PR W56 CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY FROM D.G.Clark Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013350156 BT-WAYS of LITERATURE; OR, ESS-AYS ON OLD THINGS AND NEW, IN THE CUSTOMS, EDUCATION, CHARACTER, LITERATURE, AND LANGUAGE OF THE ENGLISH- SPEAKING PEOPLE. DAYID HILTO]?^ WHEELER, ▲UTHOB or " BBlBiSDABI m SOUTH ITAI.T," NEW YORK: FUNK & WAGNALLS, Publishers, 10 AND 13 Dkt Street. ' Entered, according to Act of Congress, in tHe year 1883, by FUNK & WAGNALLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. PREFACE. 1 HAVE called this book Bt-wats of Liteeatubi!, partly because I wished a modest title, partly because, though the territory rambled over is cut by highways, I have , not kept to the great roads, but wandered across the country searching sometimes for instruction in the old, oftener for light on the new. Portions of some of these essays have appeared m periodicals, but they have been conscientiously re-written. " Our Spoken English," originally printed in the Methodist Qua/rterly Seview, is least changed for this book, but the opinions expressed in it have been modified and the discussion considerably enlarged. 1 owe the impulse which led me to writing these chapters to the Texts and Notes of the volumes issued by " The Early English Text Society, ^^ which began its good work in 1864. I owe much, too, to the late George P. Marsh, who was my teacher and friend during a five years' residence in Italy ; but I have very reluct- antly, and perhaps not wisely, departed from some of the opinions tenaciously held by him. One of these departures from what I regard as the highest authority appears in the substitution of the term Old English for Arhglo-Saxon. There is a strong tendency to this change IT PREFACE. in the nomenclature, and I share the hope that the earli- est literary produce of our tongue will be treated more kindly, and be more studied, if we can embrace it under the term English. For the transition period, I have used the term Middle English, and have written Mod- ern English whenever it seemed best to make the dis- tinction. I have found it more difficult to preserve uniformity in designating the people who, in the various periods of our language, including the present, have used the English tongue. I have tried to show in the tenth chapter that English is not a geographical or polit- ical term, but one of language, and that the various English-speaking peoples are Englishmen. I have not, however, followed this reasoning to all its conclusions, preferring perspicuity to logical consistency. Therefore, in a very few places, the reader will find an " Anglo- Saxon'' people mentioned either as an old people or as a present one. The matter presents a serious difficulty in expression, which ought to be removed by the extension of the term English to describe our language in all its stages and all English-speaking people in all times and countries. I am sensible that this volume has its unity rather in my own studies than in the various topics discussed ; but the topics all concern literature — net, indeed, as defined by highways, but as displayed on a full map of the terri- tory through which the literary highways nm — and it is not, perhaps, a disadvantage that each chapter may be read by itself. PREFACE. Y I hope that the reader of these essays will not think of me as a pedagogue giving him some lessons ; for if he does he will have reason to complain that the instmction is insufficient and imperfect. Let him rather think of me as a friend with whom he is rambling in the fields and picking up bits of instruction while taking a holiday. D. H. Wheelee. Bbookltn, July 20, 1883. CONTENTS. , FAQ£ CHAPTER I. A Fourteenth Century Book pok Women, ... 9 CHAPTER II. English Gibls m the Old Times, 35 CHAPTER III. English Boys in the Old Times 38 CHAPTER IV. Old Education and Modern, ...... 55 CHAPTER V. The Robin Hood Ballads, 69 Kote a. — Traditional Brigand Character, . . 86 CHAPTER VI. The Legends ok King Arthur, 90 CHAPTER VII. The Pounders' Age in Our Literature, . . . 108 CHAPTER Vm. Shakespeare on Greatness 138 CHAPTER IX. Englishmen, their LANGtTAGB and Countries, . . 168 Note B. — Old English Homilists, .... 183 Note C. — English Becoming Universal, . . . 185 CHAPTER X. A Grammatical Revolution 188 CHAPTER XL Our Spoken English, 211 Note D, 240 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUEE. CHAPTER I. A rOUETEENTH CENTUET BOOK FOE WOMEN. " A BOOK for the learned," is the description which is usually given to any work which originated so long ago as the fourteenth century, and was afterward forgotten. Here is a book written in French in 1372, translated into English and maintaining interest enough to be frequently copied in English manuscript and to be printed in 1484 by Oaxton. It has never been absolutely forgotten by the learned, but if Caxton were to begin again, this is about the last book he would think of printing. And yet few books better deserve the amount of attention which I ask my reader to give to this one. The Early English Text Society has published the old- est English version of the book of the Knight of La Tour Landry, compiled for the instruction of his daughters. The text has no great philological value, for several rea- sons, chiefly that it is a piece of patchwork. The anonymous translation extant in manuscripts in the Brit- ish Museum is made the basis of this edition ; but this manuscript is imperfect, one fifth being cut off at the end, and several lacunae occurring in other parts of the work. To supply these missing portions the editor has used the very faulty translation of Caxton. The reader 10 BY-WATS OF LITERATUKK. is leff to guess what is Caxtoiuan ; a negligence which is scarcely excusable, it is so easy to indicate by brackets or other signs the later version. The greater part of the work is, however, English, of the reign of King Henry YI. [1422-1461], probably half a century older than Caxton's text printed. in 1484, and the student will find it useful in tracing the influence of Wiclif s school upon our tongue. The book of the Knight of the Tower is valuable rather for its contents than for its dress. It was pre- pared by an affectionate father for the instruction of his motherless daughters, and it contains so many proofs of parental solicitude and virtuous instincts that it may be taken as a good specimen of the best teaching given to the women of that age. Let us say a few " forewords" about the author and his work before taking up its contents. Geoffry, of La Tour Landry, was a knight of a feudal family in the old province of Cujon. The castle of his family stood between Challet and Yezius, and its ruins are still visible, consisting of a great donjon dating from the twelfth century. He appears to have been a good fighter, and to have done his duty to his king and coun- try. His family fortunes flourished under his manage- ment, and seem to have been at the height of their pros- perity under his sons. He ■ probably looked well to his estates, was careful of his family alliances, and was alto- gether as shrewd as his neighbors. To these character- itstics he added a poetical tendency, and, if we may trust his simple story, as warm a heart as ever beat in France. He tells his daughters that he delighted so much in their mother that he made for her " love songges, balades, rondelles, viraloyes, and diverse other things. " The two qualities ]ust named doubtless led him to WOMEN IK THE rOURTEBlTTH CENTUBY. 11 compose his book ; lie began it in verse, but toward the end of the prologue abandoned measure, and took to prose '•^ four Vahregier et mieulx extend/re'^ — to make it shorter and easier to be understood. Later poets might profit by the example. It would be a general blessing, to be specially appreciated by editors, if most versifiers would "cut it short" and write understandable prose. The knight's afEection for his children is proved, not only by this book for his daughters, but also by a previous one, which he tells us he had written for the benefit of his two sons. To aid him in collecting the materials, illustrative ex- amples and anecdotes, he employed " two priests and two clerks," and these two hundred duodecimo pages probably gave the five of them much labor and weariness of the fiesh, and when done the work was as fine a piece, of book-making as that part of France could show. !rhe Knight of the Tower was a contemporary of Wiclif , who was preaching at Oxford while our knight was sweating over his book. Two years after, in 1374, the English reformer went to Avignon on a commission to obtain concessions from a pope, who contrived to loose and bind while shut out of Eome. The great storm of the Keformation had not yet broken over England, and the successor of Peter was still treated with respect by pious Englishmen ; but the moral atmosphere in the two countries differed in as marked a way as it does to-day. This book of counsels to daughters would prove it, if we lacked more direct evidence. It is safe to say that no father in England could have been induced, by any " two priests" in the island, to lay before his daughters some of the incidents which are recorded by our knight, with a moral earnestness and charming simpUcity that take away half their coarseness from the stories. In- 12 ■ BT-"WATS OF LITEEATUEE. deed, the book o£ rules for nuns, " Aneren Eiwle," written by a priest for English "Anchoresses," a cen- tury and a half earlier, is much less gross in matter, though greatly coarser in moral quality. Kefinement of word or thought was rare in that age, and scarcely exist- ed in France in any form ; the intention of our author is everywhere better than his text, and though he speaks of subjects not now discussed between the sexes in society, we cannot forget that these topics were then treated with greater freedom in the best circles. The character of the pure and perfect lady is the ideal which the book seeks to express. "We should now use difiEerent examples, and we have in English a moral dia- lect which has never existed in France, no resemblance to which was found in the France of the fourteenth cen- tury. But in our knight's book, biblical plainness of speech is partly redeemed by the utter cleanness of the interest and the atmosphere of chastity which surrounds the thought. The daughters of our knight, and their friends who may have read the book, were singularly fortunate in having so good a teacher. The common women of France, it must be remembered, are left out of the ac- count. They could not read, and their ideas of hfe and duty were exclusively derived from a very vulgar type of religious teachers. The moral and intellectual degra- dation of a nation whose mothers are so ignorant is not a pleasant topic ; some of the consequences are now wit- nessed in Spain and South Italy. But the high-bom ladies were rarely better ofiE than their humble sisters. Their fairer opportunities were rendered fruitless by the neglect of their fathers, or the frivolity of aimless living, or the frequency of those wars which engrossed the at- tention of all well-born people. WOMEN IK THE FOURTEENTH CENTUET. 13 It was popular in mediaeval times to teach morals and religion by popular stories and short historical narratives. The modern novel passed its infancy in that cradle. Oftenest the story was sung ; but prose came in when the writer arrived at self-consciousness. The subjects of these short histories were taken from the Scriptures, from the lives of the saints, or from the more secular fabliaux of the age. Our author followed the practice of his contemporary moralists. The stories are not often the best possible ; the incidents furnish some tough work for our credulity, but there is never lack of moral im- provement. The exhortation is sprinkled all through the sermon. We must often hold our breath in the midst of an exciting narrative to be pelted with sound doctrine about the virtues. The inconsequence of an in- cident is often charming, but the vigor of the preacher makes up what is lacking in point of argument. It is, perhaps, to the credit of his " two priests and two clerks" that a story always turns up at need. In his first and second chapters he enforces the duty of piety toward God. " The furst werke or laboure that a man or a woman shulde beginne is to serve God ; atte everi tyme he awakithe he ought to yeve God reconisaunce, bi thought or praier, that he is his lorde, creatour, and maker." He proceeds to co mmen d than king and prais- ing God as more beco ming than m aking r equests ; the Almighty knows better than we what is good' for us — a very wholesome doctrine which is still worth teaching. He then falls to urging the duty of p rayer for the dead. If we pray for the dead they will pray for us. This is to be done " everi day or ye slepe. And foryete not to praie to the blessed Yirgine Marie, that day and night praieth for us, and to recomaunde you to the seintes and santas." This is to be repeated "everi tyme that ye 14 BT-WATS OF LITEEATUEE. wake." This is probably tlie clearest statement of the quid pro quo view of prayer tbat has come to my knowl- edge, and it is a better argument than that suggested recently by professor Max Miiller for the custom of praying to the dead.* A m ore modem met hod of " pooling our iss ues" is a very popular Protestant cus- tom ; and it is too common among us for people wanting good things at tne Hand of the Lord to ask other people to form a joint-stock prayer combination. Something of a shock was administered to this system by the death of P reside nt G arfie ld ; but the orgamzfiie of p rayer combination s have n ojhing better to do, and will be at it again next year or the year after. Then come two stories enforcing the doctrine that we are to pray f or the dead. The first recounts that of two daughters of an emperor of Constantinople ; one prayed for the dead when she went to sleep, the other mocked her. Both, however, entered into intrigues with knights of the court ; but the devout girl was saved by a crowd of the dead who appeared, not to her but to her knight, fright- ening him away from her person, and into " fevers and gret sicknesse. " The other sister fell and was " diswor- shipped ;' ' the pious maiden married the son of a king. In the second story the same appearance of dead persons, surrounding a persecuted woman, saves her from the same calamity. " And, therefor, it is good to praie for the dede atte all owres." We should say that in strict logic the stories prove that dissolute women may secure safety in vice by praying to the dead ; but that idea could not have entered the head of our knight. He would liave made an a fortiori argument for a virtuous woman's prayers — ^if it had been necessary. * *' "What India Can Teach Us," p. 262, Standard Library. Funk & Wagnalls. WOMBN IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. 15 In the fifth chapter the maidens are charged on arising to enter into the service of the " higher lord Ihesu," and to say their matins and pater nosters without thinking of ■worldly things, " for ye may not goe two waies at onis.'