You know the appearance of the lizard, and the star-like shape of the spots which are sown over its back. Well, in Latin it is called 'stellio,' from stella, a star; just as the basilisk had in Greek this name of 'little king' because of the shape as of a kingly crown which the spots on its head might be made by the fancy to assume. Follow up the etymology of 'squirrel,' and you will find that the graceful creature which bears this name has obtained it as being wont to sit under the shadow of its own tail. [Footnote: [The word squirrel is a diminutive of the Greek word for squirrel, [Greek: skiouros], literally 'shadow-tail.']] Need I remind you of our 'goldfinch,' evidently so called from that bright patch of yellow on its wing; our 'kingfisher,' having its name from the royal beauty, the kingly splendour of the plumage with which it is adorned? Some might ask why the stormy petrel, a bird which just skims and floats on the topmost wave, should bear this name? No doubt we have here the French 'petrel,' or little Peter, and the bird has in its name an allusion to the Apostle Peter, who at his Master's bidding walked for a while on the unquiet surface of an agitated sea. The 'lady-bird' or 'lady-cow' is prettily named, as indeed the whole legend about it is full of grace and fancy [Footnote: [For other names for the 'lady-bird,' and the reference in many of them to God and the Virgin Mary, see Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, p. 694.]]; but a common name which in many of our country parts this creature bears, the 'golden knob,' is prettier still. And indeed in our country dialects there is a wide poetical nomenclature which is well worthy of recognition; thus the shooting lights of the Aurora Borealis are in Lancashire 'the Merry Dancers'; clouds piled up in a particular fashion are in many parts of England styled 'Noah's Ark'; the puff-ball is 'the Devil's snuff-box'; the dragon-fly 'the Devil's darning-needle'; a large black beetle 'the Devil's coach-horse.' Any one who has watched the kestrel hanging poised in the air, before it swoops upon its prey, will acknowledge the felicity of the name 'windhover,' or sometimes 'windfanner,' which it popularly bears. [Footnote: In Wallace's Tropical Nature there is a beautiful chapter on humming birds, and the names which in various languages these exquisite little creatures bear.] The amount is very large of curious legendary lore which is everywhere bound up in words, and which they, if duly solicited, will give back to us again. For example, the Greek 'halcyon,' which we have adopted without change, has reference, and wraps up in itself an allusion, to one of the most beautiful and significant legends of heathen antiquity; according to which the sea preserved a perfect calmness for all the period, the fourteen 'halcyon days,' during which this bird was brooding over her nest. The poetry of the name survives, whether the name suggested the legend, or the legend the name. Take again the names of some of our precious stones, as of the topaz, so called, as some said, because men were only able to conjecture ([Greek: topazein]) the position of the cloud-concealed island from which it was brought. [Footnote: Pliny, H. N. xxxvii. 32. [But this is only popular etymology: the word can hardly be of Greek origin; see A. S. Palmer, Folk-Etymology, p. 589.]]

Very curious is the determination which some words, indeed many, seem to manifest, that their poetry shall not die; or, if it dies in one form, that it shall revive in another. Thus if there is danger that, transferred from one language to another, they shall no longer speak to the imagination of men as they did of old, they will make to themselves a new life, they will acquire a new soul in the room of that which has ceased to quicken and inform them any more. Let me make clear what I mean by two or three examples. The Germans, knowing nothing of carbuncles, had naturally no word of their own for them; and when they first found it necessary to name them, as naturally borrowed the Latin 'carbunculus,' which originally had meant 'a little live coal,' to designate these precious stones of a fiery red. But 'carbunculus,' word full of poetry and life for Latin-speaking men, would have been only an arbitrary sign for as many as were ignorant of that language. What then did these, or what, rather, did the working genius of the language, do? It adopted, but, in adopting, modified slightly yet effectually the word, changing it into 'Karfunkel,' thus retaining the framework of the original, yet at the same time, inasmuch as 'funkeln' signifies 'to sparkle,' reproducing now in an entirely novel manner the image of the bright sparkling of the stone, for every knower of the German tongue. 'Margarita,' or pearl, belongs to the earliest group of Latin words adopted into English. The word, however, told nothing about itself to those who adopted it. But the pearl might be poetically contemplated as the sea-stone; and so our fathers presently transformed 'margarita' into 'mere-grot,' which means nothing less. [Footnote: Such is the A.S. form of margarita in three versions of the parable of the Pearl of Great Price, St. Matt. xiii. 45; see Anglo-Saxon Gospels, ed. Skeat, 1887.] Take another illustration of this from another quarter. The French 'rossignol,' a nightingale, is undoubtedly the Latin 'lusciniola,' the diminutive of 'luscinia,' with the alteration, so frequent in the Romance languages, of the commencing 'l' into 'r.' Whatever may be the etymology of 'luscinia,' it is plain that for Frenchmen in general the word would no longer suggest any meaning at all, hardly even for French scholars, after the serious transformations which it had undergone; while yet, at the same time, in the exquisitely musical 'rossignol,' and still more perhaps in the Italian 'usignuolo,' there is an evident intention and endeavour to express something of the music of the bird's song in the liquid melody of the imitative name which it bears; and thus to put a new soul into the word, in lieu of that other which had escaped. Or again—whatever may be the meaning of Senlac, the name of that field where the ever-memorable battle, now better known as the Battle of Hastings, was fought, it certainly was not 'Sanglac,' or Lake of Blood; the word only shaping itself into this significant form subsequently to the battle, and in consequence of it.

One or two examples more of the perishing of the old life in a word, and the birth of a new in its stead, may be added. The old name of Athens, 'Athaevai,' was closely linked with the fact that the goddess Pallas Athene was the guardian deity of the city. The reason of the name, with other facts of the old mythology, faded away from the memory of the peasantry of modern Greece; but Athens is a name which must still mean something for them. Accordingly it is not 'Athaevai now, but 'Avthaevai, or the Blooming, on the lips of the peasantry round about; so Mr. Sayce assures us. The same process everywhere meets us. Thus no one who has visited Lucerne can fail to remember the rugged mountain called 'Pilatus' or 'Mont Pilate,' which stands opposite to him; while if he has been among the few who have cared to climb it, he will have been shown by his guide the lake at its summit in which Pontius Pilate in his despair drowned himself, with an assurance that from this suicide of his the mountain obtained its name. Nothing of the kind. 'Mont Pilate' stands for 'Mons Pileatus,' the 'capped hill'; the clouds, as one so often sees, gathering round its summit, and forming the shape or appearance of a cap or hat. When this true derivation was forgotten or misunderstood, the other explanation was invented and imposed. [Footnote: [The old name of Pilatus was Fractus Mons, 'broken mountain' from its rugged cliffs and precipices. Pilatus did not become general till the close of the last century.]] An instructive example this, let me observe by the way, of that which has happened continually in the case of far older legends; I mean that the name has suggested the legend, and not the legend the name. We have an apt illustration of this in the old notion that the crocodile ([Greek: krokodeilos]) could not endure saffron.

I have said that poetry and imagination seek to penetrate everywhere; and this is literally true; for even the hardest, austerest studies cannot escape their influence; they will put something of their own life into the dry bones of a nomenclature which seems the remotest from them, the most opposed to them. Thus in Danish the male and female lines of descent and inheritance are called respectively the sword-side and the spindle-side. [Footnote: [In the same way the Germans used to employ schwert and kunkel; compare the use of the phrases on etha sperehealfe, and on etha spinlhealfe in King Alfred's will; see Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus, No. 314 (ii. 116), Pauli's Life of Alfred, p. 225, Lappenberg's Anglo-Saxon Kings, ii. 99 (1881).]] He who in prosody called a metrical foot consisting of one long syllable followed by two short (-..) a 'dactyle' or a finger, with allusion to the long first joint of the finger, and the two shorter which follow, whoever he may have been, and some one was the first to do it, must be allowed to have brought a certain amount of imagination into a study so alien to it as prosody very well might appear.

He did the same in another not very poetical region who invented the Latin law-term, 'stellionatus.' The word includes all such legally punishable acts of swindling or injurious fraud committed on the property of another as are not specified in any more precise enactment; being drawn and derived from a practice attributed, I suppose without any foundation, to the lizard or 'stellio' we spoke of just now. Having cast its winter skin, it is reported to swallow it at once, and this out of a malignant grudge lest any should profit by that which, if not now, was of old accounted a specific in certain diseases. The term was then transferred to any malicious wrong whatever done by one person to another.

In other regions it was only to be expected that we should find poetry. Thus it is nothing strange that architecture, which has been called frozen music, and which is poetry embodied in material forms, should have a language of its own, not dry nor hard, not of the mere intellect alone, but one in the forming of which it is evident that the imaginative faculties were at work. To take only one example—this, however, from Gothic art, which naturally yields the most remarkable— what exquisite poetry in the name of 'the rose window' or better still, 'the rose,' given to the rich circular aperture of stained glass, with its leaf-like compartments, in the transepts of a Gothic cathedral! Here indeed we may note an exception from that which usually finds place; for usually art borrows beauty from nature, and very faintly, if at all, reflects back beauty upon her. In this present instance, however, art is so beautiful, has reached so glorious and perfect a development, that if the associations which the rose supplies lend to that window some hues of beauty and a glory which otherwise it would not have, the latter abundantly repays the obligation; and even the rose itself may become lovelier still, associated with those shapes of grace, those rich gorgeous tints, and all the religious symbolism of that in art which has borrowed and bears its name. After this it were little to note the imagination, although that was most real, which dictated the term 'flamboyant' to express the wavy flame-like outline, which, at a particular period of art, the tracery in the Gothic window assumed.

'Godsacre' or 'Godsfield,' is the German name for a burial-ground, and once was our own, though we unfortunately have nearly, if not quite, let it go. What a hope full of immortality does this little word proclaim! how rich is it in all the highest elements of poetry, and of poetry in its noblest alliance, that is, in its alliance with faith— able as it is to cause all loathsome images of death and decay to disappear, not denying them, but suspending, losing, absorbing them in the sublimer thought of the victory over death, of that harvest of life which God shall one day so gloriously reap even there where now seems the very triumphing place of death. Many will not need to be reminded how fine a poem in Longfellow's hands unfolds itself out of this word.

