THE STUDY OF WORDS

ON THE STUDY OF WORDS BY RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. ARCHBISHOP

'Language is the armoury of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future, conquests' —COLERIDGE

'Out, idle words, servants to shallow fools!'—SHAKESPEARE

TWENTIETH EDITION revised by

THE REV. A. L. MAYHEW

Joint Author of 'The Concise Middle English Dictionary'

PREFACE TO THE TWENTIETH EDITION.

In all essential points this edition of The Study of Words is the same book as the last edition. The aim of the editor has been to alter as little of Archbishop Trench's work as possible. In the arrangement of the book, in the order of the chapters and paragraphs, in the style, in the general presentation of the matter, no change has been made. On the other hand, the work has been thoroughly revised and corrected. A great deal of thought and labour has of late been bestowed on English philology, and there has been a great advance in the knowledge of the laws regulating the development of the sounds of English words, and the result has been that many a derivation once generally accepted has had to be given up as phonetically impossible. An attempt has been made to purge the book of all erroneous etymologies, and to correct in the text small matters of detail. There have also been added some footnotes, in which difficult points are discussed and where reference is given to recent authorities. All editorial additions, whether in the text or in the notes, are enclosed in square brackets. It is hoped that the book as it now stands does not contain in its etymological details anything inconsistent with the latest discoveries of English scholars.

A. L. MAYHEW.

WADHAM COLLEGE, OXFORD: August, 1888.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.

These lectures will not, I trust, be found anywhere to have left out of sight seriously, or for long, the peculiar needs of those for whom they were originally intended, and to whom they were primarily addressed. I am conscious, indeed, here and there, of a certain departure from my first intention, having been in part seduced to this by a circumstance which I had not in the least contemplated when I obtained permission to deliver them, by finding, namely, that I should have other hearers besides the pupils of the Training-School. Some matter adapted for those rather than for these I was thus led to introduce—which afterwards I was unwilling, in preparing for the press, to remove; on the contrary adding to it rather, in the hope of obtaining thus a somewhat wider circle of readers than I could have hoped, had I more rigidly restricted myself in the choice of my materials. Yet I should greatly regret to have admitted so much of this as should deprive these lectures of their fitness for those whose profit in writing and in publishing I had mainly in view, namely schoolmasters, and those preparing to be such.

Had I known any book entering with any fulness, and in a popular manner, into the subject-matter of these pages, and making it its exclusive theme, I might still have delivered these lectures, but should scarcely have sought for them a wider audience than their first, gladly leaving the matter in their hands, whose studies in language had been fuller and riper than my own. But abundant and ready to hand as are the materials for such a book, I did not; while yet it seems to me that the subject is one to which it is beyond measure desirable that their attention, who are teaching, or shall have hereafter to teach, others should be directed; so that they shall learn to regard language as one of the chiefest organs of their own education and that of others. For I am persuaded that I have used no exaggeration in saying, that for many a young man 'his first discovery that words are living powers, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world,'—while yet all this may be indefinitely deferred, may, indeed, never find place at all, unless there is some one at hand to help for him, and to hasten the process; and he who so does, will ever after be esteemed by him as one of his very foremost benefactors. Whatever may be Horne Tooke's shortcomings (and they are great), whether in details of etymology, or in the philosophy of grammar, or in matters more serious still, yet, with all this, what an epoch in many a student's intellectual life has been his first acquaintance with The Diversions of Purley. And they were not among the least of the obligations which the young men of our time owed to Coleridge, that he so often himself weighed words in the balances, and so earnestly pressed upon all with whom his voice went for anything, the profit which they would find in so doing. Nor, with the certainty that I am anticipating much in my little volume, can I refrain from quoting some words which were not present with me during its composition, although I must have been familiar with them long ago; words which express excellently well why it is that these studies profit so much, and which will also explain the motives which induced me to add my little contribution to their furtherance:

'A language will often be wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Being like amber in its efficacy to circulate the electric spirit of truth, it is also like amber in embalming and preserving the relics of ancient wisdom, although one is not seldom puzzled to decipher its contents. Sometimes it locks up truths, which were once well known, but which, in the course of ages, have passed out of sight and been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths, of which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse in a happy moment of divination. A meditative man cannot refrain from wonder, when he digs down to the deep thought lying at the root of many a metaphorical term, employed for the designation of spiritual things, even of those with regard to which professing philosophers have blundered grossly; and often it would seem as though rays of truth, which were still below the intellectual horizon, had dawned upon the imagination as it was looking up to heaven. Hence they who feel an inward call to teach and enlighten their countrymen, should deem it an important part of their duty to draw out the stores of thought which are already latent in their native language, to purify it from the corruptions which Time brings upon all things, and from which language has no exemption, and to endeavour to give distinctness and precision to whatever in it is confused, or obscure, or dimly seen'—Guesses at Truth, First Series, p. 295.

ITCHENSTOKE: Oct. 9, 1851.



CONTENTS.

LECTURE I. INTRODUCTORY LECTURE

LECTURE II. ON THE POETRY IN WORDS

LECTURE III. ON THE MORALITY IN WORDS

LECTURE IV. ON THE HISTORY IN WORDS

LECTURE V. ON THE RISE OF NEW WORDS

LECTURE VI. ON THE DISTINCTION OF WORDS

LECTURE VII. THE SCHOOLMASTER'S USE OF WORDS

INDEX OF WORDS



ON THE STUDY OF WORDS

INTRODUCTORY LECTURE.

There are few who would not readily acknowledge that mainly in worthy books are preserved and hoarded the treasures of wisdom and knowledge which the world has accumulated; and that chiefly by aid of books they are handed down from one generation to another. I shall urge on you in these lectures something different from this; namely, that not in books only, which all acknowledge, nor yet in connected oral discourse, but often also in words contemplated singly, there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination, laid up—that from these, lessons of infinite worth may be derived, if only our attention is roused to their existence. I shall urge on you how well it will repay you to study the words which you are in the habit of using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual things, or our common words of the shop and the market, and of all the familiar intercourse of daily life. It will indeed repay you far better than you can easily believe. I am sure, at least, that for many a young man his first discovery of the fact that words are living powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave for themselves, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into a new world; he is never able to cease wondering at the moral marvels that surround him on every side, and ever reveal themselves more and more to his gaze.

We indeed hear it not seldom said that ignorance is the mother of admiration. No falser word was ever spoken, and hardly a more mischievous one; implying, as it does, that this healthiest exercise of the mind rests, for the most part, on a deceit and a delusion, and that with larger knowledge it would cease; while, in truth, for once that ignorance leads us to admire that which with fuller insight we should perceive to be a common thing, one demanding no such tribute from us, a hundred, nay, a thousand times, it prevents us from admiring that which is admirable indeed. And this is so, whether we are moving in the region of nature, which is the region of God's wonders, or in the region of art, which is the region of man's wonders; and nowhere truer than in this sphere and region of language, which is about to claim us now. Oftentimes here we walk up and down in the midst of intellectual and moral marvels with a vacant eye and a careless mind; even as some traveller passes unmoved over fields of fame, or through cities of ancient renown—unmoved, because utterly unconscious of the lofty deeds which there have been wrought, of the great hearts which spent themselves there. We, like him, wanting the knowledge and insight which would have served to kindle admiration in us, are oftentimes deprived of this pure and elevating excitement of the mind, and miss no less that manifold instruction which ever lies about our path, and nowhere more largely than in our daily words, if only we knew how to put forth our hands and make it our own. 'What riches,' one exclaims, 'lie hidden in the vulgar tongue of our poorest and most ignorant. What flowers of paradise lie under our feet, with their beauties and their parts undistinguished and undiscerned, from having been daily trodden on.'

And this subject upon which we are thus entering ought not to be a dull or uninteresting one in the handling, or one to which only by an effort you will yield the attention which I shall claim. If it shall prove so, this I fear must be through the fault of my manner of treating it; for certainly in itself there is no study which may be made at once more instructive and entertaining than the study of the use and abuse, the origin and distinction of words, with an investigation, slight though it may be, of the treasures contained in them; which is exactly that which I now propose to myself and to you. I remember a very learned scholar, to whom we owe one of our best Greek lexicons, a book which must have cost him years, speaking in the preface of his completed work with a just disdain of some, who complained of the irksome drudgery of such toils as those which had engaged him so long,—toils irksome, forsooth, because they only had to do with words. He disclaims any part with those who asked pity for themselves, as so many galley-slaves chained to the oar, or martyrs who had offered themselves for the good of the literary world. He declares that the task of classing, sorting, grouping, comparing, tracing the derivation and usage of words, had been to him no drudgery, but a delight and labour of love. [Footnote: It is well worth the while to read on this same subject the pleasant causerie of Littre 'Comment j'ai fait mon Dictionnaire.' It is to be found pp. 390-442 of his Glanures.]

And if this may be true in regard of a foreign tongue, how much truer ought it to be in regard of our own, of our 'mother tongue,' as we affectionately call it. A great writer not very long departed from us has borne witness at once to the pleasantness and profit of this study. 'In a language,' he says, 'like ours, where so many words are derived from other languages, there are few modes of instruction more useful or more amusing than that of accustoming young people to seek for the etymology or primary meaning of the words they use. There are cases in which more knowledge of more value may be conveyed by the history of a word than by the history of a campaign.' So writes Coleridge; and impressing the same truth, Emerson has somewhere characterized language as 'fossil poetry.' He evidently means that just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life, the graceful fern or the finely vertebrated lizard, such as now, it may be, have been extinct for thousands of years, are permanently bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would else have been their portion,—so in words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished, there are these, which might so easily have perished too, preserved and made safe for ever. The phrase is a striking one; the only fault one can find with it is that it is too narrow. Language may be, and indeed is, this 'fossil poetry'; but it may be affirmed of it with exactly the same truth that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and as effectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral sense, as of the imagination or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral sense may be perverted, they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion. On all these points I shall enter at full in after lectures; but I may give by anticipation a specimen or two of what I mean, to make from the first my purpose and plan more fully intelligible to all.