* A short prayer said devoiitly is better than a long one coupled with earthly cares. The Bible is quoted incor- rectly, and then the examples of legendary saints, who slept on hard beds that they might wake often to pray, is commended. After devout prayers as many masses as possible are to be heard, and the profit of this is shown by stories. Two daughters of a knight are described ; the one said short prayers, and ate greedily at all hours ; the other was devout and abstemious in eating. The first married well ; but while indulging in a feast at night her lord finds her, breaks his staff over the shoulders of a male companion in her reveby, and a splinter from the staff puts out an eye of the gourmand wife. The elder sister makes a thriftful household and a happy husband. " And bi this exsaumple it is good to serve God and here masse." The duty of fasting is enjoined. Maidens are to fast three days in the week, " forto holde lowe youre fieshe, to kepe you chaste and clene in Goddes service." The hard Story is repeated of a knight who lost his head in battle vdth the Saracens, but did not die till the priest came to shrive him. The priest asked the head how this miracle came about, and the head made answer, " I have forborn fleshe on the Wednisdapy in the reverens that God was solde that day, and that y ete never no thing that suffered dethe on the Friday." The same lesson is taught by the story of a sinful woman who fasted Fridays and Saturdays " in the wor- ship of Christes passion and the virginite of oure lady." Going one dark night " toward her lemman" she falls 16 BY-WAYS OF LITEEATUKE. into a well, but the virgin makes the water hard under her feet, and, in the morning, she is drawn up by won- dering people, returns to a pure life, and sweeps and keeps clean the church. Another incident is even more aside of the argument. A virtuous and pious dame died in the odor of sanctity, but, to the surprise of all, her grave became a smoking pit. A priest was called, and, to his demand over the grave for an explanation of the matter, the voice of the woman responded that, for an unconfessed sin, she was damned, not for the sin, but for failing to confess to her priest. The knight's logic makes us smile at his simplicity ; it is astonishing how often he finds a woman who has misbehaved herself helped out of a danger by religious exercises. We must remember, however, that startling and dramatic stories of the deliverances of honest and pure women were not then in the market. He wanted something impressive, and the well-behaved women's his- tory was — as for the most part it continues to be — tame and uninteresting. But we cannot dismiss the rehgious beginning of this book with this sort of criticism. The knight wrote with a very commendable purpose. If a man of the world in this year of the Lord were to write a book of counsels for his daughters, he would probably make no mention of religion. The old knight had a sounder judgment of the value of religion, and, so far forth, this book, which to us is coarse and illogical, was a good book for his time. Eeligion, after a few funda- mental principles are stated, yields chiefly religious feel- ing—and feeli ng is s eldom logical in its e xpressio n, though it is'^the truest human truth. The kni^t's con- temporaries did not see the poor reasoning, the terrible lessons that we see in his stories, but they did see the honest fatherly feeling. This book, which would de- WOMEK ISr THE FOURTEEITTH CENTURY. 17 moralize a modem boarding-scliool for girls, if it were written in modern Englisli, was a wholesome book for the knight's daughters, in great measure because it,ap- pealed at the beginning to their religious feeling, and so consecrated human life to God and Duty. If we want a collection of bad religious reasoning, of illustrations that mean anything but what they are used to teach, we need not any of us stray far from home. Certainly, we need not got back into the France of five centuries ago. It was not the fault of the Knight of the Tower that penance, auricular confession, and worship of the virgin took precedence of the religion of devotion and the prac- tice of virtue. Religion b ewilder s many people in the same way even in our time. It must be so. Our knight can state a truth in morals with great simplicity and earnestness, but Jiis stories always send him to the con- temporary religious balances to weigh human conduct. He commends meekness and courtesy in manners, for instance, in a straightforward fashion. " There nis none so gret vertu to gete the grace of God and the love of alle peple ; for humilite and curtesie overeomithe alle proude hertys that be felle, as a sparhawke, be he never so vamageus [wild], ye may overcome hym with goodly and curteys demening, ye may make hym come from the tre to youre honde." So kindness wins wild birds and tames rough hearts. To high and low courtesy is a duty, and is as profitable as it is becoming. Cases are related of maidens losing good husbands by high and mighty manners. The worldly -prudence side of the matter is pressed with rather too much zeal, but this is the least objection- able part of the matter. One story leads to another, till we find meekness in wives conniving at lewdness in hus- bands. One' lady, who offended against this law of 18 BT-WAYS OF LITEKATUBE. meekness by jealousy of her husband, came to grief by another woman's hand, and " alle her lyff after she hadd her nose al croked, the which was a f oule mayme and Tttlemessing of her visage ; for it is the fairest membre that man or woman hathe, and sittithe in the middle of the visage." The knight's literary use of the nose is commended to young authors. I believe that in these days my lady's "nostrils quiver" and that she has in rare cases " a shapely nose." For the most part, how- ever, the nose is neglected, and most noveUsts' heroines might as well be without noses, for all the good the reader gets out of this middle of their faces. Minute study of details is the aim of the popular novel ; the nose ought not, therefore, to be neglected any longer, A more edifying story is that of another lady, who fell to wrangling with a knight in company, and the knight put her to confusion by making a wisp of straw, setting it up before her, and saying, " ladi, yet that ye will chide more, chide with that straw, for y leve you hit here in my stede." This piece of ancient society wit is probably very old ; but the fact that the knight put it in his book shows that it was still considered witty and amusing. But we must remember that the society wit that now floats about has in most cases a- flavor of vul- garity. This apparently essential taint in society con- versation is a curiosity worthy of somebody's study. Wifely obedience is pushed to extremes. Three mer- chants laid a wager that each had the most dutiful wife. The test should be ' ' leping' ' into a basin of water. Then they went to their houses one after the other. The first wife refused to leap, and her husband " up with his fust and gove her two or three gret strokes' ' in the presence of the other merchants. The second wife also refused, and her lord beat her with a staff. The third lady mis- "WOMEIT IK THE FOURTEENTH CENTUKY. 19 understood an order to bring salt for a command to leap upon the table, wbere they were all feasting, and, being better bred than the other wives, obeyed the order, as she understood it, leaped upon the table and brought it down with a crash. The wager was declared won with- out appeal to the basin experiment. " And so ou^t evri good woman do the commandm ent of her hus- bande, be it evil or well ; for yef he bidde her thing that she aught not to do, it is his shame."' Good doc- trine for those times ; but how are the mighty (husbands) fallen! On the subject of dress our knight is very sensible. He tells his daughters not to be the first to take " new shappes and gises of array of women of straunge coun- trey," and in his parables condenans adopting the fash- ions set by women of the demi monde. If we mistake not, sensible men have whispered like counsels fi*om the fourteenth century down to our day, and with the same hopeless feeling to which the knight confesses. It is useless, he thinks, to resist our wives in this matter,; we shall have no peace, " for thei wille find so mani resons that they will not be werned." He further admits that the subject is too deep for him, and disclaims any intent to lecture any but the women of his own household, and this with becoming meekness. Nothing in the book better shows his worldly wisdom, if we may not say his common-sense. Putting together the duty of unreason- ing obedience and the power to dress as they pleased, we may infer, not ungallantly, that the mediaeval ladies got what they wanted most and surrendered what they least valued — when they surrendered liberty. Yet it should not be overlooked that in the story of the three husbands' wager, two women refuse to obey— a two-thirds vote of the gentle sex against the knight's theory. His literary 20 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUKB. assistants probably failed to find any better story. The " abject subjection of women" was doubtless a fact of mediaeval times ; but wherever women wore clothes of fashionable styles and changeableness, they probably had their own way in other matters. Their real hardship lay in the fact that they wanted so little besides " the new shappes and gises of array. " Our knight, in another place, tells the melancholy his.> tory of a lady who woiuld not put on her best clothes on a Lady-day that fell on a Sunday. She suddenly lost all her beauty, swelled to the size of a. pipe, and only recov- ered her natural form by severe penance. The lesson is probably religious, but there is a little uncertainty. However it is safest to conclude that he is teaching the homely virtue known to us as putting on one's best clothes on Sunday, a virtue which has a bit of honest religion in it ; vanity has, however, so often perverted it that it is doubtful whether going to church in one's best is still an orthodox custom for women. There are several good illustrations in these lessons for girls of the popular reversal of the order in frhich moral judgments are given upon human conduct. The best is perhaps the account given of three successive wives of a knight. The first woman was fond of gay clothing, but otherwise a perfect wife. Her husband regretted her death so much that he appealed to his brother, a hermit, for a revelation of her condition in the other life. The hermit saw her in a vision su ffering horr ible t orm ents in hell, and without hope of release — ^for her e xtrava gance i ngre ss. The second wife was equally loved, and after herdeath the same means disclosed her state in the other world. She was in purgatory to expiate the w orst crim e in a wife, and her torment was to endure only a hun- dred years. The third wife died, and the "sorrowing WOMEK IK THE FOURTEENTH CENTUKT. 21 husband once more peeped into the invisible state. Number three was in tor ment of a terrible so rt, because when in life she had pl ucked out the hairs on her fore - head and painted herself. Wherever she had plucked out a hair, Satan thrust a burning awl or a needle into the brain. This torture was to last a thousand years, and how much longer the hermit could not tell. For adul- tery, a hundred years in purgatory ; f of plucking hair out of one's forehead, a thousand years and an indefinite number more of intense suffering ; for fine dress, eternal damnation. ;N"ow, I do not believe that the knight's feeling on such subjects was so bad as the logic of these stories. I know people who give more attention to the drinking of a glass of cider than they do to a seduction ; but the disproportioning is altogether imconscious. In us moderns, too, there is a feeling that the weightier matters of the law will be generally looked after, while the mint and anise questions of religious observance will be neglected if we do not enforce them by Pharisaical tithing of them. Good morals are always suifering from , religious neglect of them ; the saying is a strong one, and let me restore the balance by saying that somebody must look after the cider drunkenness and the formal observances of religion. Our author waxes eloquent over the case of the third wife. " Whi sufiBsithe it not that God hathe formed man and woman after hys own shape, in the whiche the aungeles so moche delitithe hem for joye to see God in the visage ? . . . Alas ! whi take women nowe hede of the gret love God hathe geve hem to make hem after hys figure and whi popithe [color] they and paint- ithe and pluckithe her visage other wise thanne God hath ordeinned hem ?" The great sin of these practices is that they beget pride, and this begets sinful desires S3 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUBE. and lusts, " for which tilings Noah's flood destroyed all the world." This notion of the effects of fine dressing and artiflcializing of the person has been one of the most persistent of the practical applications of religion. It is a curiosity in belief wliich our children will probably in- vestigate ; but in these days the lady who " popithe and pluckithe" may be a very good woman and by no means proud ; and we do not feel that her conduct puts us in peril of the fate which befell Noah's world. But on many subjects the book is charming. The knight's commendation of charity and kindness is a simple-hearted tribute to the spirit of humanity. The claims of the poor on the abundance of the rich, the sentiment that noblesse oblige applied to well-bom women, the power of kind words and modest ways to reclaim the erring, the gentleness of women that sweet- ens social life — ^whatever is contained in true gentlehood — are warmly commended. His idea of the duty of a wife whose husband is " out of the belief and faith of Almighty God, " needs no addition or subtraction, unless it be his belief that by superior devotion, " she may pur- chase grace for her hiisband." Even this deduction must be made with some hesitation, for it is practically true that salt of good savor is needed in a family half of which tends to putrescence. " If goodness in one be not set over against vice in another, all would perish and fall into perdition." This conception of a woman's vicarious office in a household was a very early Christian growth, and the idea and its fruit have given health to Christendom. It is the highest point attained by our knight, but unhappily he did not know his elevation. He thonght himself nearer to heavenly air when he recited " old wives' fables" about vespers and matins. His next best lesson is the teaching about courteous ways WOMEN IK THE lOUETEENTH CENTURY. 23 and kind sentiments. Somehow gentle manners have fallen to France in the stead of Christian life. The heritage of Koman blood had much to do with this result ; but the teachings of such as our knight kept gentlehood alive in brutal ages. There was httle hypocrisy under the well-bred gentility of that time, and if there was some duplicity, our knight cannot be accused of encourag- ing any form of insincerity. This scanty praise, for good purposes and good teach- ings on two or three subjects, is >all that can be awarded. It is at best an awful book for the instruction of girls, and leaves the impression that, bad as men now are, the race has escaped from purgatory since the fourteenth century. It is not easy to pass judgment on such a book as this or on the man who wrote it five hundred years ago. On the one hand, we are bound to believe that the knight's daughters did not see the coarseness which our girls would see in his stories ; and we might reason that girls were the better in the fourteenth century because they had not cut their wisdom teeth. It is very awful to think on what the modern girl in our large towns knows of the social immoralities of life. "It is dreadful," said a street-car conductor to me recently, " to think that girls from eight to twelve years old know more about the things they ought not to know than their mothers know — yes, more than their fathers know." That is a con- soling view which by contrast we may take of the knight's coarse book. But, on the other hand, we are bound to recognize the coarseness of feeling in the knight's daughters which made them- blind, and to respect the refining processes which have made our girls bundles of quivering sensibilities. It must be good to have eyes and bad to be blind. And yet, it is none the less a hard 24 BY- WATS OF MTERATUEE. problem — vastly harder than that of the old knight — how to make the light sweet and healthful for our girls with their great gift of eyes. The progress of society makes the necessary Tirtues of life more necessary and more difficult to teach. Increased sensitiveness opens a score of new doors for temptation, and a moral break- down becomes possible through the enlargement of the sensitive side of intellectual activity. A coarse jest means much more in the nineteenth century than it meant in the fourteenth. CHAPTER II. ENGLISH GIKL8 EST THE OLD TIMES. In the preceding chapter we have reviewed the Knight of the Tower's book of counsels to his daughters, and noticed the interesting fact that even so early as the fourteenth century there was a marked contrast between English and French ideas about women. The Early English Text Society has given us a volume containing a collection of early English manuscripts and books, treating of the education and manners of young people^' In the present chapter I shall collect some of the facts about the education of girls 6ontained in that book, and notice some of the points of difference between the ancient customs of the two sides of the channel. It seems at first sight incredible that, though England was long ruled by a JSTorman king and court, the two ' peoples remained very wide apart in their character, especially while the same church forms and creed pre- vailed in both. But the truth is that French character was overborne by English, though the former had all the advantage in the struggle. If it had not been so, there would have been no independent England in the sixteenth century. And there is scarcely a fragment of early English literature but shows us that Catholicism, pure and simple, did not take root in the English mind. England was Protestant before Wiclif. The Reforma- tion revealed, did not create, the gulf between the relig- ious, ideas of the Latin and the English races. And yet 36 BY WAYS OF LITERATURE. it is a perplexing question, with mueh to be said on both sides of it, whether pecuharities of race did not really make the difference. The French people were wonder- fully complex in origin, and the history would make them more Aryan than ourselves ; but we are rapidly losing faith in the extermination business in conquered countries. It is highly probable that despite the Komap, Teutonic and Scandinavian conquests,. France has remained prevailingly Euskarian in the character of its people — there is more Basque than anything else in French blood. These small dark-skinned, black-haired folk are in France what they are in Ireland, and no mixture of blood has changed the general drift of char- acter. One of the pieces in this collection is entitled, " How the Good "Wife Taught her Daughter," and doubtless belongs to the fourteenth century. From the number of manuscripts containing the substance of these coun- sels, we may infer that this was a popular poem exten- sively circulated among the English portion of the peo- ple. It is much shorter than the knight's book, and contains only about two hundred lines for its two hun- dred pages ; but if his stories and repetitions are left out, the difference is not very great after all. Each set of counsels may be taken as national in their time, inas- much as numerous manuscripts of both remain to us. The very idea of the mother as the teacher of heT daughters has an Anglo-Saxon face, and the devolving of this upon the father is not less Latin in feature. Not that the mother in France would in no case counsel her daughter, but that, in general, she would be less recog- nized as the guide of her girls ; and it is to the credit of the French character that fathers sustain a closer relation of affection to children of either sex. An English ESTGLISH GIELSIITTHE OLD TIMES. 