each one to esteem and prize most that which
he has in common with his fellow countrymen,.
and not now any longer those things which separate
and divide him from them.
And the love of our own language, what is it in fact,.
but the love -of our country expressing itself in one,
1




14      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
particular direction? If the great acts of that nation
to which we belong are precious to us, if we feel ourselves made greater by their greatness, summoned to a
nobler life by the nobleness of Englishmen who have
already lived and died, and bequeathed to us a name
which must not by us be made less, what exploits of
theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly point
out their native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being destined for a glorious future, than
that they should have acquired for themselves and for
those who come after them a clear, a strong, an harmonious, a noble language?  For all this bears witness to
corresponding merits in those that speak it, to clearness of mental vision, to strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them that have gradually formed and shaped
it to be the utterance of their inmost life and being.
To know of this language, the stages which it has
gone through, the quarters from which its riches have
been derived, the gains which it is now making, the
perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the
losses which it has sustained, the latent capacities which
may yet be in it, waiting to be evoked, the points in
which it is superior to, in which it comes short of, other
tongues, all this may well be the object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be
ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corruptors
of it; to introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent
knowledge of that with which we shall have ourselves
more than a merely superficial acquaintance; to bequeath
it to those who come after us not worse than we received
it ourselves. "Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna,"



LANGUAGES REACH FAR BACK.         15
this should be our motto in respect at once of our
country, and of our country's tongue.
Nor shall we, I trust, any of us feel this subject to
be alien or remote from the purposes which have
brought us to study within these walls. It is true that
we are mainly occupied here in studying other tongues
rather than our own. The time we bestow upon it is
small as compared with that bestowed on those others.
And yet one of our great purposes in learning them is
that we may better understand this. Nor ought any
other to dispute with it the first and foremost place in
our reverence, our gratitude, and our love.
But the knowledge of this, like all other knowledge
which is worth attaining, is only to be attained at the
price of labour and pains. The language which at this
day we speak is the result of processes which have
been going forward for hundreds and for thousands of
years. Nay more, it is not too much to affirm that processes modifying the English which at the present day
we write and speak, have been at work from the first
day that man, being gifted with discourse of reason,
projected his thought from out himself, and embodied
and contemplated it in his word. Which things being
so, if we would understand this language as it now is,
we must know something of it as it has been; we must
be able to measure, however roughly, the forces which
have been at work upon it, moulding and shaping it
into the forms which it now wears. At the same time
various prudential considerations must determine for
us how far up we will endeavour to trace the course of
its history. There are those who may seek to trace




16      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
our language to the forests of Germany, to investigate
its relation to all the kindred tongues that were there
spoken; again, to follow it up, till it and they are seen
descending from an elder stock; nor once to pause,
till they have assigned to it its place not merely in respect of that small group of languages which are immediately round it, but in respect of all the tongues
and languages of the earth. I can imagine few studies
of a more surpassing interest than this.
Others, however, must be content with seeking such
insight into their native language as may be within
the reach of all who, unable to make this the subject
of special research,: possessing neither that vast compass
of knowledge, nor that immense apparatus of books,
not being at liberty to dedicate to it that devotion almost of a life which, followed out to the full, it would
require, have:yet an intelligent interest in their mother
tongue, and desire to learn as much of its growth and
history and construction as may be reasonably deemed
within their reach. To such as these I shall suppose
myself to be speaking. It would be a piece of great
presumption in me to undertake to speak to any other,
or to assume any:other ground than this for myself
I know there are some, who, when they are-invited
to enter at all upon the past history of the language,
are inclined to make answer-"To what end such
studies to us?  Why cannot we leave them to a few
antiquaries and grammarians?  Sufficient to us to
know the laws of our present English, to obtain an accurate acquaintance with the language as we now
find it, without concerning ourselves with the phases
through which it has previously past." This may




THE PAST EXPLAINS THE PRESENT.        17
sound plausible enough; and I can quite understand
a real lover-of his native tongue, supposing he had
not bestowed much thought upon the subject, arguing
in this manner. And yet indeed such argument proceeds altogether on a mistakle. One sufficient reason
why we should occupy ourselves with the past of our
language is, because the present is only intelligible in
the light of the past, often of a very remote past
indeed. There are anomalies out of number now existing in our language, which the pure logic of grammar
is quite incapable of explaining; which nothing but
a knowledge of its historic evolutions, and of the disturbing forces which have made themselves felt
therein, will ever enable us to explain.  Even as,
again, unless we possess some knowledge of the past,
it is impossible that we can ourselves advance a single
step in the unfolding of the latent capabilities of the
language, without the danger of some barbarous violation of its very primary laws.
The plan which I have laid down for myself, and
to which I propose to adhere, in this lecture and
in those which will succeed it, is as follows. In this
my first lecture I will ask you to consider the language
as now it is, to decompose with me some specimens of
it, to prove by these means, of what elements it is compact, and what functions in it these elements or component parts severally serve; nor shall I leave this
subject without asking you to admire the happy marriage in our tongue of the languages of the north and
south, an advantage which it alone among all the lan



18      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
guages of Europe enjoys. Having thus presented to
ourselves the body which we wish to submit to scrutiny,
and having become acquainted, however slightly,
with its composition, I shall invite you to go back with
me, and trace some of the leading changes to which in
time past it has been submitted, and through which it
has arrived at what it now is; and these changes I
shall contemplate under four aspects, dedicating a lecture to each; —changes which have resulted from the
birth of new or the reception of foreign words; —
changes consequent on the rejection or extinction of
words or powers once possessed by the language;changes through the altered meaning of words; —and
lastly, as not unworthy of our attention, but often
growing out of very deep roots, changes in the orthography of words.  I shall everywhere presume, as
I feel I have aright to do, an acquaintance on your
parts with the leading outlines of English history.
I proceed at once to the special subject of my lecture of to-day.
And first, starting from the recognized fact that
the English is not a simple but a composite language,
made up of several, elements, in the same way as
we are a people made up of Anglo-Saxons and AngloNormans, with not a few accessions from other quarters beside, I would suggest to you the profit and
instruction which we might derive from seeking to resolve it into its component parts-from taking, that is,
any passage from an English author, distributing the
words of which it is made up according to the languages
from which we have drawn them; estimating the




HEBREW  AND ARABIC WORDS.              19
relative numbers and proportions, which these languages have severally lent us; as well as the character
of the words which they have thrown into the common
stock of our tongue.
Suppose the English language to be divided into a
hundred parts; of these, to make a rough distribution,
sixty would be Saxon, thirty would be Latin (including of course the Latin which has come to us through
the French), five would be Greek; we should thus
have assigned ninety-five parts, leaving the other five,
perhaps too large a residue, to be divided among all
the other languages from which we have adopted isolated words. Thus, just to enumerate a few of these
latter; we have a certain number of Hebrew words,
mostly, if not entirely belonging to religious matters,
as'amen,''cabala,'' cherub,''ephod,''hallelujah,''jubilee,'' manna,'' Messiah,''sabbath,''seraph.'
The Arabic words in our language are more numerous; we have several arithmetical and astronomical
terms, as' algebra,''cypher,'*' zero,''zenith,''nadir,''talisman,''almanach;' and chemical, for the Arabs
were the chemists, no less than the astronomers and
arithmeticians of the middle ages; as' alkali,''alembic,''elixir,''alcohol;' add to these the names of
animals or articles of merchandize first introduced
by them to the notice of Western Europe, as'giraffe,'' gazelle,'  saffron,'' lemon,''orange,'' sherbet,''lute,''syrup,''artichoke,''mattrass,''jar,''assegai,''barragan,''coffee,''sugar,''amber,'  mummy,''jasmin,''crimson;' and some further terms,'assassin,'
* But see Grimm's YMythologie, p 985.




20       ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.'vizier,''divan,''sultan,''admiral,'' arsenal,''carat,' tarif,''sofa,''caffre,''Magazine;' and I believe
we shall have nearly completed the list.-We have
moreover a few  Persian words, as'bazaar,''lilac,''pagoda,''caravan,''azure,''scarlet,''taffeta,''saraband;' of'scimitar' it can, I believe, only be said
that it is Eastern. We have also a very few Turkish, as'tulip,'' turban,'' chouse,''dragoman,' or as
it used to be spelt,'truchman' —this last having
hardly a right to be called English.
The new world has given us a certain number of
words, Indian and other-' tobacco,'' chocolate,''potato,''maize,' (Haytian),'condor,''hamoc,''cacique,'' wigwam;' and if' hurricane' is a word which Europe
originally derived from  the  Caribbean islanders, it
should of course be included in this list.
To come nearer home-we have a certain number of
Italian words, as'bandit,''charlatan,''pantaloon,''gazette.'  We have some Spanish, as'musquito,''negro,''duenna,''punctilio,''alcove,'*'alligator,''gala,'' cambist,''palaver.' A good many of our sea
terms are Dutch, as'sloop,''schooner,''yacht.'Celtic things are for the most part designated among
us by  Celtic words;  such as'bard,''kilt,'' clan,''pibroch,''plaid,''reel.' Nor only such as these,
which are all of them comparatively of modern introduction, but a considerable number, how  large a
number is yet a very unsettled question, of words
* On the question whether this ought not to have been included
among the Arabic, see Diez, Worterbuch d. Roman Sprachen, p 10.




ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH.            21
which at a much earlier date found admission into our
tongue, are derived from this quarter.
Now, of course, I have no right to presume that
any among us are equipped with that knowledge of
other tongues which shall enable us to detect of ourselves and at once the nationality of all or most of the
words which we may meet-some of them greatly disguised, and having undergone manifold transformations
in the process of their adoption among us; but only
that we have such' helps at command and within our'reach in the way of dictionaries and the like, and so
much diligence in their use, as will enable us to discover the quarter from which the words which we meet
have reached us; and I will confidently say that few
studies of the kind will be more fruitful, will suggest
more various matter of reflection, will more lead you
into the secrets of the English tongue, than an analysis of a certain number of passages drawn from different authors, such as I have just now proposed. For
this analysis you will take some passage of English
verse or prose —say, the first ten lines of ParadiseLostor the Lord's Prayer-or the 23rd Psalm; you will distribute the whole body of words contained ill that passage, of course not omitting the smallest, according to
their nationalities-writing, it may be, A over every
Anglo-Saxon word, I over every Latin, and so on
with the others, if any other should occur in the passage which you have submitted to this examination.
When this is done,:you will count up the number of
those which each language contributes; again, you
will note the character of the words derived from each
quarter.




22      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
Yet here, before I pass further, I would observe in
respect of those which come from the Latin, that it
will be desirable further to mark whether they are
directly from it, and such might be marked L', or
only mediately from it, and to us directly from the
French, which would be L2, or L at second hand-our
English word being only in the second generation descended from the Latin, not the child, but the child's
child. There is a rule that holds pretty constantly
good, by which you may generally determine this
point. It is this, —that if a word be directly from the
Latin, it will not have undergone any alteration or
modification in its form  and shape, save only as
respects the termination-' innocentia' will have become'innocency,''natio' will have become'nation,''firmamentum' will have become'firmament,' but
nothing more. On the other hand, if it comes through
the French, it will generally be considerably altered
in its passage. It will have undergone a process of
lubrication; its sharply defined Latin outline will in
good part have departed from it; thus,'crown' is from'corona,' but through' couronne,' and itself a dissyllable,'coroune,' in our earlier English;'treasure' is
from'thesaurus,' but through'tr6sor;''emperor' is
the Latin'imperator,' but it was first'empereur.' It
will not at all uncommonly happen that the substantive has passed to us through this process, having
come through the intervention of the French; while
we have only felt at a later period our want of the
adjective also, which we have proceeded to borrow
direct from the Latin. Thus,'people' is indeed'pop



DOUBLE ADOPTIONS.                23
ulus,' but it was'peuple' first, while'popular' is a
direct transfer of a Latin vocable into our English
glossary. So too'enemy' is'inimicus,' but it was
first softened in the French, and had its Latin physiognomy to a great degree obliterated, while'inimical' is Latin throughout;'parish' is'paroisse,' but'parochial' is' parochialis.'
Sometimes you will find in English what I may. call
a double adoption of a Latin word; I mean that we
have many Latin words which now  make part of our
vocabulary in two shapes, in both these forms (' doppelggngers' the Germans would call them); directly
from the Latin, and mediately through the French.  In
these cases it will be particularly noticeable how that
which has come through the French has been shaped
and moulded, generally cut short, often cut a syllable
or two shorter (for the French devours letters and syllables), than the Latin. I will mention a few examples;' secure' and' sure,' both from the Latin' secnrus,' but one directly, the other through the French;'fidelity' and' fealty,' both from the Latin' fidelitas,'
but one directly, the other at second-hand;'species'
and'spice,' both from the Latin'species,' spices being
properly only kinds of aromatic drugs;'blaspheme'
and'blame,' both from'blasphemare,' but'blame'
immediately from'blamer;' add to these'granary'
and' garner;''tradition' and'treason;''regality' and'royalty;''hospital' and' hotel;''persecute' and'pursue;''superficies' and   surface;''faction' and'fashion;''particle' and' parcel;''redemption' and'ransom;''potionJ' aLzd'poison;' Toration' and!orih




24       ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
son.'   In naming these I have ever named the Latin
form before the French; but the reverse is in almost
every case the order in which the words were adopted
by us; we had'pursue' before'persecute,'' spice' before'species,''royalty' before'regality,' and so for
the most part with the others.t
The explanation of this greater change which the
earlier form of the word has undergone, is not far to
seek.  Wvords which have been introduced into a language at an early period, when as yet writing is rare,
and books are few or none, when therefore orthography is unfixed, or being purely phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, words which thus for a
long while live orally on the lips of men, before they
are set down in writing, these we shall for the most
part find reshaped and remoulded by the people who
have adopted them, entirely assimilated to their language in form and termination, so as in a little while
to be almost or quite undistinguishable from natives.
On the other hand a most effectual check to this process, a process sometimes barbarizing and defacing,
however it may be the only one which makes the new
entirely homogeneous with the old, is imposed by the
* Somewhat different from this, yet itself also curious is the passing of an Anglo-Saxon word in two different forms into English, and
continuing in both; thus,' desk' and' dish,' both the Anglo-Saxon'disc,' the German' tisch;' girdle' and' kirtle,' both of them corresponding to the German' giirtel;' already in Anglo-Saxon a double
spelling,' gyrdel'' cyrtel,' had prepared for the double words.
t We have in the same way double adoptions from the Greek, one
direct, one through some other language; thus,' adamant,' and' diamond;' monastery' and'minster;'scandal' and' slander.'




DOUBLE ADOPTIONS IN  FRENCH.                 25
existence of a much written language and a full formed
literature. The foreign word, being once adopted into
these, can no longer undergo  a thorough transformation. For the most part the utmost which use and
familiarity can do with it now, is to cause the gradual
dropping of the foreign termination. Yet this too is
not unimportant; it often goes far to making a home
for a word, and hindering it from wearing the appearance of a foreigner and stranger..
But to return from this digression-I said just now
that you would learn very much from observing and
calculating the proportions in which the words of one
descent and those of another occur in any passage
which you analyse. Thus examine the Lord's Prayer.
It consists of exactly sixty words.  You will find that
only the following six claim the rights of Latin citizenship-'trespasses,''trespass,'' temptation,''deliver,''power,'' glory.'   Nor  would  it  be  very  dif* The French itself has something of the same kind of double
adoption from the Latin, and one quite bearing out what has been
said above: or, in the case of the French, we should perhaps more
accurately call it a double formation, one going far.back in the history of the language, the other belonging to a later and more literary period. Thus from' separare' is derived' sevrer,' to separate
the child from its mother's milk, to wean, but also' separer,' without
this special sense; from' pastor''Ipatre,' a shepherd in the literal,
and' pasteur' the same in a tropical, sense; from' catena,''chaine'
and' cadene;' from' pensare,'' peser' and' penser;' from' captivus'' chetif' and' captif;' from'nativus,''naif' and' natif;' from' designare,''dessiner' and'designer;' from'decimare,' ddcimer' and' dimer;' from' homo,' homme' and' on; from' strictus,'' troit'
and' strict;' from' sacramentum,' serment' and' sacrement;? from'ministerium,' metier' and' ministere.'




26       ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
ficult to substitute for any one of these a Saxon word.
Thus for'trespasses' might be substituted'sins;' for' deliver' free;[ for' power" might;' for'glory''brightness;' which would only leave' temptation,'about which
there could be the slightest difficulty, and' trials,'
though we now ascribe to the word a somewhat different sense, would in fact exactly correspond to it.  This
is but a small percentage, six words in sixty, the proportion, that is, of ten in the hundred; and we often
light upon a still smaller proportion.  Thus take the
three first verses of the 23rd Psalm:-," The Lord is
my Shepherd; therefore can I lack nothing; He shall
feed me in a green pasture, and lead me forth beside the
waters of comfort; He shall convert my soul, and
bring me forth in the paths of righteousness for his
Name's sake."   Here are forty-five words, and only
three of these are Latin,'pasture,''comfort,' and'convert;' and for every one of these too it would be easy
to substitute a word of Saxon origin; little more, that
is, than the proportion of seven in the hundred; while
still stronger than this, in five verses out of Genesis,
containing one hundred and thirty words, there are
only five not Saxon, less, that is, than four per cent.
Shall we therefore conclude that these are the proportions in which the Anglo-Saxon and Latin elements
of the language stand to one another? If they are so,
then my former proposal to express their relations by
sixty and thirty was greatly at fault; and seventy and
twenty, or even eighty and ten, would fall short of
adequately representing the real predominance of the
Saxon over the Latin element of the language. But




ANGLO-SAXON AND LATIN.             27
it is not so; the Anglo-Saxon words by no means outnumber the Latin in the degree which the analysis of
those passages would seem to imply. It is not that
there are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that
the words which there are, being words of more primary necessity, are so many more times used, so much
more frequently recur. The proportions which the
dictionary, that is, of the language at rest would furnish, are very different from these, which the analysis
of sentenices, or of the language in mnotion, gives.
The notice of this fact will lead us to some very important conclusions as to the character of the words
which the Saxon and the Latin severally furnish; and
principally to this:-that while the English language
is thus compact in the main of these two elements, we
must not for all this regard these two as making, one
and the other, exactly the same kind of contributions to.it. On the contrary their contributions are
of very different character.  The Anglo-Saxon is
not so much, as I have just called it, one element of
the English language, as the foundation of it, the basis.
All its joints, its whole articulation, its sinews and its
ligaments, the great body of articles, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all
smaller words which serve to knit together and bind the
larger into sentences, these, not to speak of the grammatical structure of the language, are exclusively
Saxon. The Latin may contribute its tale of bricks,
yea, of goodly and polished hewn stones to the spiritual
building, but the mortar, with all that holds and binds
these together, and constitutes them into a house, is
Saxon throughout. I remember Selden in his Table




28      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
Talk using another comparison; but to the same effect:
"If you look upon the language spoken in the Saxon
time, and the language spoken now, you will find
the difference to be just as if a man had a cloak
which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's days, and
since, here has put in a piece of red, and there a piece
of blue, and here a piece of green, and there a piece
of orange-tawny. We borrow words from Ithe French,
Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man pleases."
I believe this to be the law which holds'good in
respect of all composite languages.  However composite they may be, yet they are only so in regard of
their words. There may be a medley of these, some
coming from one quarter, some from another; but
there is never a mixture of grammatical forms and inflexions. One or other language entirely predominates
here, and everything has to conform and subordinate
itself to the laws of this ruling and ascendant language.
The Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present English; while that has thought good to drop its
genders, even so the French substantives which come
among us, must also leave theirs behind them; as in
in like manner the French verbs must renounce their
own conjugations, and adapt themselves to, ours.*'At the same time the secondary or superinduced
language, even while it is quite unable to force any of
its forms on the language which receives its words,
may yet compel that to renounce a portion of its own
forms, by the impossibility of making them fit the
* W. Schlegel (Indische Bibliothek, i. 284): Coeunt quidem paullatim in novum corpus peregrina vocabula, sed grammatica linguarum, unde petitse sunt, ratio perit.




ANGLO-SAXON THE RULING LANGUAGE.    29
new comers; and thus it may exert, although not a
positive, yet a negative, influence on the grammar of
the other tongue. It has been so, as is generally
admitted, in the instance of our own. "1When the
English language was inundated by a vast influx of
French words, few, if any, French forms were received
into its grammar; but the Saxon forms soon dropped
away, because they did not suit the new roots; and
the genius of the language, from having to deal with
the newly imported words in a rude state, was induced
to neglect the inflexions of the native ones. This for
instance led to the introduction of the s as the universal termination of all plural nouns, which agreed with
the usage of the French language, and was not alien
from that of the Saxon, but was merely an extension
of the termination of the ancient masculine to other
classes of nouns.)"*
If any of you should wish to convince yourselves
by actual experience, of the fact which I just now asserted, namely that the radical constitution of the language is Saxon, I would say, Try to compose a sentence of ten words and no more on any subject you
please, employing therein only words which are of a
Latin derivation.  You will find it impossible, or
next to impossible, to do it; whichever way you turn,
some obstacle will meet you in the face. And while
it is thus with the Latin, whole pages might be written, I do not say in philosophy or theology or upon
any abstruser subject, but on familiar matters of com* J. Grimm, quoted in the Philological Museum, vol. i. p 667.




30      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
mon everyday life, in which every word should be of
Saxon derivation, not one of Latin; and these, pages
in which with the exercise of a very little skill, all
appearance of awkwardness and constraint should be
avoided, so that it should never occur to the reader,
unless otherwise informed, that the writer had submitted himself to this restraint and limitation in the
words which he employed, and was only drawing them
from one section of the English language. Sir Thomas
Browne has given several long paragraphs so constructed. Take for instance the following: "The first
and foremost step to. all good works is the dread and
fear of the Lord of heaven and earth, which through
the Holy Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sinful hearts-to tread the ways of wisdom, and lead our
feet into the land of blessing."* This is not stiffer
than the ordinary English of his time. I would suggest to you at your leisure to make these two experiments. Endeavour first to compose a sentence of sonime
length upon any possible subject, from which every
word which the Saxon has contributed to our tongue
shall be rigidly excluded: you will find it, at least if I
may judge by my own experience, wholly beyond
your power. On the other hand with a little patience
and'ingenuity you will be able to compose a connected
narrative of any length you please into which no Latin
word shall be admitted, in which none but Saxon shall
be employed.
While thus I bring before you the fact that it would
* Works, vol. 4, p. 202.




CON NECTING WORDS NOT LATIN.        31
be quite possible to write English, foregoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of the language, I
would not have you therefore to conclude that this
portion of the language is of little value, or that we
could draw from the resources of our Teutonic tongue
efficient substitutes for all the words which it has contributed to our glossary. I am persuaded that we
could not; and, if we could, that it would not be desirable. I mention this, because there is sometimes a
regret expressed that we have not kept our language
more free from the admixture of Latin, a suggestion
made that we should even now endeavour to keep
under the Latin element of it, and remove it as far as
possible out of sight. I remember Lord Brougham
urging upon the students at Glasgow as a help to writing good English, that they should seek as far as possible to rid their diction of long-tailed words in' osity'
and'ation.' He plainly intended to indicate by this
phrase all learned Latin words, or words derived from
the Latin. This exhortation rests on a certain amount
of truth; no doubt there were writers of a former age,
Samuel Johnson in the last century, Cudworth and Sir
Thomas Browne in the century preceding, who gave
undue preponderance to the learned, or Latin, portion
in our language; and very much of its charm, of its
homely strength and beauty, of its most popular and
truest idioms, would have perished from it, had they
succeeded in persuading others to write as they had
written.
But at the same time we could almost as ill do without this side of the language as the other. It repre



32      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAG
sents and supplies as real needs as the other does. Philosophy and science and the arts of a high civilization
find their utterance in the Latin words of our language, or, if not in the Latin, in the Greek, which for
present purposes may be grouped with them. How
should they have found it in the other branch of our
language, among a people who had never cultivated
any of these?  And while it is undoubtedly of importance to keep this within due bounds, and, cceteris pcaribus, it will in general be advisable, when a Latin and
a Saxon word offer themselves to our choice, to use
the Saxon rather than the other, to speak of'happiness' rather than'felicity,''almighty' rather than' ommipotent,' a' forerunner' rather than a'precursor,' still
these latter must be regarded as much denizens in the
language as the former, no alien interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as fully as the most Saxon
word of them all. One part of the language is not to
be cultivated at the expense of the other; the Saxon
at the cost of the Latin, as little as the Latin at the
cost of the Saxon.  "Both are indispensable; and
speaking generally without stopping to distinguish as
to subject, both are equally indispensable. Pathos, in
situations which are homely, or at all connected with
domestic affections, naturally moves by Saxon words.
Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to merit the
name of lyrical) must be in the state of flux and reflux,
or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon
element of our language. And why? Because the
Saxon is the aboriginal element; the basis and not the
superstructure: consequently it comprehends all the




QUOTATION FROM DE QUINCEY.          33
ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to the
elementary situations of life. And although the Latin
often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, yet
the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the advantage of
precedency in our use and knowledge; for it is the
language of the nursery whether for rich or poor, in
which great philological academy no toleration is given
to words in'osity' or'ation.' There is therefore a
great advantage, as regards the consecration to our
feelings, settled by usage and custom upon the Saxon.
strands in the mixed yarn of our native tongue.. And
universally, this may be remarked-that wherever the
passion of a poem is of that sort which uses, presumes,
or postulates the ideas, without seeking to extend them,
Saxon will be the' cocoon' (to speak by the language
applied to silk-worms), which the poem spins for itself.
But on the other hand, where the motion of the feeling is by and through the ideas, where (as in. religious
or meditative poetry-Young's, for instance, or Cowper's), the pathos creeps and kindles underneath the
very tissues of the thinking, there the Latin will predominate; and so much so that, whilst the flesh, the
blood, and the muscle, will be often almost exclusively
Latin, the articulations only, or hinges of connection,
will be Anglo-Saxon."*
I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation of the golden mean in this matter than in our authorized Version of the Bible. One
of the chiefest among the minor and secondary bless* De Quincey, On Wordsworth.




34      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
ings which that Version has conferred on the nation or
nations drawing spiritual life from-it,-a blessing not
small in itself, but only small by comparison with the
infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the vehicle to
them,-is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact with
which its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to ignore the full rights of the Latin
part of the language on the one side, and on the other
any burdening of their Version with such a multitude
of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its
homely character, and shut up great portions of it
from the understanding of plain and unlearned men.
There is a remarkable confession to this effect, to the
wisdom, in fact, which guided them from above, to the
providence that overruled their work, an honorable
acknowledgment of the immense superiority in this respect of our English Version over the Romish or Douay,
made by one now unhappily familiar with the latter, as
once he was with our own. One of those who has forsaken the communion of the English Church has exprest
himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all,
which in forsaking our translation, he feels himself to
have foregone and.lost. These are his words: " Who
will not say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous
English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great
strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the
ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the
sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows
how he can forego.  Its felicities often seem to be
almost things rather than mere words. It is part of
the national mind, and the anchor of national serious



DOUAY VERSION OF SCRIPTURE.          35
ness.... The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses.
The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is
hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of
his best moments, and all that there has been about
him of soft and gentle, and pure and penitent and
good, speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible.
It is his sacred thing, which doubt has
never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the
length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him, whose
spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."*
Such are his touching words; and certainly one has
only to compare this version of ours with the Douay,
and the far greater excellence of our own reveals itself
at once. I am not speaking now in respect of superior accuracy of scholarship; nor yet of the absence of
by-ends, of all turning and twisting the translation to
support certain doctrines; nor yet do I allude to the
fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the
other only from the Latin, and thus the translation of
a translation, often reproducing the mistakes of that
translation; but, putting aside all considerations such
as these, I would now speak only of the superiority of
the diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorreAct, is conveyed to English readers. I open the
Douay version at Gal. v. 19, where the long list of the
"works of the flesh," and "fruit of the Spirit," is
given. But what could a mere English reader make
* Dublin Review, June, 1853.




36      ENGLISH A- COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
of words such  as these-' impudicity,''ebrieties,''comessations,''longanimity,' all which occur in that
passage? while our Version has for'impudicity''wantonness,' for'ebrieties''drunkenness,' for'comessations''revellings,' for'longanlimity''long-suffering.'
Or set over against one another such phrases as these,
in the Douay,'the exemplars of the celestials' (Heb.
ix. 23), but in ours,' the patterns of things in the heavens.' Or suppose if, instead of the words which we
read at Hieb. xiii. 16, namely, " to do good and to communicate forget not; for with such sacrifices God is
well pleased," we read as follows, which are the words
of the Douay, " Beneficence and communication do not
forget; for with such hosts God is promerited"?-who
does not feel how great and enduring our loss would
have been, how it would have searched into the whole
religious life of our people, if the translation used by
them  had been composed in such Latin-English as
this?
There was indeed something still deeper than love
of sound and genuine English at work in our translators, whether they were conscious of it, or no, which
hindered them from sending the Scriptures to their fellow-countrymen dressed out in a semi-Latin garb. The
Reformation, which they were in this translation so
mightily strengthening and confirming, was just a
throwing off, on the part of the Teutonic nations, of
that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would have
held them; an assertion at length that they were come
to full age, and that not through her, but directly
through Christ, they would address themselves unto




THE ENGLISH AND DOUAY BIBLE.        37
God. The use of the Latin language as the language of
worship, as the language in which the Scriptures might
alone be read, had been the great badge of servitude,
even as the Latin habits of thought and feeling which
it promoted had been the great helps to the continuance of this servitude, through long ages. It lay deep
then in the very nature of their cause that the Reformers should develop the Saxon, or essentially national, element in the language; while it was just as
natural that the Douay translators, if they must translate the Scriptures into English at all, should yet
translate them into such English as should bear the
nearest possible resemblance to the Latin Vulgate,
which Rome with a very deep wisdom of this world
would gladly have seen as the only one in the hands
of the faithful.
Let me again, however, recur to the fact that what
our Reformers did in this matter they did without exaggeration; even as they had shown the same wise
moderation in higher matters. They gave to the Latin
side of the language its rights, though they would not
suffer it to encroach upon and usurp those of the Teutonic part of the language. It would be difficult not
to believe, even if all outward signs said not the same
thing, that there are great things in store for the one
language of Europe which is thus the connecting link
between the North and the South; between the languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of the North
and by the Romance nations of the South; —which
holds on to both, which partakes of both; which is as
a middle term between both. It has been often thought
2




38      ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE.
that the English Church, being ilr like manner doublefronted, looking on the one side toward Rome, being
herself truly Catholic, looking on the other toward the
Protestant communions, being herself also protesting
and reformed, may yet have a great part in the Providence of God to play for the reconciling of a divided
Christendom. And if this ever should' be so, if, in spite
of our sins and unworthiness, so blessed a task should
be in store for us, it will not be a small help and
assistance thereunto, that. the langtuage in which her
mediation will have to be effected is one wherein both
parties may claim their own, in which neither will feel
that it is receiving the adjudication of a stranger, of
one who must be an alien from its deeper thoughts: and
habits, because an alien from its words, but a language
in which both recognize very much of that which is
deepest and most precious of their own.
Nor is this merit which I have just claimed for our
English the mere dream and fancy of patriotic.vanity.
The scholar who in our clays is most profoundly acquainted with the great group of the Gothic languages
in Europe, and a passionate lover, if ever there were
such, of his native German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has
expressed himself very nearly to the same effect, has
given the palm over all to our English in words which
you will not grudge to hear- quoted, and with which: I
shall bring this lecture to a close.  After ascribing to
it "a veritable power of expression, such as perhaps
never stood at the command of any other language of
men," he goes on to say, "Its highly spiritual genius,
and wonderfully happy development and condition,




JACOB GRIMM ON ENGLISH.            39
have been the result of a surprisingly intimate union
of the two noblest languages in modern Europe, the
Teutonic and the Romance. It is well known in what
relation these two stand to one another in the English
tongue; the former supplying in far larger proportion the material groundwork, the latter the spiritual
conceptions. In truth the English language, which by
no mere accident has produced and upborne the greatest and most predominant poet of modern times, as distinguished from the ancient classical poetry (I can, of
course, only mean Shakespeare), may with all right be
called a world-language; and like the English people
appears destined hereafter to prevail with a sway more
extensive even than its present over all the portions of
the globe. For in wealth, good sense, and closeness
of structure no other of the -languages at this day
spoken deserves to be compared with it-not even our
German, which is torn, even as we are torn, and must
first shake. off many defects, before it can enter boldly
into competition with the English.*
* Ueber den Ursprungj der Sprache, Berlin, 1851, p. 135.




40
LECTURE  II.
GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
IT is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as living, of others as dead. These epithets
are not severally mere synonyms for'spoken' and'unspoken,' however we very often esteem them no
more. Some languages are living, or alive, in quite a
different and in a much higher sense than this; showing themselves to be so by many infallible proofs, by
motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay.
A living language is one in which a vital formative
energy is still at work; a dead language is one in which
this has ceased. A living language is one which is in
the course of actual evolution; which is appropriating
and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth; which at the same time is casting off
useless and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its
vocabulary words of which it finds no use, rejecting
from itself by a re-active energy the foreign and heteroge.
neous, which may for a while have been forced upon it.
I would not assert that'in the process of all this it does
not make mistakes'; in the desire to simplify it may
let go distinctions which were not useless, and which




SOURCES OF THE ENGLISH.              41
it would have been better to retain; its acquisitions
are not all gains; it sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which were most worthy'to have lived. So far as it does this its life is an
unhealthy one; there are here signs of decay and
death beginning; but still it lives, and even these
misgrowths and misformations are themselves the Unt
terances and evidences of life. A dead language, the
Latin for instance, is as incapable of losing as it is of
gaining. V We may know it better; but it can never
be more nor less in itself than it has been for hundreds
of years.
Our own language is of course a living language
still; it is therefore gaining and losing; it is a tree in
which the vital sap is yet working, ascending from its
roots into its branches; and as this works, new leaves
are being put forth by it, old are dropping away and
and dying. I propose for the subject of my present
lecture to consider some of the evidences of this its
present life. As I took for the subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several elements of our composite English are now found in it,
so I shall take for the subject of this, the sources from
which the English language has enriched its vocabulary, the periods at which it has made its chief additions, the character of the additions which at different
periods it has made, and the notives which induced it
to seek them.
I had occasion to mention in that lecture, and indeed
I dwelt for some time on the fact, that the core, the
radical constitution of our language, is Anglo-Saxon;




42      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
so that, composite or. mingled as it must freely be allowed to be, it is only such in respect of its words,
not in respect of" its construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms. These are all of one piece;
and whatever of new has come in has been compelled
to conform itself to these. The framework is English;
only a part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this
filling in, of these its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.
The first::great augmentation by foreign words of
our vocabulary was:a consequence, although not an
immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the
Norman domination which Duke William's victory established in our land. And here let me say in respect
of that victory, in contradiction to the sentimental regrets of; Thierry and others, and with the fullest acknowledgment of the present miseries which it entailed
on the Saxon race, that it was really the making of
England. God never showed more plainly that IHe
had great things in store for the people which should
occupy this English soil, than when he brought that
aspiring Norman race among us. At the same time
the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with
any large amount of French words did not find place
till very considerably later than this event, however it
was a consequence of it.  Some French words we
find very soon after; but in the main the two streams
of language continued for a long while separate and
apart, even as the two nations remained aloof, a conquering and a conquered, and neither forgetting the
fact.




