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kind,' Flora 'Bluminne,' Aurora Röthin;' instead of Apollo schoolboys were to speak of 'Singhold ;' instead of Pan of 'Schaflieb;' instead of Jupiter of 'Helfevater,' 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.

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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 Iosing; 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,

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, in 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 language changes, but only as the bud changes into the

LANGUAGES CHANGED.

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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 travelling 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 becom. ing 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

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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—namely, 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 new power; 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 extinc-tion of the words in our language-as indeed in every