Lastly let me note the pathos of poetry which lies often in the mere tracing of the succession of changes in meaning which certain words have undergone. Thus 'elend' in German, a beautiful word, now signifies wretchedness, but at first it signified exile or banishment. [Footnote: On this word there is an interesting discussion in Weigand's Etym. Dict., and compare Pott, Etym. Forsch. i. 302. Ellinge, an English provincial word of infinite pathos, still common in the south of England, and signifying at once lonely and sad, is not connected, as has been sometimes supposed, with the German elend, but represents Anglo-Saxon ae-lenge, protracted, tedious; see the New English Dictionary (s.v. alange)] The sense of this separation from the native land and from all home delights, as being the woe of all woes, the crown of all sorrows, little by little so penetrated the word, that what at first expressed only one form of misery, has ended by signifying all. It is not a little notable, as showing the same feeling elsewhere at work, that 'essil' (= exilium) in old French signified, not only banishment, but ruin, destruction, misery. In the same manner [Greek: nostimos] meaning at first no more than having to do with a return, comes in the end to signify almost anything which is favourable and auspicious.

Let us then acknowledge man a born poet; if not every man himself a 'maker' yet every one able to rejoice in what others have made, adopting it freely, moving gladly in it as his own most congenial element and sphere. For indeed, as man does not live by bread alone, as little is he content to find in language merely the instrument which shall enable him to buy and sell and get gain, or otherwise make provision for the lower necessities of his animal life. He demands to find in it as well what shall stand in a real relation and correspondence to the higher faculties of his being, shall feed, nourish, and sustain these, shall stir him with images of beauty and suggestions of greatness. Neither here nor anywhere else could he become the mere utilitarian, even if he would. Despite his utmost efforts, were he so far at enmity with his own good as to put them forth, he could not succeed in exhausting his language of the poetical element with which it is penetrated through and through; he could not succeed in stripping it of blossom, flower, and fruit, and leaving it nothing but a bare and naked stem. He may fancy for a moment that he has succeeded in doing this; but it will only need for him to become a little better philologer, to go a little deeper into the story of the words which he is using, and he will discover that he is as remote as ever from such an unhappy consummation, from so disastrous a success.

For ourselves, let us desire and attempt nothing of the kind. Our life is not in other ways so full of imagination and poetry that we need give any diligence to empty it of that which it may possess of these. It will always have for us all enough of dull and prosaic and commonplace. What profit can there be in seeking to extend the region of these? Profit there will be none, but on the contrary infinite loss. It is stagnant waters which corrupt themselves; not those in agitation and on which the winds are freely blowing. Words of passion and imagination are, as one so grandly called them of old, 'winds of the soul' ([Greek: psyches anemoi]), to keep it in healthful motion and agitation, to lift it upward and to drive it onward, to preserve it from that unwholesome stagnation which constitutes the fatal preparedness for so many other and worse evils.



LECTURE III.

ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS.

Is man of a divine birth and of the stock of heaven? coming from God, and, when he fulfils the law of his being, and the intention of his creation, returning to Him again? We need no more than the words he speaks to prove it; so much is there in them which could never have existed on any other supposition. How else could all those words which testify of his relation to God, and of his consciousness of this relation, and which ground themselves thereon, have found their way into his language, being as that is the veritable transcript of his innermost life, the genuine utterance of the faith and hope which is in him? In what other way can we explain that vast and preponderating weight thrown into the scale of goodness and truth, which, despite of all in the other scale, we must thankfully acknowledge that his language never is without? How else shall we account for that sympathy with the right, that testimony against the wrong, which, despite of all aberrations and perversions, is yet the prevailing ground-tone of all?

But has man fallen, and deeply fallen, from the heights of his original creation? We need no more than his language to prove it. Like everything else about him, it bears at once the stamp of his greatness and of his degradation, of his glory and of his shame. What dark and sombre threads he must have woven into the tissue of his life, before we could trace those threads of darkness which run through the tissue of his language! What facts of wickedness and woe must have existed in the one, ere such words could exist to designate these as are found in the other! There have never wanted those who would make light of the moral hurts which man has inflicted on himself, of the sickness with which he is sick; who would persuade themselves and others that moralists and divines, if they have not quite invented, have yet enormously exaggerated, these. But are statements of the depth of his fall, the malignity of the disease with which he is sick, found only in Scripture and in sermons? Are those who bring forward these statements libellers of human nature? Or are not mournful corroborations of the truth of these assertions imprinted deeply upon every province of man's natural and spiritual life, and on none more deeply than on his language? It needs but to open a dictionary, and to cast our eye thoughtfully down a few columns, and we shall find abundant confirmation of this sadder and sterner estimate of man's moral and spiritual condition. How else shall we explain this long catalogue of words, having all to do with sin or with sorrow, or with both? How came they there? We may be quite sure that they were not invented without being needed, and they have each a correlative in the world of realities. I open the first letter of the alphabet; what means this 'Ah,' this 'Alas,' these deep and long-drawn sighs of humanity, which at once encounter me there? And then presently there meet me such words as these, 'Affliction,' 'Agony,' 'Anguish,' 'Assassin,' 'Atheist,' 'Avarice,' and a hundred more—words, you will observe, not laid up in the recesses of the language, to be drawn forth on rare occasions, but many of them such as must be continually on the lips of men. And indeed, in the matter of abundance, it is sad to note how much richer our vocabularies are in words that set forth sins, than in those that set forth graces. When St. Paul (Gal. v. 19-23) would range these over against those, 'the works of the flesh' against 'the fruit of the Spirit,' those are seventeen, these only nine; and where do we find in Scripture such lists of graces, as we do at 2 Tim. iii. 2, Rom. i. 29- 31, of their contraries? [Footnote: Of these last the most exhaustive collection which I know is in Philo, De Merced. Meret. Section 4. There are here one hundred and forty-six epithets brought together, each of them indicating a sinful moral habit of mind. It was not without reason that Aristotle wrote: 'It is possible to err in many ways, for evil belongs to the infinite; but to do right is possible only in one way' (Ethic. Nic. ii. 6. 14).] Nor can I help noting, in the oversight and muster from this point of view of the words which constitute a language, the manner in which its utmost resources have been taxed to express the infinite varieties, now of human suffering, now of human sin. Thus, what a fearful thing is it that any language should possess a word to express the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing. And yet such in more languages than one may be found. [Footnote: In the Greek, [Greek: epichairekakia], in the German, 'schadenfreude.' Cicero so strongly feels the want of such a word, that he gives to 'malevolentia' the significance, 'voluptas ex malo alterius,' which lies not of necessity in it.] Nor are there wanting, I suppose, in any language, words which are the mournful record of the strange wickednesses which the genius of man, so fertile in evil, has invented. What whole processes of cruelty are sometimes wrapped up in a single word! Thus I have not travelled down the first column of an Italian dictionary before I light upon the verb 'abbacinare' meaning to deprive of sight by holding a red-hot metal basin close to the eyeballs. Travelling a little further in a Greek lexicon, I should reach [Greek: akroteriazein] mutilate by cutting off all the extremities, as hands, feet, nose, ears; or take our English 'to ganch.' And our dictionaries, while they tell us much, cannot tell us all. How shamefully rich is everywhere the language of the vulgar in words and phrases which, seldom allowed to find their way into books, yet live as a sinful oral tradition on the lips of men, for the setting forth of things unholy and impure. And of these words, as no less of those dealing with the kindred sins of revelling and excess, how many set the evil forth with an evident sympathy and approbation of it, and as themselves taking part with the sin against Him who has forbidden it under pain of his highest displeasure. How much ability, how much wit, yes, and how much imagination must have stood in the service of sin, before it could possess a nomenclature so rich, so varied, and often so heaven-defying, as that which it actually owns.

Then further I would bid you to note the many words which men have dragged downward with themselves, and made more or less partakers of their own fall. Having once an honourable meaning, they have yet with the deterioration and degeneration of those that used them, or of those about whom they were used, deteriorated and degenerated too. How many, harmless once, have assumed a harmful as their secondary meaning; how many worthy have acquired an unworthy. Thus 'knave' meant once no more than lad (nor does 'knabe' now in German mean more); 'villain' than peasant; a 'boor' was a farmer, a 'varlet' a serving-man, which meaning still survives in 'valet,' the other form of this word; [Footnote: Yet this itself was an immense fall for the word (see Ampere, La Langue Francaise, p. 219, and Littre, Dict. de la Langue Francaise, preface, p. xxv.).] a 'menial' was one of the household; a 'paramour' was a lover, an honourable one it might be; a 'leman' in like manner might be a lover, and be used of either sex in a good sense; a 'beldam' was a fair lady, and is used in this sense by Spenser; [Footnote: F. Q. iii. 2. 43.] a 'minion' was a favourite (man in Sylvester is 'God's dearest minion'); a 'pedant' in the Italian from which we borrowed the word, and for a while too with ourselves, was simply a tutor; a 'proser' was one who wrote in prose; an 'adventurer' one who set before himself perilous, but very often noble ventures, what the Germans call a gluecksritter; a 'swindler,' in the German from which we got it, one who entered into dangerous mercantile speculations, without implying that this was done with any intention to defraud others. Christ, according to Bishop Hall, was the 'ringleader' of our salvation. 'Time-server' two hundred years ago quite as often designated one in an honourable as in a dishonourable sense 'serving the time.' [Footnote: See in proof Fuller, Holy State, b. iii. c. 19.] 'Conceits' had once nothing conceited in them. An 'officious' man was one prompt in offices of kindness, and not, as now, an uninvited meddler in things that concern him not; something indeed of the older meaning still survives in the diplomatic use of the word.