SAXON AN ELEMENT OF THE ENGLISH.                 43
Time however softened the mutual antipathies.  The
Norman,  shut out from France, began more and more
to feel that Eligland was his home and sphere.  The
Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme depression which had ensued on his defeat,e  became
every day a more important element of the new English  nation which was gradually  forming  from  the
coalition of the two races.  His language partook of
his elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no longer the only language in which
a gentleman could speak, or in which  a poet could
sing.  At the same time the Saxon, now passing into
the English language, required a vast addition to its
vocabulary, if it were to serve all the needs of those
who were willing to employ it now.  How much was
there of high culture, how many of the arts of life, of
* We may trace, I think, a permanent record of this depression in
the fact that a vast number of Teutonic words, which have a noble
and august sense in the kindred language of Germany, and evidently had once such in the Anglo-Saxon, have forfeited this in whole
or in part, have been contented to take a lower place, while, in
most instances, a word of the Latin moiety of the language has assumed the place which they have vacated. Thus' tapfer' is valiant,
courageous, but' dapper' is only spruce or smart;'prachtig' which
means proud, magnificent, has dwindled into'pretty;''taufen' being
to baptize, only appears with us as'to dip;''weinen' is honest
weeping in German, it is only' whining' with us;'dach' is any roof
whatever, but' thatch' is only a straw roof for us;' baum' is a living tree, while' beam' is only a piece of dead timber  in' horn-beam,
one of our trees,' beam' still keeps its earlier use.' HIaut' is skin,
but its English representative is'hide,' skin, that is, of a beast.' Stuhl,' a seat or chair, is degraded into' stool;' while' graben' is
no longer to dig, but only to' grub.' And this list might be
very largely increased.




44       GAINS OF THI:E ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
its refined pleasures, which had been strange to Saxon
men, and had therefore found no utterance in Saxon
words.  All this it was sought to supply from  the
French.
I consider the great period of the incoming  of
French words into the English language to have been
when the Norman nobility were exchanging their own
language for the English; and I should be disposed
with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much exaggeration in attributing the great influx of these into English to one man's influence, namely to Chaucer's.*
Doubtless he did much; he fell in with, and furthered
a tendency already existing. But to suppose that the
greater number of French vocables which he employed
in his poems had never been employed before, had
been hitherto unfamiliar to English ears, is to suppose
that his poems must have presented to his contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and
leaves it impossible to explain how he should at once
have become the popular poet of our nation.
That Chaucer largely developed the language ill this
direction is indeed plain.  We have only to compare
his English with that of another great master of the
* Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul's school, in his
book, Logonomia dlizglica, 1621, Preface: Huc usque peregrinoe
voces in lingua Anglicd inauditae. Tandem circa annum 1400 Gal'
fridus Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et Latinis poesin suam famosam reddidit. The whole passage, which is too long
to quote, as indeed.the whole book, is curious. Gil was an earnest
advocate of phonetic spelling, and has adopted it in all his English
quotations in this book.




FRENCH WORDS IN ENGLISH.                 45
tongue, his cotemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much
more his diction is saturated with French words than
is that of the Reformer. We may note too that a great
many which he and others employed, and as it were
proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and
received, so that no doubt they were here in excess.*
At the same time this can be regarded as no condemnation of their attempt; it was only by actual experience that it could be proved whether the language
wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb
them into itself, and assimilate* them  with all that it
already was and had; or did not require, and would
therefore in due time reject and put them away. And
the same will happen in every attempt to transplant
on a large scale the words of one language into another.  Some will take root; others will not, but after
a longer or briefer period will wither and die.  Thus
I observe in Chaucer such French words as these,'misericorde,''malure' (malheur),'penible,''gipon,''pierrie' for'precious stones;' none of which have
been permanently incorporated in our tongue.  As little has' creansur,' which Wiclif (2 Kin. 4. 1) employs
for creditor, held its place. It is curious to mark other
* We may observe exactly the same in Plautus; a multitude of
Greek words are used by him, which the Latin language did not
want, and therefore refused to take up; thus' clepta,' Idanista,''harpagare,''L nauclerus,''strategus,'' morologus,'' malacus,'' sycophantia' [so'seymnus' by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, are
employed except by him; yet only experience could show that they
were superfluous; and at the epoch of Latin literature in which he
lived it was well done to put them on trial.
2*




46       GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a
very much later: day, and yet finally extruded from
the language: seeming to have taken firm root, they
have yet withered away in the- end.  Thus has it been
for example with'rivage,''jouissance,''accoil' (accueillir),'sell:':(  saddle), all occurring in Spenser;
with'esperance,'' orgillous' (= orgueilleux),'rondeur,' in  Shakespeare.'Maugre,''congie,'' mot,''devoir,' were;:English once; when we employ them
now, it is with the sense that we are using foreign
words,.  The same: is truge of'dulce,''aigredoulce'
(  soursweet), of' mur' for wall, of the verb' to cass'
(all in Holland), of' volupty' (Sir T. Elyot),,'volunty'
(Evelyn)-,'medisance' (Montagu),'petit' (South),'eloign' (Hackett), this last surviving still in the beautiful, now only provincial word, though formerly employed by Chaucer,-'ellinge,' that is, lonely, melancholy, separated from friends.*
We' have  seen when the great influx of- French
words took place-that is, from the time of the Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the first, to that
of Chaucer.  With him  our literature and language
had made a burst, which they were nQt able to maintain.  He was as some warm  bright day in the very
early spring, which  seems to say that the winter is
over and gone; the promise of which, however, is deceitful; the full bursting and blossoming of the spring* Let me here observe once for all that in adding the name of an
author, which I shall often do, to a word, I do not mean to affirm
that the word is in any way peculiar to him; although in some
cases it may be so; but only that he is one authority for its use.




LATIN WORDS IN ENGLISH.             47
time are yet far off.  That struggle with France which
which began so gloriously, but ended so disastrously,
even with the loss of. our whole ill-won dominion
there, the savagery of our wars of the Roses, wars
which were a legacy bequeathed to us by that unrighteous conquest, leave a great blank in our literary history, nearly a century during which very little was
done for the cultivation of our native tongue, during
which it could. have made few important accessions to
its wealth. Lydgate is the most important name in this
period; but Warton's judgment about him is certainly
too favorable.
A time however was coming when we were about
to receive largely from the Latin, and this by way of
direct importation from it, and not as before, Latin
words, which were French before they were English,
and only as French reached us. The revival of learning, the period of a familiar re-acquaintance with the
great master-pieces of ancient literature, was naturally
the period when this would be. This revival of learning, which found place somewhat earlier in Italy,
where it had its birth, than with us, extended to England and was operative here during the reigns of
Henry the Eighth and his immediate successors. During this period, Latin words came into the language
not by single adoption, as with later writers, but in
floods. Thus Puttenham, a writer of Queen Elizabeth's reign, who in 1589 published an Art of English
Poetry, gives a long list of words which he states to
have been of quite recent introduction into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and




48      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not
give you his whole catalogue, but some specimens
from it; it is difficult to understand in regard of some
of these how the language should have managed to do
without them solong;'method,''methodical,''function,''numerous,''penetrate,''penetrable,''indignity,''savage,'' scientific,''delineation,''dimension'all which he notes to have recently come up; so too'idiom,''significative,''compendious,''prolix,'' figurative,''inveigle,''metrical.' All these he adduces
with praise; others* upon which he bestows equal
commendation have not held their ground, as.'placation,''numerosity,''harmonical.'  Of those novelties
which he disallowed, in some cases, as in the words,'facundity,''implete,''attemptat' (' attentat'), he only
anticipated the decision of a later day; while others
which he disallowed no less, as' audacious,''compatible,''egregious,' have maintained their ground. These
too have done the same;'despicable,''destruction,,'homicide,''obsequious,''ponderous,''portentous,''prodigious,' all which another writer a little earlier
condemns as "inkhorn terms, smelling too much of
the Latin."
It is curious to observe the "words of art" as he
calls them, which Philemon Holland, a voluminous
translator at the end of the sixteenth and beginning
of the  seventeenth  century, counts it needful to
explain in a sort of glossary which he prefixes to his
translation of Pliny's Natural ZHistory,* 1601.  One
* Besides this works he translated the whole of Plutarch's.Mo



INFLUENCE  OF THE RESTORATION.                   49
can hardly  at the present day understand  how  any
person who would care to read the book at all would
find  any  difficulty  with  words like  the  following,'acrimony,''austere,''bulb,''consolidate,''debility,'' dose,''ingredient,''opiate,''propitious,''symptom,'
all which as novelties he carefully explains.  Some of
the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and
more technical than these; but the vast proportion of
them present no more difficulty than those which I
have adduced.*
ralla, Livy, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and possibly other
classical authors. His works make a part of the library of dullness
in Pope's Dunciad:
" De Lyra there a dreadful front extends,
And here the groaning shelves Philemon bends."
But his books are a mine of genuine idiomatic English, neglected
by most of our lexicographers, wrought to a considerable extent
and with great advantage by Richardson; yet capable, as it seems
to me, of yielding much more in illustration of the language than
they yet have yielded.
* And so too in French it is surprising to find of how late introduction are many words, which it seems as if the language could
never have done without.'Desinteressement,' -exactitude,''sagacite,'' bravoure,' were not introduced till late in the seventeenth
century.' Renaissance,'' emportement,' desagrement,' were all
recent in 1675 (Bouhours);' ind6vot," intolerance,''impardonnable,''irreligieux' were struggling into allowance at the end of the seventeenth century, and were not established till the beginning of the
eighteenth;' insidieux' was invented by Malherbe;' frivolite' does
not appear in the earlier editions of the Dictionary of the d.cademy.
The Abbe de St Pierre was the first to employ' bienfaisance,' the
elder Balzac'fdliciter,' Sarrasin'burlesque.'  Mad. de Sevign6
cries out against her daughter for employing' effervescence' in a letter. (Comment dites-vous cela, ma fille? Voil un mot dont je
n'avais jamais oui parler.)'Demagogue' was first hazarded by




50       GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
The period during which this naturalization *of
Latin words in the English language was going actively forward, may be said to have continued for
about a century or more. It first received a cheek
from  the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and
habits of thought with the Restoration of Charles the
Second.  The writers already formed before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to
write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and
Latin in diction, but not so those of a younger generation.  We mlay say of this influx of Latin that it left
the language immensely increased in copiousness, with
greatly enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat
burdened, and not always able to move gracefully
under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to
acquire foreign words, but to know what to do with
them after youl have acquired, is the difficulty. It
might have received indeed most serious injury, if all
the words which the great writers of this the Latin
period of our language employed, and so proposed as
Bossuet, and was counted so bold that it was long before any ventured to follow him in its use. Somewhat earlier Montaigne had
introduced'diversion' and'enfantillage,' though not without
being rebuked by cotemporaries on the score of the last.'Convertisseur' was born of those hateful efforts to convert the French
Protestants at so much a head; one who undertook this on a large
scale being so called. Caron gave to the language' avant-propos,'
Ronsard' aviditb,' Joachim Dubellay' patrie,' Denis Sauvage'jurisconsulte,' and Etienne first brought in, apologising at the same time
for the boldness of it,' analogie.' (Si les orielles franqoises peuvent
porter ce mot.)




NATURALIZATION OF WORDS.            51
candidates for admission into it, had received the
stamp of popular allowance.
But happily it was not so; it was here, as. it had
been before with the French importations; the reactive powers of the language, enabling it to throw off
that which was foreign to it, did not fail to display
themselves now, as they had done then. The number
of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one must say that in almost
all instances where the alien act has been enforced,
the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such
as the circumstances of the case abundantly bore out.
Either the words were not idiomatic, or were not
intelligible, or were not needed, or looked ill, or
sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against
them. A lover of his native tongue will tremble to
think what that tongue would have become, if all the
vocables from  the Latin and the Greek which were
then introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had
been admitted on the strength of their recommendation; if' torve' and' tetric' (Fuller),' cecity' (Hooker),'lepid' and'sufflaminate' (Barrow),'stultiloquy,'' immorigerous,''clancular,''ferity,''hyperaspist' (all in
Jeremy Taylor), if'dyscolous' (Foxe),' moliminously'
(Cudworth),'immarcescible' (Bishop Hall),' arride'
(ridiculed by Ben Jonson), with  the hundreds of
other words like these, and even more monstrous than
some of these, not to speak of such Italian as' leggiadrous' (Beaumont, Psyche), had not been rejected and
disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.




52      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
A  great many too were allowed and adopted, but
not exactly in the shape in which they first were introduced among us; they were made to drop their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to conform  themselves to English ways, and
only so were finally incorporated into the great family
of English words.* Thus'pantomimi' (Lord Bacon)
soon became'pantomimes;''atomi' (Lord Brooke)'atoms;'' epocha' (Dryden, and used as late as South)
became'epoch;''caricatura' (Sir T. Brown)'caricature;'' effigies' and'statua' (both in Shakespeare)'effigy' and'statue;' not otherwise'pyramis' and'pyramides,' which also are forms employed by him,
became'pyramid' and'pyramids;''colone' (Burton)' clown;''apostata' (Massinger) became'apostate;''despota' (Foxe)'despot;''mummia' (Webster)'mummy;''synonyma' (Milton, prose)'synonyms;''galaxias' (Foxe)'galaxy;' and' heros' (H. More)'hero.'  Nor can that slight but widely extended
change of'innocency,'' indolency,''temperancy,'
and the large family of words with similar termination, into'innocence,''indolence,''temperance' and
the like, be regarded otherwise than as part of the
same process.   The same has gone on with words
from  other languages, as from  the Italian and the
Spanish; thus'banditto' (Shakespeare) becomes'bandit;''princessa' (Hacket)'princess;''scaramucha'
* J. Grimm (W6rterbuch, p. xxvi.): Fillt von ungefahr ein
fremdes wort in den brunnen einer sprache, so wird es so lange darin
umgetrieben, bis es ihre farbe annimmt, und seiner fremden art zum
trotze wie ein heimisches aussieht.




ENGLISH NOT EXCLUSIVE.              53
(Dryden)' scaramouch;'' caprichio' becomes first'caprich' (Butler), then' caprice;'' ambuscado,'' barricado,''renegado,''hurricano' (all in Shakespeare),'brocado' (Hackluyt), drop their foreign terminations,
and severally become'ambuscade,''barricade,''renegade,''hurricane,''brocade.' Other slight modifications of spelling, not in the termination, but in. the
body of a word, will indicate in like manner its more
entire incorporation into the English language. Thus'restoration' was at first spelt'restauration;' and so
long as' vicinage' was spelt' voisinage,' as by Bishop
Sanderson, or'mirror''miroir,' as by Fuller, they
could scarcely be said to be those purely English
words which now they are.
HIere and there even.at this late period of the language awkward foreign words will be recast throughout into a more English mould;'chirurgeon' will
become'surgeon;'' squinancy' will become first'squinzey' (J. Taylor), and then'quinsey;''porkpisce' (Spenser), that is'sea-hog,' or'hog-fish,' will
be'porpesse,' and then'porpoise,' as it is now. In.
other words the attempt will be made, but it will be
now too late to be attended with success.'Physiognomy' will not give place to'visnomy,' even though
Spenser and Shakespeare employ this briefer form;
nor'hippopotamus' to'hippodame,' even at Spenser's
bidding. In like manner the attempt to naturalize' avant-courier' in the shape of  vancurrier' has failed.
Looking at this process of the reception of foreign
words, and afterwards their assimilation to our own,
and the great number of words in which this work




54      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
has been accomplished, we may trace, I think, as was
to be expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions and that of our language. As
it is. the very character of our institutions to repel
none, but rather.to afford a'shelter and a refuge to all,
from whatever quarter they come, and after a while
longer: or shorter all the strangers and incomers have
beenf incorporated into. the English nation, within one
or two generations have forgotten that they were ever
any other than members of it, retaining no other reminiscence. of their, foreign extraction than some. slight difference of name, and that often disappearing or having
disappeared, exactly so has it been with. the English
language. None has been less exclusive; none has
stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its
arms wider, with a greater confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could make truly its own,.assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it thought
good to receive into its bosom.
These are the two great enlargements from without
of our vocabulary. All other are minor and subordinate. Thus that introduction of French tastes by Charles
the Second and his courtiers. returning from exile, to
which I have just adverted, though it rather modified
the structure of our sentences than the elements of our
vocabulary, gave us some new words. In one of Dryden's plays, Marriage a lct Mo2de, a lady full of affectation is introduced, who is always employing French
idioms in preference to English, French words rather
than native. - It is not a little curious that of these
which are thus put into her mouth to render her ridi



PRESTIGE IS BECOMING ENGLISH.         55
culous not a few are now excellent English, and have
nothing far sought or affected about them-so often
does it prove that what:is laughed at in the beginning,
is by all admitted and: allowed at the last. For example, to speak of a person being in the'good graces' of
another has nothing in it ridiculous now; nor yet have
the words'repartee;''embarrass,''chagrin,'  grimace;'
which all must plainly have been both novel and affected at. the time when Dryden wrote.'Fougue' and'fraischeur,' which he himself employed —who, it is
true, was not a frequent offender in this way-have
not been justified by the same success.
Nor can it be said that this, adoption and naturalization of foreign words ever ceases in a language. There
are periods, as we have seen, when  this goes forward
much more largely than at others; when a language
throws open, as it were, its doors, and welcomes
strangers with an especial freedom; but there is never
a time, when one by one these foreigners and strangers
are not stepping-into it. WTe do not for the most part
observe the fact, at least not while it is actually doing.
The great innovator Time manages his innovations so
dexterously, spreads them over such vast periods, and
therefore brings them about so gradually, that often,
while effecting the mightiest changes, he seems to us to
be effecting none at all.
It is indeed well nigh impossible to conceive anything more gradual than the steps by which a foreign
word is admitted into the full rights of an English
one; and thus the process of its incoming often eludes
our notice altogether. It appears to me that we may




56       GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
best understand this, by fixing our attention upon
some single word, which at this very moment is in the
course of becoming English. I know no better example than the French word'prestige' will afford.'Prestige' manifestly supplies a want in our tongue; it expresses something which no single word in English
could express; which could only be expressed by a
long circumlocution; being that moral influence which
past successes, as the pledge and promise of future
ones, breed. The word has thus naturally come to be
of very frequent use by good English writers; for they
do not feel that in employing it, they are deserting as
good or a better word of their own.  At first all used
it avowedly as French, writing it in italics to indicate
this. At the present moment some writers do so still,
some do not; that is, some regard it still as French,
others consider that it has now become English, and
obtained an English settlement.*  Gradually the number of those who write it in italics will become fewer
and fewer, till they cease altogether. It will then only
need that the accent should be shifted, in obedience to
the tendencies of the English language, from the second syllable to the first, and that instead of'prestige'
* We may see something of the same process in Greek words
which were being incorporated in the Latin. Thus Cicero writes
dvbros&r (A.cad. ii. 39, 123), but Seneca (Ep. 122),'antipodes.'
The word for Cicero was still Greek, while in the period that elapsed
between him and Seneca, it had become Latin. Exactly in the same
way' criterion' was so little felt to be an English word in the time
of Jeremy Taylor, that he writes it xpir~po0v.  I think also that he
writes not' acme,' but xix.




SCIENTIFIC WORDS.                  57
it should be pronounced' prestige,' and its naturalization will be complete. I have little doubt that in twenty
years it will be so pronounced by the great body of
well educated Englishmen, and that our present pronunciation will pass away in the same manner as' obleege,' once universal, has past away, and given
place to' oblige.'*
Let me here observe in passing that the process of
throwing the accent of a word back, by way of completing the naturalization of it, is one which we may
note constantly going forward in our language. Thus
while Chaucer accentuates sometimes' natuire,' he also
accentuates elsewhere' nature,' while sometimes' virtue' at other times' virtue;'' ssay' was' essay' with
Dryden; he closes a heroic line with the word, as Pope
does with' barrier,' therefore pronounced' barrier' by
him.
Greek  and Latin words also we still continue to
adopt, although now  not any longer in masses, but
only one by one.  With the lively interest which always has been felt in classical studies among us, and
which will continue to be felt, so long as any greatness
and nobleness survive in our land, it must needs be
that accessions from these quarters would never cease
altogether.  I do not refer here to purely scientific
terms; these, so long as they continue such, and do
* See in Coleridge's Table Talk, p. 3, the story of John Kemble's
stately correction of the Prince of Wales for adhering to the earlier
pronunciation' obleege'-" It will become your royal mouth better
to say oblige."




58      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
not pass over the threshold of the science or sciences
for the use of which they were invented, being never
heard on the lips, or employed in the writings, of any
others but the cultivators of these sciences, have no
right to be properly called words at all. They are a
kind of shorthand of the science, or algebraic notation;
and will not find place in a rightly constituted dictionary- of the language, but rather in a technical dictionary
apart by themselves. Of these, compelled by the advances of'physical science, we have coined multitudes
out of number' in these later times, fashioning them
mainly from the Greek, no other language within our
reach yielding itself at all so easily to our needs.
Of non-scientific words, both Greek and Latin, some
have made their way among us quite in these latter
times. To speak first of Greek, Burke attempted the
verb'to spheterize,' that is, to appropriate, or make
one's own; but this without success. Others have
been more fortunate;'r-esthetic' we have got indeed
through the Germnansbutfrom the Greeks. Tennyson
has given allowance to'a eon;' and'myth'- is a deposit
which vast and far-reaching controversies have left in
the popular language.'Photography' is an example of
what I was just now speaking of-namely, a scien'tific word which has travelled beyond, the limits of
the science which it designates, and which- gave it
birth; being heard on the lips of others besides photographers, and therefore having a right to be considered as making part of the language.
More numerous are the Latin.'Solidarity,' a word
which we owe to the French communists, and which




GERMAN iWORDS IN ENGLISH.           59
signifies a community in gain and loss, in honour and
dishonour, a being, so to. speak, all in the same bottom,
is so convenient that it will be vain to struggle against
its reception. The newspapers already have it, and
books will not long exclude it;: not to say that it has
found place in German, and probably in other European languages as well. Ruskin Ihas given to'ornamentation' the sanction and authority of his name.
Not quite so new, but of quite recent introduction into
the language, are'normal,''abnormal.'
When we consider the near affinity between: the
English and German languages,.-which, if not sisters,
may at least be regarded as first cousins,' it is somewhat remarkable that almost since the day when they
parted company, each to fulfil its own destiny, there
has been- little or no further commerce between them
in the matter of giving.or taking, that is, until within
the last fifty years. At anyrate adoptions on our part
from the German have been till within this period almost none. Of late however they have been somewhat
more frequent. With several of the German compound
words we have been in recent times so well pleased,
that we must needs adopt them into, or imitate them in,
English. We have not always. been very happy in
those which we have selected for imitation or adoption..Thus we might have been satisfied with'manual,' and
not put together that very ugly and very unnecessary
word'handbook,' which is scarcely,. I should suppose,
ten or fifteen years old.'Einseitig' (itselfa modern word,
if I mistake not) has not, indeed, been adopted, but is
evidently the pattern on which we have formed' one



60     GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
sided,' —a word to which a few years ago something of
affectation was attached; and any one who employed it
at once gave evidence that he was more or less a dealer
in German wares; it has however its manifest conveniences, and will hold its ground.'Fatherland'
(Vaterland) on the contrary will scarcely establish
itself among us, the note of affectation will continue
to cleave to it, and we shall go on contented with'native country' to the end. The most successful of
these compounded words, borrowed recently from the
German, is'folk-lore,' and the substitution of this for
the long and Latinized,'popular superstitions,' must
be esteemed, I think, to be aln unquestionable gain.
To speak now of other sources from which the new
words of a language are derived. Of course the period
when absolutely new roots are generated will have
past away, long before men begin to take any notice
by a reflective act of processes going forward in the
language which they speak. This pure productive, or
creative energy, as we might call it, belongs only to
the earliest periods of a nation's existence,-to periods
quite out of the ken of history. It is only from materials already existing either in its own bosom, or in the
bosom of other languages, that it can enrich itself in
the later, or historical stages of its life.
And first, it can bring its own words into new combinations; it can join two, and sometimes even more
than two, of the words which it already has, and form
out of them a new one. It need hardly be observed
that much more is wanted here than merely to unite
two or more words to one another by a hyphen; this




LATIN  COMPOUND  EPITHETS.                  61
is not to make a new word: they must really coalesce
and grow together. Different languages possess this
power of forming new words by the combination of
old in very different degrees, and even the same language at different periods of its existence.  The eminent felicity of the Greek in this respect has been
always acknowledged.  "The joints of her compounded words," says Fuller, "are so naturally oiled, that
they run nimbly on the tongue, which makes them
though  long, never tedious, because  significant."*
* Holy State, b. 2, c. 6. There was a time when the Latin promised to display, if not an equal, yet not a very inferior, freedom in
in this forming of new words by the happy marriage of old. But in
this, as in so many respects, it seemed possessed at the period of its
highest culture with a timidity which caused it voluntarily to abdicate many of its own powers. Where do we find in the Augustan
period of the language so grand a pair of epithets as these, occurring as they do in a single line of Catullus: Ubi cerva silvicbltri; ubi
aper nenmorivagus? Nay, it did not even retain those compound epithets which it once had formed, but was content to let numbers of
them drop:' parcipromus,'' turpilucricupidus,' and many more, do
not extend beyond Plautus. On this matter Quintilian observes (l. 5.
70): Res tota magis Grsecos decet, nobis minus succedit; nec id
fieri natura puto, sed alienis favemus; ideoque cum xup?-crt Cv
mirati sumus, incurvicervicumn vix a risu defendimras. Elsewhere he
complains, though not with reference to compound epithets, of the
little generative power which existed in the Latin language, that its
continual losses were compensated by no equivalent gains (8. 6. 32):
Deinde, tanquam consummata sint oimnia, nihil generare audemus
ipsi, quum multa quotidie ab antiquis ficta moriantur. Notwithstanding this complaint, it must be owned that the silver age of the
language, which sought to recover, and did recover to some extent
the abdicated energies of its earlier times, re-asserted among other
powers that of combining words, with a certain measure of success.
3'




62     GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Sir Philip Sydney boast of the capability of our English- language in this respect-that " it is particularly.
happy in the composition of two or three words together, near equal to the Greek."  No one has done more
than Milton to justify this praise, or to make manifest
what may be effected by this marriage of words.
Many of his compound epithets, as' golden-tressed,''tinsel-slippered,'' coral-paven,'' vermeil-tinctured,'
are themselves poems in miniature.
Our modern inventions in the same kind are for the
most part very inferior; they could hardly fail to be
so, seeing that the formative, plastic powers of a language. are always waning and diminishing more and
more. It may be, and indeed is, gaining in other respects, but in this it is losing; and thus it is not strange
if its later births in this kind are less successful than
its earlier. Among the poets of our own time Shelly
has done more than any other to assert for the language
that it has not renounced this power; while among
writers of prose in these later days Jeremy Bentham
has been at once one of the boldest, but at the same
time one of the most unfortunate, of those who have
issued this money from their mint. Still we ought not
to forget, while we divert ourselves with the strange
amorphous progeny of his brain, that we owe'international' to him —a word at once so convenient and
supplying so real a need, that it was and with manifest
advantage at once adopted by all.
Another way in which languages jncrease their stock
of vocables is by the forming of new words according
to the analogy of formations, which in seemingly par



ADJECTIVES IN AL.                    63
allel cases have been already allowed.   Thus long
since upon certain substantives such as'nation,''congregation,''convention,' were formecd their adjectives,'national,''congregational,''conventional;' yet these
also at a comparatively modern period;'congregational' and' national' first rising up in the Assembly
of Divines, that, is, during the time of the Commnonwealth.*   These having  found  admission into  the
language, it is attempted to repeat the process in the
case of other words with the same ending.t I confess the
effect is often exceedingly disagreeable.  We are- now
pretty well used to' educational,' -and the word is sometilhes serviceable enough; but I can perfectly remember
when some eighteen years ago an'Educational -Magazine' was started, the first impression on one's mind
was, that a work having to do with education should
not thus bear upon its front an offensive, or to say the
best, a very dubious novelty in the English language.
These adjectives are now multiplying fast. We have'inflexional,''denominational,'   and not content with
this, in dissenting magazines at least, the monstrous
birth,' denominationalism;''emotional' too is creeping
* Collection of Scarce Tracts, Edited by Sir Walter Scott, vol. vii.
p. 91. 
t A parallel to this is the formation in the later Latin of Tertullian, Prudentius, and others, of a multitude of substantives in' men'
and''amen,' according to the analogy of the very few, three or four,'certamen,' cantamen,'' irritamen,''fragmen,' which already existed at its best times in the language. At a later day their number
becomes legion;' figmen,''putamen,''peccamen,' spurcamen,'' speculamen,''cruciamen,''litamen,' are only a few.




64      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
into books, though as yet I have but seen it in- an
American, and I dare say others as well; so that it is
hard to say where this influx will stop, or whether all
our words with this termination will not finally bring
forth an adjective. Convenient as you may sometimes
find these, I would yet certainly counsel you to abstain
from all but the perfectly well recognized formations
of this kind. It is prudent to follow here, rather than
to lead.'Starvation' is another word of quite recent introduction, formed in like manner on the model of preceding formations of a similar clharacter —its first
formers indeed not observing that they were putting a
Latin termination to a Saxon word. The word is an
Americanism.  "Strange as it may appear," observes
a writer in the Notes and Queries, " it is nevertheless
quite true that this word, now unhappily so common
on every tongue, is not to be found in our own English dictionaries; neither in Todd's- Johnson, published
in 1826, nor in Richardson's, published ten years later,
nor in Smart's Walker ReTnodelled, published about the
same time as Richardson's. It is Webster, who has the
credit of importing it from his country into this, and in
a supplement issued a few years ago Mr. Smart adopted
it as' a trivial word, but in very common and at present good use.'"
Again, languages enrich themselves, our own has
done so, by recovering treasures which for a while had
been lost by them or foregone. I do not mean that all
which drops out of use is loss; there are words which
it is gain to be rid of; which it would be folly to wish




OBSOLETE WORDS REVIVED.             65
to revive; of which Dryden, setting himself against an
extravagant zeal in this direction, says in an ungracious comparison-they do "not deserve this redemption, any more than the crowds of men who daily die,
or are slain for sixpence in a battle, merit to be restored
to life, if a wish could revive them."* There are others
however which it is a real gain to draw back again
from the temporary oblivion which had overtaken
them; and this process of their setting and rising
again is not as unfrequent as at first might seem.
You may perhaps remember that Horace, tracing in
a few memorable lines the history of words, while he
notes that many which were once current have now
dropped out of use, does not thereby count that of.necessity their race is for ever run; on the contrary he
confidently anticipates a palingenesy for many among
them: "Multa renascentur, quse jam cecidere;" and I
am convinced that there has been such in the case of
our English words to a far greater extent than we are
generally aware. Words slip almost or quite as imperceptibly back into use as they once slipped out of
it. Let me suggest a few facts in evidence of this.  In
the cotemporary gloss which an anonymous friend of
Spenser's furnished to his Shepherd's Calendar, "for
the exposition of old words," as he declares, he thinks
it expedient to include in his list, such as the following:'dapper,''scathe,''askance,''sere,''embellish,''bevy,''forestall,''fain,' with not a few others quite
as familiar as these.  Who will say of the verb'to hal* Postscript to his translation of the.Z/neid.




'66    GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
low' that it is even obsolescent; and yet WVallis two
hundred years ago observed- "it has almost gone out
of use" (fere desuevit). It would be difficult to find
an example of the verb'to advocate' between Milton
and Burke. Franklin, a close observer in such matters, as he was himself an admirable master of English
style, considered the word to have sprung up during
his own residence in Europe. In this indeed he was
mistaken; it had only during this period revived.
Johnson says of'jeopardy'-" it is not in use;" which
certainly is not any longer true. I am persuaded that
as far as intelligibility is concerned, Chaucer is not
merely as near, but much nearer, to us than he was
felt by Dryden and his cotemporaries to be to them.
He and the writers of his time make exactly the same
sort of complaints, only in still stronger language, about
his archaic phraseology and the obscurities which it involves that are made at the present day. Thus in the
Preface to his Tales from  Chaucer Dryden having
quoted some not very difficult lines from the earlier
poet whom  he was modernizing, proceeds: "You
have here a specimen of Chaucer's language, which is
so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be understood."
Nor was it merely'thus with respect of Chaucer.
These wits and poets of the court of Charles the Second
were conscious of a greater gulf between themselves
and the Elizabethian vera, separated from them by little
more than fifty years, than any of which we are aware,
separated from it by nearly two centuries more. I do
not mean merely that they felt themselves more removed from its tone and spirit; their altered circum



DRYDEN ON SHAKESPEARE'S DICTION.             67
stances might explain this; but I am convinced that
they found a greater difficulty and strangeness in the
language of Spenser and Shakespeare than we find now;
that it sounded in many ways more uncouth, more
old-fashioned, more abounding in obsolete terms than
it does in our ears at the present.  Only in this way
can I explain the tone in which they are accustomed
to speak of these worthies of the near past. I must
again refer to Dryden, the truest representative of literary England in its good and in its evil during the last
half of the seventeenth century. Of Spenser, whose
death was separated from his own birth by little more
than thirty years, he speaks as of one belonging to
quite a different epoch, counting it much to say, "' notwithstanding his obsolete language, he is still intelligible."*  Nay, hear what his judgment is of Shakespeare, so far as language is concerned: " It must be
allowed to the present age that the tongue in general
is so much refined since Shakespeare's time, that many
of his words and more of his phrases are scarce. intelligible. And of those which we understand, some are
ungrammatical, others coarse; and his whole style is
so pestered with figurative expressions, that it is as
affected as it is obscure."t
* Preface to Juvenal.
t Preface to Troilus and Cressida. In justice to Dryden, and
lest it should be said that he had spoken poetic blasphemy, it ought
not to be forgotten that' pestered' had not in his time at all so
offensive a sense as it would have now. It meant no more than
inconveniently crowded; thus Milton: "Confined and pestered in
this pinfold here."




68,     GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Sometimes a word will emerge anew from the undercurrent of society, not indeed new, but yet to most
seeming as new, its very existence having been altogether forgotten by the greater number of those speaking
the language; although it must have somewhere lived
on upon the lips of men. Thus, for instance, since the Californian and Australian discoveries of gold we hear often
of a'nugget' of gold; a lump, that is, of the pure
metal; and there has been some discussion whether
the word had been born for the present necessity, or
whether it be a recent malformation of'ingot.'  I
am inclined to think that it is neither one nor the
other. I would not indeed affirm that it may not be a
popular recasting of'ingot;' but only that it is not a
recent one; for'nugget' very nearly in its present
form, occurs in our elder writers, being spelt'niggot'
by them.-  There can be little doubt that this is the
same word; all the consonants, which are generally
the stamnina of a word, being the same; while this
early form'niggot' makes more plausible their suggestion that'nugget' is only'ingot' disguised, seeing
that there wants nothing but the very common metathesis of the two first letters to bring that out of this.
New words are often formed from the names of persons, actual or mythical. Some one has observed how
interesting would be a complete collection, or a collection approaching to completeness, in any language of
* Thus in North's Plutarch, p. 499: "After the fire was quenched,
they found in niggots of gold and silver mingled together, about a
thousand talents;" and again, p. 323: " There was brought'a marvellous great mass of treasure in viggots of gold."