27 father may be expected to instruct his sons ; the daugh- ters would, according to English ideas, depend more lipon maternal wisdom. This divergence carries us to the radical difference between French and English female character ; the latter has the higher and purer inoral tone, and consequently a stronger position in the family. -There were always two heads to an English household," rarely more than one in the French family, [Not that the French woman was perfectly subordinated to her husband, nor that the reverse was always ti'ue on the other side of the channel ; but that the woman of Latin stock is seldom a lawgiver or a spring of authority. Now the Eiaskarian (miscalled Keltic) nature has always yielded readily to religious authority and . easily falls of its own weight into superstitious notions and practices. It is a great mistake to suppose that such superstitions came in by priestly teaching. They, in fact, sprang out of the soil of the aboriginal European, rtiind. The European aboriginal man — the oldest his- torical man in Western Europe— was probably this dark and small Euskarian ; and in France he persisted to such; an extent — mixed of course, except in Brittany, with the white-faced Aryans of various tribes — as to give the rul- ing religious characteristics of the people. In England, on the other hand, the invading Englishman and Scandi- navian acquired a complete predominance in the new British life and character. The Englishman was an Aryan, worshipping the light he could see, and bowing to nothing because it was called great or claimed power, but bowing reverently before high moral qualities. Augustine and his monks easily won the English heart, because they brought light and were noble men whose virtues inspired admiration. But by and by, when it be- csame a question of Roman authority, and of superstitious 28 BY-WATS or LITEKATUEE. customs imported from France, the Aryan-English re- volted. This is one side of a perplexing question — or a part of one side of it — but I do not feel confident that it exactly represents the truth of the matter. Race is often a convenient literary fiction ; but in this matter of tlie aboriginal European I am inclined to believe that there are some very large facts which are not yet prop- erly appreciated. Let us return to our book. We miss in the good wife's lines all the purely ceremonial parts of religion ; but devotion is encouraged. The blessing of the Virgin is invoked ; but there is nothing said of praying for the dead, or of their power to deliver girls from temptation, or from the consequences of unchaste living. For, dehv- eranee from temptation depends upon the shrewd, com- mon-sense advice which is still given in all well-regulated Anglo-Saxon households : " Don't put yourself where your lover may get you into trouble." The fair infer- ence from the knight's teachings is, " Do what you will, if you have prayed for the dead, their dead bodies will intervene between you and peril at the critical moment" — though it was not what he meant ; he did not dare, nor did his daughters dare, to think as far as an infer- ence. Our good wife's creed is so short on this subject, it is so homely and practical, so like the best teaching girls get on these matters in our days, that she does not, like the French knight, need to teach modesty by numer- ous chapters through which one must hold his nose while he reads. There is nothing in the religious precepts to show that the writer was a Catholic or a Protestant ; the distinction did not then exist. The invocation for the Yirgin's blessing on her daughter is the only sign of Eomanism. She exhorts her daughter to love God and Holy Church, ENGLISH GIRLS IIT THE OLB TIMES. 29 to go to church when she can, and not to stay away for the rain, to give tithes and oflEering with a glad heart, to be kind to the poor, and not to be hard : " He prospers well who loves the poor." Her daughter must not laugh at people, old or young, when m church, and must not chatter or gossip with her neighbors. The practical parts of the advice show differences be- tween the olden time and now. It strikes us oddly enough to read a warning not to get drunk, and to have this counsel made important by repetition, and a state- ment of the evils of female drunkenness. It may be hoped that no modem mother needs to give such a lesson to her girls. And yet the writer heard Cardinal Man- ning say in a public meeting, in 1867, that intemperance was destroying the character of English women, and, what was worse, of English children. A friend tells us that he rode recently in a car, in Philadelphia, which contained a drunken young woman whose respectability was Touched for by his fellow-passengers. These un- pleasant remnants of old English vices mark another con- trast between the Latin and Anglo-Saxon stocks, to the credit of the former, which is the less given to de- bauches of intoxication. In fact, the comparative ex- emption of the so-called Latin people of Southern Europe — Latin only because they speak dialects of Latin — ^is a very remarkable one, and needs better explana- tions than we have. I lived in Italy five years, and heard and saw nothing of drunkenness among the Ital- ians. Drunkenness exists to a larger extent in France ; but a mile square with Charing Cross, Londbn, in the centre, probabably produces more drunkards than the whole French Empire ; and a large part of the London drunkards are women. The good wife's daughter is counselled to despise no 30 by-ways of litebatukb. offer of marriage, but speedily to tell it to her friendsv This would show that early English customs were similar to those which stiU prevail in this country. Marrying men first consulted the girls, and thereafter the girls were expected to report to their mothers. The Latin custom of consulting the young women last, and then rather as a matter of form, has never taken root in Anglo-Saxon life. It is another proof of the superior position of woman in the English social system. The strength of the wife's language on this point, " Scorn him not, whatsoever he be," prompts Mr. Fur- nivall to query whether the mothers of that time did not find it hard to marry off their daughters, as hard as their descendants are said, in the popular novels, to find this business. The subject is not very pleasant, and, in fact, is not altogether wholesome. Late English novels, and a good deal of writing in English weekly papers like the Satii-rday Heview, afford material for a large book, which might be called, " The Perfect Angler for a Hus- band ;" or, " How the Good Mother got her Daughter Married." After some refiection and balancing of pen, and certain moralizings, this writer decides to hand the subject over to the other sex. The virtues which are praised by the good wife have a certain English flavor about them ; they grow elsewhere, to be sure, but the fruit is more ruddy, and has a refined aroma, in English hfe. The girls, when they become wives, are to be cheerful, and true, and blameless of life, and to love their husbands above all earthly things. Thrift .and forethought are the good wife's strong points. Her daughter is charged not to*" waste her hus- band's substance, but to help him to get and to keep. When her daughters are bom, she is to begin to lay by things against their marriage. Pleasant reminder of ENGLISH QIKLS IN THE OLD HSIEa. 31 blankets, bed-quilts, pillow-cases, featber-beds, and num- berless pieces of bousebold stuff, collected against bappy wedding-days by old-fashioned Anierican naothers ! I have not lately seen anything so beautiful to my eyes as some handiwork made by a K'ew Jersey girl seventy years ago as a part of her trousseau. The dear girl made a good wife and died in God's peace ; and her great- granddaughters are getting married with trousseaux from Paris. The great-grandmother spun every thread of the fabrics with which she set up housekeeping. The persistence of early customs is shown by the cau- tion given to housewives to keep their own keys. The English housewife keeps them to this day. - The subject of dress could not be passed by in a book for girls ; but it occupies a small place in the good wife's. Her daughter must not ruin her husband by extravagance, nor show off in borrowed glitter, nor envy people who can dress better than her purse per- 'mits. > To such thriftful counsels on the use of money much of English home-life owes its success. The farthihg3 which the prudent English wife lays up in housekeeping gear for her daughters, her sister of the Latin race is too apt to spend in jewelry, lottery tickets, spectacular dis- plays, or fine dresses. The English household, with a prudent wife at its head, never leaked out farthings, much less shillings, through these social crevices where so much of our money goes in these days. But let us not forget that it is mean to keep, and stingy to save, and that seK-denial now means doing as your neighbors do. The profusion of nature in this country has made us unconscious spendthrifts, and economy is one of the greatest hardships of poverty ; it is much less a hardship to keep on plunging into debt until the diver gets to the 33 BY-WATS OF LITEEATUKE. bottom and must stop because his " credit" or capacity for genteel beggary is exhausted. It is to be regretted that our good wife thought it a duty to charge her daughter against profanity. "Women did swear in those days, even when they went regularly to church, not staying away for the rain. There was a very coarse grain in the life of that time. Even good Queen Bess, long after that, was rather careless in her choice of words when she got angry, which she did pretty often. Another bit of the wisdom of Solomon appears in the command not to curse your children when they are saucy, but to give them a smart flogging. The rod was not spared in those days ; but probably some children were spoiled by it, or in spite of it. The collectors and editors of old manuscripts have found a good many incidents of early English education, from which it is known that young people of both sexes had durus and stultus declined to them very freely. Perhaps the boys had the hardest time of it ; at any rate, we know most about their tribulations. Bat there are not wanting proofs of the sorrows of the girls". Agnes Paston not only sent (1457) to pray the master of her son that, if her boy " hath not done well, nor will not amend, he will truly belash him till he will amend ;" but she seems to have " belashed " her marriageable daughter with her own hands. Oleve writes — Paston Letters — on the 29th of June, 1454: : " She — the daughter — was never in so great sorrow as she is nowadays, for she may not speak with no man, whosoever come, ne not may see nor speak with my man, nor with servants of her mother's, but that she beareth her on bond otherwise than she meaneth ; and she hath since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice on a day, and ENGLISH GIRLS IN THE OLD TIMES. 33 her head broken in two or three places. " Of course this particular mother did not . necessarily represent the women of her time ; but it is quite conceivable that she did, The Pilgrim stock brought into this country a faith in the rod that has been as tenacious as their Cal- vinism. 1 have seen, in my youth, in Western New York, very large girls whipped by " the schoolmaster" — a much less seemly business than the floggings their mothers were said to give them from time to time. I suspect, too, that the custom survives iji great vigor in some parts of the country. Indeed, the newspapers occasionally report the flogging of girls by fathers and pedagogues. Ascham was stimulated to write his " scholemaster" by the news " that divers scholars of Eton be run away from the school for fear of beating ;" but the girls seem also to have appealed to his compassion, for he repre- sents Lady Jane Grey as saying : " One 01 the greatest benefits that God ever gave me is that he sent me so sharpe and severe parents and so gentle a scholemaster. For when I am in presence either of father or mother, whether I speake, kepe silence, sit, stand or go, eate, drinke, be merie or sad, be sewy- ing, plaiying, dauncing, or doing anie thing els, I must do it as it were in soch weight, mesure, and number, even so perfethe as God made the world, or els I am so sharplie taunted, so cruellie threatened, yea, presentlie some tymes with p inch es, n ippes and b obbe s, and other waies, which I will not name for the honor 1 bear them, so without measure misordered, that I thinke myself in hell till tyme cum that I must go to M. Elmer, who teacheth theme so jentlie, so pleasantlie, with soch falre allurements to learning, that I thinke al the tyme noth- ing whiles I am with him. And when I am called from 34 BY-WATS OF LITERATURE. him I fall on weeping. " The tender emotions of this young lady make one wonder whether she was not suffer- ing from an illness called love-sicliness. Modern gentle- men in similar positions have been the object of a regard very similar to that which Lady Jane seems to have felt for Mr. Elmer. A lady, who received her education at a popular school for girls, tells me that a certain profes- sor in the institution, who had apparently made a cove- nant with his eyes not to look upon a woman, was the innocent occasion of much unhappiness to a score of yoimg girls who, among their companions, freely con- fessed and wrangled over their love of him. A fact is always worth preserving, and I therefore set down my friend's story of a single incident. On one occasion tlie admired and beloved professor drank water at a water- cooler fn a corridor. One of the infatuated girls watched him, and, when he turned away, seized the glass from which he had drank and kissed it with raptu- roiis devotion. I must add that this school had no boys in it. One cannot biit revolt at the picture which Lady Jane Grrey makes of her sufferings ; but thinking of the young miss who is heart-broken because a new hat is denied her, one cannot but wonder whether she would not bo of a happier temper if she had a few of these ' ' pinches, nippes, and bobbes. ' ' This is speculation, not advice to parents. An old Anglo-Saxon custom gave form to a great feature of early English education. The Teuton chief- tain gathered about him a crowd of well-born lads, who were voluntary servants about his person. They only, for the most part, were allowed to touch his person. Our oldest books on education are instructions to well- born lads serving in this way in noble houses. From ENGLISH GIRLS IN" THE OLD TIMES. 