Language then is 'fossil poetry'; in other words, we are not to look for the poetry which a people may possess only in its poems, or its poetical customs, traditions, and beliefs. Many a single word also is itself a concentrated poem, having stores of poetical thought and imagery laid up in it. Examine it, and it will be found to rest on some deep analogy of things natural and things spiritual; bringing those to illustrate and to give an abiding form and body to these. The image may have grown trite and ordinary now: perhaps through the help of this very word may have become so entirely the heritage of all, as to seem little better than a commonplace; yet not the less he who first discerned the relation, and devised the new word which should express it, or gave to an old, never before but literally used, this new and figurative sense, this man was in his degree a poet—a maker, that is, of things which were not before, which would not have existed but for him, or for some other gifted with equal powers. He who spake first of a 'dilapidated' fortune, what an image must have risen up before his mind's eye of some falling house or palace, stone detaching itself from stone, till all had gradually sunk into desolation and ruin. Or he who to that Greek word which signifies 'that which will endure to be held up to and judged by the sunlight,' gave first its ethical signification of 'sincere,' 'truthful,' or as we sometimes say, 'transparent,' can we deny to him the poet's feeling and eye? Many a man had gazed, we are sure, at the jagged and indented mountain ridges of Spain, before one called them 'sierras' or 'saws,' the name by which now they are known, as Sierra Morena, Sierra Nevada; but that man coined his imagination into a word which will endure as long as the everlasting hills which he named.

But it was said just now that words often contain a witness for great moral truths—God having pressed such a seal of truth upon language, that men are continually uttering deeper things than they know, asserting mighty principles, it may be asserting them against themselves, in words that to them may seem nothing more than the current coin of society. Thus to what grand moral purposes Bishop Butler turns the word 'pastime'; how solemn the testimony which he compels the world, out of its own use of this word, to render against itself—obliging it to own that its amusements and pleasures do not really satisfy the mind and fill it with the sense of an abiding and satisfying joy: [Footnote: Sermon xiv. Upon the Love of God. Curiously enough, Montaigne has, in his Essays, drawn the same testimony out of the word: 'This ordinary phrase of Pass-time, and passing away the time, represents the custom of those wise sort of people, who think they cannot have a better account of their lives, than to let them run out and slide away, to pass them over and to baulk them, and as much as they can, to take no notice of them and to shun them, as a thing of troublesome and contemptible quality. But I know it to be another kind of thing, and find it both valuable and commodious even in its latest decay, wherein I now enjoy it, and nature has delivered it into our hands in such and so favourable circumstances that we commonly complain of ourselves, if it be troublesome to us or slide unprofitably away.'] they are only 'pastime'; they serve only, as this word confesses, to pass away the time, to prevent it from hanging, an intolerable burden, on men's hands: all which they can do at the best is to prevent men from discovering and attending to their own internal poverty and dissatisfaction and want. He might have added that there is the same acknowledgment in the word 'diversion' which means no more than that which diverts or turns us aside from ourselves, and in this way helps us to forget ourselves for a little. And thus it would appear that, even according to the world's own confession, all which it proposes is—not to make us happy, but a little to prevent us from remembering that we are unhappy, to pass away our time, to divert us from ourselves. While on the other hand we declare that the good which will really fill our souls and satisfy them to the uttermost, is not in us, but without us and above us, in the words which we use to set forth any transcending delight. Take three or four of these words—'transport,' 'rapture,' 'ravishment,' 'ecstasy,'—'transport,' that which carries us, as 'rapture,' or 'ravishment,' that which snatches us out of and above ourselves; and 'ecstasy' is very nearly the same, only drawn from the Greek. And not less, where a perversion of the moral sense has found place, words preserve oftentimes a record of this perversion. We have a signal example of this in the use, or rather misuse, of the words 'religion' and 'religious' during the Middle Ages, and indeed in many parts of Christendom still. A 'religious' person did not then mean any one who felt and owned the bonds that bound him to God and to his fellow-men, but one who had taken peculiar vows upon him, the member of a monastic Order, of a 'religion' as it was called. As little did a 'religious' house then mean, nor does it now mean in the Church of Rome, a Christian household, ordered in the fear of God, but a house in which these persons were gathered together according to the rule of some man. What a light does this one word so used throw on the entire state of mind and habits of thought in those ages! That then was 'religion,' and alone deserved the name! And 'religious' was a title which might not be given to parents and children, husbands and wives, men and women fulfilling faithfully and holily in the world the duties of their several stations, but only to those who had devised a self-chosen service for themselves. [Footnote: A reviewer in Fraser's Magazine, Dec. 1851, doubts whether I have not here pushed my assertion too far. So far from this, it was not merely the 'popular language' which this corruption had invaded, but a decree of the great Fourth Lateran Council (A.D. 1215), forbidding the further multiplication of monastic Orders, runs thus: Ne nimia religionum diversitas gravem in Ecclesia Dei confusionem inducat, firmiter prohibemus, ne quis de cetero novam religionem inveniat, sed quicunque voluerit ad religionem converti, unam de approbatis assumat.]

But language is fossil history as well. What a record of great social revolutions, revolutions in nations and in the feelings of nations, the one word 'frank' contains, which is used, as we all know, to express aught that is generous, straightforward, and free. The Franks, I need not remind you, were a powerful German tribe, or association of tribes, who gave themselves [Footnote: This explanation of the name Franks is now generally given up. The name is probably a derivative from a lost O.H.G. francho, a spear or javelin: compare A.S. franca, Icel. frakka; similarly the Saxons are supposed to have derived their name from a weapon—seax, a knife; see Kluge's Dict. (s.v. frank).] this proud name of the 'franks' or the free; and who, at the breaking up of the Roman Empire, possessed themselves of Gaul, to which they gave their own name. They were the ruling conquering people, honourably distinguished from the Gauls and degenerate Romans among whom they established themselves by their independence, their love of freedom, their scorn of a lie; they had, in short, the virtues which belong to a conquering and dominant race in the midst of an inferior and conquered one. And thus it came to pass that by degrees the name 'frank' indicated not merely a national, but involved a moral, distinction as well; and a 'frank' man was synonymous not merely with a man of the conquering German race, but was an epithet applied to any man possessed of certain high moral qualities, which for the most part appertained to, and were found only in, men of that stock; and thus in men's daily discourse, when they speak of a person as being 'frank,' or when they use the words 'franchise,' 'enfranchisement,' to express civil liberties and immunities, their language here is the outgrowth, the record, and the result of great historic changes, bears testimony to facts of history, whereof it may well happen that the speakers have never heard. [Footnote: 'Frank,' though thus originally a German word, only came back to Germany from France in the seventeenth century. With us it is found in the sixteenth; but scarcely earlier.] The word 'slave' has undergone a process entirely analogous, although in an opposite direction. 'The martial superiority of the Teutonic races enabled them to keep their slave markets supplied with captives taken from the Sclavonic tribes. Hence, in all the languages of Western Europe, the once glorious name of Slave has come to express the most degraded condition of men. What centuries of violence and warfare does the history of this word disclose.' [Footnote: Gibbon, Decline and Fall, c. 55. [It is very doubtful whether the idea of 'glory' was implied originally in the national name of Slav. It is generally held now that the Slavs gave themselves the name as being 'the intelligible,' or 'the intelligibly speaking' people; as in the case of many other races, they regarded their strange-speaking neighbours as 'barbarian,' that is 'stammering,' or even as 'dumb.' So the Russians call their neighbours the Germans njemets, connected with njemo, indistinct. The old name Slovene, Slavonians, is probably a derivative from the substantive which appears in Church Slavonic in the form slovo, a word; see Thomsen's Russia and Scandinavia, p. 8. Slovo is closely connected with the old Slavonic word for 'fame'— slava, hence, no doubt, the explanation of Slave favoured by Gibbon.]]

Having given by anticipation this handful of examples in illustration of what in these lectures I propose, I will, before proceeding further, make a few observations on a subject, which, if we would go at all to the root of the matter, we can scarcely leave altogether untouched,—I mean the origin of language, in which however we will not entangle ourselves deeper than we need. There are, or rather there have been, two theories about this. One, and that which rather has been than now is, for few maintain it still, would put language on the same level with the various arts and inventions with which man has gradually adorned and enriched his life. It would make him by degrees to have invented it, just as he might have invented any of these, for himself; and from rude imperfect beginnings, the inarticulate cries by which he expressed his natural wants, the sounds by which he sought to imitate the impression of natural objects upon him, little by little to have arrived at that wondrous organ of thought and feeling, which his language is often to him now.

It might, I think, be sufficient to object to this explanation, that language would then be an accident of human nature; and, this being the case, that we certainly should somewhere encounter tribes sunken so low as not to possess it; even as there is almost no human art or invention so obvious, and as it seems to us so indispensable, but there are those who have fallen below its knowledge and its exercise. But with language it is not so. There have never yet been found human beings, not the most degraded horde of South African bushmen, or Papuan cannibals, who did not employ this means of intercourse with one another. But the more decisive objection to this view of the matter is, that it hangs together with, and is indeed an essential part of, that theory of society, which is contradicted alike by every page of Genesis, and every notice of our actual experience—the 'urang-utang theory,' as it has been so happily termed—that, I mean, according to which the primitive condition of man was the savage one, and the savage himself the seed out of which in due time the civilized man was unfolded; whereas, in fact, so far from being this living seed, he might more justly be considered as a dead withered leaf, torn violently away from the great trunk of humanity, and with no more power to produce anything nobler than himself out of himself, than that dead withered leaf to unfold itself into the oak of the forest. So far from being the child with the latent capabilities of manhood, he is himself rather the man prematurely aged, and decrepit, and outworn.