'Demure' conveyed no hint, as it does now, of an overdoing of the outward demonstrations of modesty; a 'leer' was once a look with nothing amiss in it (Piers Plowman). 'Daft' was modest or retiring; 'orgies' were religious ceremonies; the Blessed Virgin speaks of herself in an early poem as 'God's wench.' In 'crafty' and 'cunning' no crooked wisdom was implied, but only knowledge and skill; 'craft,' indeed, still retains very often its more honourable use, a man's 'craft' being his skill, and then the trade in which he is skilled. 'Artful' was skilful, and not tricky as now. [Footnote: Not otherwise 'leichtsinnig' in German meant cheerful once; it is frivolous now; while in French a 'rapporteur' is now a bringer back of malicious reports, the malicious having little by little found its way into the word.] Could the Magdalen have ever bequeathed us 'maudlin' in its present contemptuous application, if the tears of penitential sorrow had been held in due honour by the world? 'Tinsel,' the French 'etincelle,' meant once anything that sparkled or glistened; thus, 'cloth of tinsel' would be cloth inwrought with silver and gold; but the sad experience that 'all is not gold that glitters, that much showing fair to the eye is worthless in reality, has caused that by 'tinsel,' literal or figurative, we ever mean now that which has no realities of sterling worth underlying the specious shows which it makes. 'Specious' itself, let me note, meant beautiful at one time, and not, as now, presenting a deceitful appearance of beauty. 'Tawdry,' an epithet applied once to lace or other finery bought at the fair of St. Awdrey or St. Etheldreda, has run through the same course: it at one time conveyed no suggestion of mean finery or shabby splendour, as now it does. 'Voluble' was an epithet which had nothing of slight in it, but meant what 'fluent' means now; 'dapper' was what in German 'tapfer' is; not so much neat and spruce as brave and bold; 'plausible' was worthy of applause; 'pert' is now brisk and lively, but with a very distinct subaudition, which once it had not, of sauciness as well; 'lewd' meant no more than unlearned, as the lay or common people might be supposed to be. [Footnote: Having in mind what 'dirne,' connected with 'dienen,' 'dienst,' commonly means now in German, one almost shrinks from mentioning that it was once a name of honour which could be and was used of the Blessed Virgin Mary (see Grimm, Woerterbuch, s. v.). 'Schalk' in like manner had no evil subaudition in it at the first; nor did it ever obtain such during the time that it survived in English; thus in Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight, the peerless Gawayne is himself on more than one a 'schalk' (424, 1776). The word survives in the last syllable of 'seneschal,' and indeed of 'marshal' as well.] 'To carp' is in Chaucer's language no more than to converse; 'to mouth' in Piers Plowman is simply to speak; 'to garble' was once to sift and pick out the best; it is now to select and put forward as a fair specimen the worst.

This same deterioration through use may be traced in the verb 'to resent.' Barrow could speak of the good man as a faithful 'resenter' and requiter of benefits, of the duty of testifying an affectionate 'resentment' of our obligations to God. But the memory of benefits fades from us so much more quickly than that of injuries; we remember and revolve in our minds so much more predominantly the wrongs, real or imaginary, men have done us, than the favours we owe them, that 'resentment' has come in our modern English to be confined exclusively to that deep reflective displeasure which men entertain against those that have done, or whom they fancy to have done, them a wrong. And this explains how it comes to pass that we do not speak of the 'retaliation' of benefits at all so often as the 'retaliation' of injuries. 'To retaliate' signifies no more than to render again as much as we have received; but this is so much seldomer practised in the matter of benefits than of wrongs, that 'retaliation' though not wholly strange in this worthier sense, has yet, when so employed, an unusual sound in our ears. 'To retaliate' kindnesses is a language which would not now be intelligible to all. 'Animosity' as originally employed in that later Latin which gave it birth, was spiritedness; men would speak of the 'animosity' or fiery courage of a horse. In our early English it meant nothing more; a divine of the seventeenth century speaks of 'due Christian animosity.' Activity and vigour are still implied in the word; but now only as displayed in enmity and hate. There is a Spanish proverb which says, 'One foe is too many; a hundred friends are too few.' The proverb and the course which this word 'animosity' has travelled may be made mutually to illustrate one another. [Footnote: For quotations from our earlier authors in proof of many of the assertions made in the few last pages, see my Select Glossary of English Words used formerly in senses different from their present, 5th edit. 1879.]

How mournful a witness for the hard and unrighteous judgments we habitually form of one another lies in the word 'prejudice.' It is itself absolutely neutral, meaning no more than a judgment formed beforehand; which judgment may be favourable, or may be otherwise. Yet so predominantly do we form harsh unfavourable judgments of others before knowledge and experience, that a 'prejudice' or judgment before knowledge and not grounded on evidence, is almost always taken in an ill sense; 'prejudicial' having actually acquired mischievous or injurious for its secondary meaning.

As these words bear testimony to the sin of man, so others to his infirmity, to the limitation of human faculties and human knowledge, to the truth of the proverb, that 'to err is human.' Thus 'to retract' means properly no more than to handle again, to reconsider. And yet, so certain are we to find in a subject which we reconsider, or handle a second time, that which was at first rashly, imperfectly, inaccurately, stated, which needs therefore to be amended, modified, or withdrawn, that 'to retract' could not tarry long in its primary meaning of reconsidering; but has come to signify to withdraw. Thus the greatest Father of the Latin Church, wishing toward the close of his life to amend whatever he might then perceive in his various published works incautiously or incorrectly stated, gave to the book in which he carried out this intention (for authors had then no such opportunities as later editions afford us now), this very name of 'Retractations', being literally 'rehandlings,' but in fact, as will be plain to any one turning to the work, withdrawings of various statements by which he was no longer prepared to abide.

But urging, as I just now did, the degeneration of words, I should seriously err, if I failed to remind you that a parallel process of purifying and ennobling has also been going forward, most of all through the influences of a Divine faith working in the world. This, as it has turned men from evil to good, or has lifted them from a lower earthly goodness to a higher heavenly, so has it in like manner elevated, purified, and ennobled a multitude of the words which they employ, until these, which once expressed only an earthly good, express now a heavenly. The Gospel of Christ, as it is the redemption of man, so is it in a multitude of instances the redemption of his word, freeing it from the bondage of corruption, that it should no longer be subject to vanity, nor stand any more in the service of sin or of the world, but in the service of God and of his truth. Thus the Greek had a word for 'humility'; but for him this humility meant—that is, with rare exceptions—meanness of spirit. He who brought in the Christian grace of humility, did in so doing rescue the term which expressed it for nobler uses and a far higher dignity than hitherto it had attained. There were 'angels' before heaven had been opened, but these only earthly messengers; 'martyrs' also, or witnesses, but these not unto blood, nor yet for God's highest truth; 'apostles,' but sent of men; 'evangels,' but these good tidings of this world, and not of the kingdom of heaven; 'advocates,' but not 'with the Father.' 'Paradise' was a word common in slightly different forms to almost all the nations of the East; but it was for them only some royal park or garden of delights; till for the Jew it was exalted to signify the mysterious abode of our first parents; while higher honours awaited it still, when on the lips of the Lord, it signified the blissful waiting-place of faithful departed souls (Luke xxiii. 43); yea, the heavenly blessedness itself (Rev. ii. 7). A 'regeneration' or palingenesy, was not unknown to the Greeks; they could speak of the earth's 'regeneration' in spring-time, of recollection as the 'regeneration' of knowledge; the Jewish historian could describe the return of his countrymen from the Babylonian Captivity, and their re-establishment in their own land, as the 'regeneration' of the Jewish State. But still the word, whether as employed by Jew or Greek, was a long way off from that honour reserved for it in the Christian dispensation—namely, that it should be the vehicle of one of the most blessed mysteries of the faith. [Footnote: See my Synonyms of the N.T. Section 18.] And many other words in like manner there are, 'fetched from the very dregs of paganism,' as Sanderson has it (he instances the Latin 'sacrament,' the Greek 'mystery'), which the Holy Spirit has not refused to employ for the setting forth of the glorious facts of our redemption; and, reversing the impious deed of Belshazzar, who profaned the sacred vessels of God's house to sinful and idolatrous uses (Dan. v. 2), has consecrated the very idol-vessels of Babylon to the service of the sanctuary.

Let us now proceed to contemplate some of the attestations to God's truth, and then some of the playings into the hands of the devil's falsehood, which lurk in words. And first, the attestations to God's truth, the fallings in of our words with his unchangeable Word; for these, as the true uses of the word, while the other are only its abuses, have a prior claim to be considered.

Thus, some modern 'false prophets,' willing to explain away all such phenomena of the world around us as declare man to be a sinner, and lying under the consequences of sin, would fain have them to believe that pain is only a subordinate kind of pleasure, or, at worst, a sort of needful hedge and guardian of pleasure. But a deeper feeling in the universal heart of man bears witness to quite another explanation of the existence of pain in the present economy of the world—namely, that it is the correlative of sin, that it is punishment; and to this the word 'pain,' so closely connected with 'poena,' bears witness. [Footnote: Our word pain is actually the same word as the Latin poena, coming to us through the French peine.] Pain is punishment; for so the word, and so the conscience of every one that is suffering it, declares. Some will not hear of great pestilences being scourges of the sins of men; and if only they can find out the immediate, imagine that they have found out the ultimate, causes of these; while yet they have only to speak of a 'plague' and they implicitly avouch the very truth which they have set themselves to deny; for a 'plague,' what is it but a stroke; so called, because that universal conscience of men which is never at fault, has felt and in this way confessed it to be such? For here, as in so many other cases, that proverb stands fast, 'Vox populi, vox Dei'; and may be admitted to the full; that is, if only we keep in mind that this 'people' is not the populace either in high place or in low; and this 'voice of the people' no momentary outcry, but the consenting testimony of the good and wise, of those neither brutalized by ignorance, nor corrupted by a false cultivation, in many places and in various times.