35 this practice grew the custom extensively used in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the rearing of lads in the houses of patrons. It appears that girls were fre- quently brought up in this way. In the absence of full information about the female education of those centu- ries we must conclude that the girls got their best culture in that way. The convents did less for them than for their sisters across the channel, and the girl was fortu- nate who was placed in a household where she could learn female crafts and manners, if nothing else. There is doubtless less sympathy between parents and children in the Anglo-Saxon than in the Latin races. The English treatment of children, especially this custom of sending them into other people's houses to be reared, at from seven to nine years of age, struck foreigners very strangely. The Italian " Relation of England," of the reign of Henry YIL, contains a hard statement of the matter. Mr. Furnivall thinks the tradespeople and not the gentry are referred to. The relator sets forth . that the children are placed in the houses of other people to do menial offices, and, no matter how rich the parents are, few children of either sex escape this fate. He says the parents excuse the practice on the ground that the children learned better manners, " but I for my part believe that they do it because they like to enjoy all their comforts themselves, and that they are better served by strangers than they would be by their own children. Beside which, the English being great, ep- icures, and very avaricious by nature, indulge in the most delicate fare themselves, and give their household the coarsest bread, and beer, and cold meat, baked on Sunday for the week, which, however, they allow them in great abundance. That if they had their own chil- dren at home, they would be obliged to give them the 36 BT--VrAYS OF LITERATURE. I same food" they made use of for themselves.' ' He thinks the pretext of having the children learn better manners would be good if the children were ever taken back to the home roof -tree, but they are not. Their patrons set them up, or get them married, or they make shift for themselves. It is easy to see that girls must have had a rongh time of it under such a system ; and it is perhaps not strange that English women acquired a sturdier character, a higher moral life, and less grace of manner than French women obtained. The English girl who was educated in this way must have learned to help herself in many ways, and early discipline of rather a coarse sort may have taught her to take care of herself in her relations to the other sex. Some instances are recorded in early manuscripts of boys losing their places because they were suspected of having designs on the allections of well-born young ladies. If it is permitted to remark on this worldly view of the matter, it may be conjectured that the girls seldom lost their places — or the affections which they coveted — under like circumstances ; though the manuscripts do record a few cases. We need not sigh for a return of this olden time when girls needed to be advised not to swear or get drunk, and were "truly belashed " after they were old enough to be married. All changes of social custom have their good and bad consequences ; but it is seldom, if ever, that a comparison of customs five centuries apart fails to show progress as well as change. In the case before us we must find satisfaction in the comparison. Our girls are better reared, educated, and husbanded than their predecessors were in the fourteenth century. Probablj- our daughters' daughters will have to learn thrift over again ; but material inventions have brought so many BKGLISH GIRLS IS THE OLD TIMES. 37 ItoXTirieB within reach of the poor — and so much more may be expected in that line of progress — that we may contemplate the "thickening of population," which is inevitable, without anticipating great sorrow for our girls of the twentieth century. ;: ■ CHAPTER III. ENGLISH B0T8 IN THE OLD TIMES. Doubtless it came of the Saxon stock of customs that the training of boys in early England took the general form of apprenticeship ; the main feature of which was, that lads grew up away from home, and, as far as possi- ble, in families of somewhat better standing than their own. Boys of humble birth often remained at home learning the handicraft of their fathers ; and it cannot be denied that in well-born families the sons were often educated at home. But still the notion entertained about education was that of sending the lad into some family where he might learn to serve and acquire such accomplishments as befitted his calling or rank. To place him in a family of better birth than his own was to open the way to his advancement through the superior training he would receive, and the acquaintances he would form. This idea, a very practical one, has come down to our time in a modified form. "We no longer think of sending our boys to be educated where patron- age may smile on them ; but perhaps it is mainly for lack of information respecting the residence of the future patron. Williams College would have been thronged in ' Garfield's time if it had then been known that Garfield was to become President of the United States. Parents do, however, consider the advantages which may be de- rived by their sons from college friendships, which are apt to be very tenacious, especially within the " Greek " ENGLISH BOYS IN. THE OLD TIMES. 39 ^ societies. Probably, however, the prevailing argnihent for sending our sons to colleges where rich men's sons are sent is a delusion and a snare. It involves a trebling of the cost of college education, a great danger from fashionable vices, and after all is done there is no high probability that the rich men's sons will stay rich or be useful friends. Several other ideas entered into the old system. The. boy was more easily disciplined away from home; the. restraint of authority, freed from the control of affec- tion, was likely to be a better check on wild blood than, home influence ; and a good deal of trouble was saved iii the same way, as parents even now get rid of their wild human colts. The author of the Italian " Relation of, England " mentions that boys put out for rearing were fed on coarse farcj whereas if they had been kept at home they must needs have eaten such food as their parents. Probably the coarse "fare was best for the boysj whatever motive led to this part of the system. The subjects upon which a boy was expected to study and practise were, in very early times, such as are now left out altogether, or treated as extras. These were merely exercises — manners and courtesy, music and sing- ing, knowledge of the order of precedency of ranks and ability to carve. These things were best learned in a household where a discipline more military than domes- tic prevailed. Reading, writing, grammar, were subor-, dinate matters, to which those who studied accomplish- ments gave for a long time but little attention. Mr. Furnivall, the charming editor of the " Babees Boke," expresses the opinion that education in England travelled up from the middle and lower ranks rather than down from the higher. The classes who studied the graces of society did not betake themselves to solid 40 BT-WATCS OF LITEKATURB. .( learning till the sons of the poor educated by priests jos- tled them on the steps of the throne. The poor man's course of study became in time that of the rich man ; "\vhen geometry got into the course there ceased to be a royal road to learning. But unfortunately this was hardly come about till the rich began that pillaging of poor boy's rights which has now shut those for whom they were given out of the munificent endowments of the schools of England. Each founder of ' these endowments provided for the ed ucat ion and b oar d of a certain number of poor la( j^. But the election fell into the hands of the rich, or of those who desired the favor of the rich, and these gave the places to wealthy lads. The complaint of the poor could not be heard ; perhaps it was not often made, for ir. a land of privilege the poor are kept in ignorance of the blessings of education. This is one of the wrongs which democratic England ought to make haste to set right. The sons of the English nobility were chiefly educated during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, in the houses of other nobles, especially in those of the chancellors of the kings. Becket brought up numbers of these young nobles, and the king's son was also in- trusted to his care. Longehamps, the Bishop of Ely, Cliancellor to Richard Lionheart, kept these noble lads in good discipline. Roger de Hoveden says : ' ' All the sons of the nobles acted as his servants, with downcast looks, nor dare they to look upward toward the heaven unless it so happened that they were addressing him ; and if they attended to anything else they were pricked with a goad, which their lord held in liis hand, fully mindful of his grandfather of pious memory, who being of servile condition in the district of Beauvais, had ENGLISH BOYS IN THE OLD TIMES. 41 for his occupation to guide the plow and whip up the oxen ; and who at length, to gain his liberty, fled to the J^orman territory." Old Eoger is cracking his joke at -the expense of the old Bishop ; and the saint's " goad " is probably sharpened a little by Roger's feelings. But we meet everywhere in the manuscripts with these references to corporeal discipline. A schoolmaster with- out a " goad " of some sort is a quite modern institution. Eobert Grostead, Bishop of Lincoln — ^who died 1253 — kept the sons of nobles at his palace, where they served him as his pages, receiving a very excellent training for the times. Sir Thomas More grew up in the house of Cardinal Morton, serving as a sort of waiting-man to his master. The splendid Wolsey had "wards who paid for their board and education," and these wards were of the highest nobility. In the household of the Earl of Northumberland were "young gentlemen of their fryndes fynding," kept there to learn manners. Mr. Furnivall gives other instances. Roger Ascham was similarly brought up. That the tradespeople im- itated the nobility in this custom is well established. This was the first English college, and it dates back to the fighting lords who made Britain English in the sixth century. The amount of education, outside of accomplishments which boys received in these primitive colleges, varied with the age. Probably it did not at first include the ability to read, but in time it came to embrace what we should call a common school education, with a spice of Latin. Professor Brewer says that the reason why the whole government of the country in Henry the Eighth's time was in the hands of the clergy was, the general 4)2 BY-WAYS OF LITEKATURE. ignorance of tlie upper classes. It is dis^^ited whetlier a g entlem an was exp ected to be able to w rita in the fopr- teenth c entur y. Mr. Fxirnivall thinks that by the end of the fifteenth century gentlemen could read and write freely. Tip to that time education — or what we should call education — 'Was monastic. The success of men edu- cated by priests compelled the secular college to enlarge its curriculum ; and once started upon the bookish method it gradually became the English university. The old type — the family type — existed for at least two him- dred years by the side of the new. Sir Thomas Boleyn is said to have been the only noble in Henry the Eighth's court able to speak French well enough to be sent abroad on an embassy. The learning of the country was still in the hands of the ecclesiastics who had been educated in the monasteries or priests' houses. The French fact is not, however, a very important one. The Englishman has always had a ■stubborn preference for his own tongue, and a contempt for the French speech. The system of education in the households of priests was not greatly different in theory from that of the lordly mansion. The culture was of a more brainy sort ; Latin took precedence of manners, though the latter was not neglected. Noblemen placed their sons with priests when they desired for them a thorough mental discipline ■ — with a nobleman's family when they chiefly desired outside polish. The heads of monasteries took into their houses the sons of the neighboring gentry. Kichard Pace tells us that he grew up in the house of Thomas Langston, :Bishop of Winchester, among other boys, and that the prelate " was vastly delighted to hear the scholars repeat 4o him at night the lessons given them by the teachers ESrOLISH BOYS IS THU OLD TIMES. 43 during, the day. " Pace adds : " In this competition he who had borne himself notably went away with a present of something suitable to his charactei", and with com- mendation expressed in the most refined language ; for that excellent governor had ever in his mouth the maxim that merit grows with praise" — a maxim too much neg- lected by us modern teachers. In Elizabeth's time Sir ^iclmlaa "Pi^p mn-^-fa.t'hpr of the great Bacon — made the following sharp statement, prov- ing that the son came honestly by his mastery over Eng- lish : " The chiefs things and most of price, in warde- ship, is the wardes mynde ; the next to that, his bodie ; the last and meaneste, his lande. !Nowe hitherto the~ chiefe care of governaunee hath bin to the lande, being the nieaneste ; and to the bodie, being the better, very small ; but to the mynde, being the best, none at all, which methinkes is playnely to sett the carte before the horse." It is a crack at abuses which had become gen- eral, or at least common enough to make a public opin- ion which Nicholas Bacon put into fighting form. The tendency to neglect mental training — the survival of the old college which taught fencing and good manners . — ^had to be severely checked by sharp criticism. In the instructions drawn up by Bacon for the educa- tion of wards, he prescribes two hours' daily study of music. It is curious that this science has fallen clean out of the college curriculum, where it once held so prominent a place. One might add that it is more strange that pounding pianos has come to be synonymous with studying music, and that boys are not even taught so much as the first rudiments of music in our schools. In the time of which we write music seems to have ranked next to Latin — still the language of literature — in the best schools. 44 BY-WAYS OF LITERATURE. Tlie Universities of Cambridge arid Oxford were mostly frequented by tlie sons of the poor up to the Eeformation. The cost of supporting boys at college was small, and wealthy men took pride in helping the promising lads. Many of these scholars must have been very poor, and they often begged from door to door. Sir Thomas More speaks of this as though it were proverbial : " Then may wee yet, like poore scholars of Ojcford, go a begging with our baggs and wallets, and sing Salwe regina at rich men's dores. " It is not so clear that we are quite free from this old cus- tom. College students are said to be sought after as book agents ; and, if the newspapers do not use too much color, a book agent is hardly more popular than were the begging, bag-carrying Oxford boys of the fifteenth cen- tury. In 1214 the town of Oxford agreed to pay " fifty- two shillings yearly for the use of poor scholars, and to give one hundred of them a meal of bread, ale, and pottage, with one large dish of flesh or fish every St. Ificholas day." Mr. Fumivall attempts to estimate the cost of keeping a boy at Oxford, in 1468, from a passage in the Paston letters. The attempt is not altogether success- ful, but leaves the impression that Oxford was even then more expensive than our American colleges. Young Paston' s yearly bills are footed up to what would be equivalent to six hundred dollars of our money ; and there are American colleges of good grade where half that sum is more than sufficient, while five hundred dol- lars is probably a high figure for the average cost at American colleges. Tet Paston's case is not a good one for comparison, and we do not suppose that the begging students got haK as much as he spent. Doubtless a great many students were subsisted and ENGLiSir BOYS IN THB OLD TIMES. 