PROPER NAMES BECOME WORDS.           69
the names of persons which have afterwards become
names of things, from nomina appellativca have become
nomina reaica.  Let me without confining myself to
those of more recent introduction endeavour to enumerate as many as I can remember of the words which
have by this method been introduced into our language.
To begin with mythical antiquity-the Chimsera has
given us'chimerical,' Hermes'hermetic,' Tantalus'to
tantalize,' Hercules'herculean,' and Dsedalus'dedal,'
if this word may on Spenser's and Shelley's authority
be allowed. Gordius, a Phrygian king who tied that
famous'gordian' knot which Alexander cut, will supply a natural transition from mythical to historical.
Here Mausolus, a king of Caria, has left us'mausoleum,' Academus'academy,' Epicurus'epicure,' Philip
of Macedon a'philippic,' being such a discourse as
Demosthenes once hurled against him, the enemy of
Greece, and Cicero'cicerone;' Mithridates, who had
made himself poison-proof, gave us the now forgotten
word,'mithridate,' for antidote; as from Hippocrates
we derived'hipocras,' a word often occurring in our
early poets, being a wine supposed to be mingled according to his receipt. A grammar used to be called
a' donat' or' donet' (Chaucer) from Donatus, a famous
grammarian. Lazarus, perhaps an actual person, has
given us'lazar' and'lazaretto;' and Simon Magus'simony;' Mahomet a' maumet' or' mammet,' that is,
an idol; and'dunce' is from Duns Scotus. To come
to more modern times, and not pausing at Ben Jonson's' Chaticerisms,' Bishop Hall's' Scoganisms' from
Scogan, Edward the Fourth's Jester, or his'aretinisms,'
3*




70       GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
from an infamous Italian named Aretine, these being
probably not intended even by their authors to endure,
a Roman.cobbler named Pasquin has given us the'pasquil' or'pasquinade;''Colonel Negus in Queen Anne's
time first mixed the beverage which goes by his name;
Lord Orrery:was the first for whom  an'orrery' was
made; and Lord Spencer first wore, or at least first
brought into fashion, a'spencer.' Dahl, a Swede, introduced the cultivation of the' dahlia.'  The'tontine'
was conceived by  an  Italian, Tonti;  and  another
Italian, Galvani, first noted the phenomena of galvanism.'Martinet,''mackintosh,''doyly,''to macadamize,''to burke,"' are all names of persons or formed
from  persons, and then transferred to things, on the
score of some connexion existing between the one and
other.*
Again the names of popular characters in literature,
such as have taken strong hold on the national mind,
give birth to a number of new words. Thus from
Homer we: have'mentor' for a monitor;'stentorian'
* Several of these we have in common.with the French; of their
own they have' sardanapalisme,' any piece of profuse luxury, from
Sardanapalus; while for'lambiner,' to dally or loiter over a task,
they are indebted to Denis Lambin, a worthy Greek scholar of the
sixteenth century, whom his adversaries accused of sluggish movement, and wearisome diffuseness in style. The name of an unpopular
French minister of finance, M. de Silhouette, unpopular because he
sought to cut down unnecessary expences in the state, was applied
to whatever was cheap and, as was implied, unduly economical. It
has survived in the black outline portrait which is now called a' silhouette.' (Sismondi, Histoire des Fran-ais, t. 19, p. 94, 95.) I
need hardly add' guillotine.'




PROPER NAMES BECOME WORDS.           71
for loud-voiced; and inasmuch as with all of Hector's
nobleness there is a certain amount of big talking about
him,'to hector' from him;* while the medieval romances about the siege of Troy ascribe to Pandarus
that shameful ministry out of which his name has past
into the words'to pandar' and' pandarism.''Rodomontade' is from Rodomont, a blustering and boasting
hero of Boiardo, and adopted by Ariosto;' thrasonical'
from  Thraso, the braggart in the Latin comedies.
Cervantes has given us' quixotic;' Swift,' liliputian;'
to Moliere the, French language owes'tartiffe,' and
tartufferie.'' Reynard,' too, which with. us is a duplicate for fox, while in the French'renard' has quite
excluded the older'volpils,' was originally not the
name of a kind, but the proper name of the fox hero,
the vulpine Ulysses, in that famous beast-epic of the
middle ages, Reinekce Fuchs; the immense popularity of
which we gather from many evidences, from none more
clearly than from this.'Chanticleer' and'Bruin' are
in like manner the proper names of the cock and bear
in the same poem; these have not made fortune to the
same extent of actually putting out in any language
the names which before existed, but still have become
quite familiar to us all.
We must not count as new words properly so called,
although they may delay us for a minute, those comic
words, most often comic combinations formed at will,
and sometimes of enormous length, in which, as plays
* See Mure's Language and Literature of.Incient Greece, vol.
i. p. 350.




'72     GAINS OF THE. ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
and displays of power, great writers ancient and modern have delighted.,These for the most part are
meant to do service for the moment, and then to pass
away. The inventors of them had themselves no intention of fastening them permanently on the language.
Thus among the Greeks Aristophanes coined petX2ovtIctao, to loiter lilke Nicias, with allusion to the delays
with which this prudent commander sought to put off
the disastrous Sicilian expedition, with not a few other
familiar to every scholar. The humour of them sometimes consists in their enormous length, as in the dJf4LTr70Tosor0r176r?7tarparof of Eupolis; sometimes in their
mingled observance and transgression of the laws of
the language, as in the'ocnlissimus' of Plautus, a comic
superlative of' oculus;' as in the'dosones,"'dabones,'
which in Greek and in medieval Latin were names
given to those who were ever promising, ever saying,
"Iwill give," but never performing their promise.
Plautus with his exuberant wit., and out of his mastery and command of the Latin language, will compose four or five lines consisting entirely of comic combinations thrown off for the occasion.@   Of the same
character is Butler's' cynaretomachy,' or battle of a
dog and bear. ~Nor do I suppose that Fuller, when
he used'to avunenulize,' to imitate or follow in the
steps of one's uncle, or Cowper, when he suggested'extraforaneous' for'out of doors,' in the least intendecl them as lasting additions to the language,
Sometimes a word springs up inll a very clurious way;
P* ersa, 4,, 20-23,




ORIGIN OF CIHOUSE.                 73
here is one, not having, I suppose, any great currency
except among schoolboys; yet being no invention of
theirs, but a genuine English word, though of somewhat late birth in the language, I mean'to chouse.'
It has a singular origin.  The word is, as I have mentioned already, a Turkish one, and signifies'interpreter.'  Such  an interpreter or'chiaous' (written'chaus' in HIakluyt,'chiaus' in Massinger), being attached to the Turkish embassy in England, committed
in the year 1609 an enormous fraud on the Turkish
and Persian merchants resident in London. He succeeded in cheating them of a sum amounting to ~4000
-a sum very much greater at that day than at the
present. From the vast dimensions of the fraud, and
the notoriety which attended it, any one who cheated
or defrauded was  said'to  chiaous,''chause,' or'chouse;' to do, that is, as this' chiaous' had done.*
There is another very fruitful source of new words
in a language, or perhaps rather another way in which
it increases its vocabulary, for a question might arise
whether the words thus produced ought to be called
new. I mean through the splitting of single words
into two or even more. The impulse and suggestion
to this is in general first given by varieties in spelling;
* It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (Etynmologia,
1671) although quite ignorant of this story, had suggested that' chouse' might be thus connected with the Turkish' chiaus.' I believe that Gifford, in his edition of Ben Jonson, has the honour of
having first cleared up the matter. To this he was naturally led by
a passage in the 3ichemier, Act i. Sc. 1, which put him on the right
track for the discovei.




74      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
but the result very often is that what at first were only
precarious and arbitrary differences in this, come in the
end to be regarded as entirely different words, each
with its own distinct domain of meaning, which as by
general agreement is assigned to it. The words at
parting divide the inheritance between them, which
hitherto they held in common. No one who has not
had his attention called to this matter- who has not
watched and catalogued these words as they have come
under his notice, would at all believe how numerous
they are. VWhen I adduced in a former work* nearly
eighty examples in this kind, separating off into more
than twice that number of words, I supposed that
while a few might have escaped my notice, I had yet
nearly adduced all. So far, however, was this from
the case, that I could illustrate what I have just affirmed of the generation in this way of words with the
following additional examples; and I now have no
doubt whatever that there is a large number which I
have left, and which still remain to be gathered in.
Thus'clot' and'clod' were only different spellings
once of the same word; yet now it is always' clots' of
blood, and'clods' of earth. So was it with'vend'
and'vent;' but now men'vend' wares, and'vent'
complaints; with' float' and'fleet;' but now we have
used ourselves to speak of a'float' of timber, and a'fleet' of ships; with' crone' and'crony' (" Marry not
an old crony or a fool for money:" Burton);' writhe'
and'wreathe' (Mark xv. 17, Wiclif);'sop,''soup'
* Stldy of' Wordr, p. 156 —160.




TWO WORDS OUT OF ONE.                   75
and     p;' sup;''wake' and'watch;''knoll' and'noll;''tamper'! and'temper;''grits' and'grouts;''band,''bend' and.'bond;''patron' and'pattern;' chagrin' and'shagreen;'*'housewife' and' hussey;''drachm' and'dram;''brat' and'brood;''tetchy' and'touchy;''thrill,''trill' and'drill;''bursar' and'purser;'' accompt' and'account;''masque' and'mask;"' nighest'
and'-next;''chivalry' and'cavalry;''nourish' and'nurse;'' spital' (= hospital) and'spittle' (===house of
correction);'shallop' and'sloop;''ordinance' and'ordnance;''snake' and'sneak' (both crawl);'spirt'
and'sprout;''then' and'than;''stud' and'steed;''gulp' and.'gulph;''  cord' and.'chord;''break' and'breach;'' deal' and'dole.;' lurk' and'lurch;''trice'
and'thrice;''syrop' and' shrub;' Britain' and'Britany;'' Francis' and' Frances.'t
But my subject is inexhaustible; it has no limits
except those, which  indeed  may be often narrow
enough, imposed by my own ignorance on the one side;
and on the other, by the necessity of consulting your
patience, and of only choosing such matter as will admit a popular setting forth.   These necessities, however, bid me to pause, and suggest that I should not
look round for other quarters from whence accessions
of new words are derived.  Doubtless I should not be
* See Diez, TWidrterbuch d. Roman. Sprachel, p. 588.
t The distinguishing of this female Christian name by a slight
difference in spelling is quite of modern introduction; see Ben
Jonson's V'Aew Inn, Act ii. Sc. 1.; and Fuller's Holy State, b. iv.
c. 14.




76      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
long without finding many such. I must satisfy myself for the rest with a very brief consideration of the
motives which, as they have been, are still at work
among us, inducing us to seek for these augmentations
of our vocabulary.
And first, the desire of greater clearness is a frequent
motive and inducement to this. It has been well and
truly said: " Every new term, expressing a fact or a
difference not precisely or adequately expressed by
any other word in the same language, is a new organ
of thought for the mind that has learned it."*  The
limits of their vocabulary are in fact for most men the
limits of their knowledge; and for all of us in a great
degree. Of course I do not affirm that it is absolutely
impossible to have our mental conceptions clearer and
more distinct than our words; but it is very hard to
have, and still harder to keep, them so. And therefore it is that men, conscious of this, so soon as ever
they have learned to distinguish in their minds, seekl
also to distinguish in their words.
The desire.of greater explicitness, the sense that a
word covers too large a space of meaning, is the frequent occasion of the introduction of another, which
shall relieve it of a portion of this. Thus, there was
a time when' witch' was applied equally to male and
female dealers in unlawful magical arts. Simon Magus for example is styled a' witch' in Wiclif's New
Testament, and Posthumus in Shakespeare's Cymbeeine:
but when the medieval Latin,'sortiarius,' supplied
Coleridge, Chutchl and State, p. 200.




NECESSITIES EVOKE WORDS.             77
another word,'sorcier,''sorcerer,' (originally'the
caster of lots'), then' witch' gradually was confined
to the hag, or female practiser of these arts, while
sorcerer' was applied to the male.
New necessities, new evolutions of society into more
complex conditions, evoke new words; which come
forth, because they are required now, but did not formerly exist, because they were not required in the
period preceding. For example, in Greece, so long as
the poet sang his own verses,'singer' (dotd66) sufficiently expressed the double function; such a'singer'
was Homer, and such he describes Demodocus, the
bard of the Phseacians; that double function, in fact,
not being in his time contemplated as double, but each
part of it so naturally belonging to the other, that no
second word was required. ~When, however, in the'division of labour one made the verses which another
chaunted, then' poet' or' maker,' a word unknown in
the Homeric age, arose. In like manner, when'physicians' were the only natural philosophers, the word
covered this meaning, as well as that other which it
still retains; but when the investigation of nature and
natural causes detached itself from the art of healing,
became an independent study of itself, the name'physician' remained to that which was as the stock and
stem of the art, while the new offshoot sought out a
new name for itself.
Another motive to the invention of new words is
the desire thereby to cut short lengthy explanations,
tedious circuits of language. Science is often a great
gainer by words, so far as they can be called such,




78      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
which say at a stroke what it would have taken sentences otherwise to have said. Thus'isothermal' is
quite of modern invention; but what a long story it
would be" to tell the meaning of' isothermal lines,' all
which is saved by the word.
Or take another more familiar example; the term'watershed' has only recently begun to appear in books
of geography, and yet how convenient it must be admitted; to be; meaning, as I need hardly tell you it
does, not merely that which sheds the waters, but that
Which divides them (' wasser-scheide'); and being applied to that exact ridge and highest line in a mountain region, where the waters of that region separate
off and divide, some to one side, and some to the other;
as in the Rocky: Mountains of North America there
are streams rising within very'few miles of one another,
which flow severally east and west, and, if not in unbroken course, yet as affluents to larger rivers, fall at
last severally into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. It
must be allowed, I think,-that not merely geographical
terminology, but- geography itself, had a benefactor in
him who first endowed it with so expressive and comprehensive a word, bringing before us a fact which we
should scarcely have been aware of without it.
There:is another word which I have just employed,' affluent,' in the sense of a stream which does not flow
into the sea, but joins a larger stream, as for instance
the Moselle is an'affluent' of the Rhine. It is itself
an example in the same kind of that whereof I have
been speaking, having been only recently constituted




SU-IST, SUICiSM.                   79
a substantive, and employed in this sense, while yet its
utility is obvious.
Again, new words are coined  out of the necessity
which men feel of filling up gaps in the language.
Thoughtful men, comparing their own language with
that of other nations, become conscious of deficiencies,
of important matters unexprest in their own, and with
more or less success proceed to supply the deficiency.
For example, that too common sin, the undue love of
self, with the postponing of the interests of all others
to our own, had for a long time no word to express it
in English. One writer tried to supply the want by
calling the man a' suist,' as one seeking'sua,' or his
own things, and the sin itself,'suicism.''Philauty'
(qttavw-ia) had been more than once attempted by our
scholars. The gap, however, was not really filled up,
till, some of the Puritan writers devised'selfish' and'selfishness,' words which to us seem obvious enough,
but which yet are not more than two hundred years
old.*
Before quitting this part of the subject, let me say a
few words in conclusion on this deliberate introduction
* I have quoted elsewhere a passage from IHacket's Life of.rchbishop Williams, marking the first rise of this word, and the quarter from which it arose. In Whitelock's Zootomia (1654) there is
another indication of it as a novelty, p. 364: " If constancy may be
tainted with this selfishness (to use our new wordings of old and
general actings)." "It is he who in his striking essay, The Grand
Schismatic, or Suist anatomized, puts forward his own words,'suist,' and' suicism,' in lieu of those which have ultimately been
adopted.




80      GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
of words to supply felt omissions in a language, and
the limits within which this or any other conscious interference with t]he development of a language is desirable or possible. By the time that a people begin to
meditate upon their language, to be aware by a conscious reflective act either of its merits or deficiencies,
by far the greater and more important part of its work
is done; it is fixed in respect of its structure in ilmmutable forms; the region in which any alteration or
modification, addition to it, or subtraction from it, deliberately devised and carried out, may be possible, is
very limited indeed. Its great laws are too firmly
established to admit of this; so that almost nothing
can be taken from it, which it has got; almost nothing
added to it, which it has not got. It will travel indeed
in certain courses of change; but it would be as easy
almost to alter the career of a planet as for man to alter
these. This is sometimes a subject of regret with those
who see what they believe manifest defects or blemishes in their language, and such as appear to them
capable of remedy. And yet in fact this is well;
since for once that these redressers of real or fancied
wrongs, these suppliers of things lacking, would have
mended, we may be tolerably confident that ten times,
yea, a hundred times, they would have marred; letting go that which it would have been well to have
retained; retaining that which by a necessary law the
language now lets fall; and in manifold ways interfering with the processes of natural logic. The genius of
a language, unconsciously presiding over all its transformations, and conducting them to a definite issue,




GERMAN PURISTS.               81
will have been a far truer, far safer guide, than the
artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of
any association of men. For the genius of a language
is the utterance of the sense and inner conviction of all
who speak it, as to what it ought to be, and as to how
it will best attain its objects; the other attempt is but
that of a few; and while a pair of eyes, or two or
three pairs of eyes may see much, millions of eyes
will certainly see more.
In the forms and laws of a language any interference such as that which I have supposed is impossible; it can only find place in the words. Something,
indeed much, may here be done by wise masters, ill
the way of rejecting that which would deform, allowing and adopting that which will strengthen and enrich. Those who would purify or enrich a language,
so long as they have kept within this their proper
sphere, have often effected much, far more than at
first could have seemed possible. The history of the
German language affords so much better illustration
of this than our own would do, that I shall make no
scruple in seeking my examples there.  When the
patriotic Germans began to wake up to a consciousness
of the enormous encroachments which foreign languages, the Latin and French above all, had made on
their native tongue, the lodgements which they had
therein effected, and the danger which threatened it,
namely, that it should cease to be German at all, but
only a. mingle-mangle, a variegated patchwork of
many languages, without any unity or inner coherence
at all, various societies were instituted among them,




82      GAINS OF THE: ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
at the beginning and during the course of the seventeenth century, for the recovering of what was lost of
their own, for the expelling of that which had intruded from abroad; and these with excellent effect.
But more effectual than these societies were the
efforts of single men, who in this merited well of their
country. In respect of words which are now entirely
received by the whole nation, it is often possible to
designate the writers who first substituted them for
some affected Gallicism or unnecessary Latinism. Thus
to Lessing his fellow-countrymen owe the substitution
of' Zartgefiihl' for'Delicatesse,' of' Empfindsamlkeit'
for'Sentimentalitit,' of'WVesenheit' for'Essence.'
It was Voss (1786) who first employed' alterthiimlich'
for'antik.' Wieland too was the author or reviver
of a multitude of excellent words, for which often he
had to do earnest battle at the first; such were' Seligkeit,''Anmuth,''Entziickung,''festlich,'' entwirren,'
with many more. It was a novelty when Biisching
called his great work on geography'Erdbeschreibung'. instead of'Geographie;' and'Schnellpost'
instead of'Diligence,''Zerrbild' for'Carricatur' are
also of recent introduction. - Even for' Wrterbuch,'
as J. Grimm tells us, he can find no example of its
use dating earlier than 1719.
Yet at the same time it must be acknowledged that
some of these reformers proceeded with more zeal
than knowledge, while- others did whatever in them
lay to make the whole movement:absurd-even as
there ever hang on the skirts of a noble movement, be
it: in literature or politics or higher things yet, those




GERBAN PURISTS.                83
who contribute their all to bring ridicule and contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against foreigners
which enisued, and in the zeal to purify the language
from them, some went to such extravagant excesses
as to desire to get rid of'Testament,' and words like
it, consecrated by longest use, and to find native substitutes in their room; or they understood so little
what foreign words were, or how to draw the line
between them and native, that they would fain have
gotten rid of' Vater,''Mutter,''WVein,'  Fenster,''Meister,' Kelch;'* the three first of which belong to
the German language by just as good a right as they
do to the Latin and the Greek; while the other three
have been naturalized so long that to propose to expel
them now would be as if, having passed an alien act
for the banishment of all foreigners, we should proceed to include under that name, and as such drive
forth from the kingdom, the descendants of the French
Protestants who found refuge here at the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantz, or even of the Flemings who
settled among us in the time of our Edwards. One
notable enthusiast in this line proposed to create an
entirely new nomenclature for all the mythological
personages of the Greek and the Roman pantheon,
who, one would think, might have been allowed, if
any, to retain their Greek and Latin names. So far
however from this, they were to exchange these for
equivalent German titles; Cupid was to be'Lust* Zur Geschichte und Beurtheilung der Fremdwdrter im Dentschen, von Aug. Fuchs, Dessau, 1842, p. 85 —91.




84     GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
kind,' Flora'Bluminne,' Aurora'IRdthin;' instead
of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of'Singhold;'
instead of Pan of'Schaflieb;' instead of Jupiter of'IHelfevater,' with much else of the same kind. Let
us beware (and the warning extends a great deal further than to the matter in hand) of making a good
cause ridiculous by our manner of supporting it, of
assuming that exaggerations on one side can only
be redressed by exaggerations as great upon the other.




85
LECTURE III.
THE DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
I TOOK occasion to observe at the commencement of
my last lecture that it is the essential character of a
living language to be in flux and flow, to be gaining
and losing; the words which constitute it as little continuing exactly the same, or in the same relations to
one another, as do the atoms which at any one moment make up our bodies remain for ever without
alteration. As I then undertook for my especial subject to trace some of the acquisitions which our own
language had made, I shall dedicate the present to a
consideration of some of the losses, or at any rate
diminutions, which during the same period it has endured. It will however be expedient here to offer one
or two preliminary observations for the purpose of
guarding against possible misapprehensions of my
meaning.
It is certain that all languages must, or at least all
languages do in the end, perish; they run their course;
they have their youth, their manhood, their old age,
their decrepitude, their dissolution. Not indeed that,
even when this last hour has arrived, they disappear,
4




86  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
leaving no traces behind them. On the contrary, out
of their death a new life comes forth; they pass into
new forms, the materials of which they were composed
more or less survive, but these now organized in new
shapes and according to other laws of life. Thus, for
example, the Latin perishes as a living language, but
a great part of the words that composed it live on in
the four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese; not a few in our own. Still in their
own proper being languages perish and pass away; no
nations, that is, continue to speak them any more.
Seeing then that they thus die, they must have had
the germs of death, the possibilities of decay, in them
from the very first; nor is this all; but in such mighty
strong built fabrics as these, the causes which shall
thus produce their final dissolution must have been
actually at work very long before the results began to
be visible.
Indeed, very often it is with them as with states,
which, while in some respects they are knitting and
strengthening, ill others are already unfolding the
seeds of their future and, it may be, still remote overthrow. Equally in these and those, in states and languages, it would be a serious mistake to assume that
all up to a certain point and period is growth'and gain,
and all after, decay and loss. On the contrary, there
are long periods during which growth in some directions is going hand in hand with decay in others;
losses in one kind are being compensated or more than
compensated by gains in another; during which a lan.
guage changes, but only as the bud changes into the




LANGUAGES CHANGED.              87
flower, and the flower into the fruit. There is indeed
a moment when the growth and gains cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the
decay; when these ever become more, those ever less;
when the forces of death and disorganization at work
are stronger than of life and order: and from that moment the decline of a language may properly be dated.
But until that crisis and turning point has arrived, we
may be quite justified in speaking of the losses, the
real losses of a language, without in the least thereby
implying that the period of its commencing degeneracy has begun; it may yet be far distant: and therefore when I dwell on certain losses and diminutions
which our own has undergone, or is undergoing, you
will not conclude that I am seeking to present it to
you as now t~ravelling the downward course to dissolution and death. This is very far from my' intention. In some respects it is losing, but in others gaining; nor is everything which it lets go, a loss; for this
too, the having parted with a word in which there is
no true help, or with a cumbrous form, may itself be
sometimes a most real gain. It is undoubtedly becoming different from what it has been; but only different
in that it is passing into another stage of its development; only different, as the fruit is different from the
flower, and the flower from the bud; having changed
its merits, but not having renounced them; possessing,
it may be, less of beauty, but more of usefulness; not
serving the poet so well, but serving the historian and
philosopher and theologian better than of old.
One thing more let me say, before entering on the




88 DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
special details of my subject. It is this. The losses
and diminutions which a language endures differ in one
respect from its gains and acquisitions-lnamely, that
they are of two kinds, while its gains are only of one.
Its gains are only in words; it never puts forth in the
course of its later evolution a newpower; never makes
itself a new case, or a new tense, or a new comparative.
But its losses are both in words and in powers-in
words of course, but in powers also: it leaves behind
it, as it travels onward, cases which it once possessed,
renounces the employment of tenses which it once
used; is content with one termination both for masculine and feminine, and so on::nor is this a peculiar
feature of one language, but the universal law of all.
" In all languages," as has been well said, "there is a
constant tendency to relieve themselves of that precision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade of
meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, and
detect as it were a royal road to the interchange of opinion."  For example, a vast number of languages had
at an early period of their development, besides the
singular and plural, a dual number, some even a
trinal, which.they have let go at a later. But what I
mean by a language renouncing its powers will, I trust,
be more clear to you before my lecture is concluded.
I just say this much about it now to explain and justify a division which I shall make, considering first the
losses of the English language in the region of words,
and then in the region of powers.
And first, there is going forward a continual extinction of the words in our language-as indeed in every




WORDS DIE OUT.                      89
other. When I speak of this the dying out of words,
I do not allude to mere tentative, experimental words,
such as I spoke of in my last lecture, words offered to
the language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to
such as either belonged to the primitive stock of the
language, or if not so, which had been domiciled in it
long, and had appeared to have found a lasting home
in it.  Thus not a few  pure Anglo-Saxon words lived
on into the formation of our early English, and yet
have since dropped out of our vocabulary, while their
places have been filled by others. Not to mention those
of Chaucer and Wiclif, which are very numerous,
many have lived on to far later periods, and yet have
finally given way.  That beautiful word'wanlhope'
for despair, hope which has so waned that now there is
an entire want of it, was in use down to the reign of
Elizabeth; it occurs so late as in the poems of Gascoigne.* Spenser uses often' to wellk' (welken) in the
sense of to fade,' to sty' for to mount,'to hery' as to
glorify or praise,'to halse' as to embrace,' teene' as
vexation or grief: Shakespeare'to tarre' as to provoke,' to sperr' (sparran) as to enclose or bar in;' to
sag' for to droop, or hang tile head downward.  Hol*- It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII.; see
the State Papcr's, vol. viii. p.. 247. It was the latest survivor of a
whole group or family of words which continued much longer in
Scotland than with us; of which some perhaps continue there still;
these are but a few of them;' wanthrift' for extravagance;'wanluck,i misfortune;'wanwit,' folly;'wangrace,' wickedness;'wantrust' (Chaucer), distrust.




90   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
land employs' geir'* for falcon,'reise' for journey,'frimm' for lusty, fresh, or strong.'To schimmer'
occurs in Bishop Hall;' to tind,' that is to kindle,
surviving in'tinder,' is used by Bishop Sanderson;'to nimm,' that is, to take, as late as by Fuller.' Nesh' in the sense of soft through moisture,' leer' in
that of empty, good Saxon-English once, still live on
in some of our provincial dialects. Indeed of those
above named several do the same; it is so with'frimme,' with'to  nimm.'' Heft,' employed by
Shakespeare in the sense of weight, is still employed
in the same sense by our peasants in Hampshire.
A number of vigorous compounds we have dropped
and let go.  Such for instance is Wiclif's'dearworth'
for beloved.'Ear-sports' for entertainments of song
or music (dlcpodiLa-.a) is a constantly recurring word in
HIolland's translation of Plutarch.  If not for Shakespeare, we should have quite forgotten that young men
of hasty fiery valour were called'hot-spurs;' and even
now we regard the word rather as the proper name of
one than that which would have been alike the designation of all.t Fuller warns men that they should
not'witwanton' with God; severe austere old men,
those who, as Falstaff would say, "hate us youth,"
* We must not suppose that this still survives in' girfalcon;'
which wholly belongs to the Latin element of the language; being
the later Latin' gyrofalco,' and that, " a gyrando, quia diu gyraldo
acriter proedam insequitur."
t " Some hot-spurs there were that gave counsel to go against
them with all their forces, and to fright and terrify them, if they
made slow haste." (Holland's Livy, p. 922.)




SAXON WORDS LOST.                91
were' grimsirs' or' grimsires' once (Massinger).'Rootfast' and'rootfastness' (Stctte Pcapers, vol. vi. p. 534)
were ill lost, being worthy to have lived; so too was
Lord Brooke's'book-hunger;' and Baxter's' wordwarriors,' with which term he noted those whose strife
was only about words. I believe that'malingerer' has
not quite fallen out of use, but I do not find it in our
dictionaries, being the soldier who, out of evil will
(malin gre) to his work, shams and shirks, and is not
found in the ranks.
Those who would gladly have seen the Anglo-Saxon
to have predominated over the Latin element in our
language, even more than it actually has done, must
note with regret that in a great many instances a word
of the former stock has been dropped, and a Latin
coined to supply its place; or where the two once
existed side by side, the Saxon has died, and the Latin
lived on. Thus WTiclif employed'soothsaw,' where
we now use'proverb;''sourdough,' where we employ'leaven;''to after-think' (still in use in Lancashire)
for'to repent;''medeful,' which has given way to'meritorious.'  Sir J. Cheke has'foresayer' for'prophet,' Jewel'foretalk,' where we now  employ'preftcee;''starconner' (Gascoigne) did service once, if
not instead of' astrologer,' yet side by side with it;'circle-learning' Bacon employs for'encyclopaedia;'
this it is true is only half Saxon;'to eyebite' (Holland)
was the expressive word which was employed where
we now employ'to fascinate.'' Wanhope,' as we saw
just now, has given place to'despair,''middler,' for
one who goes in the middle, to'mediator;''outland



92  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
ish' can hardly be said to survive, having been put
out of use by' foreign.'
I had occasion just now to notice the fact that many
words survive in our provincial dialects, long after
they have died out from the main body of the speech.
The fact is one connected with so much of deep interest
in the history of language that I cannot pass it thus
slightly over.  Some further observations may here
fitly find room, which shall assist to put us in a right
point of view for estimating the character of these, and
raising them from that unmerited contempt with which
they are often regarded. ] shall best accomplish my
intention by looking at the matter in connection with
other phenomena of speech. Let us then suppose a
portion of those speaking a language to have been
separated off from the main body of its speakers, either
through their forsaking for one cause or other their
native seats, or by the intrusion of a hostile people,
like a wedge, between them and the others, forcibly
keeping them asunder, and cutting off their communications, as the Saxons intruded between the Britons of
Cornwall and of Wales; and it will inevitably happen
that before very long differences of speech will begin
to reveal themselves between those to whom even dialectic distinctions had been formerly unknown. The
divergences will be of various kinds; idioms will come
up in the separated body, which, not being recognized
and allowed by those who will continue the arbiters of
the language, will be esteemed by them, should they
come under their notice, violations of its law, or at
any rate departures from its purity. WVhere a colony




ARCHAIC LANGUAGE.               93
has gone forth into new seats, and exists under new
conditions, it is probable that the necessities, physical
and moral, rising out of these new conditions will give
birth to words among them, which there will be
nothing to call out among those who continue in the
old haunts of the nation; or even their intercourse with
people whom tREey, and not the other, now touch, will
bring in new words, as the contact with the Indian
tribes has given to American English a certain number
of words hardly or not at all allowed by us.
There is another cause, however, which will probably be more effectual than all these, namely, that
words will in process of time be dropped by those who
constitute the original stock of the nation,which will not
be dropped by the offshoot; idioms which those have
over-lived, and have stored up in the unhonored lumber room of the past, will still be in use and currency
among the smaller and separated section which has
gone forth; and thus it will come to pass that what
seems and in fact is the newer swarm, will have many
older words, and very often an archaic air and oldworld fashion both about the words they use, the pronunciation of the words, and the order and manner in
which they combine them. Thus after the Conquest
we know that our insular French gradually diverged
from the French of the continent. Chaucer's Prioress
in the Canterbury Tales could speak her French "full
faire and fetishly," but it was French, as the poet slyly
tells us,
"After the scole of Stratford atte bow,
For French of Paris was to hire unknowe."
4*




94  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
One of our. old chroniclers, writing in the reign of
Elizabeth, informs us that by the English colonists
within the Pale in Ireland. a great many words were
preserved in common use, " the dregs of the old ancient
Chaucer English" as he contemptuously calls it, which
had become quite obsolete and forgotten in England
itself. For example they still called a spider an' attercop'-a word by the way, which in the North has not
even now gone out of popular use; a physician a'leech;' a dunghill was still for them a'mixen;' a
quadrangle or base court a'bawn;'* they employed'uncouth' in the earlier sense of unknown-nay more,
their general manner of speech was so different,'though
continuing English still, that Englishmen at their first
coming over often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. We have another example of the same in
what toolk place after the revocation of the Edict of
Nantz, and the consequent formation of colonies of
Protestant French emigrants in various places, especially in Amsterdam and other chief cities of Holland.
There gradually grew up among these what came to be
called "refugee French," which within a generation or
two diverged in several particulars from the classical
language; its divergence being mainly occasioned by
this, that it remained stationary, where the classical
language was in motion; it retained usages and words,
which the latter had consented to let go.
* The only two writers of whom I am aware as subsequently using
this word are, both writing in Ireland and of Irish matters, Spenser
and Swift. The passages are both quoted by Richardson.




PROVINCIAL ENGLISH.              95
Nor is it otherwise in respect of our English provincialisms. It is true that our country people who in the
main employ them, have not been separated by distance of space, nor yet by insurmountable obstacles
intervening, from the main body of their fellow-countrymen; but they have been quite as effectually divided by deficient education. They have been, if not locally, yet intellectually, kept at a distance from the
onward march of the nation's mind; and of them also
it is true that a great number of their words, idioms,
turns of speech, which we are ready to set down as
vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the primary rules of grammar, do merely attest that those who
employ them have not kept abreast with the advance of
the language and nation, but have been left behind by
it. The usages are only local in the fact that, having
once been employed by the whole body of the English
people, they have now receded from the lips of all except those in some certain country districts, who have
been more faithful than others to the traditions of.the
language.
It is tlhus in respect of a great number of isolated
words, which were excellent Anglo-Saxon, which were
excellent early English, and which only are not excellent present English, because use, which is the supreme
arbiter in these matters, has decided against their further employment. Several of these I enumerated just
now. It is thus also with several grammatical forms
and flections. For instance, where we decline the plural of' I sing,''we sing,''ye sing,''they sing,' in Lancashire they would decline,'we singen,'' ye singen,'




96    DIMINUTIONS OF THEIl  ENGLISH LANGUAGE.' they singen.' This is not indeed the original form of
the plural, but it is that form of it which, coming up
about Chaucer's time, was just going out in Spenser's;
he, though we must ever keep in mind that he does not
represent exactly the language of his time, affecting a
certain archaism both in words and forms, continually
uses it, while after him it becomes ever rarer, the last
of whom  I am  aware as occasionally using it being
Fuller, until it quite disappears.*;
The termination of the participle present in' ande'
or'and,' which was first changed into'end,' and then
further  softened  into'ing;''sendantde,''sendend,''sendin.g,' may be observed in Scotch poetry down to
a very recent date. In the earlier shape in which we
possess Wicliff's Bible' and' or' end' is predominantly,
and in some parts of it invariably, used as the participial termination; while in the somewhat later revision
I ing' has taken its place. In Chaucer the old form still
occasionally struggles with the new; thus'lepande,''criande' for'leaping,'' crying;' but it has nearly given
* Ben Jonson (English Grammar, c. 17) does not hesitate to express his strong regret that this form has not been retained. " The
persons plural," he says, " keep the termination of the first person
singular. In former times, till about the reign of King Henry VIII.,
they were wont to be formed by adding en; thus, loven, sayen, complainen. But now (whatsoever is the cause) it hath quite grown out
of use, and that other so generally prevailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again; albeit (to tell you my opinion) I am
persuaded that the lack hereof, well considered, will be found a
great blemish to our tongue. For seeing time and person be as it
were the right and left hand of a verb, what can the maiming bring
else, but a lameness to the whole body?"