But the truer answer to the inquiry how language arose, is this: God gave man language, just as He gave him reason, and just because He gave him reason; for what is man's word but his reason, coming forth that it may behold itself? They are indeed so essentially one and the same that the Greek language has one word for them both. He gave it to him, because he could not be man, that is, a social being, without it. Yet this must not be taken to affirm that man started at the first furnished with a full-formed vocabulary of words, and as it were with his first dictionary and first grammar ready-made to his hands. He did not thus begin the world with names, but with the power of naming: for man is not a mere speaking machine; God did not teach him words, as one of us teaches a parrot, from without; but gave him a capacity, and then evoked the capacity which He gave. Here, as in everything else that concerns the primitive constitution, the great original institutes, of humanity, our best and truest lights are to be gotten from the study of the first three chapters of Genesis; and you will observe that there it is not God who imposed the first names on the creatures, but Adam— Adam, however, at the direct suggestion of his Creator. He brought them all, we are told, to Adam, 'to see what he would call them; and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof' (Gen. ii. 19). Here we have the clearest intimation of the origin, at once divine and human, of speech; while yet neither is so brought forward as to exclude or obscure the other.

And so far we may concede a limited amount of right to those who have held a progressive acquisition, on man's part, of the power of embodying thought in words. I believe that we should conceive the actual case most truly, if we conceived this power of naming things and expressing their relations, as one laid up in the depths of man's being, one of the divine capabilities with which he was created: but one (and in this differing from those which have produced in various people various arts of life) which could not remain dormant in him, for man could be only man through its exercise; which therefore did rapidly bud and blossom out from within him at every solicitation from the world without and from his fellow-man; as each object to be named appeared before his eyes, each relation of things to one another arose before his mind. It was not merely the possible, but the necessary, emanation of the spirit with which he had been endowed. Man makes his own language, but he makes it as the bee makes its cells, as the bird its nest; he cannot do otherwise. [Footnote: Renan has much of interest on this matter, both in his work De l'Origine du Langage, and in his Hist. des Langues Semitiques. I quote from the latter, p. 445: Sans doute les langues, comme tout ce qui est organise, sont sujettes a la loi du developpement graduel. En soutenant que le langage primitif possedait les elements necessaires a son integrite, nous sommes loin de dire que les mecanismes d'un age plus avance y fussent arrives a leur pleine existence. Tout y etait, mais confusement et sans distinction. Le temps seul et les progres de l'esprit humain pouvaient operer un discernement dans cette obscure synthese, et assigner a chaque element son role special. La vie, en un mot, n'etait ici, comme partout, qu'a la condition de l'evolution du germe primitif, de la distribution des roles et de la separation des organes. Mais ces organes eux-memes furent determines des le premier jour, et depuis l'acte generateur qui le fit etre, le langage ne s'est enrichi d'aucune fonction vraiment nouvelle. Un germe est pose, renfermant en puissance tout ce que l'etre sera un jour; le germe se developpe, les formes se constituent dans leurs proportions regulieres, ce qui etait en puissance devient en acte; mais rien ne se cree, rien ne s'ajoute: telle est la loi commune des etres soumis aux conditions de la vie. Telle fut aussi la loi du langage.]

How this latent power evolved itself first, how this spontaneous generation of language came to pass, is a mystery; even as every act of creation is of necessity such; and as a mystery all the deepest inquirers into the subject are content to leave it. Yet we may perhaps a little help ourselves to the realizing of what the process was, and what it was not, if we liken it to the growth of a tree springing out of, and unfolding itself from, a root, and according to a necessary law—that root being the divine capacity of language with which man was created, that law being the law of highest reason with which he was endowed: if we liken it to this rather than to the rearing of a house, which a man should slowly and painfully fashion for himself with dead timbers combined after his own fancy and caprice; and which little by little improved in shape, material, and size, being first but a log house, answering his barest needs, and only after centuries of toil and pain growing for his sons' sons into a stately palace for pleasure and delight.

Were it otherwise, were the savage the primitive man, we should then find savage tribes, furnished scantily enough, it might be, with the elements of speech, yet at the same time with its fruitful beginnings, its vigorous and healthful germs. But what does their language on close inspection prove? In every case what they are themselves, the remnant and ruin of a better and a nobler past. Fearful indeed is the impress of degradation which is stamped on the language of the savage, more fearful perhaps even than that which is stamped upon his form. When wholly letting go the truth, when long and greatly sinning against light and conscience, a people has thus gone the downward way, has been scattered off by some violent catastrophe from those regions of the world which are the seats of advance and progress, and driven to its remote isles and further corners, then as one nobler thought, one spiritual idea after another has perished from it, the words also that expressed these have perished too. As one habit of civilization has been let go after another, the words which those habits demanded have dropped as well, first out of use, and then out of memory and thus after a while have been wholly lost.

Moffat, in his Missionary Labours and Scenes in South Africa, gives us a very remarkable example of the disappearing of one of the most significant words from the language of a tribe sinking ever deeper in savagery; and with the disappearing of the word, of course, the disappearing as well of the great spiritual fact and truth whereof that word was at once the vehicle and the guardian. The Bechuanas, a Caffre tribe, employed formerly the word 'Morimo,' to designate 'Him that is above' or 'Him that is in heaven' and attached to the word the notion of a supreme Divine Being. This word, with the spiritual idea corresponding to it, Moffat found to have vanished from the language of the present generation, although here and there he could meet with an old man, scarcely one or two in a thousand, who remembered in his youth to have heard speak of 'Morimo'; and this word, once so deeply significant, only survived now in the spells and charms of the so- called rainmakers and sorcerers, who misused it to designate a fabulous ghost, of whom they told the absurdest and most contradictory things.

And as there is no such witness to the degradation of the savage as the brutal poverty of his language, so is there nothing that so effectually tends to keep him in the depths to which he has fallen. You cannot impart to any man more than the words which he understands either now contain, or can be made, intelligibly to him, to contain. Language is as truly on one side the limit and restraint of thought, as on the other side that which feeds and unfolds thought. Thus it is the ever- repeated complaint of the missionary that the very terms are well-nigh or wholly wanting in the dialect of the savage whereby to impart to him heavenly truths; and not these only; but that there are equally wanting those which should express the nobler emotions of the human heart. Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, in his curious History of the Abipones, tells us that neither these nor the Guarinies, two of the principal native tribes of Brazil, possessed any word in the least corresponding to our 'thanks.' But what wonder, if the feeling of gratitude was entirely absent from their hearts, that they should not have possessed the corresponding word in their vocabularies? Nay, how should they have had it there? And that in this absence lies the true explanation is plain from a fact which the same writer records, that, although inveterate askers, they never showed the slightest sense of obligation or of gratitude when they obtained what they sought; never saying more than, 'This will be useful to me,' or, 'This is what I wanted.' Dr. Krapf, after laborious researches in some widely extended dialects of East Africa, has remarked in them the same absence of any words expressing the idea of gratitude.

Nor is it only in what they have forfeited and lost, but also in what they have retained or invented, that these languages proclaim their degradation and debasement, and how deeply they and those that speak them have fallen. For indeed the strange wealth and the strange poverty, I know not which the strangest and the saddest, of the languages of savage tribes, rich in words which proclaim their shame, poor in those which should attest the workings of any nobler life among them, not seldom absolutely destitute of these last, are a mournful and ever- recurring surprise, even to those who were more or less prepared to expect nothing else. Thus I have read of a tribe in New Holland, which has no word to signify God, but has one to designate a process by which an unborn child may be destroyed in the bosom of its mother. [Footnote: A Wesleyan missionary, communicating with me from Fiji, assures me I have here understated the case. He says: 'I could write down several words, which express as many different ways of killing an unborn child.' He has at the same time done me the favour to send me dreadful confirmation of all which I have here asserted. It is a list of some Fiji words, with the hideous meanings which they bear, or facts which they imply. He has naturally confined himself to those in one domain of human wickedness—that, namely, of cruelty; leaving another domain, which borders close on this, and which, he assures me, would yield proofs quite as terrible, altogether untouched. It is impossible to imagine a record more hideous of what the works of the arch-murderer are, or one more fitted to stir up missionary zeal in behalf of those dark places of the earth which are full of the habitations of cruelty. A very few specimens must suffice. The language of Fiji has a word for a club which has killed a man; for a dead body which is to be eaten; for the first of such bodies brought in at the beginning of a war; for the flesh on each side of the backbone. It has a name of honour given to those who have taken life; it need not have been the life of an enemy; if only they have shed blood—it may have been the life of a woman or a child—the title has been earned. It has a hideous word to express the torturing and insulting of an enemy, as by cutting off any part of his body—his nose or tongue, for instance—cooking and eating it before his face, and taunting him the while; the [Greek: hakrotaeriazein] of the Greeks, with the cannibalism added. But of this enough.] And I have been informed, on the authority of one excellently capable of knowing, an English scholar long resident in Van Diemen's Land, that in the native language of that island there are [Footnote: This was written in 1851. Now, in 1888, Van Diemen's Land is called Tasmania, and the native language of that island is a thing of the past.] four words to express the taking of human life—one to express a father's killing of a son, another a son's killing of a father, with other varieties of murder; and that in no one of these lies the slightest moral reprobation, or sense of the deep-lying distinction between to 'kill' and to 'murder'; while at the same time, of that language so richly and so fearfully provided with expressions for this extreme utterance of hate, he also reports that a word for 'love' is wanting in it altogether. Yet with all this, ever and anon in the midst of this wreck and ruin, there is that in the language of the savage, some subtle distinction, some curious allusion to a perished civilization, now utterly unintelligible to the speaker; or some other note, which proclaims his language to be the remains of a dissipated inheritance, the rags and remnants of a robe which was a royal one once. The fragments of a broken sceptre are in his hand, a sceptre wherewith once he held dominion (he, that is, in his progenitors) over large kingdoms of thought, which now have escaped wholly from his sway. [Footnote: See on this matter Tylor, Early History of Mankind, pp. 150-190; and, still better, the Duke of Argyll, On Primeval Man; and on this same survival of the fragments of an elder civilization, Ebrard, Apologetik, vol. ii. p. 382. Among some of the Papuans the faintest rudiments of the family survive; of the tribe no trace whatever; while yet of these one has lately written:—'Sie haben religioese Gebraeuche und Uebungen, welche, mit einigen anderen Erscheinungen in ihrem Leben, mit ihrem jetzigen Culturzustande ganz unvereinbar erscheinen, wenn man darin nicht die Spuren einer frueher hoehern Bildung erkennen will.' Sayce agrees with this.]