4S taught for a mucli smaller sum. The tutor system always made education expensive for those who paid their way. Roger Bacon, who died in 1248, speaks of a young fel- low who came to him aged fifteen, not having where- withal to live, or having found proper masters, " because he was obliged to serve those who gave him necessa- ries, during two years, no one to teach him a word of the things he learned." This must have been some- thing like our system of working for board. The social expenses which so readily grew rank on college soil had very early become oppressive, and in time helped to crowd out the poor boys. In the Paston letters we find mention of a custom that a man made a bachelor should give a feast. There is a striking mingling of disappoint- ment and piety in this allusion : " I was promised veni- son against my feast by my Lady Harcourt, and of an- other person too, but I was deceived of both ; but my guests held them pleased of such meat as they had, blessed be God !" This was in 1478. This lad seems to have had as much trouble to keep in money as boys do in these days. He borrowed of his fellow-pupils, and wrote urgently for money, as boys still do, at school or elsewhere. Impecuniousness is an affliction which lights upon a lad just so soon as he has a pocket to take money out of. It seems that royalty was a burden even to its school- mates ; for young Paston wrote for money to spend on the degree of the queen's brother. In fact, when royalty went into the universities, the sons of yeomen went out of them. By Queen Elizabeth's time the change in the quality of the blood was pretty wel: completed. Gen- tlemen's sons, or those who affected to be sach, became the possessors of the privileges of Oxford and Cam- bridge. And lihir change not only drove out the poor 46 BT-WAT3 OF LITERATURE. beggars— who, with all their faults, were a merry race, and did not serve badly the function of newspapers in days before printing — ^but also enlarged the cost of edn- eation by social customs brought in from the old patron's college which had at last reluctantly given up the ghost. There is at least one bright spot in this picture. The noble families felt bound to educate their sons, and Eng- lish wealth makes obeisance to culture. There is some danger that American wealth may rather imitate the early English system and content itself with manners and expensive tastes, and that the college faculties may pass dunces who are rich to degrees. A very interesting sta- tistic would be a showing of the proportion in which the sons of millionaires among us go to college or succeed in earning degrees. It rarely happened in the early times that the son of a nobleman distinguished himsplf. We need not hesitate to accept the evidence, for no opportunity to praise a well-born boy Avas ever lost. Scholarship involves so much hard work, that a man seldom excels in it without the whip and spur of the strongest motives. John Awdelay, the blind poet of Ilogleman Monas- tery, in the fourteenth century, sings of the abuse of endowments meant for the poor : ' ' Now if a poor mon set his son to Oxford to scol], Bothe the fader and the moder hyndryd they schall be ; And if there falle a benefyse, it schall be gif a fole ; To a clerke of kechyn, one into the chancere. Glerkys that have cunying Thai mai get no vaunsyng Without symony." EKGLISH BOYS IN THE OLD TIMES. 47 The iollowing passage from Wliitgift — 1589 — gives a good deal of insight into the process of " scrowging poor people out of the endowments." " At this present of one sort and other there are about three thousand students nourished in them both [univer- sities] as by a late service it manifestly appeared. They [the colleges at the universities] were created by their founders at the first, onelie for pore men's sons, whose pai'ents were not able to bring them up unto learning ; but now they have the least benefit of them, by reason the rich do so incroch on them. And so farre hath this inconvenience spread itself that it is in my time a hard matter for a pore man's child to come by a fellowship, though he be never so good a scholer and worthie of that name. Such packing also is used at elections that not he which best deserveth, but he that hath most friends, though he be the worst scholer, is alwaies surest to speed ; which will turn in the end to the overthrow of learning. That some gentleman also, whose friends have been in past times benefactors to- certain of these houses [colleges] do intrude into the disposition of their estates, without all respect of order or statutes devised by the founders, onelie thereby to place whome they think good — and not without some hope of gaine — the case is too evident, and their attempt would soon take place, if their superiors did not provide to bridle their endevors. " In some grammar schools likewise which send scholers to these universities, it is lamentable to see what briberie is used ; for yer the scholer can be preferred such briberie is made, that pore men's children are com- monly shut out, and the richer sort received — who in times past thought it dishonor to live, as it were, upon iS BY-WATS OF LITEKATUKB. almes — and yet being placed, most of tliem stndie little other than histories [dramas], fables, dice, and trifles, as men that make not their living by their studie the end of their purposes, which is a lamentable bearing. . Be- sides their being for the most part either gentlemen, or rich men's sons, they oft bring the universities into much slander. For standing upon their reputation and libertie, they ruffle and roist it out, exceeding in apparell and banting riotous companie — which draweth them from their books into another trade. And for excuse, when they are charged with breach of all good order, thinke it sufficient to sale that they be gentlemen, which griereth manie not a little." The monastic schools must not be confounded with the system of instruction of wealthy men's sons by the gov- ernors of the monasteries. The monastic school of early times was a simple expansion of choir practice. Every church, abbey, priory, or monastery had its public wor- ship and its need of lads to assist in the service as singers, etc. From time immemorial these lads were taught to sing by some member of the fraternity, and very natu- rally other things — at first grammar — were added to the music. The monasteries recruited their members from poor people's sons of their neighborhoods, and with those lads destined for the Church were associated their young companions in a sort of day school. This school was an excellent recruiting ground for the priesthood, and was fostered with interested care. The famous cathedral schools of the Middle Ages, some of them presided over by the most learned ecclesi- astics of the times, taught only those things which quali- fied men for the priesthood. The monastic schools expanded into two distinct branches — the common school for the poor of the parish, ENGLISH BOYS IN THE OLD TIMES. 49 and the divinity school. The college did not grow out of that system ; it is historically related to the ' ' board- ing-out" system mentioned in the first part of this, article. The parish school retains to this day its connec- tion with the church. Indeed, it ,may be said that all our magnificent system of common schools took its rise in the singing lessons of the old English churches. And a very large part of the common-school education of England is still conducted on the same system. The monastic schools educated in the rudiments many who afterward distinguished themselves, usually, if not always, the sons of poor persons. The poet Lydgate may be mentioned. He gives in his " Testament" an account of his school life, which makes him out a good- for-nothing pupil. He came to school late, chattered, lied, made faces at his masters, stole apples and grapes, shammed illness, played tricks on honest people, and got about as much flogging as he deserved for all these ill- behavings. The school must have been a common^ school, attended by the poor boys of the parish ; the rich boys probably being in the houses of prelates or noblemen under a much stricter discipline. The veracity of these statements i of Lydgate will be generally accepted without hesitation. B oyho od is one of the most con- servative of our inst itution s — a boy of the fourteenth century could not be distingaished from one of the nine- teenth. Pious Samuel s are very rare among them ; but their pranks do not often express anything worse than high spirits arid moral unconsciousness. Most of them come to a fair average of decent living when the moral sense awakens in them. ^- Unfriendly legislation helped to keep the farmers' boys in their places. In 1388 it was enacted that " he or she which used to labor at the plough and cart, or 50 BT-WATS OF LITERATURE. other labor or service of husbandry, till they he of the age of fweVue years, th We have no evidence that these appeals touched Bru- tus. It is a master-stroke of art to leave this in shadow. For, " who can understand his errors ?" How is it possible to penetrate even one's own consciousness deeply enough to see how the noblest of natures is swerved by the unfelt force of a low motive allied to a noble one ? The criminality of the conspiracy is power- fully suggested by this doubt whether pure purpose may not be deflected by impure associations : " Therefore it is meet That noble minds keep ever with their likes." The greatness of Csesar is also taught by the convul- sions of nature and society that presage and avenge his fall. What other purpose of enough importance to justify the space of action taken up by it can justify the long recital of the horrors of the night before the assas- sination, the fires, the gliding ghosts, the open graves, the uncaged Hon, men all fire walking up and down the street ? The other purpose which it serves is fully an- swered in the following act, when it is merely reported to intensify the fears of the dream- frightened Calpumia. The meaning of these convulsions of nature Shakespeare expresses by the mouth of Caesar's wife : " When beggars die there are no comets seen ; The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes." There are shadows on this scene at Csesar' s home, in- explicable motions of the human soul in the near sight of the last earthly struggle are revealed, and yet left in full possession of their secret. The slight balancings of wiU SHAKESPEARE OUT GREATNESS. 163 affected by invisible hands we sec, and an awe of the unseen world comes over us as it came over Csesar. Bat with these inevitable human limitations, Caesar is greater than Brutus in the sanctuary of the domestic aifections. He yields to the entreaties of this beloved woman, and is not ashamed to confess to senators that her tears have swerved his mighty will. Caesar is so high in love ! We should have lacked something, if he who had quick- ened the light nature of Antony with a deathless attach- ment to his person, who was beloved by and loved Brutus as his angel, who had won the quenchless affec- tion of the lowly, had not given us some great proof of his love for a woman. It is just, too, that this woman is not painted, as Portia is, as the greatest of Roman women. The wealth of his heart seems all the richer when bestowed where there is no conspicuous merit. Go forward now to the consequences which came of Caesar's death. The prophecy of Antonyj when he is alone with the body of his master, is, whatever be thought of his public speech, a sincere expression of his heart, and it is justified by events. And it precedes the funeral scene in the Forum, as if to guard us against the common belief that Antony was a hypoCritie to the core of his nature : " Oh, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth, That I am meek and gentle with these butchers ! Thou art the ruins of the noblest man That ever lived in the tide of times. ; Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood ! Over thy wounds now do I prophesy — Which like damb mouths do ope their ruby lips, To beg the voice and utterance of my tongue — A curse shall light upon the limbs of men ; Domestic fury and fierce civil strife 164 BY-WAYS OF LITERATURE. Shall cumber all the parts of Italy ; Blood and destruction shall be so in use. And dreadful objects so familiar, That mothers shall but smile when they behold Their infants quartered with the hands of war ; All pity choked with custom of fell deeds ; And Caesar's spirit, ranging for revenge, "With Ate by his side come hot from hell. Shall in these confines with a monarch's voice Cry, ' Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war ; That this foul deed shall smell above the earth With carrion men, groaning for burial." Surely it is the prerogative of the highest greatness to become so necessary to society that wreck and dissolution follow its loss. Nature and man unite to celebrate the death and vindicate the majestic name of Csesar. The good Brutus, on the wrong side, is a mere stra^ in the hands of these wrathful forces leagued to avenge the rights of the governing genius. Briefly now of this sort of greatness : 1. CiBsar is broad ; he touches at some point of his nature all classes of men. The food upon which he has grown great is human nature well learned and well loved. He has a vivid sympathy with the humble, he is the idol of the legions, he has mastered the keys of all the noble natures around him, and with rare exceptions all love him. Cassius and a few others are mastered by their jealousy, the vice of ignoble souls ; but the precise point of Brutus's' f ear is the universal homage to Caesar's genius and the wonderful power of Caesar's intellect. 2. Caesar is high ; he stands alone in the State, be- cause no man has been able to keep him company in the march to eminence. There is no proof in the play that Brutus had a tithe of his state-craft or special skill in SHAKESPEARE OK GREATN-B8S. 165 controlling other minds. On the contrary, the con- epirac was burdened by Brutus. Its chances of success would have been multiplied if he had committed suicide after his speech in the Forum. What Brutus could not do on a small scale — manage men — Caesar had easily done on a vast scale. In this lonely elevation above all other men, Shakespeare placed and kept the genius of government. 3. Caesar is the bond of human society. He maintains it upon his shoulders ; it falls into ruin when he falls : " Then you and I, and all of us fell down, While bloody treason flourished over us." This oflElce is essentially the highest in human society. The high and the low, the strong and the weak, alike depend upon its faithful and noble performance. The fall of Caesar robbed the world of Brutus, of the peerless Portia, of the best blood of Rome. It spread ruin over the fields, and throned anarchy in the city ; and in the general ruin all the benefits of civilization were involved. Good government is the essential condition of individual and pubUc prosperity ; Caesar represents it, impersonates it ; it dies with him. I will not disparage goodness. There is no proof in this play that Caesar lacked it ; much on the other side of that question. But in him goodness keeps company with such a crowd of merits that it is less conspicuous than in Brutus, who is only good. The lesson is that goodness alon e is not the full f urnitu re of a great n ature. To this there is needful great insight, large experience, successful striving ; and all these in perfect balance. If such a union of qualities leads a man to the supreme ofiSce in society, and he rules wisely, prudently, over a 166 fiT-wiirS OF LITKRATUBE. great people, Brutus can no more be reckoned his supe- rior than an infant can be counted nobler than a man. I speak, of course, only of the C^sar of this play ; but I incline to believe that the Caesar of history is not greatly different. The events which followed his taking off go far to show that he was judiciously providing Kome with what it most needed, a reformed and stronger government. Imperialism had become necessary to order in Rome. In Shakespeare's conception greatness is, then, a special capacity, accompanied with great weaknesses, for serving human society. The truly great man is the world's burden-bearer, the slame, whom through his weakness society has captured and bound to public duties. There is no glamour left for our eyes. Caesar stands here bending and falling under his load, self- sacrificing and sacrificed. We should find no joy in it if the spectacle did not suggest the very Christian ideal which, least of all things, we associate with Caesar — " Whosoever will be greatest among you, let him be the servant of all." But a simple ambition to be a slave — without the motives which elevated the life of Jesus to his own standard — could npt exist without illusions to shed over it the fiction of glory. These illusions are the real cause of this supreme type of greatness ; and Shakespeare has said his say about them by the lips of Wolsey : " I have ventured Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders, This many summers in a sea of glory, Bat far beyond my depth : my high-blown pride At length broke under me and now has left me, Weary and old with service, to the mercy Of a rude stream that must forever hide me. SHAKESPEAKE Olf GBEATirESS, 16'i' Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate ye : I feel my heart new-opened. Oh, how wretched Is that poor man that hangs on princes' favors ! There is' betwixt that smile we would aspire to, That sweet aspect of princes, and their ruin. More pangs than wars or women have : And when he falls, he falls like Lucifer Never to hope again." And it matters little whether the favors come from a king or from a people. CHAPTER IX. THEIK LANQPAGE AND COUNTKIES. The end of the fourteenth century is, perhaps, the best point from which to look back into the Old English times. The people, in Chaucer's day, had npt only absorbed the Frenchmen who came over with the Con- queror three centuries before, but had also devoured the Frenchmen's language and digested as much as they wanted of it into the tissue of their own. This great feat in swallowing had not been achieved easily, but the achieving it was a great proof not alone of sturdy force in the people but equally of great merit in the language of Old England. Latin had scarcely more prestige when it overcame the Keltic dialects of Gaul than French had when it surrendered in England to the Englishman's dialect. The Frenchmen held the throne, the court, the administration, and the more attractive kinds of culture. Latin was still used by the church and the schools ; English, according to common history, was the tongue of cowboys and mechanics, of farmers and shopkeepers — of the people. And yet the popular dialect gained the day. The fact has never been fully explained, per- ■laps never will be. The common history was, perhaps, not altogether just ; a class of scholars of whom there are a few traces must have maintained a cultus of the native tongue. There are, however, some strange facts about that Old English. It was not altogether a cowboy's tongue, by ElfGLISHMEN, THEIR LANGUAGB AND COUNTRIES. 