To one who admits the truth of this proverb it will be nothing strange that men should have agreed to call him a 'miser' or miserable, who eagerly scrapes together and painfully hoards the mammon of this world. Here too the moral instinct lying deep in all hearts has borne testimony to the tormenting nature of this vice, to the gnawing pains with which even in this present time it punishes its votaries, to the enmity which there is between it and all joy; and the man who enslaves himself to his money is proclaimed in our very language to be a 'miser,' or miserable man. [Footnote: 'Misery' does not any longer signify avarice, nor 'miserable' avaricious; but these meanings they once possessed (see my Select Glossary, s. vv.). In them men said, and in 'miser' we still say, in one word what Seneca when he wrote,— 'Nulla avaritia sine poena est, quamvis satis sit ipsa poenarum'— took a sentence to say.] Other words bear testimony to great moral truths. St. James has, I doubt not, been often charged with exaggeration for saying, 'Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all' (ii. 10). The charge is an unjust one. The Romans with their 'integritas' said as much; we too say the same who have adopted 'integrity' as a part of our ethical language. For what is 'integrity' but entireness; the 'integrity' of the body being, as Cicero explains it, the full possession and the perfect soundness of all its members; and moral 'integrity' though it cannot be predicated so absolutely of any sinful child of Adam, is this same entireness or completeness transferred to things higher. 'Integrity' was exactly that which Herod had not attained, when at the Baptist's bidding he 'did many things gladly' (Mark vi. 20), but did not put away his brother's wife; whose partial obedience therefore profited nothing; he had dropped one link in the golden chain of obedience, and as a consequence the whole chain fell to the ground.

It is very noticeable, and many have noticed, that the Greek word signifying wickedness (ponaeria) comes of another signifying labour (ponos). How well does this agree with those passages in Scripture which describe sinners as 'wearying themselves to commit iniquity,' as 'labouring in the very fire'; 'the martyrs of the devil,' as South calls them, being at more pains to go to hell than the martyrs of God to go to heaven. 'St. Chrysostom's eloquence,' as Bishop Sanderson has observed, 'enlarges itself and triumphs in this argument more frequently than in almost any other; and he clears it often and beyond all exception, both by Scripture and reason, that the life of a wicked or worldly man is a very drudgery, infinitely more toilsome, vexatious, and unpleasant than a godly life is.' [Footnote: Sermons, London, 1671, vol. ii. p. 244.]

How deep an insight into the failings of the human heart lies at the root of many words; and if only we would attend to them, what valuable warnings many contain against subtle temptations and sins! Thus, all of us have felt the temptation of seeking to please others by an unmanly assenting to their opinion, even when our own independent convictions did not agree with theirs. The existence of such a temptation, and the fact that too many yield to it, are both declared in the Latin for a flatterer—'assentator'—that is, 'an assenter'; one who has not courage to say No, when a Yes is expected from him; and quite independently of the Latin, the German, in its contemptuous and precisely equivalent use of 'Jaherr,' a 'yea-Lord,' warns us in like manner against all such unmanly compliances. Let me note that we also once possessed 'assentation' in the sense of unworthy flattering lip- assent; the last example of it in our dictionaries is from Bishop Hall: 'It is a fearful presage of ruin when the prophets conspire in assentation;' but it lived on to a far later day, being found and exactly in the same sense in Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his son; he there speaks of 'abject flattery and indiscriminate assentation.' [Footnote: August 10, 1749. [In the New English Dictionary a quotation for the word is given as late as 1859. I. Taylor, in his Logic in Theology, p. 265, says: 'A safer anchorage may be found than the shoal of mindless assentation']] The word is well worthy to be revived.

Again, how well it is to have that spirit of depreciation, that eagerness to find spots and stains in the characters of the noblest and the best, who would otherwise oppress and rebuke us with a goodness and a greatness so immensely superior to our own,—met and checked by a word at once so expressive, and so little pleasant to take home to ourselves, as the French 'denigreur,' a 'blackener.' This also has fallen out of use; which is a pity, seeing that the race which it designates is so far from being extinct. Full too of instruction and warning is our present employment of 'libertine.' A 'libertine,' in earlier use, was a speculative free-thinker in matters of religion and in the theory of morals. But as by a process which is seldom missed free-thinking does and will end in free-acting, he who has cast off one yoke also casting off the other, so a 'libertine' came in two or three generations to signify a profligate, especially in relation to women, a licentious and debauched person. [Footnote: See the author's Select Glossary (s.v.)]

Look a little closely at the word 'passion,' We sometimes regard a 'passionate' man as a man of strong will, and of real, though ungoverned, energy. But 'passion' teaches us quite another lesson; for it, as a very solemn use of it declares, means properly 'suffering'; and a 'passionate' man is not one who is doing something, but one suffering something to be done to him. When then a man or child is 'in a passion,' this is no outcoming in him of a strong will, of a real energy, but the proof rather that, for the time at least, he is altogether wanting in these; he is suffering, not doing; suffering his anger, or whatever evil temper it may be, to lord over him without control. Let no one then think of 'passion' as a sign of strength. One might with as much justice conclude a man strong because he was often well beaten; this would prove that a strong man was putting forth his strength on him, but certainly not that he was himself strong. The same sense of 'passion' and feebleness going together, of the first as the outcome of the second, lies, I may remark by the way, in the twofold use of 'impotens' in the Latin, which meaning first weak, means then violent, and then weak and violent together. For a long time 'impotent' and 'impotence' in English embodied the same twofold meaning.

Or meditate on the use of 'humanitas,' and the use (in Scotland at least) of the 'humanities,' to designate those studies which are esteemed the fittest for training the true humanity in every man. [Footnote: [Compare the use of the term Litterae Humaniores in the University of Oxford to designate the oldest and most characteristic of her examinations or 'Schools.']] We have happily overlived in England the time when it was still in debate among us whether education is a good thing for every living soul or not; the only question which now seriously divides Englishmen being, in what manner that mental and moral training, which is society's debt to each one of its members, may be most effectually imparted to him. Were it not so, were there any still found to affirm that it was good for any man to be left with powers not called out and faculties untrained, we might appeal to this word 'humanitas,' and the use to which the Roman put it, in proof that he at least was not of this mind. By 'humanitas' he intended the fullest and most harmonious development of all the truly human faculties and powers. Then, and then only, man was truly man, when he received this; in so far as he did not receive this, his 'humanity' was maimed and imperfect; he fell short of his ideal, of that which he was created to be.

In our use of 'talents,' as when we say 'a man of talents,' there is a clear recognition of the responsibilities which go along with the possession of intellectual gifts and endowments, whatever these may be. We owe our later use of 'talent' to the parable (Matt. xxv. 14), in which more or fewer of these are committed to the several servants, that they may trade with them in their master's absence, and give account of their employment at his return. Men may choose to forget the ends for which their 'talents' were given them; they may count them merely something which they have gotten; [Footnote: An [Greek: hexis], as the heathen did, not a [Greek: dorema], as the Christian does; see a remarkable passage in Bishop Andrewes' Sermons, vol. iii. p. 384.] they may turn them to selfish ends; they may glorify themselves in them, instead of glorifying the Giver; they may practically deny that they were given at all; yet in this word, till they can rid their vocabulary of it, abides a continual memento that they were so given, or rather lent, and that each man shall have to render an account of their use.

Again, in 'oblige' and 'obligation,' as when we speak of 'being obliged,' or of having 'received an obligation,' a moral truth is asserted—this namely, that having received a benefit or a favour at the hands of another, we are thereby morally bound to show ourselves grateful for the same. We cannot be ungrateful without denying not merely a moral truth, but one incorporated in the very language which we employ. Thus South, in a sermon, Of the odious Sin of Ingratitude, has well asked, 'If the conferring of a kindness did not bind the person upon whom it was conferred to the returns of gratitude, why, in the universal dialect of the world, are kindnesses called obligations?' [Footnote: Sermons, London, 1737, vol. i. p. 407.]

Once more—the habit of calling a woman's chastity her 'virtue' is significant. I will not deny that it may spring in part from a tendency which often meets us in language, to narrow the whole circle of virtues to some one upon which peculiar stress is laid; [Footnote: Thus in Jewish Greek [Greek: eleaemosnuae] stands often for [Greek: dikaosnuae] (Deut. vi. 25; Ps. cii. 6, LXX), or almsgiving for righteousness.] but still, in selecting this peculiar one as the 'virtue' of woman, there speaks out a true sense that this is indeed for her the citadel of the whole moral being, the overthrow of which is the overthrow of all; that it is the keystone of the arch, which being withdrawn, the whole collapses and falls.

Or consider all which is witnessed for us in 'kind.' We speak of a 'kind' person, and we speak of man-'kind,' and perhaps, if we think about the matter at all, fancy that we are using quite different words, or the same words in senses quite unconnected. But they are connected, and by closest bonds; a 'kind' person is one who acknowledges his kinship with other men, and acts upon it; confesses that he owes to them, as of one blood with himself, the debt of love. [Footnote: Thus Hamlet does much more than merely play on words when he calls his father's brother, who had married his mother, 'A little more than kin, and less than kind.' [For the relation between kind (the adj.) and kind ('nature,' the sb.) see Skeat's Dict.]] Beautiful before, how much more beautiful do 'kind' and 'kindness' appear, when we apprehend the root out of which they grow, and the truth which they embody; that they are the acknowledgment in loving deeds of our kinship with our brethren; of the relationship which exists between all the members of the human family, and of the obligations growing out of the same.

But I observed just now that there are also words bearing on them the slime of the serpent's trail; uses, too, of words which imply moral perversity—not upon their parts who employ them now in their acquired senses, but on theirs from whom little by little they received their deflection, and were warped from their original rectitude. A 'prude' is now a woman with an over-done affectation of a modesty which she does not really feel, and betraying the absence of the substance by this over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. Goodness must have gone strangely out of fashion, the corruption of manners must have been profound, before matters could have come to this point. 'Prude,' a French word, means properly virtuous or prudent. [Footnote: [Compare French prude, on the etymology of which see Schelar's French Dict., ed. 3 (1888)].] But where morals are greatly and generally relaxed, virtue is treated as hypocrisy; and thus, in a dissolute age, and one incredulous of any inward purity, by the 'prude' or virtuous woman is intended a sort of female Tartuffe, affecting a virtue which it is taken for granted none can really possess; and the word abides, a proof of the world's disbelief in the realities of goodness, of its resolution to treat them as hypocrisies and deceits.