OLD ENGLISH NOT BAD ENGLISH.          97
way. In Spenser a solitary example of it crops up in
the term'glitterand arms,' which he is fond of employing.
Of such as may now employ forms like these we
must say, not that they violate the laws of the language,
but only that they have taken theirpermanent stand at
a point of it which was only a point of transition, and
which it has now left behind, and overlived. Thus to
take examples which you may hear at the present day
in almost any part of England-a countryman will say,
" He made me afeard;" or " The price of corn ris last
market day;" or "I will axe him his name."  You
would probably set these phrases down for barbarous
English; but they are not at all so; in one sense they
are quite as good English as " He made me afraid;"
or " The price of corn rose last market day;" or "I will
as/k him his name."'Afeard,' used by Spenser, is the
regular participle of the old verb'to affear,' as' afraid'
is of' to affray,' and just as good English;'ris' or' risse'
is an old prseterite of' to rise;''to axe' is not a mispronunciation of'to ask,' but a genuine English form of
the word, the form which in the earlier English it constantly assumed; it is quite exceptional when the word
appears in its other, that is its present, shape in Wiclif's
Bible; and indeed'axe? occurs continually, I know
not whether invariably, in Tyndale's translation of the
Scriptures. Even such a phrase as " Put them things
away," is not bad, but only antiquated, English. While
I say this, I would not imply that these forms are open
to you to use; I do not say they would be good Eng -
lishfor you. They would not; inasmuch as they are




98 DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
contrary to present use and custom, and these must be
our lawgivers in what we speak and in what we write;
just as in our buying and selling we are bound to use
the current coin of the realm, and not attempt to pass
that which long since has been called in, whatever merits or intrinsic value it may possess.  All which I. affirm is that the phrases just brought forward represent
past stages of the language, and are not barbarous violations of it.
The same may be asserted of certain ways of pronouncing words, which are now  in use among the
lower classes, but not among the higher; as, for example,'contrary,''mischievous,''blasphemous,' instead
of'contrary,''mischievous,"'blasphemnous.' It would
be abundantly easy to show by a multitude of quotations from our poets, and those reaching very far down,
that these are merely the retention of the earlier pronunciation by the people, when the higher classes have
abandoned it.*
Another example of that which is commonly accounted ungrammatical usage, but which is really the
retention of old grammar by some, where others have
substituted new, is the constant application by our rustic population in the south of' his' to inanimate objects,
and to these not personified, as well as to persons;
where'its' would be employed by others.  I shall
* A single proof may in each case suffice:
"Our wills and fates do so contrdry run."-Shakespeare.
" Ne let mischievous witches with their charms."- Spenser.
"0  argument blasphemous, false and proud." —Milton.




'HIS' AND'ITS.'                99
presently call your attention to the late introduction of
this little word'its' into the English language.  It
rests indeed altogether on a mistake and a forgetfulness
of the true constructions of the language. It would
be long to explain this at full: it has been explained
well in Latham's English Grammar.  I will endeavour
very briefly to put the matter before you, and trace
the steps by which this came to pass. Let me prepare
the way by reminding you first that'his' does not
exactly correspond to'suns,' but to'ejus' or'illius,'
being the genitive of'he' ('he's' ='his'); and that'it,' or'hit,' as it was long written (Sir Thomas More
in general so writes it, but about his time' hit' is going
out) is the neuter of'he,' the final't' being the sign
of this neuter, just as'illud' is the neuter of'ille.'
Now, by way of illustrating the matter in hand, let us
suppose that those who spoke the Latin language had
forgotten that the final'd' in'illud' was the sign
of the neuter; let us suppose further that'illud'
through some cause or other had still further lost in
their eyes its connexion with'ille,' as'hit' through
becoming'it' has obscured its relation to'he;' and
that it had been dealt with by them quite as an independent word, upon which they proceeded to form a
genitive of its own;'illius' no longer seeming to them
such genitive, and that they had proceeded to fashion
an'illudius;' so doing they would have committed
exactly the same error which we have committed in
forming the word'its,' and in dismissing' his' from
any longer serving as the neuter genitive no less than
the masculine. I do not say that many conveniences




100  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
have not attended the change: the desire to obtain
these was doubtless the motive to the creation of this
genitive; which still rested on a misapprehension, and
however now sanctioned by time and usage, can be
considered as originally only a blunder.
- Attention once called to the matter, one is surprised
to discover of how late introduction the word'its'
proves to be into the language. Through the whole of
our authorized Version of the Bible' its' does not once
occur; the work which it now performs being accomplished, as our rustics would now  accomplish it, by'his'* or'her't applied as freely to inanimate things
as to persons, or else by' thereof' or'of it.''Its' occurs, I believe, only three times in all Shakespeare,
and I doubt whether Milton has once admitted it into
Paradise Lost, although, when that was composed,
others freely allowed it.  How soon all this was forgotten we have striking evidence in the fact that Dryden, when in one of his fault-finding moods with the
great men of the preceding generation he is takling Ben
Jonson to task for general inaccuracy in his English
diction, among other counts of his indictment, quotes
this line from  Caliline,
"Though heaven should speak with all his wrath at once,"
and proceeds, " heavern is ill syntax with his;" while in
* Thus Exod. xxxvii. 17:" Of beaten work made he the candlestick;
his shaft and his branch, his bowls, his knops, and his flowers, were
of the'same;" cf. Mt. v. 15.
t Rev. xxii. 2: "The tree of life, which yielded her fruit every
month."




'ITS' OF LATE' INTRODUCTION.               101
fact up to within forty or fifty years of the time whlen
Dryden began to write, no other syntax was known.
Curious also is it to note that in the long controversy,
which followed on the publication by Chatterton of the
poems which he ascribed to a monk Rowlie, living in
the fifteenth century, no one appealed at the time to
such lines as the following,
"Life, and all its goods I scorn,"
as at once decisive of the fact that the poems were not
of the age which they pretended. Warton who rejected,
although with a certain amount of hesitation, the poems,
and gives reasons, and many of them  good ones, for
this rejection, yet takes no notice of this little word,
which betrays the forgery at once; although there
needed nothing more than to point to it, for the disposing of the whole question.*
* Lest this digression should grow to an immoderate length, I must
append in a note another illustration of the matter in hand.
Instead of'luncheon,' our country people in Hampshire, as in
many other parts, always use the form' nuncheon' or' nuntion.' I
cannot doubt that either this was the original pronunciation, and
our received one a modern corruption; or else, and this appears to
me more probable, that we have made a confusion between two originally different words, from which they have kept clear.  Thus in
Howell's Vocabulary, 1659, and in Cot;grave's French and English
Dictionary, both words occur: " nuncion or nunebeon, the afternoon's repast," and "lunchion, a big piece" i. e. of bread, for both
give the old French' caribot' as the equivalent of luncheon, which
word has this meaning.  It is clear that in this sense of lump or' big piece' Gay uses' luncheon:'
"When hungry thou stood'st staring like an oaf,
I sliced the lunchcon from the barley loaf."




102 DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
What has been here said in respect of much of our
provincial English, namely that it is old English rather
than bad English, may be affirmed, no doubt, with
equal right in respect of many so called Americanisms.
There are parts of America where'het' is used or was
used a few years since as the perfect of'to heat;'' holp'
as the perfect of' to help;'' stricken' as the participle
of'to strike.' Again, there are words which have
become obsolete here during the last two hundred
years, which have not become obsolete there, although
many of them  probably retain only a provincial life.
The excellent word,'freshet,' for a river swollen by
rain or other causes, and rushing with wider and more
rapid  current than  usual to  the sea, which would
scarcely be found in English since Milton employed
it,' has never been out of use in America, Having
and Miss Baker in her JV'orthanmptonshire Glossary explains'lunch'
as " a large lump of bread, or other edible;'He helped himself
to a good lunch of cake.' " We may note further that this' nuntion'
may possibly put us on the right track for arriving at the etymology
of the word. Richardson has called attention to the fact that it is
spelt "noon-shun" in Brown's Pastorals, which must at least suggest as possible and plausible that the'nuntion' was originally applied to the labourer's slight meal, to which he withdrew for the
shunning of the heat of the middle noon. It is at any rate certain
that the dignity to which' lunch' or' luncheon' has now arrived, as
when we read in the newspapers of a " magnificent luncheon," is altogether modern; the word telonged a century ago to rustic life,
and in literature had not travelled beyond the " hobnailed pastorals"
which professed to describe that life.
* "All fish from sea or shore,
Freset or purling brook, of shell or finll:"
Todd misunderstands the -word, explaining it "a stream of fresh
water." Not so; but as the whole passage moves in antitheses,
" sea or shore," " shell or fin," so "' freshet or purling brook."




AMERICAN ENGLISH.               103
lately come back to us from  thence.  Other words
again, which indeed have continued in currency on
both sides of the Atlantic, have yet on our side receded
from their original use, while they have not receded
from it on the other.' Plunder' is a word in point;
so too when unleavened cakes are called " sad cakes,"
as in parts of America they are, it is evident that'sad'
is used in its original sense of unmoved, being but
another spelling of' set'-a sense which once the proper
one of the word, has now left it with us.*
In the contemplation of facts like these it has been
sometimes asked, whether a day will ever arrive when
the language spoken on this side of the Atlantic and
on the other, will divide into two languages, an old
English and a new. We may confidently answer, No.
Doubtless, if those who went out from us to people and
subdue a new continent, had left our shores two or
three centuries earlier than they did, when the language was very much farther removed from that ideal
after which it was unconsciously striving, and in which,
once reached, it in great measure acquiesced; if they
had not carried with them to their distant homes their
English Bible, and what else of worth had been already
uttered in the English tongue; if, having once left us,
the intercourse between Old and New England had
been entirely broken off, or only rare and partial;
* Pickering's Vocabulary of Words and Phrases, supposed to be
peculiar to.Ai?erica, Boston, 1816. I would gladly in a future
edition treat the matter of this paragraph with something more of
the fulness which it deserves, if any transatlantic readers from the
stores of their own experience would help me.




104  DIMINUTIONS OF TIIE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
there would then have unfolded themselves differences
between the language spoken here and there, which in
tract of time accumulating and multiplying, might in
the end have justified the regarding of the languages
as no longer one' and the same. It could nQt have
been otherwise than that such differences should have
displayed themselves; for while there is a law of
necessity in the evolution of languages, while they
pursue certain courses and in certain directions, from
which they can be no more turned aside by the will of
men than one of the heavenly bodies could be pushed
from its orbit by any engines of ours, there is a law
of liberty no less; and this liberty would not have
failed to make itself in many ways felt.  In the
political and social condition of America, so far removed from ours, in the many natural objects which
are not the same with those which surround us here,
in efforts independently carried out to rid the language
of imperfections, or to unfold its latent powers, even in
the different effects of climate on the organs of speech,
there would have been causes enough to have provoked
in the course of time not immaterial divergencies of
language.
As it is, however, the joint operation of those tlhree
causes referred to already, namely, that the separation
did not take place till after the language had attained
the ripeness of maturity, that England and America
owned a common body of literature to which they
alike looked up and appealed, as containing the authoritative standards of the language, that the intercourse
between the one people and the other has been large




EXTINCT WORDS.                 105
and frequent, as probably it will be larger and more
frequent still, these have been strong enough to traverse
and check these tendencies, have so effectually combined in repressing such divergence, that the written
language of educated men on both sides of the water
remains precisely the same, their spoken manifesting
a few trivial differences of idiom; while even among
those classes which do not consciously recognize any
ideal standard of language, there are scarcely greater
differences, in some respects far smaller, than exist
between inhabitants of different provinces in this one
island of England; and in the future we may reasonably anticipate that these differences, so far from increasing, will have rather the tendency to diminish.
It seems often as if an almost unaccountable caprice
presided over the fortunes of words, and determined
which should live and which die.  Thus in a vast
number of instances a word lives on as a verb, but has
ceased to be employed as a noun; we say' to embarrass,' but no longer an'embarrass;''to revile,' but
not, with Chapman and Milton, a.'revile;''to wed,'
but not a'wed,' unless it should be urged that this
survives in'wed-lock,' a locking or binding together
through the giving' and receiving of a'wed' or pledge,
namely the ring; we say' to infest,' but not any longer'infest.' Or with a reversed fortune a word lives on
as a noun, but has perished as a verb-thus as a noun
substantive, a'slug,' but no longer' to slug' or render
slothful; a' child,' but no longer' to child' ('childing
autumn,' Beaumont and. Fletcher); or as a noun
adjective,'serene,' but not'to serene,' a beautiful




106  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
word, which we have let go, as the French have'sereiner;'*'meek,' but not' to meek' (Wiclif);'fond,'
but not with Dryden,' to fond.'
Or, again, the affirmative remains, but the negative
is gone; thus' wisdom,' but not any more' unwisdom'
(Wiclif);' cunning,' but not' uncunning;" manhood,''wit,''mighty,' but not' unmanhood,'' unwit,''unmighty' (all in Chaucer);'buxom,' but not'unbuxom' (Dryden);'to know,' but not' to unknow' (Wiclif), which  survives only in'unknowing' and'unknown.'  Or once more, with a curious variation from
this, the negative survives, while the affirmative is
gone; thus'wieldy' (Chaucer) survives only in' unwieldy;''couth' and' couthly' (both in Spenser), only
in.' uncouth' and'uncouthly;''ruly' (Foxe) only in'unruly;''gainly' (H. More) in'ungainly;' these two
last were both of them  serviceable words, and have
been ill lost;' exorable' (Holland) and' evitable' only
in' inexorable' and' inevitable.' In like manner'semble' (Foxe) and' hearten' (Chapman) have disappeared;
while' dissemble' and' dishearten' continue.  So also
of other pairs one has been taken and one left;'height,'
or'highth,' as Milton  better spelt it, remains, but'lowth' (Becon) is gone;'righteousness,' or'right* How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied
by a circumlocution or by some less excellent word-' Oseur,'' affranchisseur' (Amyot),' mepriseur,' murmurateur,''blandisseur'
(Bossuet),' abuseur' (Rabelais),' desabusement,''rancceur,' are all
obsolete at the present. So' desaimer,' to cease to love (' disamare'
in Italian),' guirlander,'' steriliser,'' blandissant,'' ordonnement'
(Montaigne), with innumerable others.




'RATHEST,' ILL LOST.             107
wiseness,' as it would once and more accurately have
been written, remains, but its correspondent'wrongwiseness' has been taken.  Again, of whole groups
of words formed after some particular scheme it may
be only a single specimen will survive. Thus'gainsay,' that is, again say, survives; but'gainstrive'
(Foxe), that is, resist,'gainstand,' and other similarly
formed words exist no longer. It is the same with'foolhardy,' which is but one, though now indeed the
only one remaining, of three or four adjectives formed
on the same principle; thus' foollarge,' at least as expressive a word as'prodigal,' occurs in Chaucer, and' foolhasty,' found also in him, lived on to the time of
Holland; while'foolhappy' is in Spenser.'Exhort'
remains; but'dehort,' a word whose place neither'dissuade' nor any other exactly supplies, has escaped
us.  We have'twilight,' but'twibill' (== bipennis:
Chapman) is extinct.
Let me mention another real loss, where in like manner there remains in the present language something
to remind us of that which is gone. The comparative'rather' stands alone, having dropped on either side its
positive'rathe,' and superlative'rathest.''Rathe,'
having the sense of early, though a graceful word, and
not fallen quite even out of popular remembrance, inasmuch as it is embalmed in the Lycidas of Milton,
"And the rathe primrose, which forsaken dies,"
might still be suffered to share the common lot of so
many words which have perished, though worthy to
live; but the disuse of'rathest' has created-a real gap




108   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
in the language, and the more so, seeing, that''liefest' is
gone too.' Rather' expresses the Latin'potius;' but' rathest' being gone, we have no word, unless'soonest' may be accepted as such, to express' potissimum,'
that is the preference not of one way over another
or over certain others, but of one over all; which we
therefore effect by dint of various circumlocutions.
Nor is'rathest' so long out of use, that it would be a
playing of the antic to attempt to revive it. On the
contrary, it is found so late as in Bishop Sanderson's
Sermons, who in the opening of that beautiful one on
the text,, "When my father and my mother forsake me,
the Lord taketh me up," puts the consideration, " why
these,' that is, father and. mother, "are named the
rathest, and the rest to be included in them."*
The causes which are at work to bring about that
certain words, becoming in the course of time obsolete,
drop out of the living spoken tongue, are often very
hard to arrive at-how, that is, there should be a certain tacit consent on the part of a whole people not to
employ them any more; for without this, they could
not have died out. I must be content with little more
than calling your attention to the fact, and illustrating
it by a few examples. That it is not accident, that
there is a law here at work, however hidden it may be
from us, is plain from the fact that certain families of
words, words formed on certain principles, have a tendency thus to fall into desuetude.
Thus, I think, we may trace a certain tendency in
* For other passages in which' rathest' occurs, see'the State Papers, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.




WORDS UNDER BAN.                  109
words ending in'some,' the Anglo-Saxon and early
English,' sum,' the German,'sam' (' friedsam,''seltsam') to fall out of use. It is true that a vast number of
these survive, as' gladsome,''handsome,''wearisome,''buxom' (this last spelt better' bucksome' by our earlier writers, for its present spelling altogether disguises
its true character, and the family to which it belongs;
being the same word as the German'beugsam' or'biegsam,' bendable, compliant); but a large number
of these words, more than can be ascribed to accident,
more than their due proportion, are either quite or
nearly extinct.  Thus in Wiclif's Bible alone you
might note the following,' lovesum,''hatesum,''lustsum,''heavysum,''lightsum,''delightsum;' all of which,
except the last, are gone, and that, although used in
our authorized Version, now only survives in poetry.
So too' brightsome' (Marlowe),' wieldsome' (Golding),' unlightsome' (Milton),'ugsome' (Foxe),' laboursome'
(Shakespeare),'longsome' (Gascoigne),' quietsome,'' mirksome' (both in Spenser),' toothsome' (Beaumont
and Fletcher),' gleesome,''joysome' (both in Browne's
Pastorals),'meddlesome' (Barrow),'bigsome,''win.
some,''dosome,' meaning prosperous, well-to-do, a word
still surviving in the North,'playsome' (employed by
the historian Hume), have nearly or quite disappeared
from our English speech. They seemed to have held
their ground in Scotland* in considerably larger num* Jamieson's Dictionary gives a large number of words with this
termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to Scotland, as'bangsome,' i. e. quarrelsome,'freaksome,''drysome,''grousome' (the German' grausam').
5




110  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
bers than in the south of the Island. Thus Campbell
employs that very graceful word' winsome,' but would
scarcely have done so but for his Scotch breeding, and
perhaps even then only in a Scotch ballad.
Neither can I esteem it a mere accident that of a
group of depreciatory and contemptuous words ending
in' ard,' at least one-half should have dropped out of
use; I allude to that group of which'dotard,''laggard,''braggard,' now spelt' braggart,'' sluggard,''wizard,' may be taken as surviving specimens;' blinkard' (Homilies);' dizzard':(Burton);' dullard' (Udal);'musard' (Chaucer);'puggard,''stinkard' (Ben Jonson), as extinct.
Again, there was once a whole family of words,
whereof the greater number are now under ban; which
seem  at one time to' have been formed almost at
pleasure, the only condition being that the combination should be a happy one-I mean all those singularly expressive words formed by a combination of
verb and substantive, the former governing the latter;
as'scarecrow,''telltale,''scapegrace,''turncoat,'' turntail,' skinflint,''spendthrift,''lickspittle,' dclaredevil,'' makebate' (= st6renfried),' cutpurse,''cutthroat,''marplot,''marprelate.' These with a certain
number of others, have held their ground, and may be
said to be still more or less in use; but what a number
more are forgotten; and yet, though not always elegant, they constituted a very vigorous portion of our
language, and preserved some of its most genuine
idioms. It could not well be otherwise; they are
almost all words of abuse, and the abusive words of a




WORDS UNDER BAN.                 111
language are always among the most picturesque and
vigorous and imaginative which it affords. The whole
man speaks out in them, and often the man under the
influence of passion and excitement, which always lend
force and fire to his speech. Let me remind you of a
few of them;' smellfeast,' if not a better is yet a more
graphic, word than our foreign'parasite;' as graphic
indeed for us as TpEy6,E6'rvof to Greek ears;'clawback'
is a stronger, if not a more graceful, word than' flatterer' or' sycophant;''tosspot' (Fuller), or sometimes'reelpot' (Middleton), is a word which tells its own
tale as well as drunkard; and' pinchpenny' (Holland)
as well as or better than miser.  And then what a
multitude more there were in like kind;'spintext,'' lacklatin,' both applied to ignorant clerics;' bitesheep'
(a favourite word with Foxe) to such of these as were
rather wolves tearing, than shepherds feeding, the
flock;'slip-string' (= pendard) to one owed to the
gallows (Beaumont and Fletcher).
How many of these words occur in Shakespeare;
the following list makes no pretence to completeness;'martext,''carrytale,''pleaseman,''sneak-cup,''mumblenews,''wantwit,''lackbrain,''lackbeard,''lacklove,''ticklebrain,''breedbate' (the old French'attise-feu,'
or' attise-querelle'),' swingebuckler,''pickpurse,''pickthank,'' picklock,''breakvow,''breakpromise;''makepeace'-this last being the only one among them all in
which reprobation or contempt does not utter itself.
Nor is the list exhausted yet; there are further' dingthrift' ( = prodigal, Herrick),'wastethrift,' (Beaumont
and Fletcher),' scape-thrift' (HIolinshed),' shakebck4



112   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH  LANGUAGE.
ler' (Becon),'swashbuckler,''spitvenom,'' killjoy,''lackland,''pickquarrel,'' cumberworld' (Drayton),'curryfavor,'' clutchfist' (Middleton), with others which
it will be convenient to omit.'Rakehell,' which used
to be spelt' rakel' or' rakle' (Chaucer), a good English
word, would be only through an error included in this
list, although  Cowper, when  he writes'rake-hell'
(" rake-hell baronet") evidently regarded it as belonging to this group.*
Perhaps one of the most frequent causes which leads
to the disuse of words is this: in some inexplicable
way there comes to be attached something of ludicrous,
or coarse, or vulgar to them, out of a feeling of which
they are no longer used in earnest serious writing, and
at the same time fall out of the discourse of those who
desire to speak elegantly.  Not indeed that this degradation which overtakes words is in all cases inexplicable.  The unheroic character of most men's minds,
* The mistake is far earlier: it is clear that at a very early time
the sound suggested first this -sense, and then this spelling. Thus
Stanihurst, Description of Ireland, p. 28: "They are taken for no
better than rakehels, or the devil's black guard."-Let me observe
before quitting the matter that many languages have groups of
words formed upon the same scheme, although, singularly enough,
they are altogether absent from the Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm,
D)eutsche Gracmmnati/k, vol. ii. p. 976.) The Spaniards have a great
many very expressive words of the sort  Thus with allusion to the
great struggle in which Christian Spain was engaged for so many
centuries, a vaunting braggart is- a' matamoras,' a' slaymoor;' he
is a'matasiete,' a'slayseven;' a' perdonavidas,' a'sparelives.'
Others may be added to these, as' azotacalles,''picapleytos,''rompe-esquinas,', ganapan,"'cascatreguas.'




CAUSES OF DISUSE OF WORDS.          113
with their consequent intolerance of that heroic which
they cannot understand, is constantly at work, and not
seldom with success, in taking down words of nobleness
from their high pitch; and, as the most effectual way of
doing this, in casting an air of mock-heroic about them.
Thus'to dub,' a word resting on one of the noblest
usages of chivalry, has now something of ludicrous
about it; so too has' doughty;' they belong to that
serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplication of
which, as of all parodies on greatness, is a sign of evil
augury for a nation, is a present sign of evil augury
for our own.'Pate' in the sense of' head' is now comic or ignoble; it was not so once; as is plain from the fact that
it occurs in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms
(Ps. vii. 17.) The same may be said of'sconce,' in
this sense at least; of'nowl' or'noll,' which Wiclif
uses; of'slops' for trousers (Marlowe's Lzucan); of'smug,' which once meant no more than adorned (" the
smug bridegroom:" Shakespeare.)'To nap' in the
sense of to slumber lightly is now a word without
dignity; while yet in Wiclif's Bible it is said "Lo he
schall-not nappe, nether slepe that kepeth Israel" (Ps.
cxxi. 4.)'To punch,''to thump,' both which, and in
serious writing, occur in Spenser, could not now obtain
the same use; nor yet'to wag.' It is not otherwise in
regard of phrases. I remember in the great ballad of
Chevy Chase, which Sir Philip Sydney declared he
could never hear but " it stirred him like a trumpet,"
a noble warrior whose legs are hewn off, is described
as being "in doleful dumps;" just as, in Holland's
translation of Livy, the Romans are set forth as being




114   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
"in the dumps" in consequence of their disastrous
defeat at Canny.  And in the sermons of Barrow, who
certainly intended to write an elevated style, and did
not seek familiar, still less vulgar, expressions, we yet
meet such terms as'to rate,''to snub,''to gull,''dumpish,' and the like; which we may confidently
affirm were not vulgar when he used them.
Then too the advance of refinement causes words to
be foregone, which are felt to speak too plainly. It is
not merely here that one age has more delicate ears
than another; this is something; but besides this, and
even if this delicacy were at a staiidstill, there would
still be a continual process going on, by which the
words, which for a certain while have been employed
to designate coarse or disagreeable facts or things, would
be disallowed, or at least relinquished to the lower
classes of society, and others assumed in their place.
The former by long use being felt to have come into
too direct and close relation with that which they designate, to summon it up too distinctly before the mind's
eye, they are thereupon exchanged for other words,
which, at first at least, indicate more lightly and at a
greater distance the offensive thing, rather hint and
suggest than paint and describe it: although by and
bye these new will be themselves also probably discarded, and for the same reasons which brought about
the dismissal of those which they replaced.  It lies in
the necessity of things that I must leave this part of
my subject without illustration.*
* As not, however, turning on a very coarse matter, and illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might refer the Span



NO NEW  FORMS OR POWERS.               115
Thus much in respect of the words and the character
of the words, which we have lost or let go.  In respect
of these, if a language, as it travels onward, loses some,
it also acquires others, and probably many more than
those which it loses; they are leaves on the tree of
language, of which if some fall away, a new succession
talces their place. But it is not so, as I already observed, with the forms or powers of a language, that is,
with the various inflexions, moods, duplicate or triplicate formation of tenses; which those who speak it
come gradually to perceive that they can do without,
and therefore cease to employ; seeking to suppress
grammatical intricacies, and to obtain grammatical simplicity and so far as possible a pervading uniformity,
sometimes even at the hazard of letting go that which
had real worth, and contributed to the more lively, if
not to the clearer, setting forth of the inner thought of
the mind.  Here there is only loss, with no compensating gain; or at least only diminution, never addition.  In regard of these inner forces and potencies of
a language, there is no creative energy at work in its
later periods, in any, indeed, but quite the earliest.
They are not as the leaves, but may be likened to the
stem and leading branches of a tree, whose shape, mould
and direction are determined at a very early period of
its growth; which accident or other causes may diminish, but which can never be increased.  I have already
slightly alluded to a very illustrious example of this,
ish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote and Sancho on
the dismissal of' regoldar,' from the language of good society, and
the substitution of' erutar' in its room. (Don Quixote, 4. 7. 43.)




116  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
namely to the dropping of the dual number in the
Greek language. When the New Testament was written, it had so fallen out of the common dialect in which
that is composed, that, as is probably well known to us
all, no single example of it occurs throughout all the
writings of the New Covenant. Nor, in respect of this
very form, is this an isolated case. There is no dual
in the modern German, Danish or Swedish; in the old
German and Norse there was.
How mIuch in this respect for better or for worse we
have got rid of, I need hardly tell you; how bare,
whether too bare is another question, we have stripped
ourselves; what simplicity reigns in the present English, as compared with the old Anglo-Saxon. That
had six declensions, our present English but one; that
had three genders, English, if we except one or two
words, has none; that formed the genitive in. a variety
of ways, we only in one; and the same fact meets us,
wherever we compare the grammars of the two languages. At the same time, it can scarcely be repeated
too often, that in the estimate of the gain or loss thereupon ensuing, we must by no means put certainly to
loss everything which the language has dismissed, any
more than everything to gain which it has acquired.
It is no real wealth in a language to have needless and
superfluous forms. They are often an embarrassment
and an encumbrance to it rather than a help. The
Finnish language has fourteen cases, but I do not suppose that it can do more, or indeed at all as much,
with its fourteen as the Greek is able to do with its
five.




OTFRIED MULLER QUOTED.           117
And therefore it seems to me that some words of
Otfried Muller, in many ways admirable, do yet exaggerate the losses consequent on the reduction of the
forms of a language.  " It may be observed," he says,
" that in the lapse of ages, from the time that the progress of language can be observed, grammatical forms,
such as the signs of cases, moods and tenses have never
been increased in number, but have been constantly
diminishing. The history of the Romance, as well as
of the Germanic, languages shows in the clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and copious, has
been gradually weakened and impoverished, until at
last it preserves only a few fragments of its ancient inflections.. Now there is no doubt that this luxuriance
of grammatical forms is not an essential part of a language, considered merely as a vehicle of thought. It
is well known that the Chinese language, which is
merely a collection of radical words destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas
with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from
the mode of its formation by a mixture of different
tongues, has been stripped of its grammatical inflections more completely than any other European language, seems nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be
distinguished by its energetic eloquence.  All this
must be admitted by every unprejudiced inquirer; but
yet it cannot be overlooked, that this copiousness of
grammatical forms, and the fine shades of meaning
which they express, evince a nicety of observation, and
a faculty of distinguishing, which unquestionably prove
that the race of mankind among whom these languages
5*




118  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
arose was characterized by a remarkable correctness
and subtlety of thought. Nor can any modern European, who forms in his mind a lively image of the
classical languages in their ancient grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his mother tongue,
conceal from himself that in the ancient languages the
words, with their inflections, clothed as it were with
muscles and sinews, come forward like living bodies,
full of expression and character, while in the modern
tongues the words seem shrunk up into mere skeletons." *
I cannot think but that this is stated too strongly;
however, when my lecture is concluded, you will be
able better to judge for yourselves. And here I am
sure that you will greatly prefer that I should address
myself to the consideration not of forms which the language has relinquished long ago, but mainly to those
which it is relinquishing now; such as, touching us
more nearly, will have a far more lively interest for us
all. Let me then instance one of these. The female
termination which we employ in certain words, such
as from'heir''heiress,' from'prophet''prophetess,'
from' sorcerer''sorceress,' was once far more widely
extended than it now is; the words which retain it are
daily becoming fewer. It has already fallen away in
so many, and is evidently becoming of more unfrequent use in so many others, that, if we may augur
of the future from the analogy of the past, it will one
day altogether disappear from the language. Thus all
* Literature of Greece, p. 5.




FEMININES IN'ESS' AND'STER.'          119
these occur in WViclif's Bible;'teacheress' as the
female teacher (Wisd. viii. 4);'singeress,' the female
singer (2 Chr. iii. 5);'friendless,''servantess,''leperess,''neighbouress,''sinneress' (Luke vii. 37);'devouress,''spousess' (Prov. v. 19);' thralless' (Jer.
xxxiv. 16);'dwelleress,'' waiteress' (Jer. ix. 17.)
Add to these'chideress,' the female chider,' herdess,''constabless,''moveress,''soudaness' (=  sultaness),'guideress;''charmeress' (all in Chaucer); and others,
which however we may have now let them fall, reached
to far later periods of the language; thus'pedleress,''vassaless,''victoress' (all in Spenser);'fornicatress'
(Shakespeare);'ministress,''flatteress' (both in Holland);'saintess' (Sir T. Urquhart);'heroess' (Chapman);' clientess' (Middleton);'soldieress,''guardianess,''votaress' (all in Beaumont and Fletcher);'comfortress' (Ben Jonson);'solicitress,''impostress,''buildress' (all in Fuller);'commandress' (Burton);'monarchess' (Drayton);'discipless' (Speed);'auditress,''cateress,''tyranness' (all in Milton);'detractress'
(Addison);'hucksteress' (Howell);'tutoress' (Shaftesbury);' farmeress' (Lord Peterborough, Letter to Pope);
with many more which, I doubt not, might easily be
brought together.
Exactly the same thing has happened with another
feminine affix, which was once used in a far greater
number of words than now. I mean'ster' in the room
of'er,' to indicate that a noun before applied to the
male was now intended to be transferred and applied
to the female.*'Spinner,' taking the feminine form
* On this termination see J. Grimm's Deutsche Gramm., vol. ii.
134; vol. iii. 339.