But while it is thus with him, while this is the downward course of all those that have chosen the downward path, while with every impoverishing and debasing of personal and national life there goes hand in hand a corresponding impoverishment and debasement of language; so on the contrary, where there is advance and progress, where a divine idea is in any measure realizing itself in a people, where they are learning more accurately to define and distinguish, more truly to know, where they are ruling, as men ought to rule, over nature, and compelling her to give up her secrets to them, where new thoughts are rising up over the horizon of a nation's mind, new feelings are stirring at a nation's heart, new facts coming within the sphere of its knowledge, there will language be growing and advancing too. It cannot lag behind; for man feels that nothing is properly his own, that he has not secured any new thought, or entered upon any new spiritual inheritance, till he has fixed it in language, till he can contemplate it, not as himself, but as his word; he is conscious that he must express truth, if he is to preserve it, and still more if he would propagate it among others. 'Names,' as it has been excellently said, 'are impressions of sense, and as such take the strongest hold upon the mind, and of all other impressions can be most easily recalled and retained in view. They therefore serve to give a point of attachment to all the more volatile objects of thought and feeling. Impressions that when past might be dissipated for ever, are by their connexion with language always within reach. Thoughts, of themselves are perpetually slipping out of the field of immediate mental vision; but the name abides with us, and the utterance of it restores them in a moment.'

Men sometimes complain of the number of new theological terms which the great controversies in which the Church from time to time has been engaged, have left behind them. But this could not have been otherwise, unless the gains through those controversies made, were presently to be lost again; for as has lately been well said: 'The success and enduring influence of any systematic construction of truth, be it secular or sacred, depends as much upon an exact terminology, as upon close and deep thinking itself. Indeed, unless the results to which the human mind arrives are plainly stated, and firmly fixed in an exact phraseology, its thinking is to very little purpose in the end. "Terms," says Whewell, "record discoveries." That which was seen, it may be with crystal clearness, and in bold outline, in the consciousness of an individual thinker, may fail to become the property and possession of mankind at large, because it is not transferred from the individual to the general mind, by means of a precise phraseology and a rigorous terminology. Nothing is in its own nature more fugacious and shifting than thought; and particularly thoughts upon the mysteries of Christianity. A conception that is plain and accurate in the understanding of the first man becomes obscure and false in that of the second, because it was not grasped and firmly held in the form and proportions with which it first came up, and then handed over to other minds, a fixed and scientific quantity.' [Footnote: Shedd, History of Christian Doctrine, vol. i. p. 362; compare Guesses at Truth, 1866, p. 217; and Gerber, Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 145.] And on the necessity of names at once for the preservation and the propagation of truth it has been justly observed: 'Hardly any original thoughts on mental or social subjects ever make their way among mankind, or assume their proper importance in the minds even of their inventors, until aptly selected words or phrases have as it were nailed them down and held them fast.' [Footnote: Mill, System of Logic, vol. ii. p. 291.] And this holds good alike of the false and of the true. I think we may observe very often the way in which controversies, after long eddying backward and forward, hither and thither, concentrate themselves at last in some single word which is felt to contain all that the one party would affirm and the other would deny. After a desultory swaying of the battle hither and thither 'the high places of the field' the critical position, on the winning of which everything turns, is discovered at last. Thus the whole controversy of the Catholic Church with the Arians finally gathers itself up in a single word, 'homoousion;' that with the Nestorians in another, 'theotokos.' One might be bold to affirm that the entire secret of Buddhism is found in 'Nirvana'; for take away the word, and it is not too much to say that the keystone to the whole arch is gone. So too when the medieval Church allowed and then adopted the word 'transubstantiation' (and we know the exact date of this), it committed itself to a doctrine from which henceforward it was impossible to recede. The floating error had become a fixed one, and exercised a far mightier influence on the minds of all who received it, than except for this it would have ever done. It is sometimes not a word, but a phrase, which proves thus mighty in operation. 'Reformation in the head and in the members 'was the watchword, for more than a century before an actual Reformation came, of all who were conscious of the deeper needs of the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he called it 'the positive philosophy.'

We have been tempted to depart a little, though a very little, from the subject immediately before us. What was just now said of the manner in which language enriches itself does not contradict a prior assertion, that man starts with language as God's perfect gift, which he only impairs and forfeits by sloth and sin, according to the same law which holds good in respect of each other of the gifts of heaven. For it was not meant, as indeed was then observed, that men would possess words to set forth feelings which were not yet stirring in them, combinations which they had not yet made, objects which they had not yet seen, relations of which they were not yet conscious; but that up to man's needs, (those needs including not merely his animal wants, but all his higher spiritual cravings,) he would find utterance freely. The great logical, or grammatical, framework of language, (for grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason,) he would possess, he knew not how; and certainly not as the final result of gradual acquisitions, and of reflexion setting these in order, and drawing general rules from them; but as that rather which alone had made those acquisitions possible; as that according to which he unconsciously worked, filled in this framework by degrees with these later acquisitions of thought, feeling, and experience, as one by one they arrayed themselves in the garment and vesture of words.

Here then is the explanation of the fact that language should be thus instructive for us, that it should yield us so much, when we come to analyse and probe it; and yield us the more, the more deeply and accurately we do so. It is full of instruction, because it is the embodiment, the incarnation, if I may so speak, of the feelings and thoughts and experiences of a nation, yea, often of many nations, and of all which through long centuries they have attained to and won. It stands like the Pillars of Hercules, to mark how far the moral and intellectual conquests of mankind have advanced, only not like those pillars, fixed and immovable, but ever itself advancing with the progress of these. The mighty moral instincts which have been working in the popular mind have found therein their unconscious voice; and the single kinglier spirits that have looked deeper into the heart of things have oftentimes gathered up all they have seen into some one word, which they have launched upon the world, and with which they have enriched it for ever—making in that new word a new region of thought to be henceforward in some sort the common heritage of all. Language is the amber in which a thousand precious and subtle thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested ten thousand lightning flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing, as the lightning. 'Words convey the mental treasures of one period to the generations that follow; and laden with this, their precious freight, they sail safely across gulfs of time in which empires have suffered shipwreck, and the languages of common life have sunk into oblivion.' And for all these reasons far more and mightier in every way is a language than any one of the works which may have been composed in it. For that work, great as it may be, at best embodies what was in the heart and mind of a single man, but this of a nation. The Iliad is great, yet not so great in strength or power or beauty as the Greek language. [Footnote: On the Greek language and its merits, as compared with the other Indo-European languages, see Curtius, History of Greece, English translation, vol. i. pp. 18-28.] Paradise Lost is a noble possession for a people to have inherited, but the English tongue is a nobler heritage yet. [Footnote: Gerber (Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 274): Es ist ein bedeutender Fortschritt in der Erkenntniss des Menschen dass man jetzt Sprachen lernt nicht bloss, um sich den Gedankeninhalt, den sie offenbaren, anzueignen, sondern zugleich um sie selbst als herrliche, architektonische Geisteswerke kennen zu lernen, und sich an ihrer Kunstschoenheit zu erfreuen.]

And imperfectly as we may apprehend all this, there is an obscure sense, or instinct I might call it, in every one of us, of this truth. We all, whether we have given a distinct account of the matter to ourselves or not, believe that words which we use are not arbitrary and capricious signs, affixed at random to the things which they designate, for which any other might have been substituted as well, but that they stand in a real relation to these. And this sense of the significance of names, that they are, or ought to be,—that in a world of absolute truth they ever would be,—the expression of the innermost character and qualities of the things or persons that bear them, speaks out in various ways, It is reported of Boiardo, author of a poem without which we should probably have never seen the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto, that he was out hunting, when the name Rodomonte presented itself to him as exactly fitting a foremost person of the epic he was composing; and that instantly returning home, he caused all the joy-bells of the village to be rung, to celebrate the happy invention. This story may remind us of another which is told of the greatest French novelist of modern times. A friend of Balzac's, who has written some Recollections of him, tells us that he would sometimes wander for days through the streets of Paris, studying the names over the shops, as being sure that there was a name more appropriate than any other to some character which he had conceived, and hoping to light on it there.