169 any means. It was, on tlie contrary, centuries before a Frenchman set foot in England, a language rich enough in its vocabulary to express the thoughts of theologians and philosophers, and broad as English has grown, by the habit of swallowing all the words that attract our fancy, we should be richer if we could recover a few hundred Old Enghsh words that died in the terrible cen- tury that followed tne good King Alfred. When Dan Michel wroie the " Againbi te of In wi t," he said all that we can say by remorse of consdmee . These exchanges, however, can be only sentimentally regretted. But in other cases the Old English words died and have had worse successors, and we sustained a substantial loss. Wanhop e is a better word than desyai r, w antru st than iealou sy ; and the old words Tnod, hige, gewit, and gethcmo, all descriptive of the mind or some form of its activity, with their numerous derivatives, made the old mental vocabulary richer than- the modern. There is no stronger way of stating the case than this : Old English was so rich a speech that we, with this wide-reaching language of ours, would be richer if .we had in our tongue all that our literary predecessors had in theirs a thousand years ago. It is a hopeless task to attempt to make the general reader/ee? the force of suggestions like this. We , instinctively feel the force of the Latin stream, and hurry back on its bosom to Rome and from Rome to Athens. We do not at all feel the Gothic force in language, though we do feel it in character, customs, and laws. We know that we are different from Frenchmen and Italians in the inlines if not in the outlines of our social being. But our literature has had such a close attachment to Roman models, and so insensibly expanded beyond them through the Gothic instinct, that few of us feel more than a languid interest in Old English literature. Books written in a 170 BT-WATS OF LITBBATUBB. corner of the world, and recording nothing but an insular experience, will never command the general interest of mankind. We unconscionsly think of literature as a part of the history of mankind. With commanding merit, however, a piece of insular literature might survive and grow into great fame if the people to whom it belonged, however small, kept it fresh on their own lips. Perhaps the Homeric and Scandinavian poems are under this exceptional rule ; considered simply as literature, the Hebrew poetry certainly is. But from 650 to 1350 Old English produced no such poetry, and such as it did pro- duce the Old Enghsli people did not, or could not, keep. The island on which this people lived was so often coveted and so often "conquered," that one settled order of national history was no sooner established than a new one began to be formed. Of the small black folk whom the white Kelts conquered we know very little ; groups of them are supposed to be scattered through the British Islands. Whenever we come upon black-haired and small or undersized Irishmen or Englishmen we prob- ably encounter descendants of the old Euskarian s, the oldest proprietors of those islands of whom we know any- thing at all. Anybody is free to call them the " lost tribes of Israel " who believes that the sons of Israel according to the flesh can never amalgamate and lose their identity. But he must not expect people who have studied history ever so little to believe in Jews who have lost all memory of their race and intermarried with all the new people who have come into England — ^not, at least, to believe that such Jews are going back to Palestine in a grand proces- sion. These dark folk abound more in Ireland than in England, but even in Ireland have the tongue (so far as they have any tongue not English) of their conquerors, the fair Kelts. ENGLISHMEN, THBIU LANGUAeE AND COUNTRIES. 171 If the Euskarians had any literature, it has perished or been swallowed up in the Keltic stream ; the Keltic legends or histories have been considered in a previous chapter. The Romans must have made a profound im- pression on some parts of England, and must have left their language there in the mouths of the Kelt-Romans when at the beginning of the fifth century the legions were recalled from the island to participate in the dying agonies of the imperial city. It seems but a ' ' touch and go" that England escaped having a Latinized people — from being fated (after the sixth century) by language, custom, and law, to be only a province of France, which, under similar historical antecedents, remained Latinized. What made the difference ? In both cases " barbarians" came in after the fall of Rome. The common theory is that Latin was not so much diffused in England in the fifth century ; the Roman occupation was a military one in England ; it was that and much more in France. Probably, however, it was also much more in England. It was the genius of Roman conquest to conquer society as well as hostile armies. Another explanation has been clung to with amazing tenacity : the old tale of conquests in England used to run to the effect that all the natives died in their boots or in their beds ; the Romans killed all the Kelts they could, and the Anglo-Saxons killed the rest. Of course, the Roman language died when all who spoke it perished' in defence of their homes against the savage invaders. But this theory is no longer firmly held. A considerable body of Romanized Kelts survived the conquest and might have taught Latin to the Anglo-Saxons if the con- querors had been as willing to learn as the Northmen were who afterward subdued a part of France, just across 173 BT-WAYS OF IIXKBATUKE. the Englisli Channel, and straightway learned the speech of their subjects. Peoples differ in linguistic " hold-fast ;" the Old Eng- lish had a stubborn tenacity in this matter. They had two great opportunities to learn Latin — ^in the sixth and again in the eleventh centuries, first from the people whom they conquered, and afterward from the Normans who conquered them — and they declined to improve both chances. The term commonly used to designate the Old English people, Anglo-Saxon, will be used as rarely as possible in this work. Until the fifth century there was no England and no English. The people who came from, say, Holstein, or that region, a hundred miles either way, to conquer and people Britain, in the fifth and sixth centuries, are the first Englishmen known to history. They also were fair people, but Teutonic in blood and speech. Perhaps they were much more Dutch than German. The Dutch of Holland, it may be noted, have declined some opportunities to change their speech, and kept on speaking Dutch. Stubbornness is one of the Knickerbocker qualities which a section of them brought to this country, where their descendants in speaking English only speak another dialect of their mother tongue.* All that may be too fanciful, or not sufficiently estab- lished for this argument ; but it is certain that the first Englishmen kept on speaking their own language and only picked up a few Roman words for Roman things. A street was a novelty to them, and they adopted the Roman word strata. The Kelts who kept on tilling the fields for the conquerors had to speak of many domestic * Dutch is spoken in Kew Jersey, on Long Island, and in some Hnd- Kon Biver counties, by people Vhose ancestors came to this conntiy nearly two hundred years ago. BN-GLISHMEN, THEIR LANOtTAQE AND COUNTRIES. 173 things which the first Englishmen had to learn as a matter of convenience or had no names for, and so the new masters picked up such words as paddock, wicket, irom, crock (probablj* all Keltic). Geographical names stick better than others, as witness the Indian names in this country ; and Mcmchester is in the first half {rnan) a Keltic word, and in the second half (castra) a Eoman one ; while Thames, Frome, Trent, Tweed, Severn, and most other river names are older than the first English- man and probably run back to the dark Euskarian's supremacy. But the first Englishman put as little as possible of foreign nonsense into his tongue, and went on using Old English (commonly called Anglo-Saxon) with perfect seM-satisfaction. This first Englishman probably brought some literature with him. Of course it was poetry. But it is not certain that anything has come down to us from this oldest English literature. Perhaps the Gleeman's Song was composed when the first Englishmen were not yet Christians, but worshippers of Odin and other gods of the Teutonic races. Something soon happened to these Englishmen which stirred them to unwonted enthusiasm and inspired a large and respectable literature. This new event was of a nature to make Latin sweet and gracious to the English ear. The first Englishmen became Christians and learned Christianity. The common history says that they learned it from Augustine and forty other monks sent from Borne by Gregory the Great about the year 600. There were ten thousand converts in the first year among the Saxons in the south ; and the Englishmen in the north were converted soon after, if they were not already Christians. For the moment we may lay aside the question of the origin of English as 174 BT-WAYS OF LITERATURE. distinguished from British Christianity. The Englishm en were not converted much at first, but they had a habit of keeping at anything they undertook, and in a genera- tion or two they became very good Christians ; and there is no evidence that in this matter the Dutch stubbornness held out very long against the new religion. Christ conquered these Old Englishmen more easily than any man ever did. The truth is — let it be spoken softly, so that no mission committee may hear — Gregory s ent z . whole man to Britai n, just as Christ sent a w hole ma n to the. .Grentile s. Christian missions always prosper with Pauls and Augustines for l eade rs. Perhaps it is not very strange that the first Englishman so readily gave up his soul and so obstinately kept his speech. He has always had a taste for good things. The Latin terms which he adopted were the fewest possible that a Chris- tian could have. The old tongue was called upon to do Christian duty ; and in mental operations the old terms suffered a slight change perhaps, but went on doing their work. Co nscie nce could not yet supplant invxii, and r emor se was dechned and the compound ag ainhi te made or retained for new service. We know nothing of the spoTcen Old English. It ia not improbable that old spoTcen English was more like modem Scotch ; and the contemplative Scotchman ia more like the first Englishman's photograph than the cultured Englishman is. There is a curious complication in the history. In 596 Augustine began to make Saxon Christians in the south of England. A little later the work of conversion spread northward into Northumbria ; and in Northum- bria, which stretched northward to Edinburgh, a Chris- tian literary culture grew up and flourished for a century and a half — until the Danes came with sword and fire- ENGLISHMEIT, THEIR LAWGUAGB AND COUNTRIES. 175 brand. Now, then, these Northumbrians were the Anglians or English, and tlie southern folks were not Englishmen at all, but Saxons. The Anglians culti- vated the language ; the Saxons adopted the culture and the name of the language, calKng their speech, not Saxon, -but English. So it was possibly in Scotland that the English speech became a literary one ; and that the first Englishmen were (locally) Dutchmen on the continent and Scotchmen in Great Britain. Geography becomes an abstruse science when we undertake to account for its names. We have Indians in this country by grace of a blunder of the fifteenth century. What the dark Euska- rians called England, we do not know ; the Kelts and Romans called it Britain; the ancestors of the present proprietors called parts of it by various names, but at last settled down into a habit of calling all of it Eng- land ; but not, I think, until the literary dialect culti- vated to a high degree of perfection in Northumbria be- came the literary language of educated Englishmen in all parts of the island. The first Englishman got his name through the literary eminence of a dialect (these Eng- lishmen probably had many dialects) developed into supremacy in a corner of Scotland or on the Border.* The Old English which from Northumbria spread, as a book speech, to the south was probably never spoken by the mass of the people. That elaborate written lan- guage was too fine for every-day use ; English is too fine for every-day English use to this day. The dialects which we hea/r in the various provinces of England, are probably nearer to the old ways of speaking English than was the written Old Enghsh. If we had the ballads" of the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, we could verify such speculations. The Gleeman's Song is a kind of * See Note B, following this chapter. 176 BY-WATS OF LITERATURE. ballad, and its structure is simpler than King Alfred's prose ; but the ballad literature proper (except the Brunanburg "War Song and the Gleeman's Song) per-, ished when Northumbria was conquered by the Danes. ' It is safe to assume that the first Englishmen had not on their tongues that elaborate system of iniiections which appears in the pages of King Alfred. As a matter of ' fact, in our day, the fine strokes and waving lines of literary tongues are not preserved in the popular mouth ; there is always " a free and easy" vulgate for the street, the market, and the fireside ; and, probably, it was this vulgate which, shorn of inflections, appears in the litera- ture of the thirteenth century. We are bound to believe that the first Englishmen brought our tongue with them to England. In the Northumbrian civilization — which lasted two centuries, twice as long as we have lived under our constitution — ^the inspiration of religious zeal and the contemplative genius of the race produced a rich and grammatical language. The people, however, went on speaking in the old way. The grammatical language came to grief in the days when Northumbria sank into barbarism, or at least below literature. Between Alfred and Chaucer, fully one third of the old book words died off ; but, notwithstanding those losses and notwithstand- ing the struggle of French to get into thirteenth and fourteenth century books, Shakesgeare's v ocabul ary at the end of the sixteenth century is e ighty-five per cent, of Old English and only fi fteen per c ent, ot' !New (French') English. The book words died ; the common speech lived on ; and there was so much of this common speech that, after two centuries of literary use, the myriad- minded dramatist was able to express himself with a smaller proportion of French words than very small- minded people use at this day. ENGLISHMKlif, THEIR LANGUAGE AND C0UNTKIK8. 