120   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
of'spinster,' furnishes an excellent example of what I
mean, and perhaps the only one in which both the
forms still remain in use. Formerly however there
were a vast number of these; thus' baker' had'bakester,' being the female who baked;'brewer;''brewster;''reader;''readster;''seamer;''seamster;''fruiterer;''fruitester;''tumbler''tumblester' (this and the preceding both in Chaucer);'knitter'' knitster' (a word
which, I have understood, is still alive in Devon).
And further we may observe, and it is a striking example of the richness of a language in forms at the
earlier stages of its existence, that not a few of the
words which had, as we have just seen, a feminine termination in'ess,' had also a second feminine of the
kind with which we now have to do. Thus'dancer,'
beside' danceress,' had also'daunster;''chider,' besides'chideress' had' chidester' (Chaucer);'wailer'' wailster' (Wiclif);' dweller''dwelster,''singer,'' songster.'
I know there are some who call into question the
assertion just made that the termination' ster' did once
announce invariably a female doer. It may be, and
indeed has been, urged that the existence of such
words as' seamstress,'  songstress,' is decisive evidence
that the ending'ster' of itself was not counted sufficient to designate persons as female; for if, it has been
said,'seamster' and'songster' had been felt to be
already feminine, no one would have ever thought of
doubling on this, and adding a second female termination;'seamstress,''songstress.'  But all which can
justly be concluded from hence is, that when this final'ess' was added to these already feminine forms, and




FEMININES IN'STER.'                   121
examples of it will not, I think, be found till a very
late period of the language, the true principle and law
of the words had been lost sight. of and forgotten.*
The same may be said in respect of such other of these
feminine forms as are now applied to men, such as'gamester,''youngster,''huckster,''punster,''teamster,''tapster.'   Either  like'teamster,' and  perhaps'gamester,' the words first came into existence
and assumed this form, when the true significance
of the form was altogether lost; t or like'tapster,'
which  is female in  Chaucer ('the  gay  tapstere'), or'bakester,' at this day used in Scotland for'baker,'
the word did originally belong of right and exclusively
to women; but with the gradual transfer of the occupation to men, joined to an increasing forgetfulness of
* The earliest example which Richardson gives of' seamstress' is
from Gay, of' songstress,' from Thomson. It is quite certain that
as late as Ben Jonson,'seamster' and'songster' expressed the
female seamer and singer; a single passage from his Maasque of
Christmas is evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas
there is'" Wassel, like a neat sempster and sogster; her page bearing a brown bowl."  Compare a passage from Holland's Leaguer,
1632: "A tyrewoman of phantastical ornaments, a sempster for
ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats."
t This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare's time, see his
use of'spinster' as-'spinner,' the man spinning. Henry VIII.
i. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same at Othello, i. 1. And a
little later in H:owell's Vocabulary, 1659,' spinner' and'spinster'
are both referred to the male sex, and the barbarous' spinstress' invented for the female. The first example of' youngster' which Richardson gives is from the Spectator. If it exists at all in our earlier
literature, it will hardly be otherwise than as the female correlative
of the male' younker,' or' yonker,' a word of constant recurrence.




122   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
what this termination implied, there has been also a
transfer of the name;* just as in other words, and out
of the same causes, exactly the converse has found
place;  and'baker' or'brewer,' not'bakester' or'brewster,' would be now in England applied to the
female baking or brewing. So entirely has this power
of the language now been foregone, that it cannot be
said really to survive even in'spinner' and' spinster,'
which I adduced just now as the only words in which
formally it continued; seeing that' spinster' has now
been transferred to quite another meaning than that of
a female spinning, whom, as well as the male, we should
designate not as a'spinster,' but a'spinner.'
Let me take the opportunity of observing here, by
way of confirmation of what has just been asserted,
that it is almost incredible, if we had not experience of
the fact, how soon the true rationale and significance
of some form which has never ceased to be in everybody's mouth, may be wholly lost sight of. No more
curious chapter in the history of language could be
* I have included' huckster,' as will be observed, in this list. I
certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as the
female pedler. We have only, however, to keep in mind the existence of the verb' to huck,' in the sense of to peddle (it is used by
Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the present spelling of'hawker' mislead us, and we shall confidently recognize'hucker' (the German' hoker' or' hicker'), in' hawker,' that is, the
man who'hucks,''hawks' or peddles, as in' huckster' the female
who does the same. When therefore Howell and others employ'hucksteress,' they fall into the same barbarous excess of expression,
whereof we are all guilty, when we use' seamstress' and' songstress.'




THE ENGLISH GENITIVE.             123
written than one which should trace the violations of
analogy, the transgressions of the most primary laws
of a language, which often follow hereupon; the plurals like'welkin' (=wolken, the clouds), which are
dealt with as singulars, singulars like' riches' (richesse),
which are dealt with as plurals. But there is one
example of this, familiar to us all; probably so
familiar that it would not be worth while adverting to
it, if it did not illustrate, as no other word could, this
forgetfulness which may overtake a whole people in
regard of the true meaning of a grammatical form they
have never ceased to employ. I allude to the mistaken
assumption that the's' of the genitive, as'the king's
countenance,' was merely a more rapid way of pronouncing'the king his countenance,' and that the final's' in'king's' was in fact an elided'his.' This explanation for a long time prevailed almost universally;
I believe there are many who accept it still.
It was in vain that here and there a deeper knower
of our tongue protested against this "monstrous syntax," as Ben Jonson in his Grammar justly calls it.
It was in vain that Wallis, another English scholar of
the 17th century, pointed out in his grammar that the
slightest examination of the facts showed how absurd
and untenable this explanation was, seeing that we do
not merely say'the king's countenance,' but'the queen's
countenance;' and in this case the final's' cannot stand
for'his,' for'the queen his countenance' cannot be
intended;* we do not say merely'the child's bread,'
* Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving;
on the contrary he boldly asserts, (Spectator, No. 135), " The same




124   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH  LANGUAGE.
but' the children's bread,' where it is no less impossible
to resolve the phrase into'the children his bread.'*
Despite of these protests the error held its ground. It
seems to have begun early in the sixteenth century;
you can hardly open a book printed during the seventeenth, or the early decades of the eighteenth, but you
will find often this's' in the actual printing spread out
into' his.'  The books of scholars are not a whit more
exempt from the mistake than those of others. Spenser,
Fuller, Donne, Jeremy Taylor are all guilty of it.  It
finds place in Dryden, who more than once helps out
his verse with an additional syllable gained by its aid.
It has even forced its way into our Prayer Book itself,
where in the "Prayer for all sorts and conditions of
men," added at the last revision of the Liturgy in 1661,
and I believe by Bishop Sanderson, we are bidden to
say, " And this we beg for Jesus Christ his sake."t  I
single letter s on many occasions does the office of a whole word,
and represents the his or her of our forefathers."
* Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of
this scheme, although he is not so successful in showing what the'S' sdoes mean as in showing what it cannot mean (Gramm. Ling..nglic. c. 5): Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco his adjunctum esse
(priori scilicet parte per aphcresim abscissa), ideoque apostrophi
notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem subintelligendam,
omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin apostrophi nota
commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius litterse s usus distinctius,
ibi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen semper fieri debere, aut etiam
ideo fieri quia vocem his innuat, omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et
fceminarum nominibus propriis, et substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox
his sine solcecismo locum habere non potest: atque etiam in possessivis ours, yours, theirs, hers, ubi vocem his innui nemo somniaret.
t I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our Uni



ADJECTIVES 1N'EN.'                 125
need hardly tell you that this's' is in fact the one
remnant of flexion surviving in the singular number
of our English noun substantives; it is the sign of the
genitive, and just as in Latin'lapis' makes 6 lapidis' in
the genitive, so'king,''queen,''child,' make severally'kig's,''queen's,''child's,' the comma, an apparent
note of elision, being a mere modern expedient to distinguish the genitive singular from the plural cases.
But to return.  WVe may further notice as another
example of this tendency to dispense with inflection,
of this endeavour on the part of the speakers of a language to reduce its forms to the fewest possible, consistent with  the  accurate  communication  of their
thoughts to one another, that of our adjectives in'en,'
formed on substantives, and denoting the material or
substance of which anything is made, some have gone,
others are going, out of use; while we content ourselves with the bare juxtaposition of the substantive
itself, as sufficiently expressing our meaning. Thus
instead of' golden pin' we say'gold pin;' instead of'earthen works' we say'earth works.'  It is true that
versity Presses, if so palpable and offensive an ungrammatical form
were removed from the Prayer Books which they put forth, as I have
no doubt that it is supprest by many of the clergy in the reading.
They would be only using here a liberty which they have already
assumed in the case of the Bible. In all earlier editions of the
authorized Version it stood originally at 1 Kin. xv. 24: " Nevertheless.lsa his heart was perfect with the Lord;" it is "Kdsa's heart"
now. In the same way "JJIordecai his matters" (Esth. iii. 4) has
been silently changed into "'o Jkrdecai's matters;" and in some
modern editions, but not in all, "Holof-ernes his head" (Judith xiii.
9) into " Holofernes' head."




126  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
in the case of these two adjectives,'golden' and'earthen,' they still belong to our living speech, though
mainly as part of our poetic diction, or of the solemn.and thus stereotyped language of Scripture. Others
however of these adjectives have become obsolete, and
have nearly or quite disappeared from  the language,
although the epochs of their disappearance are very
different.'Rosen' went early; I know no later example of it than in Chaucer (' rosen chapelet').'Silvern'
was originally in Wiclif's Bible, but already in the
second recension of it was exchanged for'silver'
(" silver.ne housis to Diane," Acts 19). In the coarse
polemics of the Reformation the phrase' broeaden god,'
provoked by the Romish doctrine of transubstantiation, was of frequent employment, and occurs as late
as Oldham;'cedcarn alley' in Milton;'boxen leaves,'
where we should use'box leaves,' in Dryden;' a treen
cup' in Jeremy Taylor;'a glassen breast,' meaning a
transparent one, in Whitlock's Zootomia, 1654.
It is true that a good number of these adjectives in'en' still hold their ground; yet the roots which sustain even these wre may note on closer observation as
being gradually cut away from  beneath them.  Thus'brazen' may at first sight seem as strongly established
in the language as ever; yet it is very far from so
being; the preparations for its disappearance are already vigorously at work.  Even now it only lives in
a tropical and secondary sense, as'a brazen face,' or if
in a literal sense, it is only, as was said of others, in
poetic diction or in the consecrated language of Scripture, as'the brazen serpent;' otherwise we say'a brass




STRONG AND WEAK: PRJTERITES.          127
farthing,''a brass candlestick.' It is the same with'oaten,''oaken,''birchen,''beechen,''strawen' and
many more; and the manifest tendency of the language is, as it has long been, to rid itself of these, and
to satisfy itself with an adjectival use of the substantive in their stead.
Let me illustrate by another example that which I
am now seeking especially to press on your notice,
namely, that a language, as it travels onward, simplifies itself, approaches more and more to a grammatical
and logical uniformity, seeks to do the same thing
always in the same manner; where it has two or three
ways of conducting a single operation, lets all of them
go but one; and in these ways becomes no doubt
easier to be mastered, more handy, more manageable;
but at the same time is in danger of forfeiting elements
of strength, variety and beauty, which it once possessed.  My present example is this; the tendency of
our verbs to let go their strong praeterites, and to substitute weak ones in their room; or, where they have
two or three preterites, to retain only one of them, and
that invariably the weak one. Though many of us no
doubt are familiar with the terms,'strong' and' weak'
prseterites, which in all our better grammars have put
out of use the wholly misleading terms,' irregular' and'regular,' I perhaps had better remind you of what the
exact meaning of the terms is. A strong preterite is
one formed by an internal vowel change; for instance
the verb'to drive' forms the prseterite'drove' by an
internal change of the vowel'i' into'o.' But why,
it may be asked, called'strong'? In respect that'




128   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
there is enough of vigour and indwelling energy in the
word to form its past tense from its own resources, and
with no calling in of help from without. On the other
hand'to lift' forms its preterite'lifted,' not by an internal change, but by the addition of'ed;''to grieve'
has' grieved.' Here are weak tenses; as strength was
ascribed to the other verbs, so weakness to these;
being only able to form  their prseterites by external
aid and addition., You will at once perceive that these
strong prseterites, while they testify to a vital energy
in the words which are able to put them forth, do also,
as is the confession of all who have studied the matter,
contribute much to the variety and charm  of a language.A
The matter however to which I would call your
especial attention is, that these are becoming fewer
in our language every day; a vast number of them
have disappeared, have gradually fallen quite out of
use, while others are in the act of so falling. Nor is
there any compensating process oil the other hand; the
power of forming new strong prseterites is long ago
extinct; probably no new verb which has come into
the language since the Conquest has developed this
power, while multitudes have let it go. Let me mention a few which have disappeared. * Thus' shape' has
* J. Grimm (Deutsche Gramm. vol. i. p. 1040): Dass die starke
form die iiltere, kraftigere, innere; die eclrache die spiitere, gehemmtere und mehr {usserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere, speaking generally of inflexions by internal vowel change, he characterizes them as a' chief beauty' (haupt-sch6nheit) of the Teutonic
languages.




STRONG PRA3TERITES.                129
now a weak praeterite,'shaped,' it had once a strong
one,'shope;''to bake' has now a weak praeterite,'baked,' it had once a strong one,' boke;' the praeterite of'glide' is now'glided,' it was once'glode' or' glid;''help' makes now' helped,' it made once'halp' and'holp.''Creep' made'crope,' still current in the north of England;'weep'' wope' (Chaucer);'seethe''soth' or'sod' (" Jacob sod pottage,"
Gen. xxv. 29); in each of these cases the strong prseterite has given way to the weak.  It is the same with'sheer,' which  once made'shore;' as'leap' made'lope;''wash''wishe' (Chaucer);'delve'' dalf' and'dolve;''wax''wex' and'wox;''laugh''leugh;'
with innumerable others.*
We again recognize in this which has just been
noted, the limits and restraints which a language
gradually imposes on its own freedom of action. We
may observe further, while on this matter of strong
prseterites, for it bears directly on our subject, that
where verbs have not actually renounced these their
strong prseterites, and contented themselves with weak
ones in their room, yet having once two, or, it might
* As a marvellous example of the entire ignorance as to the past
historic evolution of the language with which it has been often undertaken to write about it, I may mention that the author of the
Observations upon the English Language, referred to already, treats
all these strong printerites as of recent introduction, counting' knew'
to have lately expelled'knowed,''rose' to have acted the same
part toward'rised,' and of course esteeming them as so many barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding with
the warning that " great care must be taken to prevent their increase." p. 24.




130   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
be three of these strong, they now have only one.
The others, on the principle of dismissing whatever can
be dismissed, they have let go. Thus' chide' had once'chid' and' chode,' but though' chode' is in our Bibles
(Gen. xxxi. 36), it has not maintained itself in our
speech;'sling' had'slung' and'slang' (1 Sam. xvii.
49); only'slung' remains;'fling' had once'flung'
and'flang;''tread' had'trod' and'trad;''give' had'gave' and'gove;''lead' had'led,''lad' and'lode;''write' had'wrote,''writ,' and'wrate;' in each of
these cases, and they might easily be multiplied, only
the prseterite which I have named the first remains in
use.
Nor should you fail to observe that wherever there
is at the present time a conflict going on between
weak and strong\ forms, which shall remain in use, as
there is in several verbs, in every instance the battle is
not to the strong; on the contrary the weak is carrying
the day, is gradually putting the other out of use.
Thus' climbed' is getting the upper hand of'clomb,'
as the past tense of'to climb;'' swelled' of' swoll;''hanged' of'hung.'  It is not too much to anticipate
that a time will arrive, although it may be centuries
distant, when all the verbs in the English language
will form their prseterites weakly; not without a considerable loss of the fullness and energy which in this
respect the language even now displays, and once far
more eminently displayed.
* J. Grimm (Deutsche Gramrn. vol. i. p. 839): Die starke flexion
stufenweise versinkt und austirbt, die schwache aber um sich greift.
Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.




USE OF'THOU.'                131
Once more-the entire dropping of'thou,' except in
poetry or in addresses to the Deity, and as a necessary
consequence, the dropping also of the second singular
of the verb with its strongly marked flexion, as' lovest,''lovedst,' is another example of a force once existing
in the language, which has been, or is being, allowed
to expire. In the seventeenth century it was with'thou' in English as it is still with'du' in German,
with' tu' in French; being as it then was, the sign of
familiarity, whether that familiarity were of love, or of
contempt and scorn.*
It was not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir
Walter Raleigh's trial (1603), Coke, when argument
and evidence failed him, insulted the defendant by applying to him the term' thou':-"All that Lord Cobham did was at thy instigation, thou viper! for I thou
thee, thou traitor."  And when Sir Toby Belch in
Twelfth Night is urging Sir Andrew Aguecheek to
send a sufficiently provocative challenge to Viola, he
suggests to him that he " taunt him with the licence of
ink; if thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be
amiss." To keep this in mind will throw considerable
light on one early peculiarity of the Quakers, and give
a certain dignity to it, as once maintained, which at
present it is very far from possessing. We shall see
that however unnecessary and unwise their determination to'thee' and'thou' the whole world was, yet this
had a significance; it was not, as now it seems to us to
* Thus Wallis (Gra'mmatica Linguce./nglicanc, 1653): Singulari numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet,
vel familiariter blandientis.




132   DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISIH LANGUAGE.
be, and through the silent changes which language has
undergone, as now it indeed is, an unmeaning departure from the ordinary usage of society, but meant
something.  Right or wrong, it had an ethical motive,
being an assertion upon their parts, however misplaced,
th'at they would not have high or great or rich men's
persons in admiration. And it was one which cost
them something; at present we can very little understand the amount of courage which this' thou-ing' and'thee-ing' of all men must have demanded on their
parts, nor yet the amount of indignation and offence
which it stirred up in them who were not aware of, or
would not allow for, the scruples which induced them
to it.*  It is however in its other aspect that we must
chiefly regret the dying out of the use of' thou'-that
is, as the voice of peculiar intimacy and special affection, as between husband and wife, parents and
children, and such others as are knit together by
bands of more than common affection.
But the boldest step which in this direction of simplification the English language has made, is the re.
nouncing of the distribution of its nouns into mascu.
line, feminine and neuter, or even into masculine and
* What the actual position of the compellation' thou' was at that
time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller's
Church History, Dedication of Book vii.: " In opposition whereunto
[i. e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that thou from superiors to
inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from equals to equals is
passable, as a note of familiarity; but from inferiors to superiors, if
proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness; if from
affectation, a tone of contempt."




FEMALE AND FEMININE.             133
feminine, as in French, and with this, as a necessary
consequence, the dropping of any flexional modification in the adjectives connected with them. Natural
sex of course remains, being inherent in all language;
but grammatical gender, with the exception of'he''she' and'it,' and perhaps one or two other fragmentary instances, the language has altogether foregone.
An example will make clear the distinction between
these. WVhen I use the word'poetess,' it is not the
word'poetess' which is feminine, but the person indicated by the word who is fermale. So too'daughter,''queen,' are in English not feminine nouns, but nouns
designating female persons. Take on the contrary'filia' or'regina,''fille' or'reine,' there you have
feminine nouns as well as femanle persons.  I need
hardly say to you that wea did not inherit this simplicity from others, but made it like the Danes, in so
far as they have done the like, for ourselves. Whether
we turn to the Latin, or, which is for us more important, to the old German, we find gender; and in the
four daughter languages which have descended from
the Latin, in most of those which have descended from
the old Teutonic stock, it is fully established to the
present day. The practical business-like character of
the English mind asserted itself in the rejection of a
distinction, which in the great multitude of words, that
is, in all having to do with inanimate things, and as
such incapable of sex, rested upon a fiction, and had no
ground in the real nature of things. It is only by an
act and effort of the imagination that sex, and thus
6




134  DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
gender, can be attributed to a table, a ship, and tree;
and there are aspects, this is an example, in which the
English is one of the least imaginative of all languages,
even while it has been employed in some of the greatest
works of imagination which the world has ever seen.




LECTURE IV.
ON CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH 3WORDS.
I PROPOSE, according to the plan which I sketched
out in my first lecture, to take for the subject of my
present one the changes which in the course of time
have found place, or now are finding place, in the
meaning of many among our English words; so that,
whether we are aware of it or not, we employ them at
this day in senses very different from those in which
our forefathers employed them of old. You observe,
it is not obsolete words, it is not words which have quite
fallen out of present use that I propose to considerwords rather, still on the lips of men, but with meanings more or less removed from those which once they
had. My subject is far more practical, you will feel it
to have far more to do with your actual life, than if I
had taken obsolete words and considered them. These
last have an interest indeed, but it is an interest somewhat of an antiqcuarian character. Such words were a
part of the intellectual money with which our ancestors carried on their affairs, but now they are rather
medals for the cabinets and collections of the curious
than current money for the needs and pleasures of all.
Their wings are clipped, so that they are "winged




136       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
words" (erea 7rTsp6evTa) no more; the spark of thought,
kindling from  mind to mind, no longer runs along
them, as along the electric wires of the soul.
And then, besides this, there is little or no danger
that any should be misled by these. A reader lights
for the first time on one of these obsolete English
words,'frampold,' or'garboil,' or'brangle;' he is at
once conscious of his ignorance; he has recourse to a
glossary, or if he guesses from the context at the
word's signification, still his guess is as a guess to him,
and no more. But words that have changed their
meaning have often a deceiveableness about them, so
that he never doubts but that he knows their intention,
that they possess for him the same force which they
possessed for their writer, and conveyed to his contemporaries, when indeed it is altogether otherwise.
Let me illustrate this by examples. A reader of
our day lights upon such a passage as the following (it
is in the Preface to Howell's Lexicon, 1660): " Though
the root of the English language be Dutch, yet it may
be said to have been inoculated afterwards on a French
stock." HIe may know that the Dutch is a sister language or dialect to ours; but this that it is the mother
6r root of it will certainly perplex him, and he will
hardly know what to make of it; perhaps he ascribes
it to an error in his author, who is thereby unduly
lowered in his esteem. But presently in the course of
his reading he meets with the following statement, this
time in Fuller's hIoly -WTar: "The French, Dutch,
Italian, and English were the four elemental nations,
whereof this army [of the Crusaders] was compound



DUTCH, MISCREANT.            167
ed."  If the student has sufficient historical knowledge
to know that in the time of the Crusades there were
no Dutch in our use of the word, this statement would
merely startle him; and probably before he had finished the chapter, having his attention once roused, he
would perceive that Fuller with the writers of his time
used' Dutch' for German; even as it was constantly so
used up to the end of the seventeenth century; what
we call now a Dutchman being then a Hollander. But
it would be very possible for a young student not to
have that amount of previous knowledge which should
cause him to receive this announcement with misgiving
and surprise; and thus he might carry away altogether
a wrong impression, and rise from the perusal of the
book, persuaded that the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part in the Crusades, while the Germans had little or nothing to do with them.
And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more
often will it happen with the subtler changes which
words have undergone, conveying now much more
blame and condemnation, or conveying now much less
than formerly; or of a different kind; and a reader not
aware of tlhe changes which have taken place, may be
in continual danger of misreading his author, of misunderstanding his intention, while he has no doubt whatever that he is perfectly apprehending and taking it in.
Thus when Shakespeare in HFenry V. makes the noble
Talbot address Joan of Arc as a'miscreant,' how coarse
a piece of invective does this sound; how unlike
to that which the chivalrous soldier would have uttered; or to that which Shakespeare, even with his




138       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
unworthy estimate of the noble warrior Maid, would
have put into Talbot's mouth. But a'miscreant' in
Shakespeare's time had nothing of the meaning which
now it has. A'miscreant,' in agreement with its
etymology, was a misbeliever, one who did not believe
rightly the articles of the Catholic Faith. And I need
not tell you that this was the constant charge which the
English brought against Joan,-namely, that she was a
dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and as such, had
fallen from the faith. It is this which Talbot means
when he calls her a'miscreant,' and not what we
should intend by the name.
And in reading.of poetry especially what forces
through this ignorance are often lost, what emphasis
passes unobserved, how often the poet may be wronged
in our estimation; that seeming to us now flat and
pointless, which at once would lose this character, did
we know how to read into some word the power and
peculiar force which it once had, but which now has
departed from it. For example, Milton ascribes in
Comnus the'tinsel-sli2ppered feet' to Thetis, the goddess
of the sea.' Tinsel-slippered,' how comparatively poor
an epithet it sounds for those who know of'tinsel'
only in its modern acceptation, as mean and tawdry
finery, affecting a splendor which it does not really
possess. But learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it back to the French' 6tincelle,' and the
Latin'scintillula'; see in it, as Milton and the writers
of his time saw,'the sparkling,' and how exquisitely
beautiful a title does this become applied to a goddess
of the sea; how vividly does it call up before our




'INFLUENCE.'                 139
mind's eye the quick glitter and sparkle of the waves
under the light of sun or moon. It is Homer's' silverfooted' (dpyvp67re8a), not servilely transferred, but
reproduced and made his own by the English poet,
dealing as one great poet will do with another; who
will not disdain to borrow, but to what he borrows
will add a further grace of his own.
Or, again, do we keep in mind, or are we even
aware, that whenever the word' influence' occurs in our
English poetry, down to comparatively a modern date,
there is always more or less remote allusion to the
skyey, planetary influences supposed to be exercised
by the heavenly luminaries upon men?  How many
a-passage starts into new life and beauty and fulness
of allusion, when this is present with us; even Milton's
" store of ladies, whose bright eyes
Rain influenee,1"
as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when
we regard them-and using this language, he intended
we should-as the luminaries of this lower sphere,
shedding by their propitious presence strength and
va-lour into the hearts of their knights.
It will often happen, as in this last instance, that
although we do not fall into any actual misunderstanding, and although the word even in its present
acceptation yields a convenient and even a correct
sense, still through ignorance of its past history and of
the force which it once possessed, we shall miss a great
part of its significance. Let me illustrate this by one




140        CHANGED MEANING OF mWORDS.
further example.  A cowardly braggart of a soldier is
made in one of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays* to
describe the treatment he experienced, when like Parolles h& was at length found out, and stripped of his
lion's skin: —" They hung me up by the heels and beat
me with hazel sticks,... that the whole kingdom took
notice of me for a baffled whipped fellow."  The word
to which I wish here to call your attention is'baffled.'
Probably if you were reading, there would be nothing
here to cause you to pause; you would attach to the
word the meaning which sorts very well with the
context-" "hung up by the heels and beaten, all his
schemes of being thought much of were bafyled and defeated."  But the word means a great deal more than
this; it contains allusion to a custom in the days of
chivalry, according to which a perjured or recreant
knight was either in person, or more commonly in
effigy, hung up by.the heels, his scutcheon blotted, his
spear broken, and he himself or his effigy made the
mark and subject of all kinds of indignities; such
a one being said to be'baffled.'t  Twice in Spenser
recreant knights are so dealt with. I can only quote
a portion of the shorter passage, in which this infamous
punishment is described:
"And after all, for greater infamy
He by the heels him hung upon a tree,
And baffled so, that all which passed by
The picture of his punishment might see.'"t
* Y King; anid no King, iii. 1.
t See HIlinshed's Chronicles, vol. iii. pp. 827, 1218: Agn, 1513,
1570.: Fairy Queen, 6..7. 27; cf. 5. 3. 37.




'NEPHEW.'                141
Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men
were not so remote from the days of chivalry but that
this custom was still fresh in their minds. How much
more to them than to us, so long as we are ignorant of
the same, would those words I just quoted have conveyed?
There are several places in the authorized Version
of Scripture, wh'ere those who are not aware of the
changes which having taken place during the last two
hundred and fifty years in our language, can hardly
fail of being to a certain extent misled as to the intention of our translators; or, if they are better acquainted
with Greek than with early English, will be tempted
to ascribe to these translators, though wrongly, an inexact rendering of the original. When for instance
St. Paul teaches that if any widow hath children or'nephews,' she is not to be chargeable to the Church,
but these are to requite their parents, and to support
them (1 Tim. v. 4), it must seem strange that'nephews'
should be here brought in; while a reference to the
original makes manifest that the difficulty is not there,
but in our Version. From this also it is removed, so
soon as we know that' nephews,' like the Latin'nepotes,' meant at the time when this Version was made,
grandchildren and other lineal descendants; being so
employed by Hooker, by Shakespeare, and by the
other writers of the Elizabethian period.
In another place, in the Acts of the Apostles, St.
Luke says, " We took up our carriages and went up
to Jerusalem." (xxi. 15). How was this possible, exclaims a modern objector, when there is nothing but a
6*




142        CHANGED MEANING OF IWORDS.
mountain track, impassable for wheels, between Cmesarea, the place from which Paul and his company
started, and Jerusalem?  He would not have made
this difficulty, if he had known that in our early English,'carriages' did not mean, things which carried us,
but things which we carried;* and " we took up our
carr'iages" implies no more than "we took up our baggage," or "we trussed up our fardets," as an earlier
translation somewhat familiarly has it, and so " went
up to Jerusalem."
But a passage in which the altered meaning of a
word involves sometimes a more serious misunderstanding is that well known statement of St. James,
" Pure religion and undefiled before God and the
Father is this, to visit the fatherless. and widows in
their affliction."  "There," exclaims one who wishes
to set up St. James against St. Paul, that so he may
escape the necessity of obeying either, "listen to what
St. James says; he does not speak of faith in Christ as
the condition necessary to salvation; there is nothing
mystical in what he requires; instead of harping on
faith, he makes all religion to consist in practical cleeds
of kindness one to another."  But let us pause a moment.  Did'religion,' when our translation was made,
mean godliness? did it mean the sum  total of our
duties towards God? for of course no one would deny
* Thus in North's Plutarch, p. 470: "Spartacus charged his
[Lentulus'] lieutenants that led the army, gave them battle, overthrew them, and took all their carriage [17iv d7roc vrKv7v
cirraaav]',"




LRELIGION,''RELIGIOUS.'         143
that deeds of kindness are a part of our Christian duty,
an evidence of the faith which is in us. There is
abundant evidence to show that'religion' did not mean
this; that, like the Greek Opr1aucsa, for which it here
stands, like the Latin' religio,' it meant the outward
forms and embodiments in which the inward principle
of piety arrayed itself, the external service of God:
and St. James is urging upon those to whom he is
writing something of this kind:-" instead of the ceremonial services of the Jews, which consisted in divers
washings and in other elements of this world, let our
service, our Opruictia, take a nobler shape, let it consist
in deeds of pity and of love"-and it was this which
our translators intended, when they used'religion'
here and'religious' in the verse preceding. How little' religion' once meant godliness, how predominantly
it was used for the outward service of God, is plain
from many passages in our Homilies, and from other
cotemporary literature.
Again, there is a passage in our Liturgy which I
have no doubt is commonly misunderstood. The mistake involves no serious error; yet still in our own
language, and in words which we have constantly in our
mouths, and at such solemn times, it is certainly better
to be right than wrong. You know that in the Litany
we pray to God that it would please Him  "to give
and preserve to our use the kindly fruits of the earth;"
-" the kindly fruits," —what meaning do we attach to
this epithet? probably we take it as, those fruits in
which the kindness and bounty of God or of nature
towards us finds its expression. This is no unworthy




144      CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
explanation of the word, but still it is not the right
one. The " kindly fruits" are the "natural fruits,"
those which the earth according to its kind should
naturally bring forth, which it is appointed to produce.
To shew you how little'kindly' meant once benignant, as it means now, I will instance an employment
of it from Sir Thomas More's Life of Richard the Third.
He tells us that Richard calculated by murdering his
two nephews in the Tower to make himself accounted
" a kindly king" —not certainly a'kindly' one in our
present meaning of the word; but, having put them
out of the way, that he should then be lineal heir of
the Crown, and should thus be reckoned as king by
kind or natural descent; and such was of old the constant use of the word.
There is another passage in one of our occasional
Services, which sometimes offends those who are unacquainted with the early uses of English words, and
thus with the intention of the actual framers of that
Service. I mean the words in our Marriage Service,
"with my body I thee worship."  Clearly in our modern sense of'worship,' this language would be unjustiflable. But'worship' or' worthship' meant'honour' in our early English, and'to worship' to honour,
this meaning of' worship' still surviving in the title of
"your worship," addressed to the magistrate on the
bench. So little was it restrained of old to the honour which man is bound to pay to God, that it was
employed by Wiclif to express the honour which God
will render to his faithful servants and friends. Thus
the words of our Lord, " If any man serve me, him




'WORSHIP,'  PAINFUL.'          145
will my Father honour," these in Wiclif's translation
read thus: "If any man serve me, my Father shall
worship him."  I do not say that there is not sufficient
reason to change the words, "with my body I thee
uworship," if. only there were any means of changing
anything which is now antiquated and out of date in
our services or arrangements. I think it would be
very well if they were changed, liable as they are to
misunderstanding and misconstruction now; but still
they did not mean at the first, and therefore now do
not really mean, any more than, "with my body I
thee honour,'" and so you may answer any fault-finder
here.
Takte another example of a very easy misapprehension, although not now from Scripture or the Prayer
Book. Fuller, our Church Historian, having occasion
to speak of some famous divine that had lately died,
exclaims, "Oh the p'ainfunness of his preaching!"
We might assume at first hearing, and if we did not
know the former uses of'painfulness,' that this was
an exclamation wrung out at the recollection of the
tediousness which he inflicted on his hearers. Far
from it; the words are a record not of the pain which
he caused to others, but of the pains which he bestowed himself: and, I believe, if we had more'painful' preachers in the old sense of the word, that is, who
toole pains themselves, we should have fewer'painful'
ones in the modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. So too Bishop Grosthead is recorded as "ithe
painful writer of two hundred books" —not meaning
hereby that these books were painful in the reading,




14A6         CtHANGED MIEANING OF WORDS.
but that he was laborious and painful in their composing.
In other places unacquaintance with the. changes in
a word's usage will leave you nearly or altogether at a
loss in respect of the intention of an author whom you
may be reading. It is evident that he has a meaning,
but what it is you are unable to divine, even though
all the words he employs are words in familiar employment to the present day.  Take an example. The
poet Waller is congratulating Charles the Second on
his return from exile, and is describing the way in
which all men, even those formerly most hostile to
him, were now seeking his favor, and he writes:
" Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin
To strive for grace and expiate their sin;
All winds blow fair, that did the world embroil,.And vipers treacle yield, and scorpions oil."
Many a reader before now has felt, as I cannot doubt, a
moment's perplexity at the courtly poet's assertion that
"vipers treacle yield"-who yet has been too indolent,
or who has not had the opportunity, to search out what
his meaning might be. There is in fact allusion here
to a very curious piece of legendary lore.'Treacle,'
or'triacle,' as Chaucer wrote it,* was originally a
Greek word, and wrapped up in itself the once popular belief (an anticipation by the way of homceopathy),
* O1ptaicr, from Oipiov, the name given to the viper, see
Acts xxviii. 4.'Theriac' is only the more rigid form of the same
word, the scholarly, as distinguished from the popular, adoption
of it.




'TREACLE.'                  147
that a confection of the viper's flesh was the most potent antidote against the viper's bite.*  Waller goes
back to this the word's old meaning, familiar enough
in his time, for Milton speaks of " the sovran treacle
of sound doctrine," and Chaucer more solemnly still:
"Christ, which that is to every harm triacle;"
while "Venice treacle" was a common name for a supposed antidote against all poisons; and he would imply
that regicides themselves began to be loyal, vipers not
now yielding hurt any more, but rather healing for the
old hurts which they had inflicted.  To trace the word
down to its present use, I would observe that, expressing first this antidote, it then came to express any
antidote, then any medicinal confection or sweet syrup;
and lastly that particular syrup, namely, the sweet
syrup of molasses, to which alone it is now restricted.
Or, to take one more example in the same kind; and
for this I will again draw upon the writings of Fuller.
In his Holy War, a history of the Crusades, having
enumerated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway slaves, thieves, murderers, adulterers, who swell
the ranks and help to make up the army of the Cru-'saders, he exclaims upon this, "A lamentable case, that
the devil's black guard should be God's soldiers!"
What does he mean, we may ask, by the " devil's blac7k
guard"?  Nor is this the only passage where the
phrase, "the black guard," occurs.  On the contrary,
* Augustine (Con. duas Epp. Pelag. iii. 7): Sicut fieri consuevit
antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra venena serpentsm.