You must all have remarked the amusement and interest which children find in any notable agreement between a name and the person who owns that name, as, for instance, if Mr. Long is tall—or, which naturally takes a still stronger hold upon them, in any manifest contradiction between the name and the name-bearer; if Mr. Strongitharm is a weakling, or Mr. Black an albino: the former striking from a sense of fitness, the latter from one of incongruity. Nor is this a mere childish entertainment. It continues with us through life; and that its roots lie deep is attested by the earnest use which is often made, and that at the most earnest moments of men's lives, of such agreements or disagreements as these. Such use is not un-frequent in Scripture, though it is seldom possible to reproduce it in English, as for instance in the comment of Abigail on her husband Nabal's name: 'As his name is, so is he; Nabal is his name, and folly is with him' (i Sam. xxv. 25). And again, 'Call me not Naomi,' exclaims the desolate widow— 'call me not Naomi [or pleasantness]; call me Marah [or bitterness], for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me.' She cannot endure that the name she bears should so strangely contradict the thing she is. Shakespeare, in like manner, reveals his own profound knowledge of the human heart, when he makes old John of Gaunt, worn with long sickness, and now ready to depart, play with his name, and dwell upon the consent between it and his condition; so that when his royal nephew asks him, 'How is it with aged Gaunt?' he answers,

'Oh, how that name befits my composition, Old Gaunt indeed, and gaunt in being old— Gaunt am I for the grave, gaunt as the grave—' [Footnote: Ajax, or [Greek: Aias], in the play of Sophocles, which bears his name, does the same with the [Greek: aiai] which lies in that name (422, 423); just as in the Bacchae of Euripides, not Pentheus himself, but others for him, indicate the prophecy of a mighty [Greek: penthos] or grief, which is shut up in his name (367). A tragic writer, less known than Euripides, does the same: [Greek: Pentheus, esomenes sumphoras eponymos]. Eteocles in the Phoenissae of Euripides makes a play of the same kind on the name of Polynices.] with much more in the same fashion; while it is into the mouth of the slight and frivolous king that Shakespeare puts the exclamation of wonder,

'Can sick men play so nicely with their names?' [Footnote: 'Hus' is Bohemian for 'goose' [the two words being in fact cognate forms]; and here we have the explanation of the prophetic utterance of Hus, namely, that in place of one goose, tame and weak of wing, God would send falcons and eagles before long.]

Mark too how, if one is engaged in a controversy or quarrel, and his name imports something good, his adversary will lay hold of the name, will seek to bring out a real contradiction between the name and the bearer of the name, so that he shall appear as one presenting himself under false colours, affecting a merit which he does not really possess. Examples of this abound. There was one Vigilantius in the early Church;—his name might be interpreted 'The Watchful.' He was at issue with St. Jerome about certain vigils; these he thought perilous to Christian morality, while Jerome was a very eager promoter of them; who instantly gave a turn to his name, and proclaimed that he, the enemy of these watches, the partisan of slumber and sloth, should have been not Vigilantius or The Watcher, but 'Dormitantius' or The Sleeper rather. Felix, Bishop of Urgel, a chief champion in the eighth century of the Adoptianist heresy, is constantly 'Infelix' in the writings of his adversary Alcuin. The Spanish peasantry during the Peninsular War would not hear of Bonaparte, but changed the name to 'Malaparte,' as designating far better the perfidious kidnapper of their king and enemy of their independence. It will be seen then that Aeschylus is most true to nature, when in his Prometheus Bound he makes Strength tauntingly to remind Prometheus, or The Prudent, how ill his name and the lot which he has made for himself agreed, bound as he is with adamantine chains to his rock, and bound, as it might seem, for ever. When Napoleon said of Count Lobau, whose proper name was Mouton, 'Mon mouton c'est un lion,' it was the same instinct at work, though working from an opposite point. It made itself felt no less in the bitter irony which gave to the second of the Ptolemies, the brother-murdering king, the title of Philadelphus.

But more frequent still is this hostile use of names, this attempt to place them and their owners in the most intimate connexion, to make, so to speak, the man answerable for his name, where the name does not thus need to be reversed; but may be made as it now is, or with very slightest change, to contain a confession of the ignorance, worthlessness, or futility of the bearer. If it implies, or can be made to imply, anything bad, it is instantly laid hold of as expressing the very truth about him. You know the story of Helen of Greece, whom in two of his 'mighty lines' Marlowe's Faust so magnificently apostrophizes:

'Is this the face that launched a thousand ships, And burned the topless towers of Ilium?'

It is no frigid conceit of the Greek poet, when one passionately denouncing the ruin which she wrought, finds that ruin couched and fore-announced in her name; [Footnote: [Greek: Helenas [=helenaos], helandros, heleptolis], Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 636.] as in English it might be, and has been, reproduced—

'Hell in her name, and heaven in her looks.'

Or take other illustrations. Pope Hildebrand in one of our Homilies is styled 'Brand of Hell,' as setting the world in a blaze; as 'Hoellenbrand' he appears constantly in German. Tott and Teuffel were two officers of high rank in the army which Gustavus Adolphus brought with him into Germany. You may imagine how soon those of the other side declared that he had brought 'death' and 'hell' in his train. There were two not inconsiderable persons in the time of our Civil Wars, Vane (not the 'young Vane' of Milton's and Wordsworth's sonnets), and Sterry; and one of these, Sterry, was chaplain to the other. Baxter, having occasion to mention them in his profoundly instructive Narrative of his Life and Times, and liking neither, cannot forbear to observe, that 'vanity and sterility were never more fitly joined together;' and speaks elsewhere of 'the vanity of Vane, and the sterility of Sterry.' This last, let me observe, is an eminently unjust charge, as Baxter himself in a later volume [Footnote: Catholic Theology, pt, 3, p. 107.] has very handsomely acknowledged. [Footnote: A few more examples, in a note, of this contumely of names. Antiochus Epiphanes, or 'the Illustrious,' is for the Jews, whom he so madly attempted to hellenize, Antiochus Epimanes, or 'the Insane.' Cicero, denouncing Verres, the infamous praetor of Sicily, is too skilful a master of the passions to allow the name of the arch-criminal to escape unused. He was indeed Verres, for he swept the province; he was a sweep-net for it (everriculum in provincia); and then presently, giving altogether another turn to his name, Others, he says, might be partial to 'jus verrinum' (which might mean either Verrine law or boar- sauce), but not he. Tiberius Claudius Nero, charged with being a drunkard, becomes in the popular language 'Biberius Caldius Mero.' The controversies of the Church with heretics yield only too abundant a supply, and that upon both sides, of examples of this kind. The 'royal- hearted' Athanasius is 'Satanasius' for the Arians; and some of St. Cyprian's adversaries did not shrink from so foul a perversion of his name as to call him Koprianos, or 'the Dungy.' But then how often is Pelagius declared by the Church Fathers to be a pelagus, a very ocean of wickedness. It was in vain that the Manichaeans changed their master's name from Manes to Manichaeus, that so it might not so nearly resemble the word signifying madness in the Greek (devitantes nomen insaniae, Augustine, De Haer. 46); it did not thereby escape. The Waldenses, or Wallenses, were declared by Roman controversialists to be justly so called, as dwelling 'in valle densa,' in the thick valley of darkness and ignorance. Cardinal Clesel was active in setting forward the Roman Catholic reaction in Bohemia with which the dismal tragedy of the Thirty Years' War began. It was a far-fetched and not very happy piece of revenge, when they of the other side took pleasure in spelling his name 'CLesel,' as much as to say, He of the 150 ass-power. Berengar of Tours calls a Pope who had taken sides against him not pontifex, but 'pompifex.' Metrophanes, Patriarch of Constantinople, being counted to have betrayed the interests of the Greek Church, his spiritual mother, at the Council of Florence, saw his name changed by popular hate into 'Metrophonos,' or the 'Matricide.' In the same way of more than one Pope Urbanus it was declared that he would have been better named 'Turbanus' (quasi turbans Ecclesiam). Mahomet appears as 'Bafomet,' influenced perhaps by 'bafa,' a lie, in Provencal. Shechem, a chief city of the heretical Samaritans, becomes 'Sychar,' or city of lies (see John iv. 5), so at least some will have it, on the lips of the hostile Jews; while Toulouse, a very seedplot of heresies, Albigensian and other, in the Middle Ages, is declared by writers of those times to have prophesied no less by its name (Tolosa = tota dolosa). In the same way adversaries of Wiclif traced in his name an abridgement of 'wicked- belief.' Metternich was 'Mitternacht,' or Midnight, for the political reformers of Germany in the last generation. It would be curious to know how often the Sorbonne has been likened to a 'Serbonian' bog; some 'privilegium' declared to be not such indeed, but a 'pravilegium' rather. Baxter complains that the Independents called presbyters 'priestbiters,' Presbyterian ministers not 'divines' but 'dry vines,' and their Assembly men 'Dissembly men.']

Where, on the other hand, it is desired to do a man honour, how gladly, in like manner, is his name seized on, if it in any way bears an honourable significance, or is capable of an honourable interpretation —men finding in that name a presage and prophecy of that which was actually in its bearer. A multitude of examples, many of them very beautiful, might be brought together in this kind. How often, for instance, and with what effect, the name of Stephen, the proto-martyr, that name signifying in Greek 'the Crown,' was taken as a prophetic intimation of the martyr-crown, which it should be given to him, the first in that noble army, to wear. [Footnote: Thus in a sublime Latin hymn by Adam of St. Victor:

Nomen habes Coronati; Te tormenta decet pati Pro corona gloriae.

Elsewhere the same illustrious hymnologist plays in like manner on the name of St. Vincentius:

Qui vincentis habet nomen Ex re probat dignum omen Sui fore nominis; Vincens terra, vincens mari Quidquid potest irrogari Poenae vel formidinis.

In the Bull for the canonization of Sta. Clara, the canonizing Pope does not disdain a similar play upon her name: Clara Claris praeclara meritis, magnae in caelo claritate gloriae, ac in terra miraculorum sublimium, clare claret. On these 'prophetic' names in the heathen world see Pott, Wurzel-Woerterbuch, vol. ii. part 2, p. 522.]