Again, why should 'simple' be used slightingly, and 'simpleton' more slightingly still? The 'simple' is one properly of a single fold; [Footnote: [Latin simplicem; for Lat. sim-, sin-= Greek [Greek: ha] in [Greek: ha-pax], see Brugmann, Grundriss, Section 238, Curtius, Greek Etym. No. 599.]] a Nathanael, whom as such Christ honoured to the highest (John i. 47); and, indeed, what honour can be higher than to have nothing double about us, to be without duplicities or folds? Even the world, which despises 'simplicity,' does not profess to admire 'duplicity,' or double-foldedness. But inasmuch as it is felt that a man without these folds will in a world like ours make himself a prey, and as most men, if obliged to choose between deceiving and being deceived, would choose the former, it has come to pass that 'simple' which in a kingdom of righteousness would be a world of highest honour, carries with it in this world of ours something of contempt. [Footnote: 'Schlecht,' which in modern German means bad, good for nothing, once meant good,—good, that is, in the sense of right or straight, but has passed through the same stages to the meaning which it now possesses, 'albern' has done the same (Max Mueller, Science of Language, 2nd series, p. 274).] Nor can we help noting another involuntary testimony borne by human language to human sin. I mean this,—that an idiot, or one otherwise deficient in intellect, is called an 'innocent' or one who does no hurt; this use of 'innocent' assuming that to do hurt and harm is the chief employment to which men turn their intellectual powers, that, where they are wise, they are oftenest wise to do evil.

Nor are these isolated examples of the contemptuous use which words expressive of goodness gradually acquire. Such meet us on every side. Our 'silly' is the Old-English 'saelig' or blessed. We see it in a transition state in our early poets, with whom 'silly' is an affectionate epithet which sheep obtain for their harmlessness. One among our earliest calls the newborn Lord of Glory Himself, 'this harmless silly babe,' But 'silly' has travelled on the same lines as 'simple,' 'innocent,' and so many other words. The same moral phenomenon repeats itself continually. Thus 'sheepish' in the Ormulum is an epithet of honour: it is used of one who has the mind of Him who was led as a sheep to the slaughter. At the first promulgation of the Christian faith, while the name of its Divine Founder was still strange to the ears of the heathen, they were wont, some in ignorance, but more of malice, slightly to mispronounce this name, turning 'Christus' into 'Chrestus'—that is, the benevolent or benign. That these last meant no honour thereby to the Lord of Life, but the contrary, is certain; this word, like 'silly,' 'innocent,' 'simple,' having already contracted a slight tinge of contempt, without which there would have been no inducement to fasten it on the Saviour. The French have their 'bonhomie' with the same undertone of contempt, the Greeks their [Greek: eyetheia]. Lady Shiel tells us of the modern Persians, 'They have odd names for describing the moral qualities; "Sedakat" means sincerity, honesty, candour; but when a man is said to be possessed of "sedakat," the meaning is that he is a credulous, contemptible simpleton.' [Footnote: Life and Manners in Persia, p. 247.] It is to the honour of the Latin tongue, and very characteristic of the best aspects of Roman life, that 'simplex' and 'simplicitas' never acquired this abusive signification.

Again, how prone are we all to ascribe to chance or fortune those gifts and blessings which indeed come directly from God—to build altars to Fortune rather than to Him who is the author of every good thing which we have gotten. And this faith of men, that their blessings, even their highest, come to them by a blind chance, they have incorporated in a word; for 'happy' and 'happiness' are connected with 'hap,' which is chance;—how unworthy, then, to express any true felicity, whose very essence is that it excludes hap or chance, that the world neither gave nor can take it away. [Footnote: The heathen with their [Greek: eudaimonia], inadequate as this word must be allowed to be, put us here to shame.] Against a similar misuse of 'fortunate,' 'unfortunate,' Wordsworth very nobly protests, when, of one who, having lost everything else, had yet kept the truth, he exclaims:

'Call not the royal Swede unfortunate, Who never did to Fortune bend the knee.'

There are words which reveal a wrong or insufficient estimate that men take of their duties, or that at all events others have taken before them; for it is possible that the mischief may have been done long ago, and those who now use the words may only have inherited it from others, not helped to bring it about themselves. An employer of labour advertises that he wants so many 'hands'; but this language never could have become current, a man could never have thus shrunk into a 'hand' in the eyes of his fellow-man, unless this latter had in good part forgotten that, annexed to those hands which he would purchase to toil for him, were also heads and hearts [Footnote: A similar use of [Greek: somata] for slaves in Greek rested originally on the same forgetfulness of the moral worth of every man. It has found its way into the Septuagint and Apocrypha (Gen. xxxvi. 6; 2 Macc. viii. 11; Tob. x. 10); and occurs once in the New Testament (Rev. xviii. 13). [In Gen. xxxvi. 6 the [Greek: somata] of the Septuagint is a rendering of the Hebrew nafshoth, souls, so Luther translates 'Seelen.']]—a fact, by the way, of which, if he persists in forgetting it, he may be reminded in very unwelcome ways at the last. In Scripture there is another not unfrequent putting of a part for the whole, as when it is said, 'The same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls' (Acts ii. 41). 'Hands' here, 'souls' there—the contrast may suggest some profitable reflections.

There is another way in which the immorality of words mainly displays itself, and in which they work their worst mischief; that is, when honourable names are given to dishonourable things, when sin is made plausible; arrayed, it may be, in the very colours of goodness, or, if not so, yet in such as go far to conceal its own native deformity. 'The tongue,' as St. James has said, 'is a world of iniquity' (iii. 7); or, as some would render his words, and they are then still more to our purpose, 'the ornament of iniquity,' that which sets it out in fair and attractive colours.

How much wholesomer on all accounts is it that there should be an ugly word for an ugly thing, one involving moral condemnation and disgust, even at the expense of a little coarseness, rather than one which plays fast and loose with the eternal principles of morality, makes sin plausible, and shifts the divinely reared landmarks of right and wrong, thus bringing the user of it under the woe of them 'that call evil good, and good evil, that put darkness for light, and light for darkness, that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter' (Isai. v. 20). On this text, and with reference to this scheme, South has written four of his grandest sermons, bearing this striking title, Of the fatal Imposture and Force of Words. [Footnote: Sermons, 1737, vol. ii. pp. 313-351; vol. vi. pp. 3-120. Thus on those who pleaded that their 'honour' was engaged, and that therefore they could not go back from this or that sinful act:—'Honour is indeed a noble thing, and therefore the word which signifies it must needs be very plausible. But as a rich and glistening garment may be cast over a rotten body, so an illustrious commanding word may be put upon a vile and an ugly thing—for words are but the garments, the loose garments of things, and so may easily be put off and on according to the humour of him who bestows them. But the body changes not, though the garments do.'] How awful, yea how fearful, is this 'imposture and force' of theirs, leading men captive at will. There is an atmosphere about them which they are evermore diffusing, a savour of life or of death, which we insensibly inhale at each moral breath we draw. [Footnote: Bacon's words have often been quoted, but they will bear being quoted once more: Credunt enim homines rationem suam verbis imperare. Sed fit etiam ut verba vim suam super intellectum retorqueant et reflectant.] 'Winds of the soul,' as we have already heard them called, they fill its sails, and are continually impelling it upon its course, to heaven or to hell.

Thus how different the light in which we shall have learned to regard a sin, according as we have been wont to designate it, and to hear it designated, by a word which brings out its loathsomeness and deformity; or by one which palliates this and conceals; men, as one said of old, being wont for the most part to be ashamed not of base deeds but of base names affixed to those deeds. In the murder trials at Dublin, 1883, those destined to the assassin's knife were spoken of by approvers as persons to be removed, and their death constantly described as their 'removal.' In Sussex it is never said of a man that he is drunk. He may be 'tight,' or 'primed,' or 'crank,' or 'concerned in liquor,' nay, it may even be admitted that he had taken as much liquor as was good for him; but that he was drunk, oh never. [Footnote: 'Pransus' and 'potus,' in like manner, as every Latin scholar knows, mean much more than they say.] Fair words for foul things are everywhere only too frequent; thus in 'drug-damned Italy,' when poisoning was the rifest, nobody was said to be poisoned; it was only that the death of this one or of that had been 'assisted' (aiutata). Worse still are words which seek to turn the edge of the divine threatenings against some sin by a jest; as when in France a subtle poison, by whose aid impatient heirs delivered themselves from those who stood between them and the inheritance which they coveted, was called 'poudre de succession.' We might suppose beforehand that such cloaks for sin would be only found among people in an advanced state of artificial cultivation. But it is not so. Captain Erskine, who visited the Fiji Islands before England had taken them into her keeping, and who gives some extraordinary details of the extent to which cannibalism then prevailed among their inhabitants, pork and human flesh being their two staple articles of food, relates in his deeply interesting record of his voyage that natural pig they called 'short pig,' and man dressed and prepared for food, 'long pig.' There was doubtless an attempt here to carry off with a jest the revolting character of the practice in which they indulged. For that they were themselves aware of this, that their consciences did bear witness against it, was attested by their uniform desire to conceal, if possible, all traces of the practice from European eyes.