177 I hope the reader will not think it a trifling matter, that the first Englishmen were Englishmen merely he- cause they spohe English. For this settlement of a much-belabored question has a very important use for us. If we can define an Englishman as a man whose mother tongue is English, we have the right to call our- selves Englishmen ; and as the best English is spoken in Dublin, the Irish are, in Dublin at least, English, too. It is a pity that the Irish question could not be settled on this basis. When Sir Charles Dilke visited our country, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, he wrote a book which he called " Greater Britain." He ought to have said AU Englomd. The language gave England its name. Why should not the name expand as fast as the tongue spreads ? Why must we go on saying " English-speaking people," when we are entitled to call ' ourselves English ? Let the islanders call themselves British just as we call ourselves Americans ; the names are historical blunders, but they are distinctive ; the name which belongs to a hundred millions of people ought not to be monopolized by twenty millions. In the matter of race, the hundred millions are as homo- geneous as the first Englishmen were. The Saxons were probably as distinct from the Northumbrians (the real English) as the Germans are from ourselves. The Sax- ons became Englishmen by adopting English. This language-made brotherhood has always been liberal in spirit, and there are enthusiastic persons who think it will, by and by, take all peoples in, and all the world have " one speech and one language" again.* The first EngKshmen early began to take strangers into the family. The Saxons of the south came into the brotherhood first — probably in the seventh century. * See Note C, following this chapter. 178 BY-WATS OF LITERATURE. Then came a great rush of Danes, at first as immigrants, later, when the Englishmen began to fear their numbers, with swords in their hands. The war began near the end of the eighth century, and in half a century swept Northumbria clean of its accumulated treasures of learn- ing and literature. King Alfred (871-901) bewailed these losses and looked back to a golden age when the streams of culture had fertilized the whole land. Part of his reign is a peaceful episode. The war began again, and did not really end until in 1017 Canute came to the throne, and a Dane was master of all England. But the Danes made themselves Englishmen — that is to say, they learned English. They added some Danish words and bits of Danish idiom, but the language remained Eng- lish. Then, fifty years later, came the Normans who were, in fact, more Danes, who, having conquered a slice of land on the east side of the British Channel, called it Normandy, and were themselves called North- men or Normans. These strangers came with French on their lips ; biit after a straggle which lasted a couple of centuries in London, and hardly existed outside of London, French yielded to the English speech, and the Norman or French Danes also became Englishmen. Look over the field briefiy. The Ena^lishme n. as finally constituted in the year 1200 , consisted (1) of de- scendants of a remnant of the old Euskarian stock ; (2) doubtless also descendants of a remnant of Romans who had remained in Britain after the legions were recalled to Home ; (3) of a considerable Keltic popula- tion descended from the Kelts whom the Komans con- quered and ruled for three centuries and a half ; (4) of the Saxon portion of the Teutonic settlers, who con- quered the southern Kelts after the Eoman legions de- parted in the fifth century ; (5) of Englishmen who con- BNQLI3HMBN-, THEIK LANGUAGE AND COUNTKIES. 179 quered a place for themselves in the north of England contemporaneously with the Saxon conquests farther south ; (6) of Danes who subjected the north of Eng- land to their rule in the ninth century ; {1) of the French-speaking Danes whom William the Conqueror brought into England. Six of these groups adopted the language of the seventh, and became Englislmien, along with the Anglians or Northumbrians, by consenting to speak English. The Saxons were, to be sure, closely allied in speech to the Anglians ; the Danes were not very distant relations ; but it is none the less remarkable that the Anglian got his right to be called the first Eng- lishman by stubbornly refusing to do what all the rest did, and by not only keeping his mother tongue, but also cultivating it into commanding importance. The cultivation of English in the seventh and eighth centu- ries, by the Anglians, is the key-stone in the arch of the first Englishman's fame. By that culture he secured his place at the head of a column which is already a hundred millions strong. He was not only the first Englishman ; he was the first English Christian. The Saxons first received Augustine, and the Saxon king had a French wife who was a Christian ; but, according to the view here taken, the Saxons were not Englishmen until they adopted the more polished speech of the Anglians, who certainly began to become Christians before the year 610 and pos- sibly were Christians before the monk Augustine landed on the island. And this brings us to the distinction between Englis h C hristian ity and British C hristianit y. The latter is, of course, the older, dating from the second and possibly from the first century. A large ecclesiastical dispute lies in the facts or supposed facts of British Christianity. 180 BT-WATS OF LITERATURE. No one denies that Christianity had a flourishing exist- ence, for three centuries before there was a Dutchman of any tribe, Angle, Saxon, or Jute, in the island. But there is a group of theories that depend on the theory that the incoming Dutchman exterminated all the people, or substantially all of them, whom they found in posses- sion of the country. This theory is contrary to prob-. ability, and is also contrary to some of the known facts. Christian priests must have survived the war of invasion. The first settlements of the new masters were probably in ISTorthumbria, and the Anglian Dutchmen who settled there probably learned Christianity from priests of the conquered races. The first Englishmen may have been Christians for more than half a century when Augustine landed in Kent ; it is highly probable, also, that he found Christians in Kent. This sketch would be a very long one if it embraced the evidence for the foregoing propo- sitions. The reader is asked to consider the high im- probability that every priest or layman of the old race perished in the change to new masters ; and to remem- ber that Christians have always had a missionary spirit. Queen Bertha and the monk Augustine are interesting figures ; but we all know that equally interesting figures stand farther back in the history of British Christianity, and we know that British Christianity did not altogether die out in Britain. Probabilities and known facts favor the belief that the first Englishmen found Christianity in Northumbria and readily embraced it. The ecclesiasti- cal consequences of this theory are insignificant. Both British Christianity and Saxon Christianity came from Rome ; our view that the former was continued in the latter does not settle either way the claims of the Eng- lish Church to be independent of the Roman Catholic. As a matter of fact, the English Church did, in the six- ElfGLISHMBN-, THEIR LAN-GUAGE A.TSCD OOUJTTRIES. 181 teenth century, become independent ; wlietlier it Has a right to remain so depends upod theological, metaphysi- cal and ecclesiastical questions, which are no^ part of our present inquiry. The first Englishmen were not such because they happened to be in an island then called Britain, but because they spoke English and became Christians. Religion took up their language and spread it over the island ; and down to our days religion has continued to be the most powerful agent in spreading the language. As a literary tongue, ours is a Christian one. The new Latin tongues have pagan roots that retain vitality to this day ; English s carce ly runs back into pagan soil a t all, and all its culture has gone on in the C hristian atmosphere . Ours is the only great lan- guage which has no neathen or polytheistic memories. Probably we should never have heard of the Englishman at all if he had not cultivated Christianity along with his language ; if Christianity had not been the great theme of Old English. Without the moral energy that came out of this culture, Britain would have become an out- lying province of France, speaking French ; and the Dutchmen of Northumbria would have disappeared along with the Euskarian, the Selt, and the Dane in the foundations of the French nation. The whole course of modem history would have been changed. French would have been the language of this continent along with Spanish ; and nearly every other factor of modern life would have had Latin instead of Teutonic elements. What happened in Northumbria from about 550 to Y50 had more to do with the making of England and America than all the so-called history of the Middle Ages. The modern Englishmen, now spread over the globe, came out of a corner of Scotland or the Border to change the face of the world. NOTE B. Old EngUsh Homilists. The best, practically the best, book of Old English is King Alfred's translation of " Gregory's Pastoral Cave." The Early English Text Society published it, with notes and a modernized rendering, in 1871. The English of AKred is rather a paraphrase than a translation ; but it says quite as much quite as copiously as the original Latin. Sometimes the king who lived in the woods is better than Gregory ; as when he speaks of a man's " intending one thing in the hwrk ai his mind and in- tending a very dijferentjtliipg m the pith of his mind." The distinction is a practical one, and modem preachers might use it effectively. The most remarkable thing in the Old Homilists is the paraphrastic method of quoting the Bible, which con- tinued to prevail down to Shakespeare's day. The great dramatist quotes Scripture often, but never quotes accu- rately any of the versions that may have been within his reach. He paraphrases as Gregory did and Alfred after him. He probably learned the Bible from hearing it read in church, just as he learned the Prayer Book, which he also paraphrases rather than quotes. But Shake- speare is always very near to the sense of the Bible. He makes a clown say : " The Scripture says Adam digged." No extant version of the Bible has this state- ment in it ; but the idea is implied in Gen. 2 : 15 : to dress or work the garden includes digging. In western ©LD ENGLISH HOMILISTS; 183 Europe, it was not until doctrinal discussions becamd warm and the Bible was chosen as arbiter in tbem, that careful and literal quotations began to be required. Quotation of other books was equally loose in the early centuries of English Christianity, and in other respects quoter and quoted are often so mixed that it is not easy to distinguish them. Lit erary accu racy of all kinds g rew very slowl y, so long as the distinction between a new author and an old one was of small importance. And, as for the preachers, the allegorical method reduced the preterits of a text to insignificance ; the subjects were symbols out of which the preacher felt free to extract any idea or lesson that had a measure of fitness to the symbol. If, for instaace, the opening of a door in a wall is mentioned by Ezekiel, the door opened into some secret place becomes the theme, and the preacher's knowledge of doors and closets took the place of the prophet's meaning. It need not be pointed out here how popular this method still is. Of course Greg- ory went much farther. " He who always fears the wind wiU not sow' ' he puts in the mouth of Solomon only to get the word wmd before his reader as a symbol of " the temptations of the accursed spirit," and having gotten the devil into the text, Gregory proceeds to wres- tle with the old villain and throw him to the ground.. This mode of using the Bible is often very efEective in Gregory's hands, and still more effective in those of his royal paraphrast. Take this passage as a specimen : "It is said that the stones of the famous temple of Solomon were so well fitted and so evenly cut and polished before being brought to the place where they were to stand, that they were afterward so joined together in the holy place that no man heard there the sound either of axe or hammer. This shows us that we are to be in this exile 184 BT-WAYS OF LITBRATUKB. Qutwardly cut with flagellation, that we may be after- ward reckoned and joined to the key-stones in the city of God without the cutting of any flagellation, that all in us which is useless now may be cut away from us by the flagellation, so that afterward one peace of God's love may bind and join us together very firmly without any discord." Of course, this would be puerile as exegesis ; but it is not meant for exegesis. Taking up an incident, the preacher uses it exactly as a modem preacher would use any incident, true or false, of a fire, a shipwreck, or a railway disaster. NOTE 0. EngUsh Becoming Uhvoeraal. Ik his Introduction to the " Science of Language, " vol. 2, p. 348, Professor A. H. Sayce, of Oxford, makes a very enthusiastic avowal of faith in English as the future universal language. He says : " English may be heard all over the world from the lips of a larger number of persons than any other form of speech ; it is rapidly becoming the language of trade and commerce, the unifying elements of our modern life. Science, too, is begin- ning to claim it for her own, and it is not long ago that a Swedish and Danish writer on scientific subjects each chose to speak in English rather than in their own idioms for the sake of gaining a wider audience. Little by little the old dialects and languages of the earth are disappearing with increased means of communication, the growth of missionary efforts, and let us add, also, the spread of the English race, and that language has most chance of superseding them which, like our own, has dis- carded the cumbrous machinery of inflectional grammar. The great Grimm once advised his countrymen to give up their own tongue in favor of English, and a time may yet come when they will follow the advice of the founder of scientific German philology. That a universal language is no empty dream of ' an idle day ' is proved by the fact that the civilized western world once possessed one. Under the Roman Empire the greater part of Europe was bound together by a common gov- ernment, a common law, a common literature, and, as a neces- sary consequence, a common speech. When the darkness of barbarism again swept over it, and the single language of civil- 186 BY-WATS OF LITEEATUEE. ized Rome was succeeded by linguistic anarchy and barbarism, the Church and the Law, the sole refuges of culture, still pre- served the tradition of a universal tongue. It was not until the Reformation shattered Europe into an assemblage of hostile nationalities that language, as the expression of the highest spiritual wants and feelings of man, became finally disunited and disuniting. Diplomacy, indeed, the one attempt to har- monize the rival members of ' the European family,' had its common speech ; but diplomacy was powerless against the stronger passions which were shaping the Europe of a later • day. Now, however, there are signs that religion is at last ceasing to be an element of disunion, and becoming, instead, a bond of sympathy and common action among 'all educated men. The mischievous cry of nationalities, which found sup- port in the crude and misunderstood theories of immature philology, is dying away ; we are coming to perceive that language and race are not synonymous terms, and that language is but the expression of social life. Whatever makes for the unity and solidarity of society makes equally for the unity and solidarity of language. The decaying dialects of the world may be fostered and wakened into artificial life for a time ; but the stimulus soon disappears, and the natural laws of profit and loss regain their sway. By clearing away old prejudices and misconceptions, by explaining the life of language and the laws which direct its growth and decay, the science of speech is silently preparing the ground for the unhindered operation of those tendencies and movements which are even now changing the Babel of the primeval world into the ' Saturnia regna ' of the future, when there will be a universal language and a uni- versal law. ' ' I cannot help sympatliizing with this enthusiasm. But I cannot feel that the dialects are disappearing much. Last year in Professor Sayce's London, I heard more dialect than English. 