Irenaeus means in Greek 'the Peaceable'; and early Church writers love to remark how fitly the illustrious Bishop of Lyons bore this name, setting forward as he so earnestly did the peace of the Church, resolved as he was, so far as in him lay, to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. [Footnote: We cannot adduce St. Columba as another example in the same kind, seeing that this name was not his birthright, but one given to him by his scholars for the dove-like gentleness of his character. So indeed we are told; though it must be owned that some of the traits recorded of him in The Monks of the West are not columbine at all.] The Dominicans were well pleased when their name was resolved into 'Domini canes'—the Lord's watchdogs; who, as such, allowed no heresy to appear without at once giving the alarm, and seeking to chase it away. When Ben Jonson praises Shakespeare's 'well-filed lines'—

'In each of which he seems to shake a lance As brandished in the eyes of ignorance'

—he is manifestly playing with his name. Fuller, too, our own Church historian, who played so often upon the names of others, has a play made upon his own in some commendatory verses prefixed to one of his books:

'Thy style is clear and white; thy very name Speaks pureness, and adds lustre to the frame.'

He plays himself upon it in an epigram which takes the form of a prayer:

'My soul is stained with a dusky colour: Let thy Son be the soap; I'll be the fuller.'

John Careless, whose letters are among the most beautiful in Foxe's Book of Martyrs, writing to Philpot, exclaims, 'Oh good master Philpot, which art a principal pot indeed, filled with much precious liquor,—oh pot most happy! of the High Potter ordained to honour.'

Herein, in this faith that men's names were true and would come true, in this, and not in any altogether unreasoning superstition, lay the root of the carefulness of the Romans that in the enlisting of soldiers names of good omen, such as Valerius, Salvius, Secundus, should be the first called. Scipio Africanus, reproaching his soldiers after a mutiny, finds an aggravation of their crime in the fact that one with so ill- omened a name as Atrius Umber should have seduced them, and persuaded them to take him for their leader. So strong is the conviction of men that names are powers. Nay, it must have been sometimes thought that the good name might so react on the evil nature that it should not remain evil altogether, but might be induced, in part at least, to conform itself to the designation which it bore. Here we have an explanation of the title Eumenides, or the Well-minded, given to the Furies; of Euxine, or the kind to strangers, to the inhospitable Black Sea, 'stepmother of ships,' as the Greek poet called it; the explanation too of other similar transformations, of the Greek Egesta transformed by the Romans into 'Segesta,' that it might not suggest 'egestas' or penury; [Footnote: [But the form Segesta is probably older than Egesta, the Romans here, as in other cases, retaining the original initial s, which in Greek is represented generally by the rough, sometimes by the smooth breathing.]] of Epidamnus, which, in like manner seeming too suggestive of 'damnum,' or loss, was changed into 'Dyrrachium'; of Maleventum, which became 'Beneventum'; of Cape Tormentoso, or Stormy Cape, changed into 'Cape of Good Hope'; of the fairies being always respectfully spoken of as 'the good people' in Ireland, even while they are accredited with any amount of mischief; of the dead spoken of alike in Greek and in Latin simply as 'the majority'; of the dying, in Greek liturgies remembered as 'those about to set forward upon a journey'[Footnote: [Greek: oi exodeuontes]]; of the slain in battle designated in German as 'those who remain,' that is, on the field of battle; of [Greek: eulogia], or 'the blessing,' as a name given in modern Greek to the smallpox! We may compare as an example of this same euphemism the famous 'Vixerunt' with which Cicero announced that the conspirators against the Roman State had paid the full penalty of their treason.

Let me observe, before leaving this subject, that not in one passage only, but in passages innumerable, Scripture sets its seal to this significance of names, to the fact that the seeking and the finding of this significance is not a mere play upon the surface of things: it everywhere recognizes the inner band, which ought to connect, and in a world of truth would connect, together the name and the person or thing bearing the name. Scripture sets its seal to this by the weight and solemnity which it everywhere attaches to the imposing of names; this in many instances not being left to hazard, but assumed by God as his own peculiar care. 'Thou shalt call his name Jesus' (Matt. i. 21; Luke i. 31) is of course the most illustrious instance of all; but there is a multitude of other cases in point; names given by God, as that of John to the Baptist; or changed by Him, as Abram's to Abraham (Gen. xvii. 3), Sarai's to Sarah, Hoshea's to Joshua; or new names added by Him to the old, when by some mighty act of faith the man had been lifted out of his old life into a new; as Israel added to Jacob, and Peter to Simon, and Boanerges or Sons of thunder to the two sons of Zebedee (Mark iii. 17). The same feeling is at work elsewhere. A Pope on his election always takes a new name. Or when it is intended to make, for good or for ill, an entire breach with the past, this is one of the means by which it is sought to effect as much (2 Chr. xxxvi. 4; Dan. i. 7). How far this custom reaches, how deep the roots which it casts, is exemplified well in the fact that the West Indian buccaneer makes a like change of name on entering that society of blood. It is in both cases a sort of token that old things have passed away, that all have become new to him.

But we must draw to a close. Enough has been said to attest and to justify the wide-spread faith of men that names are significant, and that things and persons correspond, or ought to correspond, to them. You will not, then, find it a laborious task to persuade your pupils to admit as much. They are prepared to accept, they will be prompt to believe it. And great indeed will be our gains, their gains and ours,— for teacher and taught will for the most part enrich themselves together,—if, having these treasures of wisdom and knowledge lying round about us, so far more precious than mines of Californian gold, we determine that we will make what portion of them we can our own, that we will ask the words which we use to give an account of themselves, to say whence they are, and whither they tend. Then shall we often rub off the dust and rust from what seemed to us but a common token, which as such we had taken and given a thousand times; but which now we shall perceive to be a precious coin, bearing the 'image and superscription' of the great King: then shall we often stand in surprise and in something of shame, while we behold the great spiritual realities which underlie our common speech, the marvellous truths which we have been witnessing for in our words, but, it may be, witnessing against in our lives. And as you will not find, for so I venture to promise, that this study of words will be a dull one when you undertake it yourselves, as little need you fear that it will prove dull and unattractive, when you seek to make your own gains herein the gains also of those who may be hereafter committed to your charge. Only try your pupils, and mark the kindling of the eye, the lighting up of the countenance, the revival of the flagging attention, with which the humblest lecture upon words, and on the words especially which they are daily using, which are familiar to them in their play or at their church, will be welcomed by them. There is a sense of reality about children which makes them rejoice to discover that there is also a reality about words, that they are not merely arbitrary signs, but living powers; that, to reverse the saying of one of England's 'false prophets,' they may be the fool's counters, but are the wise man's money; not, like the sands of the sea, innumerable disconnected atoms, but growing out of roots, clustering in families, connecting and intertwining themselves with all that men have been doing and thinking and feeling from the beginning of the world till now.

And it is of course our English tongue, out of which mainly we should seek to draw some of the hid treasures which it contains, from which we should endeavour to remove the veil which custom and familiarity have thrown over it. We cannot employ ourselves better. There is nothing that will more help than will this to form an English heart in ourselves and in others. We could scarcely have a single lesson on the growth of our English tongue, we could scarcely follow up one of its significant words, without having unawares a lesson in English history as well, without not merely falling on some curious fact illustrative of our national life, but learning also how the great heart which is beating at the centre of that life was gradually shaped and moulded. We should thus grow too in our sense of connexion with the past, of gratitude and reverence to it; we should rate more highly and thus more truly all which it has bequeathed to us, all that it has made ready to our hands. It was not a small matter for the children of Israel, when they came into Canaan, to enter upon wells which they digged not, and vineyards which they had not planted, and houses which they had not built; but how much vaster a boon, how much more glorious a prerogative, for any one generation to enter upon the inheritance of a language which other generations by their truth and toil have made already a receptacle of choicest treasures, a storehouse of so much unconscious wisdom, a fit organ for expressing the subtlest distinctions, the tenderest sentiments, the largest thoughts, and the loftiest imaginations, which the heart of man has at any time conceived. And that those who have preceded us have gone far to accomplish this for us, I shall rejoice if I am able in any degree to make you feel in the lectures which will follow the present.



LECTURE II.

ON THE POETRY IN WORDS.

I said in my last lecture, or rather I quoted another who had said, that language is fossil poetry. It is true that for us very often this poetry which is bound up in words has in great part or altogether disappeared. We fail to recognize it, partly from long familiarity with it, partly from insufficient knowledge, partly, it may be, from never having had our attention called to it. None have pointed it out to us; we may not ourselves have possessed the means of detecting it; and thus it has come to pass that we have been in close vicinity to this wealth, which yet has not been ours. Margaret has not been for us 'the Pearl,' nor Esther 'the Star,' nor Susanna 'the Lily,' [Footnote: See Jacob Grimm, Ueber Frauennamen aus Blumen, in his Kleinere Schriften, vol. ii. pp. 366-401; and on the subject of this paragraph more generally, Schleicher, Die Deutsche Sprache, p. 115 sqq.] nor Stephen 'the Crown,' nor Albert 'the illustrious in birth.' 'In our ordinary language,' as Montaigne has said, 'there are several excellent phrases and metaphors to be met with, of which the beauty is withered by age, and the colour is sullied by too common handling; but that takes nothing from the relish to an understanding man, neither does it derogate from the glory of those ancient authors, who, 'tis likely, first brought those words into that lustre.' We read in one of Moliere's most famous comedies of one who was surprised to discover that he had been talking prose all his life without being aware of it. If we knew all, we might be much more surprised to find that we had been talking poetry, without ever having so much as suspected this. For indeed poetry and passion seek to insinuate, and do insinuate themselves everywhere in language; they preside continually at the giving of names; they enshrine and incarnate themselves in these: for 'poetry is the mother tongue of the human race,' as a great German writer has said. My present lecture shall contain a few examples and illustrations, by which I would make the truth of this appear.