But worst, perhaps, of all are names which throw a flimsy veil of sentiment over some sin. What a source, for example, of mischief without end in our country parishes is the one practice of calling a child born out of wedlock a 'love-child,' instead of a bastard. It would be hard to estimate how much it has lowered the tone and standard of morality among us; or for how many young women it may have helped to make the downward way more sloping still. How vigorously ought we to oppose ourselves to all such immoralities of language. This opposition, it is true, will never be easy or pleasant; for many who will endure to commit a sin, will profoundly resent having that sin called by its right name. Pirates, as Aristotle tells us, in his time called themselves 'purveyors.' [Footnote: Rhet. iii. 2: [Greek: oi laestai autous poriotas kalousi nun.]] Buccaneers, men of the same bloody trade, were by their own account 'brethren of the coast.' Shakespeare's thieves are only true to human nature, when they name themselves 'St. Nicholas' clerks,' 'michers,' 'nuthooks,' 'minions of the moon,' anything in short but thieves; when they claim for their stealing that it shall not be so named, but only conveying ('convey the wise it call'); the same dislike to look an ugly fact in the face reappearing among the voters in some of our corrupter boroughs, who receive, not bribes—they are hugely indignant if this is imputed to them—but 'head-money' for their votes. Shakespeare indeed has said that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; but there are some things which are not roses, and which are counted to smell a great deal sweeter being called by any other name than their own. Thus, to deal again with bribes, call a bribe 'palm oil,' or a 'pot de vin,' and how much of its ugliness disappears. Far more moral words are the English 'sharper' and 'blackleg' than the French 'chevalier d'industrie': [Footnote: For the rise of this phrase, see Lemontey, Louis XIV. p. 43.] and the same holds good of the English equivalent, coarse as it is, for the Latin 'conciliatrix.' In this last word we have a notable example of the putting of sweet for bitter, of the attempt to present a disgraceful occupation on an amiable, almost a sentimental side, rather than in its own proper deformity. [Footnote: This tendency of men to throw the mantle of an honourable word over a dishonourable thing, or, vice versa, to degrade an honourable thing, when they do not love it, by a dishonourable appellation, has in Greek a word to describe it, [Greek: hypokorizesthai], itself a word with an interesting history; while the great ethical teachers of Greece frequently occupy themselves in detecting and denouncing this most mischievous among all the impostures of words. Thus, when Thucydides (iii. 82) would paint the fearful moral ruin which her great Civil War had wrought, he adduces this alteration of the received value of words, this fitting of false names to everything—names of honour to the base, and of baseness to the honourable—as one of the most remarkable tokens of this, even as it again set forward the evil, of which it had been first the result.] Use and custom soon dim our eyes in such matters as these; else we should be deeply struck by a familiar instance of this falsehood in names, one which perhaps has never struck us at all—I mean the profane appropriation of 'eau de vie' (water of life), a name borrowed from some of the Saviour's most precious promises (John iv. 14; Rev. xxii. 17), to a drink which the untutored savage with a truer instinct has named 'fire-water'; which, sad to say, is known in Tahiti as 'British water'; and which has proved for thousands and tens of thousands, in every clime, not 'water of life,' but the fruitful source of disease, crime, and madness, bringing forth first these, and when these are finished, bringing forth death. There is a blasphemous irony in this appropriation of the language of heaven to that which, not indeed in its use, but too frequent abuse, is the instrument of hell, that is almost without a parallel. [Footnote: Milton in a profoundly instructive letter, addressed by him to one of the friends whom he made during his Italian tour, encourages him in those philological studies to which he had devoted his life by such words as these: Neque enim qui sermo, purusne an corruptus, quaeve loquendi proprietas quotidiana populo sit, parvi interesse arbitrandum est, quae res Athenis non semel saluti fuit; immo vero, quod Platonis sententia est, immutato vestiendi more habituque graves in Republica motus mutationesque portendi, equidem potius collabente in vitium atque errorem loquendi usu occasum ejus urbis remque humilem et obscuram subsequi crediderim: verba enim partim inscita et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid si ignavos et oscitantes et ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum animos haud levi indicio declarant? Contra nullum unquam audivimus imperium, nullam civitatem non mediocriter saltern floruisse, quamdiu linguae sua gratia, suusque cultus constitit. Compare an interesting Epistle (the 114th) of Seneca.] If I wanted any further evidence of this, the moral atmosphere which words diffuse, I would ask you to observe how the first thing men do, when engaged in controversy with others, be it in the conflict of the tongue or the pen, or of weapons more wounding yet, if such there be, is ever to assume some honourable name to themselves, such as, if possible, shall beg the whole subject in dispute, and at the same time to affix on their adversaries a name which shall place them in a ridiculous or contemptible or odious light. [Footnote: See p. 33.] A deep instinct, deeper perhaps than men give any account of to themselves, tells them how far this will go; that multitudes, utterly unable to weigh the arguments on one side or the other, will yet be receptive of the influences which these words are evermore, however imperceptibly, diffusing. By argument they might hope to gain over the reason of a few, but by help of these nicknames they enlist what at first are so much more potent, the prejudices and passions of the many, on their side. Thus when at the breaking out of our Civil War the Parliamentary party styled themselves 'The Godly,' while to the Royalists they gave the title of 'The Malignants,' it is certain that, wherever they could procure entrance and allowance for these terms, the question upon whose side the right lay was already decided. The Royalists, it is true, made exactly the same employment of what Bentham used to call question-begging words, of words steeped quite as deeply in the passions which animated them. It was much when at Florence the 'Bad Boys,' as they defiantly called themselves, were able to affix on the followers of Savonarola the title of Piagnoni or The Snivellers. So, too, the Franciscans, when they nicknamed the Dominicans 'Maculists,' as denying, or at all events refusing to affirm as a matter of faith, that the Blessed Virgin was conceived without stain (sine macula), perfectly knew that this title would do much to put their rivals in an odious light. The copperhead in America is a peculiarly venomous snake. Something effectual was done when this name was fastened, as it lately was, by one party in America on its political opponents. Not otherwise, in some of our northern towns, the workmen who refuse to join a trade union are styled 'knobsticks,' 'crawlers,' 'scabs,' 'blacklegs.' Nor can there be any question of the potent influence which these nicknames of contempt and scorn exert. [Footnote: [See interesting chapter on Political Nicknames in D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature.]]

Seeing, then, that language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer indicating and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life. To study a people's language will be to study them, and to study them at best advantage; there, where they present themselves to us under fewest disguises, most nearly as they are. Too many have had a hand in the language as it now is, and in bringing it to the shape in which we find it, it is too entirely the collective work of a whole people, the result of the united contributions of all, it obeys too immutable laws, to allow any successful tampering with it, any making of it to witness to any other than the actual facts of the case. [Footnote: Terrien Poncel, Du Langage, p. 231: Les langues sont faites a l'usage des peuples qui les parlent; elles sont animees chacune d'un esprit different, et suivent un mode particulier d'action, conforme a leur principe. 'L'esprit d'une nation et le caractere de sa langue, a ecrit G. de Humboldt, 'sont si intimement lies ensemble, que si l'un etait donne, l'autre devrait pouvoir s'en deduire exactement.' La langue n'est autre chose que la manifestation exterieure de l'esprit des peuples; leur langue est leur esprit, et leur esprit est leur langue, de telle sorte qu'en developpant et perfectionnant l'un, ils developpent et perfectionnent necessairement l'autre. And a recent German writer has well said, Die Sprache, das selbstgewebte Kleid der Vorstellung, in welchem jeder Faden wieder eine Vorstellung ist, kann uns, richtig betrachtet, offenbaren, welche Vorstellungen die Grundfaden bildeten (Gerber, Die Sprache als Kunst).] Thus the frivolity of an age or nation, its mockery of itself, its inability to comprehend the true dignity and meaning of life, the feebleness of its moral indignation against evil, all this will find an utterance in the employment of solemn and earnest words in senses comparatively trivial or even ridiculous. 'Gehenna,' that word of such terrible significance on the lips of our Lord, has in French issued in 'gene,' and in this shape expresses no more than a slight and petty annoyance. 'Ennui' meant once something very different from what now it means. [Footnote: Ennui is derived from the Late Latin phrase in odio esse.] Littre gives as its original signification, 'anguish of soul, caused by the death of persons beloved, by their absence, by the shipwreck of hopes, by any misfortunes whatever.' 'Honnetete,' which should mean that virtue of all virtues, honesty, and which did mean it once, standing as it does now for external civility and for nothing more, marks a willingness to accept the slighter observances and pleasant courtesies of society in the room of deeper moral qualities. 'Verite' is at this day so worn out, has been used so often where another and very different word would have been more appropriate, that not seldom a Frenchman at this present who would fain convince us of the truth of his communication finds it convenient to assure us that it is 'la vraie verite.' Neither is it well that words, which ought to have been reserved for the highest mysteries of the spiritual life, should be squandered on slight and secular objects,—'spirituel' itself is an example in point,—or that words implying once the deepest moral guilt, as is the case with 'perfide,' 'malice,' 'malin,' in French, should be employed now almost in honour, applied in jest and in play.

Often a people's use of some single word will afford us a deeper insight into their real condition, their habits of thought and feeling, than whole volumes written expressly with the intention of imparting this insight. Thus 'idiot,' a Greek word, is abundantly characteristic of Greek life. The 'idiot,' or [Greek: idiotas], was originally the private man, as contradistinguished from one clothed with office, and taking his share in the management of public affairs. In this its primary sense it was often used in the English of the seventeenth century; as when Jeremy Taylor says, 'Humility is a duty in great ones, as well as in idiots.' It came then to signify a rude, ignorant, unskilled, intellectually unexercised person, a boor; this derived or secondary sense bearing witness to a conviction woven deep into the Greek mind that contact with public life, and more or less of participation in it, was indispensable even to the right development of the intellect, [Footnote: Hare, Mission of the Comforter, p. 552.] a conviction which would scarcely have uttered itself with greater clearness than it does in this secondary use of 'idiot.' Our tertiary, in which the 'idiot' is one deficient in intellect, not merely with intellectual powers unexercised, is only this secondary pushed a little farther. Once more, how wonderfully characteristic of the Greek mind it is that the language should have one and the same word ([Greek: kalos]), to express the beautiful and the good—goodness being thus contemplated as the highest beauty; while over against this stands another word ([Greek: aischros]) used alike for the ugly to look at and for the morally bad. Again, the innermost differences between the Greek and the Hebrew reveal themselves in the several salutations of each, in the 'Rejoice' of the first, as contrasted with the 'Peace' of the second. The clear, cheerful, world-enjoying temper of the Greek embodies itself in the first; he could desire nothing better or higher for himself, nor wish it for his friend, than to have joy in his life. But the Hebrew had a deeper longing within him, and one which finds utterance in his 'Peace.' It is not hard to perceive why this latter people should have been chosen as the first bearers of that truth which indeed enables truly to rejoice, but only through first bringing peace; nor why from them the word of life should first go forth. It may be urged, indeed, that these were only forms, and such they may have at length become; as in our 'good-by' or 'adieu' we can hardly be said now to commit our friend to the Divine protection; yet still they were not forms at the beginning, nor would they have held their ground, if ever they had become such altogether.