148        CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
it is of very frequent recurrence in the early dramatists and others down to the time of Dryden, who gives
as one of his stage directions in Don Sebastian, "Enter
the captain of the rabble, with the BClack guard."
What is this'black guard'?  Has it any connexion
with a word of our homeliest vernacular?  We feel
that probably it has so; yet at first sight the connexion is not very apparent, nor indeed what the exact
force of the phrase is. Let me trace its history. In
old times, when a royal progress was made, that is
when the court moved from  one palace to another, or
the great nobility from one residence to another, these
palaces and these seats of our nobles not being so
well and completely furnished as at the present day, it
was customary that at such a removal, all kitchen
utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also
carried with them where they went. Those who accompanied and escorted' these, the lowest, meanest,
and dirtiest of the retainers, were called'the black
guard;'* then any troop or company of ragamuffins;
and lastly, when the origin of the word was lost sight
of, and it was forgotten that it properly implied a company, a rabble rout, and not a single person, one would
compliment another, not as belonging to, but as himself being, the' blackguard.'
The examples which I have adduced are, I am persuaded, sufficient to prove that it is not ta useless and
* "A slave that within this twenty years rode with the black
guard in the Duke's carriage,'mongst spits and dripping pans."
(Webster's White -Devil.) Another illustration here of what was
just asserted, p. 134, of the word' carriage.'




LAWS  OF CHANGE.              149
unprofitable study, nor yet one altogether without
entertainment, to which I invite you; that on the contrary any one who desires to read with accuracy, and
thus with advantage and pleasure, our earlier classics,
who would avoid continual misapprehension in their
perusal, and would not often fall short of, and often go
astray from, their meaning, must needs bestow some
attention on the altered significance of English words.
And if this is so, we could not more usefully employ
what remains of this present lecture than in seeking to
indicate those changes which words most frequently
undergo; and to trace as far as we can the causes,
mental and. moral, at work in the minds of men to
bring these changes about, with the good and evil out
of which they have sprung, and to which they bear
witness.
For indeed these changes to which words in the progress of time are submitted are not changes at random,
but for the most part are obedient to certain laws, are
capable of being distributed into certain classes, being
the outward transcripts and witnesses of mental and
moral processes inwardly going forward in those who
bring these changes about.,Many, it is true., will escape
any classification of ours, the changes which have
taken place in their meaning being, or at least seeming
to us, the result of mere caprice; and not explicable
by any principle which we can appeal to as habitually
at work in the mind. Many more, however, are reducible to some law or other, and with these we will occupy
ourselves now.
And, first, the meaning of a word oftentimes is grad



150        CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
ually narrowed. It was once as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed species within itself,
which all went by its common designation. By and
bye it is found convenient that each of these should
have its own more special sign allotted to it. It is here
just as in some newly enclosed country, where a single
household will at first loosely occupy a whole district;
while, as cultivation proceeds, this district is gradually
parcelled out among a dozen or twenty, and under
more accurate culture employs and sustains them all.
Thus, for example, all food was once called'meat;'
it is so in our Bible, and'horse meat' for fodder is
still a phrase in use in the North Country;'meat' is
now a name given only to flesh. Any little book or
writing was a'libel' once; now only such a one as
is scurrilous and injurious. Any leader was a' duke'
(dux); any journey, by land as much as by sea, a'voyage;''fairy' was not a name restricted, as now,
to the Gothic mythology; thus "the fairy Egeria"
(Sir J. Harrington); a'corpse' might be living quite
as well as dead.'Weeds' were whatever covered
the earth or the person; while now as respects the
earth, those only are'weeds' which are noxious, or at
least self sown; as regards the person, we speak of no
other'weeds' but the widow's. In each of these cases,
the same contraction of meaning, the separating off and
assigning to other words of large portions of this, has
found place.'To starve' (the German'sterben,' and
generally spelt' sterve' up to the middle of the seventeenth century) meant once to die any manner of death;
thus Chaucer says Christ "sterved upon the cross for




WORDS CONTRACT THIEIR MEANING.            151
our redemption;" it is now restricted to the dying by
cold or by hunger. Words not a few were once applied
to both sexes alike, which are now restricted to the
female. It is so even with'girl,' which was once a
young person of either sex;* while other words in this
list, such for instance as'hoyden' (Milton, prose),' shrew' (Chaucer),' coquet,'' witch' (Wiclif),'termagant' (Bale),'scold,''slut' (Gower), must be regarded
in their present exclusive appropriation to the female
sex as evidences of men's rudeness, and not of women's
deserts.
The necessities of an advancing civilization demand
a greater precision and accuracy in the use of words
having to do with weight, measure, number, size.
Almost all such words as'acre,''furlong,''yard,''gallon,''peck,' were once of a vague and unsettled
use, and only at a later day, and in obedience to the
requirements of commerce and social life, exact measures and designations.  Thus every field was once an'acre;' and this remains so still with the German'acker.' It was not till about the reign of Edward the
First that'-acre' was restricted to an exact measure and
portion of land.  A'furlong' was a'furrow-long,' or
length of a furrow.  Any pole was a'yard,' and this
the vaguer use of the word survives in'sailyard,'
* And no less so in French with' dame,' by which form not' domina'
only, hut' dominus,' was represented. Thus in early French poetry,'Dame Dieu' for'Dominus Deus' continually. We have here the
key to the French exclamation, or oath, as we now perceive it to be,'Dame!' of which the dictionaries give no account. See G-inin's
Variations du Langage Fran~ais, p. 347-a most instructive work.




152       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
" hallyard,' and in other sea-terms. Every pitcher was
a' galon.' (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif.) And the same has
no doubt taken place in all other languages. I will
only remind you how the Greek' drachm' was at first
a handful (SpaXtj  =-'manipulus,' from  dpaivtao, to
grasp); its later word for ten thousand (/tvpiot) implied in Homer's time any great multitude.
Opposite to this is a counter process by which words
of narrower intention gradually enlarge the domain of
their meaning, becoming capable of much wider application than any which once they admitted. Instances
in this kind are fewer than in that which we have just
been considering. The main stream and course of
human thoughts and human discourse tends the other
way, to discerning, distinguishing, dividing, and then
to the permanent fixing of the distinctions gained, by
the aid of designations which shall keep apart for ever
in word that which has been once severed and sundered
in thought. Nor is it hard to perceive why this process
should be the more frequent. MAen are struck with the
likenesses between those things which are presented to
them, with their points of resemblance; on the strength
of which they bracket them  under a common term.
Further acquaintance reveals their points of unlikeness, the.ieal dissimilarities which lurk under superficial resemblances, the need therefore of a different
notation for objects which are essentially different.
It is comparatively much rarer to discover real likeness under what at first appeared as unlikeness; and
usually when a word moves forward, and from a
specialty indicates now a generality, it is not in obedi



WORDS ENLARGE THEIR MEANING.          153
ence to any such discovery of the true inner likeness
of things, -the  steps of successful generalizations
being marked and secured in other ways. But this
widening of a word's meaning is too often a result of
those elements of disorganization and decay which are
at work in a language. lM~en forget a word's history
and etymology; its distinctive features are obliterated
for them, with all which attached it to some thought
or fact which by right was its own. Appropriated
and restricted once to some striking specialty which it
vigorously set out, it can now be used in a wider,
vaguer, more unsettled way. It can be employed
twenty times for once when it would have been possi-,
ble formerly to employ it. Yet this is not gain, but
pure loss. It is thus become part of the mnob of words,
and has ceased to be part of the army.
[Let me instance the word'preposterous.' It is now
no longer of any practical service at all in the language, being merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for absurd. But restore and confine it to its old
use, and to the one peculiar branch of absurdity which
it designated once, namely the reversing of the true
order of things, the putting of the last first, and, by
consequence, of the first last, and of what excellent
service the word would be capable. Thus it is'preposterous,' in the most accurate use of the word, to put
the cart before the horse, to expect wages before the
work is done, to hang a man first and try him afterwards; and in this strict andlaccurate sense the word
was always used by our elder writers.
In like manner'to prevaricate' was never employed




154      CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
by good writers of the seventeenth century without
nearer or more remote allusion to the use of it in the
Latin law courts, where a'prevaricator' (properly a
straddler with distorted legs) did not mean as now
with us generally and loosely, one who shuffles and
evades; but one who plays false in a particular manner; who, undertaking or being bound by his office to
prosecute a charge, is in secret collusion with the opposite party, and betraying the cause which he affects
to support, so manages the accusation as to obtain not
the condemnation, but the acquittal of the accused.
IIow much force would the keeping of this in mind
add to many passages in our elder divines.
What now is' idea' for us? How infinite the fall of
this word since the time when Milton sang of the Creator contemplating his newly created world,
" how it showed,
Answering his great idea,"
to its present use when this person " has an idea that
the train has started," and the other "' had no idea that
the dinner would be so bad."  But this word'idea' is
perhaps the worst case in the English language; in no
other instance perhaps is a word so seldom used with
any tolerable correctness; in none is the distance so
immense between the sublimity of the word in its
proper use, and the triviality of it in its slovenly and
its popular.
This tendency in words to lose the sharp rigidly
defined outline of meaning which they once possessed,
to become of wide, vague application instead of fixed,




WCORDS LOSE THEIR PRECISENESS.       155
definite, and precise, to mean almost anything, and so
really to mean nothing, is, as I have already said, one
of those tendencies, and among the most fatally effectnal, which are at work for the final ruin of a language,
and, I do not fear to add, for the demoralization of
those that speak it. It is one against which we shall
all do well to watch; for there is none of us who cannot do something in keeping words close to their own
proper meaning, and in resisting their encroachment
on the domain of others.
The causes which bring this mischief about are not
hard to trace. We all know that when a piece of our
silver money has long acted as "pale and common
drudge tween man and man," all which it had at first
of sharper outline and livelier impress is obliterated
from it in the end. So it is with words, above all with
words of science and theology. These getting into
general use, and passing often from mouth to mouth,
lose the image and superscription which they had, before they descended from the school to the marketplace, from the pulpit to the street. Being now caught
up by those who understand imperfectly and thus incorrectly their true value, who will not take the trouble of grasping that, or who are incapable of doing so,
they are obliged to accommodate themselves to the
new sphere in which they circulate, by laying aside
much of the precision and accuracy and depth which
once they had. They become looser, shallower, more
indefinite; till in the end, as exponents of thought and
feeling,'they cease to be of any service at all.
Sometimes a word does not thus merely narrow or




156       CHANGED MEANING OF SWORDS.
extend its meaning, but altogether changes it, and this in
more ways than one. Thus a secondary figurative sense
will occasionally quite put out of use and extinguish the
literal, until in the entire predominance of that it is altogether forgotten that it ever possessed this. I think I
may instance' bombast' as a word about which, in the
great body of those who use it, this forgetfulness is
complete.  The present meaning of'bombast' is well
known to us all, namely inflated words, " full of sound
and fury," but "'signifying nothing."  This, which is
now its sole meaning, was once only the secondary and
superinduced;'bombast' being properly cotton, or the
cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with which
garments were stuffed out and lined.  You remember
perhaps how  Prince Hal addresses Falstaff, "H -ow
now, my sweet creature of bombast."  Here the word
is used in its literal sense; and another early poet has
this line:
"Thy body's bolstered out with bombast and with bags."
It was then transferred in a vigorous image to the big
words without strength or solidity wherewith the discourses of some were stuffed. out, and has now quite
foregone any other meaning. So too'to garble' was
once "to cleanse from  dross and dirt, as grocers do
their spices, to pick or cull out."' It is never used
now in this its primary sense, and has indeed undergone this further change, that while once'to garble'
was to sift for the purpose of selecting the best, it is
* Phillips,'ewtv World of Words, 1706.




'POLITE,' ETC.              157
now to sift with a view of picking out the worst.'Polite' is another word in which the figurative sense
has quite put out the literal.  WTe still speak of'polished' surfaces; but not any more with Cudworth,
of "_polite bodies, as looking glasses."
Or, again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly
progressive courses of change, itself a faithful index of
changes going on in society and in the minds of men,
till at length everything is changed about it. The
process of this it is often very curious to observe;
capable as not seldom it is, of being watched step by
step in its advances to the final consummation. There
may be said to be three leading phases which the word
successively presents, three steps in its history. In the
first the word grows naturally out of its own root, is
filled with its own natural meaning. In the second,
the word allows another meaning, one superinduced
on the former, and extraneous to its etymology; to
share with the other in the possession of it, on the
ground that where the former exists,the latter commonly
co-exists with it. At the third step, the newly introduced meaning, not satisfied with its moiety, with
dividing the possession of the word, has thrust out the
original and rightful possessor altogether, and remains
in sole and exclusive possession. The three successive
stages may be represented by a, ab, b; in which series
b, which is only admitted as secondary at the second
stage, at the third becomes primary and indeed alone.
We are not to suppose that in actual fact the transitions from one signification to another are so strongly
and distinctly marked, as I have found it convenient
7




158       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine anything more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible
than the process of change. The manner in which the
new meaning first insinuates itself into the old, and
then drives out the old, can only be compared to the
process of petrifaction, as rightly understood-the water
not gradually turning what is put into it to stone, as
we generally take the operation to be; but successively
displacing each several particle of that which is brought
within its power, and depositing a stony particle in its
stead, till, in the end, while all appears to continue the
same, all has in fact been thoroughly changed. It is
precisely thus, by such slow, gradual, and subtle advances that the new meaning filters through and pervades the word, little by little displacing entirely that
which it before possessed.
No word would illustrate this process better than that
Qld -familiar example, familiar probably to us all, of
{villain.' The'villain' is first the serf or peasant,
rvillanus,' because attached to the'villa' or farm. He
is secondly the peasant who, it is taken for granted, will
be churlish, selfish, dishonest, and generally of evil
moral conditions, these having come to be assumed as
always belonging to him, and to be permanently associated with his name, by those who were at the
springs of language. At the third step, nothing of the
meaning which the etymology suggests, nothing of'villa,' survives any longer; the peasant is quite dismissed, and the evil moral conditions of him who is
called by this name alone remain. That they do so is
witnessed by the fact that the name would now in this




'BOOR,''PAGAN.'             159
its final stage be applied as freely, if he deserved it, to
peer as to peasant.' Boor' has had exactly the same
history, being first the cultivator of the soil; then
secondly, the cultivator of the soil who, it is assumed,
will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly; and then thirdly,
any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly. So too'pagan;' which is first villager, then heathen villager,
and lastly heathen. You may trace the same progress
in'churl,''clown,''antic,' and in numerous other
words. The intrusive meaning might be likened in all
these cases to the cuckoo, which is' not content with
laying its own eggs in the sparrow's nest, but in the end
thrusts out and expels the rightful occupants altogether.
Let me instance one word more by way of illustrating this part of my subject. It shall be the word'gossip,' on which however there will be a word or two
first to say. I called your attention in my last lecture
to the true character of several words and forms in use
among our country people, and claimed for them to be
in many instances genuine English, although English
now more or less antiquated and overlived. Not otherwise is it with this word'gossip.' I have myself heard
this title given by our IHampshire peasantry to the
sponsors in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers.
I do not say that it is a usual word; but it is occasionally employed, and well understood. This is a perfectly
correct employment of' gossip,' in fact its proper and
original one, and involves moreover a very curious
record of past beliefs.'Gossip' or' gossib,' as Chaucer
spelt it, is a compound word, made up of'God' and
an old Anglo-Saxon word,'sib,' still alive in Scotland,




160       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
as all readers of Walter Scott will remember, and in
some parts of England, and which means akin; they
were said to be'sib,' who were related to one another.*
But why, you may ask, was the name given to sponsors?
Out of this reason;-in the middle ages it was the prevailing belief (and the Romlish Church still affirms it),
that those who stood as sponsors to the same child,
besides contracting spiritual obligations on behalf of
that child, also contracted spiritual affinity one with
another; they became sib, or akin, in God; and thus
"gossips.' Out of this faith the Roman Catholic Church
will not allow (unless indeed by dispensations procured
for money), those who have stood as sponsors to the
same child, afterwards to contract marriage with one
another, affirming that they are too nearly related for
this to be lawful.
Take' gossip' however in its ordinary present use,
as one addicted to idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear
no relation whatever to its etymology and first meaning. The same three steps however which we have
traced before will bring us to its present use.' Gossips'
are, first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common sponsorship into affinity and near familiarity with
one another; secondly, these sponsors, who being thus
brought together, allow themselves one with the other
* "Thus fareth the golden mean through the misconstruction of
extremes. Well tempered zeal is lukewarmness, devotion is hypocrisy,
charity ostentation, constancy obstinacy, gravity pride, humility
abjection of spirit; and so go through the whole parish of virtues,
where misprision and envy are gossips, be sure the child shall be
nicknramed." (Whitelock's Zootonzia, 1654, p. I.)




WORDS TAKE A NEW COLORING.           161
in familiar, and then in trivial and idle, talk; thirdly,
any who allow themselves in this trivial and idle talk,
-called in French'commerage,' from the fact that'commere' has run through exactly the same stages as
its English equivalent.
It is plain that words which designate not things
and persons only, but these as they are contemplated
more or less in an ethical light, words which tinge
with a moral sentiment what they designate, are peculiarly exposed to change; are constantly liable to take
a new coloring, or to lose an old. The guage and
measure of praise or blame, honour or dishonour, admiration or abhorrence, which they convey, is so
purely a mental and subjective one, that it is most
difficult to take:accurate note of its rise or of its fall,
while yet there are causes continually at work leading
it to the one or the other. There are words not a few,
but ethical words above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away from their former moorings, that
although their position is now very different from that
which they; once occupied, scarcely one in a hundred
of casual readers, of those whose attention has not
been specially called to the subject, will have observed
that they have moved at all.
Here too we observe some words conveying less of
praise or blame than once, and some more; while some
have wholly shifted from the one to the other. Some
words were at one time words of slight, almost of
offence, which have altogether ceased to be so now.
Still these are rare by comparison with those which
once were harmless, but now are harmless no more;




162       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
which once it may be were terms of honour, but which
now imply a slight or even a scorn. It is only too
easy to perceive how this should come to pass. But
to take an example or two. If any were to speak now
of royal children as " royal imps," it would sound, and
with our present use of the word would be, impertinent and unbecoming enough; and yet'imp' was
once a name of dignity and honour, and not of slight,
or of undue familiarity.  Thus Spenser addresses the
Muses in this language,
" Ye sacred impns that on Parnasso dwell;"
and'imp' was especially used of the scions of royal
or illustrious houses. More than one epitaph, still existing, of our ancient nobility might be quoted, beginning in such language as this, "' Here lies that noble
im2p."  Or what should we say of a poet who should
commence a solemn poem in this fashion,
"' Oh Israel, oh household of the Lord,
Oh Abraham's brats, oh brood of blessed seed" —
what should we consider, but that he meant by using
low words on solemn occasions to turn sacred things
into ridicule?  Yet this was very far from the intention of Gascoigne, the poet whose lines I have just
quoted.  "Abrahlam's brcats" was used by him in perfect good faith, and without the slightest feeling that
anything ludicrous or contemptuous adhered to the
word lbrat,' as indeed in his time there did not.
Call a person'pragmatical' now, and you imply not
merely that he is busy, but over-busy, officious and




' TO PROSE.'                 163
self-important and pompous to boot.  But it once
meant nothing of the kind, and'pragmatical' (like
7rpCt/yaTa-tf06), was one engaged in affairs, being an
honorable title, given to a man simply and industriously engaged in the business which properly concerned him.* So too to say that a person' meddles' or
is a'meddler' implies now that he interferes unduly in
other men's matters, meddling, or mixing himself up,
with them. This was not insinuated in the earlier uses
of the word. On the contrary three of our earlier translations of the Bible have,'Llfeddle with your own business" (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow in one of his sermons draws at some length the distinction between'meddling' and "being meddlesonze," only the latter of
wrhich he condemns.
Or take again the words,'to prose' or a'proser.'
It cannot indeed be affirmed that they convey any
mzoral condemnation, yet they certainly convey no
compliment now; and are almost among the last
which any one would be willing should with justice
be applied either to his talking or his writing. For'to
prose,' as we all now know too well, is to talk or write
heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but'to prose' was once very different from
this; it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a'proser' the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will
follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ever
* "We cannot always be contemplative, or pragnmatical abroad:
but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein the enlarged
soul may leave of awhile her severe schooling." (Milton, Tetra
chordon.)




164        CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
wrote, if he did not write in verse would have'prosed'
and been a' proser,' in the language of our ancestors.
Thus Drayton writes of his contemporar.y Nashe:
"And surely. Nashe, though he a proser were,
A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear;"
that is, the ornament not of a'proser,' but of a poet.
The tacit assumption that vigour, animation, rapid
movement, with all the precipitation of the spirit, belong
to verse rather than to prose, and are the exclusive
possession of it, is that which must explain the changed
uses of the word.
Still it is according to a word's present signification
that we must employ it now. It would be no excuse,
if having applied an insulting epithet to any, we should
afterwards plead that according to its etymology and
primary usage it had nothing offensive or insulting
about it; although indeed Swift assures us that in his
time such a plea was made and was allowed.  "I remember," he says, " at a trial in Kent where Sir George
Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman'knave'
and'villain,' the lawyer for the defendant brought off
his client by alledging that the words were not injurious; for'knave' in the old and true signification
imported only a servant; and' villain' in Latin is villicus, which is no more than a man employed in country
labour,'or rather a baily."  The lawyer may have deserved his success for his ingenuity and his boldness;
though, if Swift reports him aright, not certainly on
the ground of the strict accuracy either of his AngloSaxon or his Latin.




'SYCOPHANT.  165
The moral sense and conviction of men is often at
work upon their words, giving them new turns in
obedience to these convictions, of which their changed
use will then remain a permanent record. Let me
illustrate this by the history of our word'sycophant.'
You probably are acquainted with the story which the
Greek scholiasts invented by way of explaining a word
of which they knew nothing, namely that the'sycophant' was a "manifester of figs," one who exposed
others in the act of exporting figs from Attica, an act
forbidden, they asserted, by the Athenian law. Be
this explanation worth what it may, the word obtained
in Greek a more general sense; any accuser, and then
any false accuser was a'sycophant;' and when the
word was first adopted into the English language, it
was in this meaning: thus an old English poet speaks
of "the railing route of sycopactnts;" and Holland:
"The poor man that hath nought to lose, is not afraid
of the sycophant."  But it has not kept this meaning;
a'sycophant' is now a fawning flatterer; not one who
speaks ill of you behind your back; rather one who
speaks good of you before your face, but good which
he does not in his heart believe. Yet how true a
moral instinct has presided over the changed signification of the word. The calumniator and the flatterer,
although they seem so opposed to one another, how
closely united they really are. They grow out of the
same root. The same baseness of spirit which shall
lead one to speak evil of you behind your back, will
lead him to fawn on you and flatter you before your
face,-out of a sense of which the Italians have a
7*




166       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
proverb: "Who flatters me before, spatters me behind."
But it is not the moral sense only of men which is
thus at work, modifying their words; but the immoral
as well. If the good which men have and feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit there,
so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a constant
tendency-in too many cases it has been a successful
one-to empty words employed in the condemnation
of evil, of the depth and earnestness of the moral reprobation which they once conveyed. Men's too easy
toleration of sin, the feebleness of their moral indignation against it, bring about that the blame which words
expressed once, has in some of them become much
weaker now than once, has from others vanished altogether.  " To do a shrewd turn," was once to do a
wicked turn; and Chaucer, using' shrewdness' by which
to translate the Latin'improbitas,' shews that it meant
wickedness for him; nay, two murderers he calls two'shrews,' —for there were, as already noticed, male
shrews once as well as female. But'a shrewd turn'
now, while it implies a certain amount of sharp dealing, yet implies nothing more; and'shrewdness' is
applied to men rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And not' shrewd' and'shrewdness' only, but
a great many other words,- I will only instance'peevish,''wayward,''luxury,''luxurious,''uncivil,'
conveyed once a much more earnest moral censure than
now they do.
But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have but
opened to you paths, which you, if you are so minded,




ANTECEDENTS OF WORDS.            167
can follow up for yourselves. We have learned lately
to speak of men's'antecedents;' the phrase is newly
come up; and it is common to say that if we would
know what a man really now is, we must know his'antecedents,' that is, what he. has been in time past.
This is quite as true about words. If we would know
what they now are, we must know what they have
been; we must know, if possible, the date and place of
their birth, the successive stages of their subsequent
history, the company which they have kept, all the
road which they have travelled, and what has brought
them to the point at which now we find them; we
must know, in short, their antecedents.
And let me say, without attempting to bring back
school-into these lectures which are out of school, that,
seeking to do this, we might add an interest to our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which otherwise they could never have; that taking such words,
for example, as KicKjuia, or Traltyyevetia, or Erv7pa7reia,
or aoobtarfyi, or %oXiaUTLrc6o, in Greek; as'religio,' or'sacramentum,' or' urbanitas,' or' superstitio,' in Latin;
as'libertine,' or'casuistry,'* or'humanity,' or'humourous,' in English, and seeking to trace the manner in which one meaning grew out of and superseded
another, and how they arrived at that use in which
they have finally rested (if indeed there is not still a
future before our own), we shall derive, I believe,
amusement, I am sure, instruction; we shall feel that
we are really getting something, increasing the moral
* See Whewell's History of Mioral Philosophy in England, pp.
xxvii —xxxii.




168       CHANGED MEANING OF WORDS.
and intellectual stores of our minds; furnishing ourselves with that which may hereafter be of service to
ourselves, may be of service to others-than which
there can be no feeling more pleasurable, none more
delightful. I shall be glad and thankful, if you can
feel as much in regard of that lecture, which I now
bring to its end.




169
LECTURE V.
ON THE CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH WORDS.
WHEN I announce to you that the subject of my
lecture to-day will be English orthography, or the
spelling of words in our native language, with the
alterations which this has undergone, you may perhaps
think with yourselves that a weightier, or, if not a
weightier, yet a more interesting, subject might have
occupied this our concluding lecture. I cannot allow
it to be wanting either in importance or in interest.
Unimportant it certainly is not, but might well engage,
as it often has engaged, the attention of those with far
higher acquirements than any which I possess. Uninteresting it may be, by faults in the manner of treating
it; but I am sure it ought as little to be this; and
would never prove so in competent hands. Let us then
address ourselves to this matter, not without good hope
that it may yield us both profit and pleasure.
Some one has said, "The invention of printing was
very well; but, as compared to the invention of writing,
it was no such great matter after all."  Whoever it was
who made this observation, it is clear that for him use
and familiarity had not obliterated the wonder which
there is in that, whereat we probably have long ceased




170       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
to wonder at all-the power, namely, of representing
sounds by written signs, of reproducing for the eye that
which existed at first only for the ear: and the estimate
which he formed of the relative value of these'two inventions was a just one. Writing indeed stands more
nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves rather to
be compared with it, than with printing; which, with
all its utility, is yet of altogether another and inferior
type of greatness: or, if this is too much to claim for
writing, it may at any rate be affirmed to stand midway
between the other two, and to be as much superior to
the one as it is inferior to the other.
The intention of the written word, that which presides at its first formation, the end whereunto it is a
mean, is by aid of symbols agreed on before, to represent to the eye with the greatest accuracy which is possible the spoken word.
It never fulfils this intention completely, and by degrees more and more imperfectly. Short as man's
spoken word often falls of his thought, so short his
written word falls often of his spoken. Several causes
contribute to this. In the first place, the marks of imperfection and infirmity cleave to writing, as to every
other invention of man. All alphabets have been left
incomplete.  They have superfluous letters, letters, that
is, which they do not want, because other letters already
represent the sound which they represent; they have
dubious letters, letters, that is, which say nothing certain about the sounds they stand for, because more than
one sound is represented by them —our' c,' for instance,
which sometimes has the sound of's,' as in'city,'




THE SPOKEN AND WRITTEN WORD.          171
sometimes of'k,' as in'cat;' they are deficient in letters, that is, the language has elementary sounds which
have no corresponding letters appropriated to them,
and can only be represented by combinations of letters.
All alphabets, I believe, have some of these faults, not
a few of them have all, and more. This then is one
reason of the imperfect reproduction of the spoken
word by the written. But another is, that the human
voice is so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is
able to mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of
sound, so infinitely to modify and vary these sounds,
that were an alphabet complete as human art could
make it, did it possess eight and forty instead of four
and twenty letters, there would still remain a multitude of sounds which it could only approximately give
back.
But a further cause for the divergence which comes
gradually to find place between men's spoken and their
written words is this; what men do often, they will seek
to do with the least possible trouble. There is nothing
which they do oftener than repeat words; they will seek
here then to save themselves trouble; they will contract
two syllables into one; they will slur over, and thus
after a while cease to pronounce, certain letters; for hard
letters they will substitute soft; for those which require
a certain effort to pronounce, they will substitute those
which require little or none.
And thus as the result of these causes a gulf between
the written and spoken word will not merely exist; but
it will be the tendency of it to grow ever wider and
wider. This tendency indeed will be partially counter



172      CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
worked by approximations which from time to time
will by silent consent be made of the written word to
the spoken; here and there a letter dropped in speech
will be dropped also in writing, as the' s' in so many
French words, where its absence is marked by a circumflex; a new shape, contracted or briefer, which a
word has taken on the lips of men, will find its representation in their writing. Still for all this, and despite of these partial readjustments of the relations between the two, the anomalies will be infinite; there
will be a multitude of written letters which have ceased
to be sounded letters; a multitude of words will exist
in one shape upon our lips, and in quite another in our
books.
It is inevitable that the question should arise-Shall
these anomalies be meddled with? shall it be attempted to remove them, and bring writing and speech into
harmony and consent-a harmony and consent which
never indeed in actual fact at any period of the language existed, but which yet may be regarded as the
idea of written speech, as that which it was intended
to display?  If the attempt is to be made, it is clear
that it can only be made in one way. The question is
not open, whether Mahomet shall go to the mountain,
or the mountain to Mahomet. The spoken word is the
mountain; it will not stir; it will resist all interference.
It feels its own primary rights, that it existed the first,
that it is, so to speak, the elder brother; and it will
never be induced to change itself for the purpose of
conforming and complying with the written word.
Men will not be persuaded to pronounce' would' and




THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.            173
dclebt,' because they write these words'would' and'debt' severally with an'1' and with a'b:' but perhaps they might be persuaded to write Iwoud' and'det,' because they pronounce so, and thus with all
other words, in which there exists at present a chasm
between the word as we speak it, and the word as we
write it.
Here we have the explanation of that which in the
history of almost all literatures has repeated itself
more than once, namely the endeavour to introduce
phonetic writing. It has certain plausibilities to rest
on; it has its appeal to the unquestionable fact that
the written word was intended to picture to the eye
what the spoken word sounded in the ear. At the
same time I believe that it would be impossible to introduce it; and if it were possible, that it would be
most undesirable, and this for two reasons; the first
being that the losses consequent upon its introduction
would far outweigh the gains, even supposing those
gains as great as the advocates of the scheme promise;
the second, that these promised gains would themselves
be only very partially realized, or not at all.
In the first place, I believe it to be impossible. It
is clear that such a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the alphabet. The first thing that the
phonographers have perceived is the necessity for the
creation of a vast number of new signs, the poverty of
all existing alphabets, at any rate of our own, not
yielding a several sign for all the several sounds in the
language. Our English phonographers have invented
more than a dozen of these new signs or letters, which




174      CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
are henceforth to take their places and to enjoy equal
rights with our a b c; rejecting three, and adding thirteen, they have raised their alphabet from twenty-six
letters to thirty-six. But such a reconstruction of the
alphabet is simply an impossibility, as much an impossibility as would be the reconstitution of the structure
of the language in any points where it was manifestly
deficient or illogical.  I mean that it is as impossible
to procure the reception by a people of such a reconstituted alphabet.  Sciolists or scholars may sit down
in their studies, and devise these new letters, and
prove that we need them, and that the introduction of
them would be a great gain, and a manifest improvement; and this may be all very true: but if they think
they can induce a people to adopt them, they know
little of how closely entwined the alphabet is with the
whole innermost life of a people. One may freely own
that all present alphabets are redundant here, are deficient there; our English perhaps is as greatly at fault
as any, and with that we have chiefly to do. It is not
to be denied that it has more letters than one to express one and the same sound, that it has only one letter to express two or three sounds; that it has sounds
which are only capable of being expressed at all by
awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the same
time we must accept the fact, as we accept any other
which it is out of our power to change-with regret,
indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence: as one accepts
the fact that Ireland is not thirty or forty miles nearer
to England-that it is so difficult to get round Cape
Horn  that the climate of Africa is so fatal to Euro



VARIETIES OF SPELLING.           175
pean life. A people will no more quit their alphabet
than they will quit their language; they will no more
consent to modify one ab extra than the other. Caesar
avowed that with all his power he could not introduce
a new word, and certainly Claudius could not introduce
a new letter. Centuries may sanction the bringing in
of a new one, or the dropping of an old. But to imagine that it is possible suddenly to introduce a group
of new, a dozen or more, as these reformers proposethey might just as feasibly propose that the English
language should form its comparatives and superlatives
on some entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion,
by the terminations'oteros' and' otatos;' or that we
should agree to set up a dual; or that our substantives
should return to their Anglo-Saxon declensions. Any
one of these or like proposals would not betray a whit
more ignorance of the eternal laws which regulate human language, and of the limits within which deliberate
action upon it is possible, than does this of increasing
our alphabet by thirteen entirely novel signs.
But grant it possible, grant that our six and twenty
letters have so little sacredness in them, that men
would endure a crowd of unknown interlopers to mix
themselves on an equal footing with them, still this
could only be from a sense of the greatness of the advantage to be derived from this introduction. The
great advantage claimed by the advocates of the system is that it would facilitate the learning to read, and
wholly save the labour of learning to spell, which " on
the present plan occupies," as they assure us, " at the
very lowest calculation from three to five years."