'Iliads without a Homer,' some one has called, with a little exaggeration, the beautiful but anonymous ballad poetry of Spain. One may be permitted, perhaps, to push the exaggeration a little further in the same direction, and to apply the same language not merely to a ballad but to a word. For poetry, which is passion and imagination embodying themselves in words, does not necessarily demand a combination of words for this. Of this passion and imagination a single word may be the vehicle. As the sun can image itself alike in a tiny dew-drop or in the mighty ocean, and can do it, though on a different scale, as perfectly in the one as in the other, so the spirit of poetry can dwell in and glorify alike a word and an Iliad. Nothing in language is too small, as nothing is too great, for it to fill with its presence. Everywhere it can find, or, not finding, can make, a shrine for itself, which afterwards it can render translucent and transparent with its own indwelling glory. On every side we are beset with poetry. Popular language is full of it, of words used in an imaginative sense, of things called—and not merely in transient moments of high passion, and in the transfer which at such moments finds place of the image to the thing imaged, but permanently,—by names having immediate reference not to what they are, but to what they are like. All language is in some sort, as one has said, a collection of faded metaphors. [Footnote: Jean Paul: Ist jede Sprache in Ruecksicht geistiger Beziehungen ein Woerterbuch erblasster Metaphern. We regret this, while yet it is not wholly matter of regret. Gerber (Sprache als Kunst, vol. i. p. 387) urges that language would be quite unmanageable, that the words which we use would be continually clashing with and contradicting one another, if every one of them retained a lively impress of the image on which it originally rested, and recalled this to our mind. His words, somewhat too strongly put, are these: Fuer den Usus der Sprache, fuer ihren Verstand und ihre Verstaendlichkeit ist allerdings das Erblassen ihrer Lautbilder, so dass sie allmaehlig als blosse Zeichen fuer Begriffe fungiren, nothwendig. Die Ueberzahl der Bilder wuerde, wenn sie alle als solche wirkten, nur verwirren und jede klarere Auffassung, wie sie die praktischen Zwecke der Gegenwart fordern, unmoeglich machen. Die Bilder wuerden ausserdem einander zum Theil zerstoeren, indem sie die Farben verschiedener Sphaeren zusammenfliessenlassen, und damit fuer den Verstand nur Unsinn bedeuten.]

Sometimes, indeed, they have not faded at all. Thus at Naples it is the ordinary language to call the lesser storm-waves 'pecore,' or sheep; the larger 'cavalloni,' or big horses. Who that has watched the foaming crests, the white manes, as it were, of the larger billows as they advance in measured order, and rank on rank, into the bay, but will own not merely the fitness, but the grandeur, of this last image? Let me illustrate my meaning more at length by the word 'tribulation.' We all know in a general way that this word, which occurs not seldom in Scripture and in the Liturgy, means affliction, sorrow, anguish; but it is quite worth our while to know how it means this, and to question 'tribulation' a little closer. It is derived from the Latin 'tribulum,' which was the threshing instrument or harrow, whereby the Roman husbandman separated the corn from the husks; and 'tribulatio' in its primary signification was the act of this separation. But some Latin writer of the Christian Church appropriated the word and image for the setting forth of a higher truth; and sorrow, distress, and adversity being the appointed means for the separating in men of whatever in them was light, trivial, and poor from the solid and the true, their chaff from their wheat, [Footnote: Triticum itself may be connected with tero, tritus; [so Curtius, Greek Etym. No. 239].] he therefore called these sorrows and trials 'tribulations,' threshings, that is, of the inner spiritual man, without which there could be no fitting him for the heavenly garner. Now in proof of my assertion that a single word is often a concentrated poem, a little grain of pure gold capable of being beaten out into a broad extent of gold-leaf, I will quote, in reference to this very word 'tribulation,' a graceful composition by George Wither, a prolific versifier, and occasionally a poet, of the seventeenth century. You will at once perceive that it is all wrapped up in this word, being from first to last only the explicit unfolding of the image and thought which this word has implicitly given; it is as follows:—

'Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, Until the chaff be purged from the wheat, Yea, till the mill the grains in pieces tear, The richness of the flour will scarce appear. So, till men's persons great afflictions touch, If worth be found, their worth is not so much, Because, like wheat in straw, they have not yet That value which in threshing they may get. For till the bruising flails of God's corrections Have threshed out of us our vain affections; Till those corruptions which do misbecome us Are by Thy sacred Spirit winnowed from us; Until from us the straw of worldly treasures, Till all the dusty chaff of empty pleasures, Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay, To thresh the husk of this our flesh away; And leave the soul uncovered; nay, yet more, Till God shall make our very spirit poor, We shall not up to highest wealth aspire; But then we shall; and that is my desire.'

This deeper religious use of the word 'tribulation' was unknown to classical antiquity, belonging exclusively to the Christian writers; and the fact that the same deepening and elevating of the use of words recurs in a multitude of other, and many of them far more signal, instances, is one well deserving to be followed up. Nothing, I am persuaded, would more mightily convince us of the new power which Christianity proved in the world than to compare the meaning which so many words possessed before its rise, and the deeper meaning which they obtained, so soon as they were assumed as the vehicles of its life, the new thought and feeling enlarging, purifying, and ennobling the very words which they employed. This is a subject which I shall have occasion to touch on more than once in these lectures, but is itself well worthy of, as it would afford ample material for, a volume.

On the suggestion of this word 'tribulation', I will quote two or three words from Coleridge, bearing on the matter in hand. He has said, 'In order to get the full sense of a word, we should first present to our minds the visual image that forms its primary meaning.' What admirable counsel is here! If we would but accustom ourselves to the doing of this, what a vast increase of precision and force would all the language which we speak, and which others speak to us, obtain; how often would that which is now obscure at once become clear; how distinct the limits and boundaries of that which is often now confused and confounded! It is difficult to measure the amount of food for the imagination, as well as gains for the intellect, which the observing of this single rule would afford us. Let me illustrate this by one or two examples. We say of such a man that he is 'desultory.' Do we attach any very distinct meaning to the word? Perhaps not. But get at the image on which 'desultory' rests; take the word to pieces; learn that it is from 'desultor,' [Footnote: Lat. desultor is from desult-, the stem of desultus, past part, of desilire, to leap down.] one who rides two or three horses at once, leaps from one to the other, being never on the back of any one of them long; take, I say, the word thus to pieces, and put it together again, and what a firm and vigorous grasp will you have now of its meaning! A 'desultory' man is one who jumps from one study to another, and never continues for any length of time in one. Again, you speak of a person as 'capricious,' or as full of 'caprices.' But what exactly are caprices? 'Caprice' is from capra, a goat. [Footnote: The etymology of caprice has not been discovered yet; the derivation from capra is unsatisfactory, as it does not account for the latter part of the word.] If ever you have watched a goat, you will have observed how sudden, how unexpected, how unaccountable, are the leaps and springs, now forward, now sideward, now upward, in which it indulges. A 'caprice' then is a movement of the mind as unaccountable, as little to be calculated on beforehand, as the springs and bounds of a goat. Is not the word so understood a far more picturesque one than it was before? and is there not some real gain in the vigour and vividness of impression which is in this way obtained? 'Pavaner' is the French equivalent for our verb 'to strut,' 'fourmiller' for our verb 'to swarm.' But is it not a real gain to know further that the one is to strut as the peacock does, the other to swarm as do ants? There are at the same time, as must be freely owned, investigations, moral no less than material, in which the nearer the words employed approach to an algebraic notation, and the less disturbed or coloured they are by any reminiscences of the ultimate grounds on which they rest, the better they are likely to fulfil the duties assigned to them; but these are exceptions. [Footnote: A French writer, Adanson, in his Natural History of Senegal complains of the misleading character which names so often have, and urges that the only safety is to give to things names which have and can have no meaning at all. His words are worth quoting as a curiosity, if nothing else: L'experience nous apprend, que la plupart des noms significatifs qu'on a voulu donner a differens objets d'histoire naturelle, sont devenus faux a mesure qu'on a decouvert des qualites, des proprietes nouvelles ou contraires a celles qui avaient fait donner ces noms: il faut donc, pour se mettre a l'abri des contradictions, eviter les termes figures, et meme faire en sorte qu'on ne puisse les rapporter a quelque etymologie, a fin que ceux, qui ont la fureur des etymologies, ne soient pas tenus de leur attribuer une idee fausse. II en doit etre des noms, comme des coups des jeux de hazard, qui n'ont pour l'ordinaire aucune liaison entre eux: ils seraient d'autant meilleurs qu'ils seraient moins significatifs, moins relatifs a d'autres noms, ou a des choses connues, par ce que l'idee ne se fixant qu'a un seul objet, le saisit beaucoup plus nettement, que lorsqu'elle se lie avec d'autres objets qui y ont du rapport. There is truth in what he says, but the remedy he proposes is worse than the disease.]

The poetry which has been embodied in the names of places, in those names which designate the leading features of outward nature, promontories, mountains, capes, and the like, is very worthy of being elicited and evoked anew, latent as it now has oftentimes become. Nowhere do we so easily forget that names had once a peculiar fitness, which was the occasion of their giving. Colour has often suggested the name, as in the well-known instance of our own 'Albion,'—'the silver- coasted isle,' as Tennyson so beautifully has called it,—which had this name from the white line of cliffs presented by it to those approaching it by the narrow seas. [Footnote: The derivation of the name Albion has not been discovered yet; it is even uncertain whether the word is Indo-European; see Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 200.] 'Himalaya' is 'the abode of snow.' Often, too, shape and configuiation are incorporated in the name, as in 'Trinacria' or 'the three- promontoried land,' which was the Greek name of Sicily; in 'Drepanum' or 'the sickle,' the name which a town on the north-west promontory of the island bore, from the sickle-shaped tongue of land on which it was built. But more striking, as the embodiment of a poetical feeling, is the modern name of the great southern peninsula of Greece. We are all aware that it is called the 'Morea'; but we may not be so well aware from whence that name is derived. It had long been the fashion among ancient geographers to compare the shape of this region to a platane leaf; [Footnote: Strabo, viii. 2; Pliny, H.N. iv. 5; Agathemerus, I.i. p. 15; echein de omoion schaema phullps platanan] and a glance at the map will show that the general outline of that leaf, with its sharply- incised edges, justified the comparison. This, however, had remained merely as a comparison; but at the shifting and changing of names, that went with the breaking up of the old Greek and Roman civilization, the resemblance of this region to a leaf, not now any longer a platane, but a mulberry leaf, appeared so strong, that it exchanged its classic name of Peloponnesus for 'Morea' which embodied men's sense of this resemblance, morus being a mulberry tree in Latin, and morea in Greek. This etymology of 'Morea' has been called in question; [Footnote: By Fallmerayer, Gesck. der Halbinsel Morea, p. 240, sqq. The island of Ceylon, known to the Greeks as Taprobane, and to Milton as well (P. L. iv. 75), owed this name to a resemblance which in outline it bore to the leaf of the betel tree. [This is very doubtful.]] but, as it seems to me, on no sufficient grounds. Deducing, as one objector does, 'Morea' from a Slavonic word 'more,' the sea, he finds in this derivation a support for his favourite notion that the modern population of Greece is not descended from the ancient, but consists in far the larger proportion of intrusive Slavonic races. Two mountains near Dublin, which we, keeping in the grocery line, have called the Great and the Little Sugarloaf, are named in Irish 'the Golden Spears.'