How much, again, will be sometimes involved in the gradual disuse of one name, and the coming up of another in its room. Thus, little as the fact, and the moral significance of the fact, may have been noticed at the time, what an epoch was it in the history of the Papacy, and with what distinctness marking a more thorough secularizing of its whole tone and spirit, when 'Ecclesia Romana,' the official title by which it was wont at an earlier day to designate itself, gave place to the later title, 'Curia Romana,' the Roman Church making room for the Roman Court. [Footnote: See on this matter The Pope and the Council, by Janus, p. 215.] The modifications of meaning which a word has undergone as it had been transplanted from one soil to another, so that one nation borrowing it from another, has brought into it some force foreign to it before, has deepened, or extenuated, or otherwise modified its meaning,—this may reveal to us, as perhaps nothing else would, fundamental diversities of character existing between them. The word in Greek exactly corresponding to our 'self-sufficient' is one of honour, and was applied to men in their praise. And indeed it was the glory of the heathen philosophy to teach man to find his resources in his own bosom, to be thus sufficient for himself; and seeing that a true centre without him and above him, a centre in God, had not been revealed to him, it was no shame for him to seek it there; far better this than to have no centre at all. But the Gospel has taught us another lesson, to find our sufficiency in God: and thus 'self- sufficient,' to the Greek suggesting no lack of modesty, of humility, or of any good thing, at once suggests such to us. 'Self-sufficiency' no man desires now to be attributed to him. The word carries for us its own condemnation; and its different uses, for honour once, for reproach now, do in fact ground themselves on the innermost differences between the religious condition of the world before Christ and after.

It was not well with Italy, she might fill the world with exquisite specimens of her skill in the arts, with pictures and statues of rarest loveliness, but all higher national life was wanting to her during those centuries in which she degraded 'virtuoso,' or the virtuous man, to signify one skilled in the appreciation of painting, music, and sculpture; for these, the ornamental fringe of a people's life, can never, without loss of all manliness of character, be its main texture and woof—not to say that excellence in them has been too often dissociated from all true virtue and moral worth. The opposite exaggeration of the Romans, for whom 'virtus' meant predominantly warlike courage, the truest 'manliness' of men, was more tolerable than this; for there is a sense in which a man's 'valour' is his value, is the measure of his worth; seeing that no virtue can exist among men who have not learned, in Milton's glorious phrase,' to hate the cowardice of doing wrong.' [Footnote: It did not escape Plutarch, imperfect Latin scholar as he was, that 'virtus' far more nearly corresponded to [Greek: andreia] than to [Greek: arete] (Coriol. I)] It could not but be morally ill with a people among whom 'morbidezza' was used as an epithet of praise, expressive of a beauty which on the score of its sickly softness demanded to be admired. There was too sure a witness here for the decay of moral strength and health, when these could not merely be dissevered from beauty, but implicitly put in opposition to it. Nor less must it have fared ill with Italians, there was little joy and little pride which they could have felt in their country, at a time when 'pellegrino,' meaning properly the strange or the foreign, came to be of itself a word of praise, and equivalent to beautiful. [Footnote: Compare Florio's Ital. Diet.: 'pelegrino, excellent, noble, rare, pregnant, singular and choice.'] Far better the pride and assumption of that ancient people who called all things and persons beyond their own pale barbarous and barbarians; far better our own 'outlandish,' used with something of the same contempt. There may be a certain intolerance in our use of these; yet this how much healthier than so far to have fallen out of conceit with one's own country, so far to affect things foreign, that these last, merely on the strength of being foreign, commend themselves as beautiful in our sight. How little, again, the Italians, until quite later years, can have lived in the spirit of their ancient worthies, or reverenced the most illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again, or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying to an ignoble past, and in some sort helping to maintain it, long after the temper and tone of mind that produced them has passed away. [Footnote: See on this matter Marsh, On the English Language, New York, 1860, p. 224.]

Happily it is nearly impossible for us in England to understand the mingled scorn, hatred, fear, suspicion, contempt, which in time past were associated with the word 'sbirri' in Italian. [Footnote: [Compare V. Hugo's allusion to Louis Napoleon in the Chatiments:

'Qui pour la mettre en croix livra, Sbire cruel! Rome republicaine a Rome catholique!']]

These 'sbirri' were the humble, but with all this the acknowledged, ministers of justice; while yet everything which is mean and false and oppressive, which can make the name of justice hateful, was implied in this title of theirs, was associated with their name. There is no surer sign of a bad oppressive rule, than when the titles of the administrators of law, titles which should be in themselves so honourable, thus acquire a hateful undermeaning. What a world of concussions, chicane and fraud, must have found place, before tax- gatherer, or exciseman, 'publican,' as in our English Bible, could become a word steeped in hatred and scorn, as alike for Greek and Jew it was; while, on the other hand, however unwelcome the visits of the one or the interference of the other may be to us, yet the sense of the entire fairness and justice with which their exactions are made, acquits these names for us of the slightest sense of dishonour. 'Policeman' has no evil subaudition with us; though in the last century, when a Jonathan Wild was possible, 'catchpole,' a word in Wiclif's time of no dishonour at all, was abundantly tinged with this scorn and contempt. So too, if at this day any accidental profits fall or 'escheat' to the Crown, they are levied with so much fairness and more than fairness to the subject, that, were not the thing already accomplished, 'escheat' would never yield 'cheat,' nor 'escheator' 'cheater,' as through the extortions and injustices for which these dues were formerly a pretext, they actually have done.

It is worse, as marking that a still holier sanctuary than that of civil government has become profane in men's sight, when words which express sacred functions and offices become redolent of scorn. How thankful we may be that in England we have no equivalent to the German 'Pfaffe,' which, identical with 'papa' and 'pope,' and a name given at first to any priest, now carries with it the insinuation of almost every unworthiness in the forms of meanness, servility, and avarice which can render the priest's office and person base and contemptible.

Much may be learned by noting the words which nations have been obliged to borrow from other nations, as not having the same of home-growth— this in most cases, if not in all, testifying that the thing itself was not native, but an exotic, transplanted, like the word that indicated it, from a foreign soil. Thus it is singularly characteristic of the social and political life of England, as distinguished from that of the other European nations, that to it alone the word 'club' belongs; France and Germany, having been alike unable to grow a word of their own, have borrowed ours. That England should have been the birthplace of 'club' is nothing wonderful; for these voluntary associations of men for the furthering of such social or political ends as are near to the hearts of the associates could have only had their rise under such favourable circumstances as ours. In no country where there was not extreme personal freedom could they have sprung up; and as little in any where men did not know how to use this freedom with moderation and self-restraint, could they long have been endured. It was comparatively easy to adopt the word; but the ill success of the 'club' itself everywhere save here where it is native, has shown that it was not so easy to transplant or, having transplanted, to acclimatize the thing. While we have lent this and other words, political and industrial for the most part, to the French and Germans, it would not be less instructive, if time allowed, to trace our corresponding obligations to them.

And scarcely less significant and instructive than the presence of a word in a language, will be occasionally its absence. Thus Fronto, a Greek orator in Roman times, finds evidence of an absence of strong family affection on the part of the Romans in the absence of any word in the Latin language corresponding to the Greek [Greek: philostorgos] How curious, from the same point of view, are the conclusions which Cicero in his high Roman fashion draws from the absence of any word in the Greek answering to the Latin 'ineptus'; not from this concluding, as we might have anticipated, that the character designated by the word was wanting, but rather that the fault was so common, so universal with the Greeks, that they failed to recognize it as a fault at all. [Footnote: De Orat. ii. 4: Quem enim nos ineptum vocamus, is mihi videtur ab hoc nomen habere ductum, quod non sit aptus. Idque in sermonis nostri consuetudine perlate patet. Nam qui aut tempus quid postulet, non videt, aut plura loquitur, aut se ostentat, aut eorum quibuscum est vel dignitatis vel commodi rationem non habet, aut denique in aliquo genere aut inconcinnus aut multus est, is ineptus esse dicitur. Hoc vitio cumulata est eruditissima illa Graecorum natio. Itaque quod vim hujus mali Graeci non vident, ne nomen quidem ei vitio imposuerunt. Ut enim quasras omnia, quomodo Graeci ineptum appellent, non invenies.] Very instructive you may find it to note these words, which one people possess, but to which others have nothing to correspond, so that they have no choice but to borrow these, or else to go without altogether. Here are some French words for which it would not be easy, nay, in most cases it would be impossible, to find exact equivalents in English or in German, or probably in any language: 'aplomb,' 'badinage,' 'borne,' 'chic,' 'chicane,' 'cossu,' 'coterie,' 'egarement,' 'elan,' 'espieglerie,' 'etourderie,' 'friponnerie,' 'gentil,' 'ingenue,' 'liaison,' 'malice,' 'parvenu,' 'persiflage,' 'prevenant,' 'ruse,' 'tournure,' 'tracasserie,' 'verve.' It is evident that the words just named have to do with shades of thought which are to a great extent unfamiliar to us; for which, at any rate, we have not found a name, have hardly felt that they needed one. But fine and subtle as in many instances are the thoughts which these words embody, there are deeper thoughts struggling in the bosom of a people, who have devised for themselves such words as the following: 'gemueth,' 'heimweh,' 'innigkeit,' 'sehnsucht,' 'tiefsinn,' 'sittsamkeit,' 'verhaengniss,' 'weltschmerz,' 'zucht'; all these being German words which, in a similar manner, partially or wholly fail to find their equivalents in French.