176       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
Spelling, it is said, would no more need to be learned
at all; since whoever knew the sound, would necessarily know also the spelling, this being in all cases in
perfect conformity with that. The anticipation of this
gain rests upon two assumptions which are tacitly
taken for granted, but both of them, as I now perceive,
erroneous; although I granted too hastily in some former observations on the same subject that the system
would be attended by this gain.
The first of these assumptions is, that all men pronoLunce all words alike, so that whenever they come to
spell a word, they will exactly agree as to what the
outline of its sound is. [Now we are sure men will not.
do this from the fact that, before there was any fixed
and settled orthography in our language, when therefore everybody was more or less a phonographer, seeking to write down the word as it sounded to himns, for
he had no other law to guide him, the variations of
spelling were infinite.  Take for instance the word'sudden;' which does not seem to promise any great
scope for variety. I have myself met with this word
spelt in no less than the following fourteen ways
among our early writers;'sodain,''sodaine,''sodan,''sodayne,''sodden,''sodein,''sodeine,''soden,'' sodeyn,''suddain,''suddaine,''suddein,''sudden,''sudeyn.' The same is evident from the spelling of uneclucated persons in our own day. They have no other
rule but tile sound to guide them. How is it that they
do not all spell alike; erroneously, it may be, as having only the sound for their guide, but still falling all
into exactly the same errors?  They not merely spell




PRONOUNCING DICTIONARIES.          177
wrong, which might be laid to the charge of our perverse system of spelling, but with an inexhaustible
diversity of error, and that too in case of simplest
words. Thus the little town of Woburn would seem
to give small room for caprice in spelling, while yet
the postmaster there has made, from the superscription
of letters that have passed through his hands, a collection of no less than two hundred and forty-four varieties of ways in which the place has been spelt. It
may be said that these were all or nearly all from the
letters of the uneducated. True-but it is for their
sakes, and to place them on a level with the educated,
or rather to accelerate their education by the omission
of a useless yet troublesome discipline, that the change
is proposed. I wish to show you that after the change
they would be just as much or almost as much at a
loss in spelling as now.
And another reason which would make it just as
necessary then to learn orthography as now, is the following. Pronunciation, as I have already noticed, is
far too fine and subtle a thing to be more than approximated to, and indicated in the written letter. In a
multitude of cases the difficulties which pronunciation
presented would be sought to be overcome in different
ways, so that different spellings would arise; or if not
so, one would have to be arbitrarily selected, and would
have need to be learned, just as much as the spelling
of a word now has need to be learned. I will only
ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to turn to any
Pronouncing Dictionary. This greatest of all absurdities, a Pronouncing Dictionary, may be of some service




178       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
to you in this matter; it will certainly be of no service
to you in any other.  When you mark the elaborate
and yet ineffectual artifices by which it toils after the
finer distinctions of articulation, seeks to reproduce in
letters what exists and can only exist as the spoken
tradition of pronunciation, acquired from  lip to lip,
capable of being learned, but incapable of being taught;
or when you compare two of these dictionaries with
one another, and mark the entirely different schemes
and combinations of letters which they have for representing the same sound to the eye; you will then perceive how idle the attempt to make the written in language commensurate with the sounded; you will own
that not merely out of human caprice, ignorance, or
indolence, the former falls short of and differs from the
latter; but that this lies in the necessity of things, in
the fact that man's voice can effect a great deal more
than ever his letter can. You will then perceive that
there would be as much, or nearly as much, of the
arbitrary in spelling which calls itself phonetic as in
our present, that spelling would have to be learned
just as really then as now. Nor should we be able to
dismiss the spelling card even after the arrival of that
great day, when, for example, those lines of Pope
which hitherto have presented themselves to our eyes
in this fashion:
"But errs not nature from this gracious end,
From burning suns when livid deaths descend,
When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep
Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep?"
when, I say, instead of these we should read:




LOSSES OF PHONETIC SPELLING.             179
"q. bet erz not untymtr from dis grefss end,
from b-rniij ssnz hwen livid dets desend,
hwen ertkweks swolo, or hwen tempests swip
touniiz tu wsn grey, hal nefonz tu de dip."
The scheme would not then fulfil its promises. Its
promised gains, when we come to look closely at them,
disappear. And now for its losses. There are in
every language a vast number of words, which are indistinguishable to the ear, but are at once distinguishable to the eye by the spelling. I will only mention
such as are the same parts of speech; thus' sun' and'son;''reign,''rain,' and'rein;''hair' and'hare;''plate' and'plait;''moat' and'mote;''pear' and'pair;''air' and'heir;''ark' and' arc;''mite' and'might;'  pour' and'pore;''veil' and'vale;''knight'
and'night;''knave' and'nave;''pier' and'peer;'' rite' and' right;''site' and' sight;''aisle' and' isle;''concent' and'consent;''signet' and'cygnet.'  Now,
of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the
cause of serious confusion, that there should be words
in spoken language of entirely different origin and
meaning, which yet are not in sound to be differenced
from one another.  The phonographers simply propose
to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to our
spoken language, to the written language as well. It
is fault enough in the French language, that'mere' a
mother,'mer' the sea,'maire' a mayor of a town,
should have no perceptible difference between them in
the spoken tongue; or again that the same should find
place in respect of'ver' a worm,'vert' green,'verre'
a glass,' vers' a verse. Surely it is not very wise to




180      CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
propose gratuitously to extend the same fault to the
written language as well.
This loss in so many cases of the power of discriminating between words, which however liable to confusion
now in our spoken language, are liable to none in our
written, would be serious enough: but more serious
than this would be the loss in so many cases of all
which visibly connects a word with the past, which
tells its history, and indicates the quarter from which it
has been derived. In how many English words a
letter which is silent to the ear, is yet most eloquent to
the eye-the' g' for instance in'deign,'' feign,''reign,''impugn,' telling as it does of' dignor,''fingo,''regno,'
and'impugno;' as the'b' in'debt,''doubt,' is not
idle, while it tells of' debitum' and' dubium.'
At present in all languages it is the written word
which is the conservative element in them. It is the
abiding witness against the mutilations or other capricious changes in their shape which affectation, folly,
ignorance, and half knowledge would introduce. It is
not indeed always able to hinder the final adoption of
these corrupter forms, but yet opposes a constant and
very often a successful resistance to them. With the
adoption of phonetic spelling, this witness would exist
no longer; whatever was spoken would have also to
be written, let it be never so barbarous, never so great
a departure from the true form of the word. Nor
is it merely probable that such a barbarizing process,
such an adopting and sanctioning of a vulgarism, might
take place, but among phonographers it already has
taken place. We all probably are aware that there is




PRONUNCIATION ALTERS.                 181
a vulgar pronunciation of the word' Europe,' as though
it were' Eurup.'  Now it is quite possible that nuinerically more persons in England may pronounce the
word in this manner than in the right; and therefore
the phonographers are only true to their principles
when they spell it in the fashion which they do,' Eurup,'
or indeed, omitting the E at the beginning, 1Urup, with
the life of the first syllable assailed no less than that of
the second.  What- are the consequences?  First, its
relations with the old mythology are at once and entirely broken off; secondly, the probable etymology
of the word from two Greek words, signifying' broad'
and' face,' Europe being so called from the broad line
or face of coast which our continent presented to the
Asiatic Greek, is totally obscured. But. so far from
the spelling servilely following the pronunciation, I
should be bold to  affirm  that if ninety-nine out of
every hundred persons in  England chose to call it' lrupi' this would be a vulgarism still, against which
the written word ought to maintain its protest, not
sinking down to their level, but seeking to raise them
to its own.*
* How different from innovations like this the changes in the spelling of German which J. Grimm, so far as his own example may
reach, has introduced, and the still bolder and more extensive ones
which in the Preface to his Deutsches TVdr*terbach, pp. liv. -lxii.,
le avows his desire to see introduced, as the employment ofI f,' not
merely where it is at present used, but also wherever' v' is now employed; the substituting the' v,' which would be thus disengaged,
for' w,' and the entire dismissal of' w.' They may be advisable, or
they may not; it is not for strangers to offer any opinion; but at any
rate they are not a seizing of the fluctuating, superficial accidents of
8




182       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
And if there is much in orthography which is unsettled now, how much more would there be then.
Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is continually
altering, their spelling would of c6urse have continually
to alter too.  For that pronunciation is undergoing
constant changes, although changes for the most part
unmarked, or marked only by a few, it would not be
difficult to prove. Take a Pronouncing Dictionary of
fifty or a hundred years ago; turn to almost any page,
and you will observe schemes of pronunciation there
recommended, which are now merely vulgarisms, or
which have been dropped altogether.  We gather
from a discussion in Boswell's Life of Johnson, that in
his time'great' was as often pronounced'greet' as'grate:' Pope usually so rhymes it; thus in the Dunclad:
" Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great,
There, stamped with arms, Newcastle shines complete."
Again Pope rhymes'obliged' with'besieged;' and it
has only ceased to be'obleeged' almost in our own time.*
Who now drinks a cup of' tay'? yet there is abundant
evidence that this was the fashionable pronunciation in
the first half of the last century. To appeal again to
Pope, and to adduce one couplet out of many which
he or others would supply in proof:
"Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea. "
the present, and a seeking to give permanent authority to these,
but they all rest on a deep historic study of the language, and of the
true genius of the language.
*See back, p. 57.




PRONUNCIATION ALTERS.           183
So too a pronunciation which still survives, though
scarcely among well educated persons, I mean' Room'
for'Rome,' must have been in Shakespeare's time the
predominant one, else there would have been no meanin that play on words occurring in Julius Ccesar, where
Cassius, complaining that in all Rome there was not
roonm for a single man, exclaims,
"Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough."
This much I have thought good to say in respect of
that entire revolution in English orthography, which
some rash innovators have proposed. Let me, dismissing them and their innovations, call your attention to
those alterations in spelling now which are constantly
going forward, at some periods more rapidly than at
others, but which never wholly cease out of a language;
seeking to trace, where this is possible, the motives and
inducements which bring them about. It is a subject
which none can neglect, who desires to obtain even a
tolerably accurate acquaintance with his native tongue.
Some principles have been laid down in the course of
what has been said already, which may help us to
judge whether the changes which have found place in
our own have been for better or for worse. We shall
find, if I alm not mistaken, of both kinds.
There are alterations in spelling which are for the
worse. Thus an altered spelling will sometimes obscure the origin of a word to those who, but for this,
would at once have known whence and what it was,
and would have found both pleasure and profit in this




184      CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
knowledge. I need not say that in all those cases
where the earlier spelling revealed the secret of the
word, told its history, which the later defaces or conceals, the change has been injurious, and is to be regretted; while at the same time, where it has thoroughly
established itself, there is nothing to do but to acquiesce
in it: it would be absurd to seek to undo it. Thus
when'grocer' was spelt'grosser,' it was comparatively
easy to see that he first had his name because he sold
his wares not by retail, but in the gross.'Coxcomb'
tells us nothing now; but it did when spelt, as it used
to be,'cockscomb,' the comb of a cock- being a sort of ensign or token which the fool was accustomed to wear.
How many now understand'woodbine'? but who could
have helped understanding'woodbind'?'Pigmy' used formerly to be spelt'pygmy,' and so
long as it was so, no Greek scholar could see the word,
but at once he knew that by it were indicated manikins whose measure in height was no greater than that
of a man's arm from the elbow to the closed fist. Now
he may know this in other ways; but the word itself,
so long as he assumes it to be rightly spelt, tells him
nothing. Or again, the old spelling,'diamant,' was
preferable to the modern, diamond.' It was preferable,
because it told more of the quarter from whence the
word had reached us.'Diamant' and' adamant' are
in fact only two different appropriations of one and the
same Greek, which afterwards became a Latin, word.
The meaning of'adamant' is, as you know, properly
the untameable, and it was a name given at first to




'COUSIN,'' COZEN.'                185
the highest tempered  steel;  but afterwards  transferred'* to the most precious among all the precious
stones, as that which surpassed in hardness every thing
besides.
Neither are new spellings to be praised, which separate a word in appearance from  other words with
which it is really connected; which, for those who are
not thoroughly acquainted with the subject, tend to
break up families of words into separate groups. Thus
when'jaw' was spelt'chaw,' no one could miss its
connexion with the verb'to chew.' Now probably
ninety-nine out of a hundred who use both words, are
entirely unaware of any relationship between them.
It is the same with'cousin' (consanguineus), and'to
cozen' or to deceive. I will not say which of these
words should conform itself to the spelling of the other.
There was great irregularity in the spelling of both
from the first; yet for all this, it was then better than
now, when a permanent distinction has established
itself between them, keeping out of sight that'to cozen'
is in all likelihood to deceive under show of kindred
and affinity; which if it be so, Shakespeare's words,
* First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny in Latin.
-The real identity of the two words explains Milton's use of' diamoncl,' Paradise Lost, 7; and in that sublime passage in his Jdpology
for Snmectymnuus: " Then zeal, whose substance is etherial, arming
in comiplete diamonzod."-Diez, (T Vrterbuch d. Roman. Skprachen,
p. 123), supposes that it was under a certain influence of' diafano,'
the translucent, that' adamante' in Italian, from whence we have
derived the word, was changed into' diamante.'




186       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
" Cousins indeed, and by their uncle cozened
Of comfort,"*
will be found to contain not a pun, but an etymology.
The real relation between'bliss' and'to bless' is in
like manner at present obscured.
The omission of a letter, or the addition of a letter,
may each effectually do its work in concealing the true
character and origin of a word. Thus the omission of
a letter.  When the first syllable of'bran-new,' was
spelt'brand' with a final' d,'brand-new,' how vigorous an image did the word contain.  The'brand' is
the fire, and'brand-new' is that which is fresh and
bright, as being newly come from the forge and fire.
It was equivalent to'fire-new' (Shakespeare), while
as now spelt, the word conveys to us no image at all.
Again, you have the word'scrip'-as a' scrip' of paper, government'scrip.' Is this the same word with the
Saxon'scrip,' a wallet, having in some strange manner obtained these meanings so different and so remote?
Have we here two wholly different words, though spelt
alike (homonyms)? or only two different applications
of one and the same word?  TWe have only to note
how the first of these'scrips' used to be written, namely with a final't,' not scrip but' script,' and we are at
once able to answer the question. This'scrip' is a
Latin, as the other is an Anglo-Saxon, word, and meant
at first simply a written (scripta) piece of paper-a
circumstance which since the omission of the final't'
may easily escape our knowledge.'Afraid' was spelt
* Richard IL., iv. 4.




' WHOLE.'                     187
much better in old times with the double'ff,' than
with the single'f' as now. It was then clear that it
was not another form of' afeared,' but wholly separate
from it, the participle of the verb' to affray,'' affrayer,'
or as it is now written,'effrayer.'
In the cases hitherto adduced, it has been the omission of a letter which has disturbed and obscured the
etymology.  The intrusion of a letter sometimes does
the same. Thus in the early editions of Milton, and in
all writers of his time you would find'scent,' an odor,
spelt'sent.' It was better so; there is no other noun
substantive'sent,' with which it is in danger of being
confounded; while its relation with' sentio,' with' resent,'<'dissent,' &c., is put out of sight by its novel
spelling; the intrusive'c' serves only to mislead.
Again,'whole' in Wiclif's Bible, and indeed much
later, occasionally as far down as Spenser, is spelt'hole,' without the'w' at the beginning.  There may
be the advantage in the present orthography of at once
distinguishing the word to the eye from  any other
word; but at the same time the initial'w' now prefixed hides its relation to the verb'to heal,' with which
it is more closely allied.  The'whole' man is he whose
hurt is'healed' or covered (we say of the convalescent
that he'recovers'), the word being closely allied to
* How close this relationship was once, not merely in respect of
etymology, but also of significance, a passage like this will prove:
"Perchance, as vultures are said to smell the earthiness of a dying
corpse; so this bird of prey [the evil spirit which personated Samuel,
I Sam. xxviii. 14] resented a worse than earthly savor in the soul of
Saul, as evidence of his death at hand." (Fuller, The Profane State,
b. 5. c. 4.)




188       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.'hale' (integer), from which also by its modern spelling it is divided.'Wholesome' has naturally followcd
the fortunes of'whole'; it was spelt' holsome' once.' Island' is another word of which our present spelling is inferior to the old, inasmuch as it suggests a hybrid formation, as though the word were made up of
the Latin'insula,' and the Saxon'land.' It is quite
true that'isle' is in relation with, and descent from,'insula,''isola,''ile; and hence probably the misspelling of'island.' This last however has nothing
to do with'insula,' being identical with the German'eiland,' the Anglo-Saxon'ealand,' and signif3ying t. he
sea-land, or land girt round with the sea, just as'insula'_-' in salo.' And it is worthy of note that this
spelling of' island' with an' s' in the first syllable is
quite modern. Thus in all the earlier versions of the
Scriptures, including the authorized Version as at first
set forth, it is'iland'; and in proof that this is not
accidental, it may be observed that while'iland' has
not the's,''isle' has it, as at Rev. i. 9.'Iland' indeed is the spelling which we meet with far clown into
the seventeenth century.
What has just been said of'island' leads me naturally to observe that one of the most frequent causes
of alteration in the spelling of a word is a wrongly
assumed derivation.  It is then sought to bring the
word into harmony witlh, and to make it by its spelling suggest, this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust upon it.  Here is a subject which, followed
out as it deserves, would form no uninteresting nor yet
uninstructive chapter in the history of language.  I




'PYRAMID,' WHY SO SPELT.           189
will offer one or two small contributions to it. But
first let me observe how remarkable an evidence we
have in this fact of the manner in which not the learned
only, but all people alike, learned and unlearned, crave
to have a meaning in the words which they employ,
crave to have these words not as body only, but as
body and soul. What an attestation, I say, of this
lies in the fact that where a word in its proper derivation is unintelligible to them, they will shape and
mould it into some other form, not enduring that it
should be a mere dead sound without sense in their
ears; and if they do not know the right origin of it,
will rather put into it a wrong one, than that it should
have for them no meaning, and suggest no derivation
at all.*
There is probably no language in which such a process has not been going forward; in which it is not the
explanation, in a great number of instances, of the
changes in spelling and even in form which words
have undergone. I will offer a few examples of it
from foreign tongues, before adducing any from our
own.  Here is one from the Greek, but one of which
the consequences survive in our own language to the
present day.'Pyramid' is a word, the spelling of
which is effected by an erroneous assumption of its
derivation. It is spelt by us with a'y' in the first syllable, as it was spelt with the v corresponding in the
Greek. But why was this? It was because the
Greeks assumed that the pyramids were so named
* Diez looks with much favour on.this process, and calls it, Ein
sinnreiches mittel fremdlinge ganz heimisch zu machen.
8*




190        CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
from  their having the appearance of flame going up
into a point,* and so they spelt'pyramid' that they
might find Trip or'pyre' in it; while in fact the word' pyramid,' as those best qualified to speak on the matter declare to us, has nothing to do with flame or fire
at all; being an Egyptian word of quite a different
signification, and the Egyptian letters being much better represented by the diphthong' ei' than by the letter'y,' as no doubt but for this mistaken scheme of what
the word was intended to mean they would have been.
Once more-the form in which the Greeks reproduced the Hebrew'Jerusalem,' namely'Hierosolyma,'
was intended in all probability to express that it was
the sacred city of the Solymi.t At all events the intention not merely of reproducing the Hebrew word,
but of making it also significant in Greek, of finding
hepov in it, is plainly discernible.  For indeed the
Greeks were exceedingly intolerant of foreign words,
till they had laid aside their foreign appearance-of all
words into which they could not thus put a Greek
soul;T and with a very characteristic vanity, and an
* Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii. 15. 28.
t Tacitus, Hist. v. 2.: Let me illustrate this by one or two instances more in a note.
Thus their word from which, through the Latin, our'butter' has
descended to us, is borrowed, as Pliny (Hist. AJrat. xxviii. 9) tells
us, from a Scythian word, now to us unknown: yet it is sufficiently
plain that they so shaped it and spelt it as to contain apparent allusion to cow and cheese. In oiv3 tvpov there is an evident feeling
after Po9Sf and,vtp6v. Herodian in like manner (v. 6) reproduces
the name of the Syrian goddess Astarte in a shape that is significant
also for Greek ears —c(7PpoapX1, the star-ruler, or stor-queen.




'TARTAR,)'SUNDFLUT.'              191
ignoring of all other tongues but their own, seemed
tacitly to assume that all words, from whatever quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek etymologies.'Tartar' is another word, of which it is at least possible that a wrongly assumed derivation has modified
the spelling, and indeed not the spelling only, but the
very shape in which we now possess it. To many
among us it may be known that the people designated
by this word are not'Tartars,' but' Tatars,' and you
will sometimes see the word spelt without the' r' by
those who are curious in their spelling. How then, it
may be asked, did the form'Tartar' arise?  When
the terrible hordes of middle Asia burst in upon civilized Europe in the thirteenth century, not a few beheld
in the ravages of their innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word in the Revelations (chap.
ix.) concerning the opening of the bottomless pit; and
from this belief ensued the change of their name from'Tatars' to' Tartars,' that thus it might be put into
closer relation with'Tartarus' or hell, out of which
their multitudes were supposed to have proceeded.*
Another good example in the same kind is the modern German word' Siindfiut,' which is now so spelt as
to signify a'sin-flood,' the plague or flood of waters
brought on the world by the sins of mankind; and
probably some of us have before this admired the
* We have here, in this bringing of the words by their supposed
etymology together, the explanation of the fact that Spenser (Fairy
Queen, i. 7. 44), Middleton ( Works, vol. 5. pp. 524, 528, 538), and
others employ' Tartary' as equivalent to' Tartarus' or hell.




192       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISIT.
pregnant significance of the word.  Yet the old I-igh
German word had originally no such intention; it was
spelt' Sinfluot,' that is' the great flood;' and as late as
Luther, indeed in Luther's own translation of the Bible
is so spelt as to show that the notion of a Isin-flood'
had not yet found its way into, even as it had not affected the spelling of, the word.*
But now to come nearer home.  The little raisins
which are brought from Greece, and which play so
important a part in one of the national dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called'Corinths'; and so you would find them in all mercantile lists of a hundred years ago: either from being
for the most part shipped from Corinth, the principal
commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in
large abundance in the immediate district round about
it. Their likeness in shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working together with
the ignorance of the great majority of English people
about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the
name'Corinths' into'currants,' which now with a
certain unfitness they bear; being not currants at all,
but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive size.'Court-cards,' that is the king, queen, and knave in
each suit, were once'coat-cards';t having their name
from the long splendid'coats' (vestes talares) with
which they were arrayed. It is probable that'coat'
* For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the period at
which' Sinfluot' became' Siindflut,' see the Thlcol. Stud. tl. Ifritvol. vii. p. 613.
t Ben Jonson, The.Jew Inn, Act i. sc. 1.




'COURT-CARD,''WISEACRE.'              193
after a while did not perfectly convey its original
meaning and intention; being no longer in common
use for the long garment reaching down to the heels;
and then'coat' was easily exchanged for'court,' as
the word is now both spelt and pronounced, seeing
that nowhere so fitly as in a court should such splendidly arrayed personages be found.
A  public house in the neighbourhood of London
having a few years since for its sign  "The George
Canning" is already "The George and Cannon," so
rapidly do these transformations proceed, so soon is
that forgotten which we suppose would never be forgotten.  The mere determination to make a word lookc
English, to put it into an English shape, without thereby even so much as seeming to attain any result in the
way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring
about a change in its spelling, and even in its form.
How else could' weissager' have taken its present form
of' wiseacre'?*
It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word, to receive a certain impulse and
modification from  another.  This extends sometimes
beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so,
would hardly belong to our present theme. Still I
may notice an instance or two.  Thus our'obsequies'
* Exactly the same happens in other languages; thus,' armbrust,'
a crossbow, looks German enough, and yet has nothing to do with' arm' or' brust,' being a contraction of' arcubalista,' but a contraction under these influences. As little has' abcnteuerl anything to do
with'abenad' or' theuer,' however it may seem to be connected with
them, being indeed the Provencal' adventura.'




194      CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
is the Latin'exequie,' but formed under a certain inmpulse of'obsequium,' and seeking to express the observant honour of that word.' To refuse' is' recusare,'
while yet it has derived the'f' with which its second
syllable begins from'refutare;' it is a medley of the
two. The French'rame,' an oar, is'remus,' but that
unconsciously modified by a recollection of'ramus.''Orange' is no doubt a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which is much more
nearly represented by the Spanish'naranja' than by
any form of it existing in the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of this as the
golden fruit, especially when the " aurea mala" of the
HIesperides were familiar to all antiquity.  There cannot be a doubt that'aurum,''or,' made themselves
felt in the forms which the word assumed in the languages of the west, and that here we have the explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low
Latin'orangia,' and the French'orange,' from whence
is our own.
It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign
languages, as might beforehand be expected, which are
especially subjected to such transformations as these.
The soul which the word once had in its own language
having departed from it, for as many as do not know
that language, or not being now any more to be recognized by those who employ the word, these are not satisfied till they have put another soul into it, and it thus becomes alive to them again. Thus-to take first one or
two very familiar instances, but which serve as well as
any other to illustrate my position —the Bellerophon be



'COUNTRY DANCE,2''NECROMANCY.'             195
cofies for our sailors the' Billy Ruffian,' for what can
they know of the Greek mythology, or of the slayer of
Chimeera?'Contre danse,' or dance in which the parties stand opposite to one another, becomes'country
dance,'*  as though it were the dance of the country
folk and rural districts, as contrasted with the quadrille and waltz and more artificial dances of the town.
A well known rose, the' rose des quatre saisons,' or of
the four seasons, becomes on the lips of some of our
gardeners,'the rose of the quarter sessions,' though here
it is probable that the eye has misled, rather than the
ear.' Dent de lion' becomes' dandylion,' and in French'mandragora'' main de gloire.''Necromancy' is another word which, if not now,
yet for a long period was erroneously spelt, and indeed
assumed a different shape, under the influence of an
erroneous derivation; which curiously enough, even
now that it has been dismissed, has left behind it the
markls of its presence, in our common phrase, "the
Black Art." I need hardly remind you that'necromancy' signifies, according to its proper meaning, a
* It is upon this word that De Quincey (Life and  ffianners, p. 70,
American Ed.) says excellently well: " It is in fact by such corruptions, by off-sets upon an old stock, arising through ignorance or
mispronunciation originally, that every language is frequently enriched; and new modifications of thought, unfolding themselves in
the progress of society, generate for themselves concurrently appropriate expressions.....  It must not be allowed to weigh
against a word once fairly naturalized by all, that originally it crept
in upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a ground
of legitimation in a case of this nature, as it is in law. And the old
axiom is applicable-Fieri non debuit, factum valet. Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their wealth."




196       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
prophesying by aid of the dead, and rests on the presumed power of raising up by potent spells the dead,
and compelling them to give answers about things to
come.  We all know that it was supposed possible to
exercise such power; we have a very striking example
of it in the story of the Witch of Endor, and a very
horrid one in Lucan.*   But the Latin mediaeval
writers, whose Greek was either little or none, spelt
the word,'nigromancy,' as if its first syllable had been
Latin: at the same time, not wholly forgetting the
original meaning, but in fact getting round to it
though by a wrong process, they understood the dead
by these' nigri,' or'blacks,' whom they had brought
into the word.t  Down rather to a late period we find
the spellings,'negromancer,' and'negromancy,' frequent in English.'Pleurisy' used often to be spelt, (I do not think it
is so now,) without the' e' in the first syllable, evidently
on the tacit assumption that it was from'plus''pluris.'
When Shakespeare falls into an error, he "makes the
offence gracious;" yet, I think, he would scarcely have
written,
" For goodness growing to a plurisy
Dies of his own too much,"
but that he in this way derived' plurisy' from'pluris;'
which, even with the "small Latin and less Greek"
that Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely would have
* Phars. vi. 720-830.
t Thus in a Vocabulary, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio
facta per nigros.




'FRONTISPIECE,'' SIREN.'          197
done, had the word presented itself in tl at forml, which
by right of its descent from 7rXevpd, (its meaning being
a pain or sickness in the side) it ought to have possessed.
In both these words which I have last adduced, the
correct spelling has in the end resumed its sway. It
is not so with'frontispiece' which ought to be, as by
Milton spelt,'frontispice,' being the low Latin'frontispicium,' from'frons' and'aspicio,' the fore-front of
the building, that part which presents itself to the view.
It was only the entirely ungrounded notion that the
word'piece' constitutes the last syllable, which has
given rise to our present orthography.
You may wonder that I have dwelt so long on these
details of spelling; that I have bestowed on them  so
much of my own attention, that I have claimed for
them so much of yours; yet in truth I cannot regard
them as unworthy of our very closest heed. For indeed
of how much beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate
spelling the certain indication.  Thus when we meet'syren' for'siren,' as so strangely often we do, almost
always in newspapers, and often where we should
hardly have expected (I met it lately in the Quarterly
_Review, and again in Gifford's  fassinger), how very
difficult it is not to be "judges of evil thoughts," and to
take this slovenly misspelling as the specimen and evidence of an inaccuracy and ignorance which reaches
very far wider than the single word which is before
us. But why is it that so muchl significance is ascribed
to a wrong spelling?  Because ignorance of a word's
spelling at once argues ignorance of its origin and
derivation. I do not mean that one who spells rightly




198       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
may not be ignorant of it too, but he who spells
wrongly is certainly so. Thus, to recur to the example
I have just adduced, he who spells' siren''syren,' certainly knows nothing of the magic cords (aeLpat) of
song, by which those beautiful enchantresses were
supposed to draw those that heard them to their ruin.
It will follow from this that where two spellings of
a word exist, and are both employed by persons who
generally write with accuracy and scholarship, there
must be some reason for this; and it will be worth
yoir while to inquire into the causes which enable both
to hold their ground, not ascribing either one or the
other to carelessness or error. It will in these cases
often be found that two spellings exist, because two
views of the word's origin exist, and each of those
spellings is the correct expression of one of these. The
question therefore which way of spelling should continue, and wholly supersede the other, and which, until
this takes place, we should ourselves prefer, can only
be settled by settling which of these etymologies
deserves the preference. So is it, for example, with'chemist' and' chymist,' neither of which has obtained
in our common use the complete mastery over the
other. It is not here, as in some other cases, that one
is certainly right, the other as certainly wrong: but
they severally represent two different etymologies of
the word, and each is correct upon its own. If we are
to spell'chymist' and' chmistry,' it is because these
words are considered to be derived from a Greek word,
Xv,6f, sap; and the chymic art would be that of distilling the juice and sap of plants. I have little doubt,




'SATYR,'' SATIRE.'                  199
however, that the other spelling,'chemist,' not'chymist,' is the correct-one. It was not with the distillation of herbs, but with the amalgamation of metals,
that the chemic art occupied itself at its rise, and the
word embodies a reference to Egypt, to the land of
Ham  or' Cham,'' in which this art was first practised
with success.
Of how much confusion the spelling which used to
be so common,'satyr' for'satire,' is at once the consequence, the expression, and cause; not indeed that
this confusion  first began with us;t for the  same
already found place in the Latin, where'satyricus'
was continually written for' satiricus,' out of a false
assumption of the identity between the Roman satire
and the Greek satyric drama.  The Roman'satira,'
I speak of things familiar to many of my hearers, —is
properly a full dish (lanx being understood) —a dish
heaped up with various ingredients, a'farce' (according to the original signification of that word), or hodge* XMq7ia, as Plutarch tells us Egypt was called, De Isid. et Osir.
c. 33.
t We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this error and
confusion was, how long it endured, of the way in which it was
shared by the learned as well as the unlearned, in Milton's.pology
for Smectynnuus, sec. 7, which every where presumes the identity
of the' satyr' and the' satirist.' It was Casaubon who effectually
dissipated it for the learned world. The results of his investigations were made popular for the unlearned reader by Dryden, in the
very instructive Discourse on Satirical Poetry, prefixed to his
translations of Juvenal; but the confusion still survives, and' satyrs' and' satires,' the GreekI'satyric' drama, the Latin' satirical'
poetry, are still assumed by the greater number to have something
to do with one another.




200      CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
podge; and the word was transferred from this to a
form of poetry which at first admitted the utmost
variety in the materials of which it was composed, the
shapes in which these materials were wrought up;
being the only form of poetry which the Romans did
not borrow from the Greeks. Wholly different from
this, having no one point of contact with it in its form,
its history, or its intention, is the'satyric' drama of
Greece, so called because Silenus and the'satyrs' supplied the chorus; and in their naive selfishness and
mere animal instincts held up before men a mirror of
what they would be, if only the divine, which is also
the truly human, element of humanity, were withdrawn, what man, all that made him man being withdrawn, would be.
And then what light, as we have already seen, does
the older spelling of a word often cast upon its etymology; how often does it clear up the mystery, which
would otherwise hang about it, or which had hung about
it, till some one had noticed and turned to profit this
its earlier spelling. Thus'dirge' is always'dirige' in
early English; this may be the first word in a Latin
psalm or prayer used at funerals; there is a reasonable
probability that the explanation of the word is here;
at any rate if it is not here, it is nowhere. The derivation of' midwife' is uncertain, and has been the subject of discussion; but when we find it spelt' medewife'
and'meadwife,' in WViclif's Bible, this leaves hardly a
doubt that it is the zivfe or woman who acts for a mead
or reward. In cases too where there was no mystery
hanging about a word, how often does-the early spell



'NOSTRIL,'' MORRIS-DANCE.'  201
ing make clear to all that which was before only known
to those who had made the language their study. For
example, if an early edition of Spenser should come
into your hands, or a modern one in which the early
spelling is retained, what continual lessons in English
might you derive from  it. Thus'nostril' is always
spelt by him and his cotemporaries,' nosethrill.' Now'to thrill' is the same as to drill or pierce; it is plain
then here at once that the word signifies the orifice or
opening with which the nose is thrilled or drilled or
pierced. We might have read the word for ever in
our modern spelling without being taught this.
Again the'morris' or'morrice-dance,' which is
alluded to so often by our early poets, as it is now
spelt tells us nothing about itself; but read'morislce
dance,' as it is generally spelt by Holland and his cotemporaries, and you vWill scarcely fail to perceive that
of which indeed there is no manner of doubt; namely,
that it was so called either because it was really, or
was supposed to be, a dance in use among the moriscoes of Spain, and from them introduced into England.*
Or take another example. Our word'cray-fish' or' craw-fish' is said by some of our philologers to be the
French' ecrevisse,' and no doubt rightly: but still the
matter is not self evident.  Trace however the word
through these successive spellings,' krevys' (Lydgate),'crevish' (Gascoigne),'craifish' (Holland), and the
* " I have seen him
Caper upright, like a wild MJ3orisco,
Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells."
Shakespeare, 2 IHenry VI. Act. iii. sc. 1.




