Purity, however, is not a quality which can be accurately predicated of language. What the phrase so often heard, "pure English," really means, it would, probably, puzzle those who use it to explain. For our modern tongues are like many buildings that stand upon sites long swept over by the ever-advancing, though backward and forward shifting tide of civilization. They are built out of the ruins of the work of previous generations, to which we and our immediate predecessors have added something of our own. This process has been going on since the disappearance of the first generation of speaking men; and it will never cease. But there will be a change in its mode and rate The change has begun already. The invention of printing, the instruction of the mass of the people, and the ease of popular intercommunication, will surely prevent any such corruption and detrition of language as that which has resulted in the modern English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian tongues. Phonetic degradation will play a less important part than it has heretofore played in the history of language. Changes in the forms, and variation in the meanings of words will be slow, and if not deliberate, at least half conscious; and the corruptions that we have to guard against are chiefly those consequent upon pretentious ignorance and aggressive vulgarity. It may be reasonably doubted whether there ever was a pure language two generations old; that is, a language homogeneous, of but one element. All tongues known to philology show, if not the mingling in considerable and nearly determinable pro portions of two or three linguistic elements, at least the adoption and adaptation of numerous foreign words. English has for many centuries been far from being a simple language. Chaucer's "well of English undefiled" is very pleasant and wholesome drinking; but, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, and "auxiliary" verbs aside, it is a mixture in which Normanized, Gallicized Latin is mingled in large proportion with a base of degraded AngloSaxon. And yet the result of this hybridity and degradation is the tongue in which Shakespeare wrote, and the translators of the Bible, and Milton, and Bunyan, and Burke, and Goldsmith, and Irving, and Hawthorne; making in a language without a superior a literature without an equal. But the presence in our language of two elements, both of which are essential to its present fulness and force, no less than to its fineness and flexibility, does not make it sure that these are of equal or of nearly equal importance. Valuable as the Latin adjuncts to our language are, in the appreciation of their value it should never be forgotten that they are adjuncts. The frame, the sinews, the nerves, the heart's blood, in brief, the body and soul of our language is English; Latin and Greek furnish only its limbs and outward flourishes. If what has come to us through the Normans, and since their time from France and Italy and the Latin lexicon, were turned out of our vocabulary, we could live, and love, and work, and talk, and sing, and have a folk-lore and a higher literature. But take out the former, the movement of our lives would be clogged, and the language would fall to pieces for lack of framework and foundation, and we could do none of those things. We might teach in the lecture-room, and formulate the results of our work in the laboratory, but we should be almost mute at home, and our language and our literature would be no more ours than it would be France's, or Spain's, or Italy's. To the Latin we owe, as the most cursory stu dent of our language must have observed, a great proportion of the vocabulary of philosophy, of art, of science, and of morals; and by means of words derived from the Latin we express, as it is assumed, shades of thought and of feeling finer than those of which our simple mother tongue is capable. But it may at least be doubted whether we do not turn too quickly to the Latin lexicon when we wish a name for a new thought or a new thing, and whether out of the simples of our ancient English, or AngloSaxon, so called, we might not have formed a language copious enough for all the needs of the highest civilization, and subtle enough for all the requisitions of philosophy. For instance, what we call, in Latinish phrase, remorse of conscience, our forefathers called againbite of inwit; and in using the former we express exactly the same ideas as are expressed by the latter. As the corresponding compounds and the corresponding elements have the same meaning, what more do we gain by putting together re and morse, con and science, than by doing the same with again and bite, in and wit? The English words now sound uncouth, and provoke a smile, but they do so only be cause we are accustomed to the Latin derivatives. No advantage seems likely to be pleaded for the use of the latter other than that they produce a single impression on the mind of the English-speaking man, causing him to accept remorse and conscience as simple words, expressing simple things, without the suggestion of a biting again and an inner witting. But it may first be doubted whether this thoughtless, unanalytic acceptance of a word is without some drawback of dissipating and enfeebling disadvantage; and next, and chiefly, it may be safely asserted that the English compounds would produce, if in common use, as single and as strong an impression as the Latin do. Who that does not stop to think and take to pieces, receives other than a single impression from such words as insight (bereaved twin of inwit), gospel, falsehood, worship, homely, breakfast, truthful, boyhood, household, brimstone, twilight, acorn, chestnut, instead, homestead, and the like, of which our common current English would furnish numberless examples? In no way is our language more wronged than by the weak readiness with which many of those who, having neither a hearty love nor a ready mastery of it, or lacking both, fly to the Latin tongue or to the Greek for help in the naming of a new thought or thing, or the partial concealment of an old one, calling, for instance, nakedness nudity, and a bathing-tub a lavatory. By so doing they help to deface the characteristic traits of our mother tongue, and to mar and stunt its kindly growth. No one denies-certainly I do not deny-the value of the Latin element of our modern English in the expression of abstract ideas and general notions - It also gives amplitude, and ease, and grace to a language which without it might be admirable only for compact and rugged strength. All which being granted, it still remains to be shown that there is not in simple English —that is, Anglo-Saxon without inflections the power of developing a vocabu lary competent to all the requirements of philosophy, of science, of art, no less than of society and of sentiment. I believe that pure English has, in this respect at least, the full capacity of the German language. Nevertheless, one of the advantages of English over German, in form and euphony, is in this very introduction of Anglicized Latin and Greek words for the expression of abstract ideas, which re lieves us of such quintuple compounds, for instance, as sprachwissenschaftseinheit. With the expression of abstract ideas and scientific facts, however, the Latinization of our language should stop, or it will lose its home character, and kin traits, and become weak, flabby, and inflated, and thus, ridiculous. One of the changes to which language is subject during the healthy intellectual condition of a people, and in its progress from rudeness to refinement, is the casting off of rude, clumsy, and insufficiently worked-out forms of speech, sometimes mistakenly honored under the name of idioms. Speech, the product of reason, tends more and more to conform itself to reason; and when grammar, which is the formulation of usage, is opposed to reason, there arises, sooner or later, a conflict between logic, or the law of reason, and grammar, the law of precedent, in which the former is always victorious. And this has been notably the case in |