The petty spite which unhappily so often reigns between nations dwelling side by side with one another, as it embodies itself in many shapes, so it finds vent in the words which they borrow from one another, and the use to which they put them. Thus the French, borrowing 'hablar' from the Spaniards, with whom it means simply to speak, give it in 'habler' the sense of to brag; the Spaniards paying them off in exactly their own coin, for of 'parler' which in like manner is but to speak in French, they make 'parlar,' which means to prate, to chat. [Footnote: See Darmesteter, The Life of Words, Eng. ed. p. 100.]

But it is time to bring this lecture to an end. These illustrations, to which it would be easy to add more, justify all that has been asserted of a moral element existing in words; so that they do not hold themselves neutral in that great conflict between good and evil, light and darkness, which is dividing the world; that they are not satisfied to be passionless vehicles, now of the truth, and now of lies. We see, on the contrary, that they continually take their side, are some of them children of light, others children of this world, or even of darkness; they beat with the pulses of our life; they stir with our passions; we clothe them with light; we steep them in scorn; they receive from us the impressions of our good and of our evil, which again they are most active still further to propagate and diffuse. [Footnote: Two or three examples of what we have been affirming, drawn from the Latin, may fitly here find place. Thus Cicero (Tusc. iii. 7) laments of 'confidens' that it should have acquired an evil signification, and come to mean bold, over-confident in oneself, unduly pushing (compare Virgil,Georg. iv. 444), a meaning which little by little had been superinduced on the word, but etymologically was not inherent in it at all. In the same way 'latro,' having left two earlier meanings behind, one of these current so late as in Virgil (Aen. xii. 7), settles down at last in the meaning of robber. Not otherwise 'facinus' begins with being simply a fact or act, something done; but ends with being some act of outrageous wickedness. 'Pronuba' starts with meaning a bridesmaid it ignobly ends with suggesting a procuress.] Must we not own then that there is a wondrous and mysterious world, of which we may hitherto have taken too little account, around us and about us? Is there not something very solemn and very awful in wielding such an instrument as this of language is, with such power to wound or to heal, to kill or to make alive? and may not a deeper meaning than hitherto we have attached to it, lie in that saying, 'By thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned'?



LECTURE IV.

ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS.

Language, being ever in flux and flow, and, for nations to which letters are still strange, existing only for the ear and as a sound, we might beforehand expect would prove the least trustworthy of all vehicles whereby the knowledge of the past has reached our present; that one which would most certainly betray its charge. In actual fact it has not proved so at all. It is the main, oftentimes the only, connecting link between the two, an ark riding above the water-floods that have swept away or submerged every other landmark and memorial of bygone ages and vanished generations of men. Far beyond all written records in a language, the language itself stretches back, and offers itself for our investigation—'the pedigree of nations,' as Johnson calls it [Footnote: This statement of his must be taken with a certain amount of qualification. It is not always that races are true to the end to their language; external forces are sometimes too strong. Thus Celtic disappeared before Latin in Gaul and Spain. Slavonic became extinct in Prussia two centuries ago, German taking its room; the negroes of Hayti speak French, and various American tribes have exchanged their own idioms for Spanish and Portuguese. See upon this matter Sayce's Principles of Comparative Philology, pp. 175-181.]— itself in its own independent existence a far older and at the same time a far more instructive document than any book, inscription, or other writing which employs it. The written records may have been falsified by carelessness, by vanity, by fraud, by a multitude of causes; but language never deceives, if only we know how to question it aright.

Such investigations as these, it is true, lie plainly out of your sphere. Not so, however, those humbler yet not less interesting inquiries, which by the aid of any tolerable dictionary you may carry on into the past history of your own land, as attested by the present language of its people. You know how the geologist is able from the different strata and deposits, primary, secondary, or tertiary, succeeding one another, which he meets, to arrive at a knowledge of the successive physical changes through which a region has passed; is, so to say, in a condition to preside at those past changes, to measure the forces that were at work to produce them, and almost to indicate their date. Now with such a language as the English before us, bearing as it does the marks and footprints of great revolutions profoundly impressed upon it, we may carry on moral and historical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Low German, Danish, Norman words, and then once more Latin and French, with slighter intrusions from many other quarters: and any one with skill to analyse the language might, up to a certain point, re-create for himself the history of the people speaking that language, might with tolerable accuracy appreciate the diverse elements out of which that people was made up, in what proportion these were mingled, and in what succession they followed, one upon the other.

Would he trace, for example, the relation in which the English and Norman occupants of this land stood to one another? An account of this, in the main as accurate as it would be certainly instructive, might be drawn from an intelligent study of the contributions which they have severally made to the English language, as bequeathed to us jointly by them both. Supposing all other records to have perished, we might still work out and almost reconstruct the history by these aids; even as now, when so many documents, so many institutions survive, this must still be accounted the most important, and that of which the study will introduce us, as no other can, into the innermost heart and life of large periods of our history.

Nor, indeed, is it hard to see why the language must contain such instruction as this, when we a little realize to ourselves the stages by which it has reached us in its present shape. There was a time when the languages which the English and the Norman severally spoke, existed each by the side of, but un-mingled with, the other; one, that of the small dominant class, the other that of the great body of the people. By degrees, however, with the reconciliation and partial fusion of the two races, the two languages effected a transaction; one indeed prevailed over the other, but at the same time received a multitude of the words of that other into its own bosom. At once there would exist duplicates for many things. But as in popular speech two words will not long exist side by side to designate the same thing, it became a question how the relative claims of the English and Norman word should adjust themselves, which should remain, which should be dropped; or, if not dropped, should be transferred to some other object, or express some other relation. It is not of course meant that this was ever formally proposed, or as something to be settled by agreement; but practically one was to be taken and one left. Which was it that should maintain its ground? Evidently, where a word was often on the lips of one race, its equivalent seldom on those of the other, where it intimately cohered with the whole manner of life of one, was only remotely in contact with that of the other, where it laid strong hold on one, and only slight on the other, the issue could not be doubtful. In several cases the matter was simpler still: it was not that one word expelled the other, or that rival claims had to be adjusted; but that there never had existed more than one word, the thing which that word noted having been quite strange to the other section of the nation.

Here is the explanation of the assertion made just now—namely, that we might almost reconstruct our history, so far as it turns upon the Norman Conquest, by an analysis of our present language, a mustering of its words in groups, and a close observation of the nature and character of those which the two races have severally contributed to it. Thus we should confidently conclude that the Norman was the ruling race, from the noticeable fact that all the words of dignity, state, honour, and pre-eminence, with one remarkable exception (to be adduced presently), descend to us from them—'sovereign,' 'sceptre,' 'throne,' 'realm,' 'royalty,' 'homage,' 'prince,' 'duke,' 'count,' ('earl' indeed is Scandinavian, though he must borrow his 'countess' from the Norman), 'chancellor,' 'treasurer,' 'palace,' 'castle,' 'dome,' and a multitude more. At the same time the one remarkable exception of 'king' would make us, even did we know nothing of the actual facts, suspect that the chieftain of this ruling race came in not upon a new title, not as overthrowing a former dynasty, but claiming to be in the rightful line of its succession; that the true continuity of the nation had not, in fact any more than in word, been entirely broken, but survived, in due time to assert itself anew.

And yet, while the statelier superstructure of the language, almost all articles of luxury, all having to do with the chase, with chivalry, with personal adornment, are Norman throughout; with the broad basis of the language, and therefore of the life, it is otherwise. The great features of nature, sun, moon, and stars, earth, water, and fire; the divisions of time; three out of the four seasons, spring, summer, and winter; the features of natural scenery, the words used in earliest childhood, the simpler emotions of the mind; all the prime social relations, father, mother, husband, wife, son, daughter, brother, sister,—these are of native growth and un-borrowed. 'Palace' and 'castle' may have reached us from the Norman, but to the Saxon we owe far dearer names, the 'house,' the 'roof,' the 'home,' the 'hearth.' His 'board' too, and often probably it was no more, has a more hospitable sound than the 'table' of his lord. His sturdy arms turn the soil; he is the 'boor,' the 'hind,' the 'churl'; or if his Norman master has a name for him, it is one which on his lips becomes more and more a title of opprobrium and contempt, the 'villain.' The instruments used in cultivating the earth, the 'plough,' the 'share,' the 'rake,' the 'scythe,' the 'harrow,' the 'wain,' the 'sickle,' the 'spade,' the 'sheaf,' the 'barn,' are expressed in his language; so too the main products of the earth, as wheat, rye, oats, bere, grass, flax, hay, straw, weeds; and no less the names of domestic animals. You will remember, no doubt, how in the matter of these Wamba, the Saxon jester in Ivanhoe, plays the philologer, [Footnote: Wallis, in his Grammar, p. 20, had done so before.] having noted that the names of almost all animals, so long as they are alive, are Saxon, but when dressed and prepared for food become Norman—a fact, he would intimate, not very wonderful; for the Saxon hind had the charge and labour of tending and feeding them, but only that they might appear on the table of his Norman lord. Thus 'ox,' 'steer,' 'cow,' are Saxon, but 'beef' Norman; 'calf' is Saxon, but 'veal' Norman; 'sheep' is Saxon, but 'mutton' Norman: so it is severally with 'swine' and 'pork,' 'deer' and 'venison,' 'fowl' and 'pullet.' 'Bacon,' the only flesh which perhaps ever came within the hind's reach, is the single exception. Putting all this together, with much more of the same kind, which has only been indicated here, we should certainly gather, that while there are manifest tokens preserved in our language of the Saxon having been for a season an inferior and even an oppressed race, the stable elements of English life, however overlaid for a while, had still made good their claim to be the solid groundwork of the after nation as of the after language; and to the justice of this conclusion all other historic records, and the present social condition of England, consent in bearing witness.