In other ways also the names of places will oftentimes embody some poetical aspect under which now or at some former period men learned to regard them. Oftentimes when discoverers come upon a new land they will seize with a firm grasp of the imagination the most striking feature which it presents to their eyes, and permanently embody this in a word. Thus the island of Madeira is now, I believe, nearly bare of wood; but its sides were covered with forests at the time when it was first discovered, and hence the name, 'madeira' in Portuguese having this meaning of wood. [Footnote: [Port. madeira, 'wood,' is the same word as the Lat. materia.]] Some have said that the first Spanish discoverers of Florida gave it this name from the rich carpeting of flowers which, at the time when first their eyes beheld it, everywhere covered the soil. [Footnote: The Spanish historian Herrera says that Juan Ponce de Leon, the discoverer of Florida, gave that name to the country for two reasons: first, because it was a land of flowers, secondly, because it was discovered by him on March 27, 1513, Easter Day, which festival was called by the Spaniards, 'Pascua Florida,' or 'Pascua de Flores,' see Herrera's History, tr. by Stevens, ii. p. 33, and the Discovery of Florida by R. Hakluyt, ed. by W. B. Rye for the Hakluyt Soc., 1851, introd. p. x.; cp. Larousse (s.v.), and Pierer's Conversations Lexicon. It is stated by some authorities that Florida was so called because it was discovered on Palm Sunday; this is due to a mistaken inference from the names for that Sunday—Pascha Florum, Pascha Floridum (Ducange), Pasque Fleurie (Cotgrave); see Dict. Geog. Univ., 1884, and Brockhaus.] Surely Florida, as the name passes under our eye, or from our lips, is something more than it was before, when we may thus think of it as the land of flowers. [Footnote: An Italian poet, Fazio degli Uberti, tells us that Florence has its appellation from the same cause:

Poiche era posta in un prato di fiori, Le denno il nome bello, oude s' ingloria.

It would be instructive to draw together a collection of etymologies which have been woven into verse. These are so little felt to be alien to the spirit of poetry, that they exist in large numbers, and often lend to the poem in which they find a place a charm and interest of their own. In five lines of Paradise Lost Milton introduces four such etymologies, namely, those of the four fabled rivers of hell, though this will sometimes escape the notice of the English reader:

'Abhorred Styx, the flood of deadly hate, Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep, Cocytus, named of lamentation loud Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegethon, Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage.'

'Virgil, that great master of the proprieties,' as Bishop Pearson has so happily called him, does not shun, but rather loves to introduce them, as witness his etymology of 'Byrsa,' Aen. i. 367, 368; v. 59, 63 [but the etymology here is imaginative, the name Byrsa being of Punic, that is of Semitic, origin, and meaning 'a fortress'; compare Heb. Bozrah]; of 'Silvius,' Aen. vi. 763, 765; of 'Argiletum,' where he is certainly wrong (Aen. viii. 345); of 'Latium,' with reference to Saturn having remained latent there (Aen. viii. 322; of. Ovid, Fasti, i. 238); of 'Laurens' (Aen. vii. 63):

Latiumque vocari Maluit, his quoniam latuisset tutus in oris:

and again of 'Avernus' (=[Greek: aornos], Aen. vi. 243); being indeed in this anticipated by Lucretius (vi. 741):

quia sunt avibus contraria cunctis.

Ovid's taste is far from faultless, and his example cannot go for much; but he is always a graceful versifier, and his Fasti swarms with etymologies, correct and incorrect; as of 'Agonalis' (i. 322), of 'Aprilis' (iv. 89), of 'Augustus' (i. 609-614), of 'Februarius' (ii. 19-22), of 'hostia' (i. 336), of 'Janus' (i. 120-127), of 'Junius' (vi. 26), of 'Lemures' (v. 479-484), of 'Lucina' (ii. 449), of 'majestas' (v. 26), of 'Orion' (v. 535), of 'pecunia' (v. 280, 281), of 'senatus' (v. 64), of 'Sulmo'(iv. 79; cf. Silius Italicus, ix. 70); of 'Vesta' (vi. 299), of 'victima' (i. 335); of 'Trinacris' (iv. 420). He has them also elsewhere, as of 'Tomi' (Trist. iii. 9, 33). Lucilius, in like manner, gives us the etymology of 'iners': Ut perhibetur iners, ars in quo non erit ulla; Propertius (iv. 2, 3) of 'Vertumnus'; and Lucretius of 'Magnes' (vi. 909).]

The name of Port Natal also embodies a fact which must be of interest to its inhabitants, namely, that this port was discovered on Christmas Day, the dies natalis of our Lord.

Then again what poetry is there, as indeed there ought to be, in the names of flowers! I do not speak of those, the exquisite grace and beauty of whose names is so forced on us that we cannot miss it, such as 'Aaron's rod,' 'angel's eyes,' 'bloody warrior,' 'blue-bell, 'crown imperial,' 'cuckoo-flower,' blossoming as this orchis does when the cuckoo is first heard, [Footnote: In a catalogue of English Plant Names I count thirty in which 'cuckoo' formed a component part.] 'eye- bright,' 'forget-me-not,' 'gilt-cup' (a local name for the butter-cup, drawn from the golden gloss of its petals), 'hearts-ease,' 'herb-of- grace,' 'Jacob's ladder,' 'king-cup,' 'lady's fingers,' 'Lady's smock,' 'Lady's tresses,' 'larkspur,' 'Lent lily,' 'loose-strife,' 'love-in- idleness,' 'Love lies bleeding,' 'maiden-blush,' 'maiden-hair,' 'meadow-sweet,' 'Our Lady's mantle,' 'Our Lady's slipper,' 'queen-of- the-meadows,' 'reine-marguerite,' 'rosemary,' 'snow-flake,' 'Solomon's seal,' 'star of Bethlehem,' 'sun-dew,' 'sweet Alison,' 'sweet Cicely,' 'sweet William,' 'Traveller's joy,' 'Venus' looking-glass,' 'Virgin's bower,' and the like; but take 'daisy'; surely this charming little English flower, which has stirred the peculiar affection of English poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth, and received the tribute of their song, [Footnote: 'Fair fall that gentle flower, A golden tuft set in a silver crown,' as Brown exclaims, whose singularly graceful Pastorals should not be suffered to fall altogether to oblivion. In Ward's recent English Poets, vol. ii. p. 65, justice has been done to them, and to their rare beauty.] becomes more charming yet, when we know, as Chaucer long ago has told us, that 'daisy' is day's eye, or in its early spelling 'daieseighe,' the eye of day; these are his words:

'That men by reson well it calle may The daisie, or elles the ye of day.' Chaucer, ed. Morris, vol. v. p. 281.

For only consider how much is implied here. To the sun in the heavens this name, eye of day, was naturally first given, and those who transferred the title to our little field flower meant no doubt to liken its inner yellow disk, or shield, to the great golden orb of the sun, and the white florets which encircle this disk to the rays which the sun spreads on all sides around him. What imagination was here, to suggest a comparison such as this, binding together as this does the smallest and the greatest! what a travelling of the poet's eye, with the power which is the privilege of that eye, from earth to heaven, and from heaven to earth, and of linking both together. So too, call up before your mind's eye the 'lavish gold' of the drooping laburnum when in flower, and you will recognize the poetry of the title, 'the golden rain,' which in German it bears. 'Celandine' does not so clearly tell its own tale; and it is only when you have followed up the [Greek: chelidonion], (swallow-wort), of which 'celandin' is the English representative, that the word will yield up the poetry which is concealed in it.

And then again, what poetry is there often in the names of birds and beasts and fishes, and indeed of all the animated world around us; how marvellously are these names adapted often to bring out the most striking and characteristic features of the objects to which they are given. Thus when the Romans became acquainted with the stately giraffe, long concealed from them in the interior deserts of Africa, (which we learn from Pliny they first did in the shows exhibited by Julius Caesar,) it was happily imagined to designate a creature combining, though with infinitely more grace, something of the height and even the proportions of the camel with the spotted skin of the pard, by a name which should incorporate both these its most prominent features, [Footnote: Varro: Quod erat figura ut camelus, maculis ut panthera; and Horace (Ep. ii. I, 196): Diversum confusa genus panthera camelo.] calling it the 'camelopard.' Nor can we, I think, hesitate to accept that account as the true one, which describes the word as no artificial creation of scientific naturalists, but as bursting extempore from the lips of the common people, who after all are the truest namers, at the first moment when the novel creature was presented to their gaze. 'Cerf-volant,' a name which the French have so happily given to the horned scarabeus, the same which we somewhat less poetically call the 'stag-beetle,' is another example of what may be effected with the old materials, by merely bringing them into new and happy combinations.