202         CHANGED SPELLING  OF ENGLISH.
chasm  between' crayfish' or' craw-fish' and' crevisse'
is by aid of these three intermediate spellings bridged
over at once; and in the fact of'fish' finding its way
into this French word we see only another example of
a law, which has been already abundantly illustrated in
this lecture?*
* In the reprinting of old books it is often very difficult to determine how far the old shape in which words present themselves should
be retained, how far they should be conformed to the present usage.
It is comparatively easy to lay down as a rule that in books intended
for popular use wherever the form of the word is not affected by the
modernizing of the spelling, as where this modernizing consists
merely in the dropping of superfluous letters, there it shall take
place; as who would wish our Bibles to be now printed letter for
letter after the edition of 1611, or Shakespeare with the orthography of the first folio; but wherever more than the spelling, the
actual shape, outline, and character of the word has been affected
by the changes which it has undergone, that in all such cases the
earlier form shall be held fast. There can be little question of the
justice of such a rule as this. At the same time, when it is attempted to carry it out, it is not always easy to draw the line, and to determine what affects the form and being of a word, and what does
not. About some words there can be no doubt; and therefore when
a modern editor of Fuller's Church History announces that he has
allowed himself in such changes as' dirige' into' dirge,'' barreter'
into' barrister,' synonymas' into' synonymous'!,' extempory' into'extemporary,'' scited' into' situated,'' vancurrier' into' avant-courier;' he at the same time informs us that for all purposes of the
study of the English language (and few writers are for this more important than Fuller), he has made his edition utterly useless. Or
again, when modern editors of Shakespeare print, and that without
giving any intimation of the fact,
" Like quills upon the fretful porcupine,"
he having written, and in his first folio the words standing,
"Like quills upon the fretful porpentin?e,"
this being the earlier, and in Shakespeare's time the more commo n




REPRINTING  OF OLD BOOKS.                  203
In other ways also an accurate taking note of the
spelling of words, and of the successive changes which
it has undergone, will often throw light upon them.
Thus we may know, others having assured us of the
fact, that' ant' and' emmet' were originally only two
form of the word, they must be considered as taking a very unwarrantable liberty with his text; and no less, when they substitute' Kenilworth' for' Killingworth,' which he wrote, and which was his,
Marlowe's, and generally the earlier form of the name.
Nor can I help observing that our later reprints of the authorized
Version of Scripture have allowed themselves in alterations, from
which it would have been far better to have abstained-although I am
unable to affirm, not having followed up the matter, how early these
began. It may be quite true that'moe,' where we should write' more,' is antiquated now; but to a certain extent it was so, when
the last revision of our translation was made; if therefore the authors of that revision, on which the Church has set the seal of permanence, chose to introduce it, or finding it in the former versions
to retain it, surely it ought not to have been subsequently removed,
as it has been at John iv. 41; Gal. iv. 27, and perhaps elsewhere.
We do not substitute' struck' for' strake' (Acts xxvii. 17), because' strake' has become archaic; as little therefore ought we to have
changed the perfect' lift' into' lifted' (Acts ix. 41); being indeed
inconsistent here, as'lift' has elsewhere been suffered to remain;
thus Luke xvi. 23: " He lift up his eyes."  If they spelt' kinred,'
as everywhere they did, I believe the universal spelling to a considerably later period, this should not have been changed into'kindred,' nor yet' Jerusalem' substituted for the statelier' Hierusalem.'
So too' broided hair' might have been suffered to remain at 1 Tim.
ii. 9; and'broidered' not now printed in its stead-the good old
English word' to broid,' which still survives in the form,' to braid,'
being the standing word to express the plaiting of hair; in which
sense' to broider,' however it may be related to it, is never used. Or
again, why now' shipwreck,' if they wrote' shipwrack' (2 Cor. xi.
25; 1 Tim. i. 19)? It is true that we betake ourselves to our Bibles
for far higher lessons than lessons in the English language; but why
should we not learn by the way, as the word faithfully retained




204        CHANGED SPELLING  OF ENGLISH.
different spellings of one and the same word; but we
may be perplexed to understand how two forms of a
word, now  so  different, could  ever have diverged
from  a single root.  When however we find the differwould have taught us, the original identity between these two now
distinct words,' wreck' and'wrack'? Least of all should our modern editors have given in to the corruption of' shamefastness' (1
Tim. ii. 9), and printed' shamefacedness,' as now they do, changing
the word which meant once a being established firmly and fast
in honorable shame, into the mere wearing of the blush of shame
upon the Jace. At Luke vii. 41, the question may be more difficult
to determine. The two prseterites of' to owe,"' owed' and' ought,'
have so far separated off in meaning, that money is not' ought' any
more, but only'owed.' With all this it may still be a question
whether the words of the earlier editions of our Bible should have
been changed: " There was a certain creditor who had two debtors;
the one ought five hundred pence, and the other fifty." They could
have created a difficulty to no one.
HIaving thus started the subject of alterations in our authorized
Version which, as it seems to me, ought not to have been made, let
me mention one, which I think ought. I cannot doubt that the
words at Matt. xxiii. 24, "which strain at a gnat and swallow a
camel," contain a misprint, which having been passed over in the
first edition of 1611, has held its ground ever since, and that our
translators intended, " which strain out a gnat, and swallow a
camel;" this being at once intelligible and a correct rendering of
the original; while our version, as at present it stands, is neither,
or only intelligible on the supposition, no doubt the supposition of
most English readers, that " strain at" means, swallow with difficulty, men hardly and with effort swallowing the little insect, but
gulping down meanwhile unconcerned the huge animal. It need
scarcely be said that this is very far from the meaning of the original words, which are o di'vOiitOVTe  TO'v  I6cv)WTc7a, by Meyer rendered well, " percolando removentes muscam;" and by the Vulgate
also not ill, " excolantes culicem;" for which use of &i'v)~~eLtv as
to cleanse by passing through a strainer, see Plutarch, Symp. vi. 7.
1. It was the custom of the more accurate and stricter Jews to




PROBABLE MISPRINT.                     205
ent spellings,' emmlet,''emet,'' amet,''anmt,'' ant,' the
gulf which appeared to separate'emmet' froml'ant' is
bridged over at once, and we not mnerely know on the
assurance of others that these two are in fact identical,
their differences being only superficial, but we perceive
clearly in what manner they are so.
Even before any close examination of the matter, it
is hard not to suspect that'runagate' is in fact another
form of'renegadcle,' slightly transformed, as so many
words, to put an English meaning into its first syllable;
and then the meaning gradually modified in obedience
to the new derivation which was assumed to be its
original and true one. Our suspicion of this is very
greatly strengthened (for we see how very closely the
words approach one another), by the fact that'renegade' is constantly spelt' renegate' in our old authors,
while at the same time the denial offaitAl  which is now
strain their wine, vinegar, and other potables through linen or
gauze, lest unawares they should drink down some little unclean
insect therein, and thus transgress Lev. xi., 20, 23, 41, 42-just as
the Buddhists do now in Ceylon and Hindostan- and to this custom
of theirs the Lord refers. The further fact that our present Version
rests to so great an extent on the three preceding, Tyndale's, Cranmer's, and the Geneva, and that all these have " strain out," is a
further evidence in confirmation of that about which for myself I
feel no doubt, namely, that we have here an uncorrected error of
the press. In another passage, where there was manifestly such, I
mean at 1 Cor. xii. 23, "helps in governments," the misprint aftcr
having retained its place in several successive editions was afterwards, I know not by whose authority, removed, and the present
correcter reading, "helps, governments" (dv-re 7 /e/t0,     yv0ep-?J7reLwf), substituted in its room,
9




206       CHANGED SPELLING OF ENGLISH.
a necessary element in' renegade,' and one differencing it inwardly from'runagate,' is altogether wanting
in early use-the denial of country and of- the duties
thereto owing being all that is implied in it.  Thus it is
constantly employed in Holland's Livy as a rendering
of'perfuga;'* while in the one passage where'runagate' occurs in the Prayer Book Version of the Psalms
(Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference to the original will show that
the translators could only have employed it there on
the ground that it also expressed rebel, revolter, and
not runaway merely.
I concluded my first lecture with a remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious German scholar to the
merits of our English tongue.  I will conclude this
my last with the words of another, not a German, but
still of the great Germanic stock; for they bear very
closely on the subjects which have occupied us throughout: ".As our bodies," he says, " have hidden resources
and expedients, to remove the obstacles which the
very art of the physician puts in its way, so language,
ruled by an indomitable inward principle, triumphs in
some degree over the folly of grammarians. Look at
the English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, distorted in its genuine and noble features by
old and recent endeavours to mould it after the French
fashion, invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and
Latin  words, threatening  by  increasing  hosts to: The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all the rcegates [perftguas] and fugitives that have fled to their sidle from us,"
— p.751.




QUOTATION FiROM HALBERTSMVIA.         207
overwhelm the indigenous terms. In these long contests against the combined power of so many forcible
enemies, the language, it is true, has lost some of its
power of inversion in the structure of sentences, the
means of denoting the difference of gender, and the
nice distinctions by inflexion and termination —almost
every word is attacked by the spasm of the accent and
the drawing of consonants to wrong positions; yetthe
old English principle is not overpowered.  Trampled
down by the ignoble feet of strangers, its springs still
retain force enougl to restore itself. It lives and plays
through all the veins of the language; it impregnates
the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with
its temper, and stains them with its colour, not unlike
the Greek which in taking up oriental words, stripped
them of their foreign costu-Lme, and bid them to appear
as native Greelks."'
* Halbertsmna, quoted by Bosworth in his Origin of fthe ]znglis]h
and Ger?ncntic Lavrcrages, p. 39.








INDEX OF WORDS.
PAGE                                 PAGE
Abendteuer............... 193 Bitesheep............. 111
Abnormal................  59  Black Art.............  195
Acre.................... 151 Blackguard........... 147
Adamant......                  184 Blasphemous.........  98
Advocate.................  66 Bombast............. 156
_Eon....................  58 Boor..................... 159
Asthetic................  58 Bran-new............... 186
Afeard...................  97 Brat............... 162
Affluent..................  78 Brazen.................. 126
Afraid,................. 186 Breaden................ 126
Afterthink..........   91 Broid.............. 203
Analogie.................  50 Bruin.................   71
Ant...................... 203 Butter.................. 190
Antipodes.....                  56 Buxom.............  109
Armbrust.....193
Armbrust................. 19   Carriage................. 14.
Arridle.. e 51 Carriage..141
Arrsi.k..................        5 97 Casuistry.......... 1..... 187
Chanticleer............. 71
Attercop..................  94
Chemist.................  198
Avunculize.....e....... 72
Axe........'............  97 Chouse...................   73
Chymist................. 198
Baffle.................... 140 Clawback................ 111
Baker, bakester........... 121 Commerage............... 161
Barrier....................  57 Congregational............  63
Bawn....................  94 Contrary.................  98
Beam...................   43 Convertisseur.                           50




210                    INDEX OF AWORDS.
P.IGE                               PXGE
Corpse...................  150  Emotional................   63
Country dance.............  195  Enfantillage.............  50
Court-card................ 192 Erutar................... 115
Coxcomb........               184 Europe................... 181
CQzen.................... 185  Eyebite...................  91
Crawfish.................. 201
Creansur.................   45150
Criterion.................  56 Fatherland60
Crone, croy........ 74 Folklor60
Currant.................. 192
Foolhappy.............   107
Cynarctomachy............  72 Foolhardy............... 107
70  Foolhasty............. 107
Dahlia......................                                      1
~~~Dame.151  Foollar                       ge               107
Dame................ 151
Dandylion195 Foresayer..91
Dapper43 Foretalk............  91
ID ~9apperFouue...................                         5
Dearworth......     90 Fone..            55
Delal....................69 Fraischeur                 u.........  55
17 Frances................. 75
Dehort..........    0 Fa s..........10  75
Denominationalism.........  63 Francis75
Diamond................ 1802
Frimme.................  90
Frontispiece.                  197
Donat....................  69
Dirosones...............       72
Doughty.... 113 Gainly.......... 106
2  Gallon...............   151
Drachm..................                      e..  *@*    151
Galvanism................70
Du...................... 1137
Duke.............. 150 Garble..................  156
Dumps.................. 113 Giralon.................  90
Dutch................. 136  Girfalcon                               90
Girl... l................   151
Earsport..........    90 Glassen.................  126
Educational..............   63 Glitterand...........          97
Effervescence.........149 Gordia..................  69
Eiseitig.................  59  Gossip.................. 159
Ellinge...................    46 Great.................... 182
Emmet.............    203 Grimsire......... 91




INDEX OF WORDS.                             211
PAGE                                  PAGE
Grocer................ 184 Libel.....................                150
Grub........ 43 Lunch, luncheon.......  101
Hallow...................      65  Malingerer.........              91
Handbook............            59  Mandragora.......... 195
Hector...................  71  Mausoleu........69
Heft................   90 Meat................  150
Hermetic..............   69  Meddle.............                   163
Hery....................  89 Midwife............. 200
Hide...................            43  Mischievous...........        98
Hierosolyma........ 190  Miscreant............... 137
Hipocras...... 69  Mithridate...............  69
Hippodame..... 53 Moe...................... 203
Hotspur..................  90 Morris-dance..............    201
IHuck.....   121
Huckster, huclsteress...... 121  Nap.................... 113
INational...........            63
Idea.....................  154........  162 Necromancy.............. 195
I.,,.,.   1Negus......  70
Influence............... 39..
Nemorivagus.....,.,...  61
International.............  62
Island.................188 6Nephew.................. 141
Island................... 188  Nesh......................
Isle., ~~~~~.....                           io.............8
Isothe98  Noal..                          al59
Nostril.................... 201
sN                                 e.....................  68
Jeopardy.................  66Nuget
Nuntion.................. 101
Kenilworth................ 203
Kindly.................. 152  Oblige................  57, 182
Kindred...........    203 Obsequies....... 193
Knave..............( 164 Oculissimlus........... 72
Knitster......... 120 Ora"nge.............. 194
Ornamentation............  59
Lambiner.........               70  Orrery...................    70
Lazar.................  69 Ought.............  204
Leer...............           90 Owed.................. 204




212                       INDEX OF WORDS.
PAGE                                     PAGE
Pagan................. 159  Rosen.................... 126
Painful, painfulness........ 145  Ruly................ 106
Pandar....................  71  Runagate,,....... 205
Pester...................,  6 Sad103
Philauty.......79.Sagg....................  89
Photography..............  58                                                 89
Pigmy..................... 184....  Satyr................... 199
Pinchpenny...............   111  Scent.................    187
Pleurisy196                                     mer................   90
Poet                                      Scr7 i
Polite.                        157. 1 Scrip  6.................... 186
Porcupine.................202 eamer................... 120
Porpoise..................                                                  120
Porpoise............. 12  Seastress............... 120
Pragmatical..............162  Selfishness................ 79
Preposterous.............. 153
Preposterous.......... 513  Shamefastiness.............  204
Prestige.......                    43  Shrewd, shrewdness........... 156
Pretty.......                      3 Silhouette................            70
Proevaricate............    Silvern.126
Prose, prose.............. 163  Silvicultrix...........   61
SPyam9 Sren............. 197
Smellfeast...............   111
Quinsey...........          53  Smug....................            113
Solidarity................   58
Rakehell................. 112  Songster..............                      120
Rlame...................  194  Sorcerer.................   77
Rathest..................  107  Spencer..................   70
Refuse................... 194  Sperr.................    89
Regoldar.................15   Spheterize........       58
eligion.........,...   42  Spinner, spinster..........  121
Renegade................  205  Starconner................   91
Resent.........    187  Starvation............   64
Reynard..................71  Starve.................   150
Rhodomontade...7.........  71  Stool                                         4
Riches................... 123  Sudden................ 176
Rome................. 183  Suicism............. 79
Rootfast.................   91  Suist..................                    79




INDEX OF WORDS.                                         213
PAGE                                           PAGE
Sundflut........             191  Visnomy..................   53
Sycophant.................  165  Voyage.................  150
Tantalize.................   69  Wanop..................   91
Tapster..................  121   Watershed................   78
Tarre....................    89  Wedlock..................    105
Tartar.................. 191  Weed.................... 150'Tartary.................  191   Welk........ i...........   89
Tea  eeo...................182   Welkin l...................  123
Thatch...................   43   Whine..............           43
Theriac................ 146  Whole...................  1S7
Thou....................  131  Wiseacre..................                            193
Thrasonical.......          71   Witch....................   76
Tind..................   90  Woburn..................  177
Tinsel- slippered........... 138 Woodbine..........                                  184
Tontine..................   70 Worship..                144
Tosspot.................. 111   W rterbuch...............   82
Treacle................  146
Yaxd.................... 151
Vancurrier................    53  Yonker..................  121
Villain.............    158, 164  Yongster............... 121
Tn se, EN-D.








J. S. REDFIELD,
110 AND 112 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORHK
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A THANKSGIVING STORY.
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12mo.' 75 cents.
Its success is already a fixed fact in our literature.'Chanticleer' is one of those
simple and interesting tales which, like the' Vicar of Wakefield' and Zchokke's' Poor
Pastor,' win their way to the reader's heart and dwell there. It is full of sunshine: a
hearty and a genial book."-Nesw York Daily Times.
"' Chanticleer' is scarcely inferior In a literary point of view to any of the Christmas
stories of' Charles Dickens, and is more interesting to Americans because of its allusions
to the peculiar customs of this country."-N. Y. Coin. Advertiser.
"' Chanticleer' has won the public heart, both by the felicity of its subject, and the
grace, wit, and goodness, displayed in its execution."-Southersn Literary Gazette.
" It possesses literary merit of the highest order, and will live in the atfections of all
readers of good taste and good morals, not only while Thanksgiving dinners are remi  in
bered, but while genius is appreuiated."-Mo orning XNews, Savantnahl.




REDFIELD'S NEW AND POPULAR PUBLICATIONS.
POETICAL WVORKIS OF FITZ-GREENE HALLE'CK.
New and only Complete Edition, containing several New Poems,
together with many now first collected. One vol., 12mo., price
one dollar.
" Halleck is one of the brightest stars in our American literature, and his name is
Lke a household word wherever the English language is spoken."-Albany Express.
"Theie are few poems to be found, in any language, that surpass, in beauty ol'hought and structure, some of these."-Bostose Commonwealth.
"To the numerous admirers of Mr. Halleck, this will be a welcome book; for it is a
characteristic desire in human nature to have the productions of our favorite authors
in an elegant and substantial form."-Christian Freeman.
"Mr. Halleck never appeared in a better dress, and few poets ever deserved a better
one." —Christian Intelligencer.
THE STUD Y OF WORDS.
By Archdeacon R. C. TRENCH. One vol., 12mo., price 75 cte.,l He discourses in a truly learned and lively manner upon the original unity of la1
guage, and the origin, derivation, and history of words, with their morality and separate spheres of meaning.'-Evening P-st
"' This is a noble tribute to the divin' faculty of speech. Popularly written, for use
as lectures, exact in its learning, and poetic in its vision, it is a book at once for the
scholar and the general reader."-New lork Evangelist.
" It is one of the most striking and original publications of the day, with nothing of
hardness, dullness, or dryness about it, but altogether fresh, lively, and entertaining.'
- Boston Evening Traveller.
BRONCHITIS, AND KINDRED DISEASES.
In language adapted to common readers. By W. W. HALL, MIL D
One vol., 12 mo, price $1.00.
", It is written in a plain, direct, common-sense style, and is free firom the quackery
which marks many of the popular medical books of the day. It will prove useful to
those who need it." —Central Ch. Herald.
"' Those who are clergymen, or who are preparing for the sacred calling, and public
speakers generally, should not fail of securing this work."-Ch. Ambassador.
"' It is full of hints on the nature of the vital organs, and does away with -much super.
stitious dread in regard to consumption."-Greene County Wiig.'This work gives some valuable instruction in regard to food and hygienic influences." —Nashua Oasis.
KN~IGHITS OF ENGLAAND, FRA2NCE, AND SCOTLAND,
13Y HENRtY W\ILLIAM  HERBERT.  One vol., 12mo., price $1.25., They are partly the romance of history and partly fictions, forming, when blended,
p)ortraitures, valuable firom the correct drawing of the times they illustrate, and interest.
ong firom their romance."-Albanvy Knickerbocker.
They are spirit-stirring productions, which will be read and admired by all who
are pleased with historical tales written in a vigorous, bold, and dashing style."-Bosto.q
Jourasul.
"These legends of love tnd chivalry contain some of the finest tales which the
graphic and powerful pen of Herbert has yet given to the lighter literature of the day".
-Detroit Free 1 ress




REDFIELD) S NEW AND POPULAR PUBLICATIONS.
RUSSO-TURKISE! CAMPAIGNS OF 1828 AND 1829.
With  a View  of the  Present State  of Affairs in  the East.  By
COLONEL  CHESNEY, R.A., D. C.L., F.R.S., Author of the
Expedition  for the  Survey of the Rivers Euphrates and Tigris.
With an Appendix,' containing the Diplomatic Correspondence
of the  Four Powers and the Secret Correspondence between the
Russian  and  English  QGovernments.    One  vol., 121nmo,  clothl
Maps; price $1.00.
"A condensed detail of facts, and the result of personal observation, it is replete with
instructive matter: a record of one of the nmost striking events in modern history; a
guide to the formuation of correct judgment on the future. Good maps, and minute
descriptions of the principal seats of the past and present war; a statistical account of
the military resources of Turkey; its present state and prospects; its political and
comnmercial value-occupy an interesting portion of the work, which we heartily recom.
mend to the attention of our readers."-Londos? Critic.
" It fills up a vacant niche in the history of the times which seems to be required to
give a propel understanding of the difficulties which have resulted in the present European wat'."-S-ls'izt2field Post.
" This work, which, under any circumnstances, would have excited great interest, is
worthly of special attention now, from its irelation to the eastern contest."-Albany Argsus.
"T'l'ilough abounding in information, it is clear, straightforward, and as free from overstatenment and irrevelant speculations as the'Commentaries of Cwsar'"-N-cew York
Eveniz2, Post.
THE RUSSIAN SHORES OF THE BLACK SEA,
With  a Voyage down  the Volga and a Tour through  the Country
of the Cossacks.  By LAURENCE OLIPHArNT, Author of " A  Journey to Nepaul."   From  the Third London Revised and Enlarged
Edition.  12mo, cloth; Two Maps and 18 Cuts; price 75 cents.
" The latest anid best account of the actual state of Russia."-Loqndon Stasndard.
" The book of a quick and honest observer. Full of delightlful entertainment."-Lon.
don E:caminez?.
" Mr. Olipllant is an acute observer, and intelligent man, a clear and vigorous and succinct writer, and his book embodies the best account of Southern Russia that has ever
appeared. His account of Sevastopol will find many interested readers."-Boston, Atlas.
" This book reminds us more of Stephen's delightful' Incidents of Travel' than any
other book with which we are acquainted. It is an interesting and valuable book. He
was as sharp at seeing as a live Yankee, and he- has given us the fruits of his observations
in a very graphic and interesting style."-Boston Traveller
A YEAR WITH THE TURKS;
Or, Sketches of Travel in  the  European  and Asiatic  Dominions
of the Sultan. By WARRINGTON W. SMITnt, M.A. With a
Colored Ethnological Map of Turkey.   12mo, cloth; price 75 cts,
" Mr.i Smith has had rare opportunities. Few men have crossed and recrossed the
empire in so many directions-and mlany are the errors, the false reports, the misconceptions as to fitet ol motive which are here corrected by an able and impartial witness."-London Athleneaum.
" One of the freshest and best books of travel on the Sultan's dominions."-New Yoerk
C'ommercial Advertiser.
" The reader obtains an excellent and reliable idea of the actual condition of the peo.
ple, of the mongrel races, and the present state of the Sultan's dominions. Thele is a
vivid interest in the narrative, and abundance of real infornration."-Bosion Trstnscr'ipt




REDFIELD'S  NEW   AND  POPULAR  PUBLICATIONS.
LEE'S ITAES OF LABOR.
SUMMERFIELD;
Or, Life on a Farm.  By DAY  KELLOGG  LEE.  One vol., 12mo;
price $1.00.
" We have read it with lively and satisfied interest. The scenes are natural, the char.
acters homely and life-like, and the narrative replete with passages of the profoundest
pathos, and incidents of almost painful interest. Above all,'Summerfield' is in the
deepest sense religious. and calculated to exert a strong and wholesome moral influence
on its readers, who we trust will be many."-Horace Greeley.
" It aims to teach the lesson of contentment, and the rural picture which it draws, and
the scenes of home happiness with which it makes us acquainted, are well calculated to
enforce it."-Atlas.
" There is a great deal of life and nature in the story, and in some of the scenes there
is a rich display of wit."-Albany Argus.
"' It has a flavor of originality, and the descriptions are generally excellent; and, what
is something of a peculiarity at present in writing of this kind, not overburdened with
words." —Literary World.
THE MASTER BUILDER;
Or, Life  at a Trade.  By DAY  KELLOGG  LEE.  One vol., 12mo;
price $1.00.
"He is a powerful and graphic writer, and from what we have seen in the pages of
the' Master Builder,' it is a romance of excellent aim and success."-State Register.
"The'Master Builder' is the master production. It is romance into which is instilled
the realities of life; and incentives are put forth to noble exertion and virtue. The
story is pleasing —almost fascinating; the moral is pure and undefiled."-Daily Times.
"Its descriptions are, many of them, strikingly beautiful; commingling in good pro.
portions, the witty, the grotesque, the pathetic, and the heroic. It may be read with
profit as well as pleasure."-Argus.
"' The work before us will commend itself to the masses, depicting as it does most
graphically the struggles and privations which await the unknown and uncared-fol
Mechanic in his journey through life. It is what might be called a romance, but not of
love, jealousy, and revenge order."-Lockport Courier.
"The whole scheme of the story is well worked up and very instructive."-Albaszj
Express.
MERRIMAC;
Or, Life at the Loom.  By DAY KE:LLOGGT  LEE.  One vol., 12mo;
price $1.00.
"A new volume of the series of popular stories which have already gained a well'
deserved reputation for the author. As a picture of an important and unique phase of
New England life, the work is very interesting, and can scarcely fail of popularity among
the million."-Harper's Magazine.
" The work is extremely well written. It is as interesting as a novel, while it is natural as every-day life."-Boston Traveller.
" Merrimac is a story which, by its simple pathos, and truthfulness to nature, will
touch the heart of every reader. It is free from the least tinge of that odious stilted
style of thought and diction characteristic of the majority of the novels with which the
reading public are deluged."-N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.
"Another plain, straightforward, absorbing work from a pen which before has added
riches to our literature, and honor to him who wielded it."-Buffalo Express.
"It is written in a genial spirlit and abounds in humor."-N. Y. Courier and Enquirer.




THE NOCTES AMBROSIANIE;.
WITH PORTRAITS OF WILSON, LOCKIART, MAGIN,   HOAGI    GG, AND FAC-SIMI[LES.
EDITED, WITH MEMOIRS, NOTES, AND ILLUSTRATIONS,
BY DR. SHELTON MACKENZIE,
EDITOR OF SHIIIL'S " SsToIIES OF THE IRISH BAR."
5 Vols., 12mo., cloth. Price $5.00.
The Noctes were commenced in 182', and closed in 1835. Even in England, the lapse
of years has obscured many circumstances which were well known thirty vpars ago.
DR. SHELTON MACKENZIE, already favorably known as editor of Sheil's "Sketches of
the Irish Bar," has undertaken the editorship of THE NOCTES AMsBROSIAN2E, for which so
familiar acquaintance, during the last twenty-five years, with the persons, events, and
places therein noticed may be assumed to qualify him. He has been on terms of intimacy
with most of the eminent political and literary characters treated of in the " NOCTES,"
and his annotation of the text will include personal recollections of them.
Besides this, Dr. Mackenzie has written for this edition a " History of the Rise and Progress of Blackwood's Magazine," with original memoirs of the principal accredited authors
of the "NuOCTES," viz:-Professor Wilson, The Ettrick Shepherd, J. G. Lockhart, and
Dr. Maginn.
He will also give the celebrated " Chaldee Manuscript," published in 1817, instantly
suppressed, and so scarce that the only copy which the editor has ever seen is that from
which he makes the present reprint. There will also be given the three articles, entitled
" CHRISTOPHER IN THE TENT," (in August and September, 1819), never before printed, in
any shape, in this country. The interlocutors in' THE TENT," include the greater number
of those afterwards introduced in the "' NOCTES."
The "Metricum  Symphosium  Ambrosianum," —an addendum to No. III. of " THE
NOCTES," (and which notices every living author of note, in the year 1S22), will be in
corporated in this edition. This has never before been reprinted here.
Nearly Ready, in Twe o Volzmes.
THE ODO ERTY PAPERS,
FORMING THE FIRST PORTION OF THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF THE LATE
DR. MAGINN.
WITH AN ORIGINAL MEMOIR AND COPIOUS NOTES, BY
DR. SHELTON MACKENZIE.
FOR more than a quarter of a century, the most remarkable magazine writer of his
time, was the late William Maginn, LIL.D., well-known as the Sir Morgan Odoherty of
Blackwrood's M1agazine, and as the principal contributor, for many years, to F-raser's
and other periodicals. The combined learning, wit, eloquence, eccentricity, and hun-or
of Maginn, had obtained for him, long before his death, (in 1843), the title of THE
]sOIODERN RABELAIS. His magazine articles possess extraordinary merit. He had the
art of putting a vast quantity of animal spirits upon paper, but his graver articles-which
contain sound and serious principles of criticism-are earnest and well-reasoned.
The collection now in hand will contain his Facetime (in a variety of languages), Transslations, Travesties, and Original Poetry, also his prose Tales, which are eminently beautiful, the best of his critical articles, (including his celebrated Shalkspeare Papers), ani
his Homeric Ballads. The periodicals in which he wrote have been ransacked, frosn
Blackrwood" to " Punch," and the result will be a series of great interest.
De. SHIELTONT IIACInENZIE, who has undertaken the editorship of these writings of his
distinguished Countryman, will spare neither labor nor attention in the work. The
first volume will contain an original Memoir of Dr. Maginn, written by Dr Mackenzie,
dnd a characteristic Portrait, with fac-simile.
Pubelished by J, S. REDFIELD,
110 &  112 Nassau-street,  Te-zo York




REDFIELD S NEW AND POPULAR PUBLICATIONS.
8/-iffiJ~' RE VOL rTIONAR Y TALES.
UNIFORM  SERIES.
New  and entirely Revised  Edition of WILLIAM  GILMORE  SIMMS'
Romances  of the  Revo ution,  with  Illustrations  by  DARLEY,
Each complete in one vol., 12mo, cloth; price $1.25.
I. THE PARTISAN.            III. KATHARINE WALT0ON. (In preas)
II. MIELLICHAMtPPE.          IV. THE SCOUT, (In press.)
V. WOODCRAFT. (In press.)
"The field of Revolutionary Romance was a rich one, and Mr. Simms has worked it
admirablly."-Louisville Journal.' "But few novelists of the age evince more power in the conception of a story, more
artistic skill in its management, or more naturalness in the final denou6smeznt than iMr
Simms."-Mobile Daily Advertiser.
"Not only par excellence the liter alry man of the South, but next to no romance writer
in Anmerica." —Albanuy Kiicckerbocker.
"Simms is a popular wrliter, and his romances are highly creditable to American
literature."-Boston Olive Branch.
"These books are replete with daring and thrilling adventures, principally drawn
from history."-Boston Chri stian Freemane.
"We take pleasure in noticing another of the series which Redfield is presenting to
the country of the brilliant productions of one of the very siblest of our American
authors-of one indeed who, in his peculiar sphere, is inimitable. This volume is a
continuation of'The Partisan.' " —Philadelphia A4merican Courier.
ALSO UNIFORM WITH THE ABOVE
THE YEUaASSEE,
A Romance of South Carolina. By Wm. GILMORE SIMMs. New
and entirely Revised Edition, with Illustrations by DARLEY.   12mo,
cloth; price $1.25.
"'In interest, it is second to but few romances in the language; in power, it holds 9
high rank; in healthfulness of style, it furnishes an example worthy of emulation." —
G- eene County Whig.
SIMMS' POE TICAL WORKS.
Poems: Descriptive, Dramatic, Legendary, and Contemplative,
By WM. GILMORE  SIMMS.  With  a portrait on steel.  2 vols.,
12mo, cloth; price $2.50.
CONTENTS: Norman Maurice; a Tragedy.-'-Atalantis; a Tale of the Sea.-Tales and
Traditions of the South.-The City of the Silent-Southern Passages and Pictures.Historical and Dramatic Slketches.-Scripture Legends.-Francesca d, Rimini, etc.
"We are glad to see the poems of our best Southern author collected in twc hand.
sone volumes. Here we have embalmed in graphic and melodious verse the scenic
wonders and charms of the South; and this feature of the work alone gives it a per.
omaneut and special value. None can read'Southern Passages and Pictures' without
feeling that therein the poetic aspects, association, and sentiment of Southern life and
scenery are vitally enshrined.'Normanl Maurice' is a dramatic poem of peculiar scope
and unusual interest; and'Atalantis,' a poem upon which some of the author's finest
powers of thought tlnd expression are richly lavished. None of our poets offer so great
a variety of style or a mnore original choice of subjects."-BostonL Traveller.
"His versification is fluent and mellifluous, yet not lackilg in point of vigor when an
energetic style is requisite to the subject." —N. Y. Commsercial Advertiser.
"Mr. Simms ranks among the first poets of our country, and these'well-printed
volumes contain poetical productions of rare merit."- Washi'?,tuos (D. C.) Staer.




Memoirs of a Distinguished Financier.
FIFTY YEARS
IN BOTH IHIEMISP1HEIIRES;
OR, REMINISCENCES OF A MERCHANT'S LIFE.
By VINCENT NOLTE.  12mo.  Price  $1.25.  [Eighth Edition]
The following, being a few of the more prominent names introduced in
the work, will show the nature and extent of personal and anecdotal interest exhibited in its pages:Aaron Burr; General Jackson; John Jacob Astor; Stephen Girard;
La Fayette; Audubon; the Barings; Robert Fulton; David Parish; Samuel Swartwout; Lord Aberdeen; Peter K. Vagner; Napoleon; Paul
Delaroche; Sir Francis Chantry; Queen Victoria; Horace Vernet; Major
General Scott; Mr. Saul; Lafitte; John Quincy Adams; Edward Livingston; John R. Grymes; Auguste Davezac; General Moreau; Gouverneur
Morris; J. J. Ouvrard; Messrs. Hope & Co.; General Claiborne; Marshal
Soult; Chateaubriand; Le Roy de Chaumont; Duke of Wellington; William M. Price; P. C. Labouchere; Ingres; Charles VI., of Spain; Marshal Blucher; Nicholas Biddle; Manuel Godoy; Villele; Lord Eldon;
Emperor Alexander, etc. etc.
" He seldom looks at the bright side of a character, and dearly loves-he
confesses it-a bit of scandal.  But he paints well, describes well, seizes
characteristics which make clear to the reader the nature of the man whom
they illustrate."
The-memoirs of a maln of a singularly adventurous and speculative turn. who entered
upon the occupations of manhood early, and retained its energies late; has been an eyewitness of not a few of the important events that occurred in Europe and America between the years 1796 and 1850, and himself a sharer in more than one of them; who has
been associated, or an agent insome of the largest commercial and financial operations
that British and Dutch capital and enterprise ever ventured upon, and has been brought
into contact and acquaintance-not unfrequently into intimacy-with a number of the
remarkable men of his time. Seldom, either in print or in the flesh, have we fallen in
with so restless, versatile and excursive a genius as Vincent Nolte, Esq., of Europe and
America-no more limited address will sufficiently express his cosmopolitan domicile.Blackawood's Jlagrazine.
As a reflection of real life, a book stamped with a strong personal character, and filled
with unique details of a large experience of private and public interest, we unhesitatingly call attention to it as one of the most note-worthy productions of the day. —wezw
York C/surc/hmsan.
Our old merchants and politicians will find it very amusing, and it will excite vivid
reminiscences of men and things forty years ago. We might criticise the hap-hazard
and dare-devil spirit of the author, but the raciness of his anecdotes is the result of these
very defects. —Bostot Trailscript.
His autobiography presents a spicy variety of incident and adventure, and a great deal
of really useful and interesting information, all the more acceptable for the profusion of
anecdote and piquant scandal with which it is interspersed. —V. Y. Jour. of Commrnce.
Not the least interesting portion of the work, to us here, is the narration of Nolte's
intercourse with our great men, and his piquant and occasionally ill-natured notice of
their faults and foibles. —.V. Y. Herand.
It is a vivid chronicle of varied and remarkable experiences, and will serve to rectify
the errors which too often pats among men as veritable history.-Evet.nin Post.
The anecdotes, declamations, sentiments, descriptions, and whole tone of the book
are vivacious and genuine, and, making allowance for obvious prejudices, graphic and
reliable. To the old it will be wonderfully suggestive, to the young curiously informing, and to both rich in entertainment.-Bostos dAtlas.
As an amusing narrative, it would be difficult to find its superior; but the book has
peculiar interest from the freedom with which the author shows up our American noto.
rieties of the past forty years -Courier