1 remember, for example, very vividly, a servant-girl who at every dinner asked ENGLISH BECOMING UNIVERSAL. 187 me, " Wae ye hov some Jieail, sir?" and that it took me some time to find out that she meant ale. The uni- versal speech by which Rome bound Europe together was, I fear, not a popular speech until, near the end of its unity ; and when it became universal, it began to crack and fell into four large pieces (French, Provengal, Italian, and Spanish) and a good many small pieces besides. The Reformation may have had a bad influence on unity .of speech ; but it seems to me that the mischief had been done five hundred years before there wbb a Refor- mation, and done m spite of religious unity. . Of course, there will be great value in a universal liter- ary tongue ; and English seems to be marching to that eminence. The want of the world, however, is not one literary or commercial speech so much as one common speech. We are, in this country, working on that line, and thus far successfully. We have half of the English- men of the globe ; in a century more our fifty millions will be a hundred millions. It may come to pass that the Germans, and the French and other Latins, may find it best— an overmastering convenience — to speak our tongue. It is not impossible. But there is a terrible tenacity in dialect — in the mother tongue — and the world may go on a good while with its Babel. CHAPTEE X. A GEAMMATtCAL BEVOLTJTIOH. Lf this age all branches of knowledge are successfully treated in popular language ; it will be my own fault if my readers refuse to take the following lesson in gram- mar. What we call English grammar is learned by rote in most schools, on a system which originally assumed that English grammar is like Latin grammar. The word case, which properly means accidence, is employed in our grammars to Aesigaaie positions and not accidence. We have a small group of nouns that have survived the rev- olution which destroyed case ; but the general rule is that English grammar \b positional ; the place of a word, not its inflection (or accidence), fixes its use in an expres- sion. Whether a noun is the subject or the object de- pends upon its place in the sentence and not upon its termination or "ending." Case is, grammatically, a system worked by case-endings. When we do not employ case-endings, we do not use case. We have, in- deed, some remnants of the case-ending system. The possessive form in 's stands side by side in the language with the positional possessive. We may say Ood^s love or the love of God. The first form has disappeared in great measure from the neuter terms. We onght not to say money'' s love, nor have we any grammatical form for expressing the idea that money possesses a man, though we have abundant use for such a form. We ought not to say the mime's depth, though miners may possibly do A GKAMMATICAL KEVOLUTIOIf. 189 60. We do say the depth of the rwme, the riohiess of the Tnine, the ore of the mine. When the possessive is a person, an ambiguity may arise. The love of God may mean God's love or love to or for God. This possible ambiguity in this class of expressions does not prevent their use. The love of God is freely used in the New Testament for the affecUon of God, that is to say, in the active sense ; and no revision would be expected to sub- stitute this old possessive form — revolutions do not revolve backward. The possessive in '« is a survival, and the language is struggling to get rid of it. The rea- son why, in New Testament use and pulpit use, the phrase love of God is not of double signification, we see clearly when the sentence is unfolded. The rest of the sentence points to the active sense. Usually there is an immediate removal of doubt, as in "To know the love of God, which passeth all understanding." Here to hnow cuts off any chance for ambiguity, and the whole sen- tence affirms that the sense of the phrase love of God is active. It is of practical utility to notice this progressive motion of the language. It is especially practical to keep in mind the rule for neuter possessives. I have great respect for reporters ; but they have a reckless habit about grammar, and often write the mine's explosion / the fever's rwoages, etc. A few years ago, when our towns burned down, they wrote Boston's great ilase, and Portlwnd's confLagraUon. Here there is another mistake under the misused possessive form. The names of towns are neuter. They may, of course, be personi- fied ; but they should not be described as persons pos- sessing great blazes or conflagrations. The relation is not a possessive one, and there is no propriety in using the old form in '«. 190 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUKE. For a large number of possessive reMtions we use the noun without either 's or a preposition. We use it as what we call an adjective. We say Boston culture or Boston iaked heans ; New York politics / New Jersey justice ; Chicago markets ; and Milwaukee fire. In all these cases we may write the poUtics of New York, the culture of Boston, etc. This adjectival mode of expressing the possessive' is the growing method ; it is insensibly extending itself every year. The reporter be- gins to write the Chicago Maze. It has, for most uses — for all in which the article can be dispensed with — the great advantage of brevity, and in our time the short road is the highway. It is customary to describe all noims used in this way as adjectives ; they are, in fact, however, nouns placed in the possessive relation. It is flat syntax Dr positional syntax. These two modem modes of expressing the possessive relation are results of the grammatical revolution which I have undertaken to describe. To get somewhere near the beginning of this revolution, we must go back to Latin of the fifth century. In that Latin the noun hortus (our ga/rdert) went into a sentence with a set of hooks called case-endings. It was written with the following variations : Singnlar. hortus subject called nominatiTe case, of a garden horti possessiye " genitive " to or for garden horto object " dative " garden hortum " " accusative " from or with garden horto " " ablative " In the phiral, these cases were made with the follow- ing variations : A &KAMMATICAL KETOLUTIOW. 191 gardens horti of gardens hortorum to or for garden! hortis gardens liortos from or with gardeni hortis Theoretically, any one of these forms might be placed anywhere in a sentence, and its use would be perfectly clear. Mortus would always be the subject of a sen- tence ; hortuTn and hortos would always be objects of verbs or prepositions. Mortorwrn would always be pos- sessive plural. This determination of relation by form had, indeed, great advantages. It allowed a writer to place his subject or object or possessive anywhere in the sentence, and it secured perfect clearness of expression in some relations ; but not in all. Looking at the table, we see that the dative and ablative have the same form, and that horti may be either possessive singular or nominative plural. The system was defective in con- struction — its ideal was not realized. If it had gained its end, you might have put any nouns you wanted to use in a bag, shaken them up well, and set a blind boy to pulling them out and placing them in the sentence — the hooks would determine the meaning of each, or, to be more accurate, would fix the grammatical value of each. But no human system is perfect, and imperfections end at last in breeding revolutions. The imperfect place has to be patched, and the patch assumes prominence — every boy who has had to wear patched breeches knows how prominent a patch can be — and patches that are necessary gradually enlarge their domain. To keep harti from ambiguity, its range of position in the sen- tence had to be restricted ; and when position as a patch 193 BT-TVATS OF LITEBATUKE. got a place in grammar, its utility was so obvious that the use of it naturally extended into the territory of in- flections. The revolution, when it came, made the whole garment out of the patch. The dative and ablative cases being alike in form, it was necessary to restrict their range in the sentence and to invent idiomatic constructions for them. All these devices which grew into the intricacies which a student now perspires over in Latin grammar, involved posi- tional grammar ; that is, every device by which precision is given to a Latin noun when its ease-endings failed to give it precision, was a contrivance for fixing the sense by means of the place of the noun in the sentence. The patch grew larger with every new idiom. The preposi- tions are old ; but their use was extended in the uncon- scious struggle to give grammatical definiteness to ex- pression. Let me warn my reader here that I am not describing what any group of men ever did on purpose. Changes in grammar are unconscious changes in most instances. At all events, the works of the Latin grammarians and schoolmasters perished long before the modern gramma- rians were born. Nor did Latin (or any other language) ever exist without a positional element in its grammar. Both kinds of grammar always existed in Latin ; the patch was always there, and the changes in the size of the patch (positional grammar) are very few within the long period — some eight centuries — of which we have the literary produce of Latin minds in sufficient quantity to determine questions of this kind. But the imaginary struggle to perfect an ideal of inflected grammar — and the necessary failure of it and incorporation of positional elements — -does very fairly represent an unconscious lan- guage experience. A GEAMMATIOAL RBTOLUTIOH. 193 Thus far we have considered only nouns ; but in fact the hook system extended to pronouns, adjectives, and verbs. Adjectives were fitted out with endings corre- sponding to those of nouns, and in a Latin sentence the adjective may be placed a long way from its noun with- out creating a doubt about its application. But vari- ous causes co-operated to reduce the wanderings of the adjective, and its place in a majority of instances is next after its noun or not far off. The tendency was for it to follow its noun, unless some reason existed for placing it elsewhere. The general nature of these reasons for a different placing of the adjective may be inferred from our rule that an adjective having a dependent clause should follow the noun. In Latin a wider range of rea- sons had play ; euphony might change the position of the adjective, and in verse the reason might be metrical. In verbs the hooks were even more elaborately con- structed than in the noun. The ending pointed to the singular or plural noun, and indicated relations of tense and mood with considerable completeness. But no such system can be complete, and the patch had to be put on — position came in to help out inflection. "We have in English relics of the hook system in the verb forms ; love* and loved are true examples of inflection ; but the amount of it in English is entirely insufficient to be called a sys- tem. We also have another sort of inflection in such verbs as steal, stole, stolen, which are, like the s and d of the " regular" verbs, a survival, and of no value. We should get rid of them all if we knew how. We have changed some of them ; and our children courageously say stealed and drinked / and it is a pity we have not our children's courage. We manage tense and mood chiefly by means of what we call an " auxiliary." It is not a very happy designation. In fact, we inflect ha/oe 194 BY- WATS or LITBEATtJKE. and he, shall and will, and add to them any " past par- ticiple" that we need. "7 home loved " is / hme with loved standing in the place of an object which we have hewed to fit a concept. In Latin the same system ex- isted along with, and to help out, the hook system. It was another patch on the fine suit of inflectional clothes. On a foregoing page I have given an outline of a part of the grammatical system of Latin. I might have used Old English (Anglo-Saxon) ; for the Old English system was, in the respects which we have considered, substan- tially like Latin. The reason why we have bits of in- flection in our modern English is that we have inherited them from ancestors who spoke and wrote English with these inflectional hooks to hang grammatical relations upon. But Old Ehglish is so Uttle studied and Latin so much studied that a Latin illustration is better even for those who know no Latin. I have another reason for using a Latin illustration. The revolution in Latin grammar is on so large a scale that no one can mistake it for a street brawl. The change in English from old to new was made in a corner of the world, now of vast importance, but then insignificant. The Latin change swept over an immense territory and concerned all west- em civilization. Old English had a slender stock of liter- ature which, notwithstanding repeated efforts to recover and keep it, has passed out of our memory and refuses to come back. Latin had a literary progeny which survives in full vitality and will never die. "The transition stage, too, which we may call Norman English, is not specially attractive in a literary sense, while there is French transitional Latin of permanent literary value. The songs of the troubadours are still resounding in the ear and heart of a great people. I have briefly sketched the grammatical character of A GBAMMATICAL KETOLUTIOST. ]95 Latin as it was writteii in the fifth century — as it had been written for a thousand years. It is not easy to comprehend what this long period means. It covers a fourth part of the whole historical period of the race. It includes the conquest and dominion over nearly all the civilized world by men speaking Latin, at least for all ofiicial purposes. And yet to this long-established speech there came a great change, a momentous revolu- tion. The barbarians played the return game of inva- sion, and crushed the Roman Empire, and buried its civilization in a night which we call "the dark ages." We know very imperfectly what went on in the world during those centuries. The large political movements stand out in the different countries with some distinct- ness ; the social life is a world in deep shadow often deepening into deep darkness. Of all things, we know least of the language. But pass over a period of five centuries, and we are in a Roman world, which is recognized as the old world by unmistakable marks, but is as unmistakably a new world ; and the best evidence for both the survival and the differentiation is in the language. In Italy, Spain and France, the written language is Latin. The words are the old words, preserving with amazing minuteness the old accents. But the hooks are nearly all broken off ; the patch has spread over nearly all the garment. New Latin, too, has four different voices — a French voice, a Provengal voice, a Spanish voice, and an Italian voice ; or, to use the common description, there are four new Latin tongues in place of the one old one. It is not my business here to describe the differences in these lan- guages. The marvel of the revolution is that the gram- matical changes of importance are the same in all these languages and countries, among whose people there was 196 BY-WAYS OF LITERATURE. not more intercourse than there now is between the United States and Brazil. There was some commerce on the coasts, and the crusades mingled warriors of the several countries, and the Church with its relations to the Pope and the Latin ritual were the same over the entire world of new Latin. But there were no railroads or telegraphs ; the various peoples took little interest in each other, and there were no educational forces at work that can be thought of as securing unif ormit j. Whatever social, priestly, educational activities existed, struggled to preserve Old Latin — and were beaten. The revolu- tion is a wonder and an instruction because it had human forces for which we need a name and shall yet get one. The action of them is unconscious and does not proceed from volition ; it is human, not climatic, not supematu- ]'al ; it is social, and moves bodies of men living together, but it is also extra-social, moving in the same hnes men who have nothing in common but their language and its contents of law and custojn. Italian, which is the new Latin of the heart of the Koman Empire, will best serve to illustrate the nature and extent of the revolution. The Italian nouns are dis- tinguished by hooks only as singular or plural, masculine or feminine. There are no case-hooks. This is true, also, in the other new Latin tongues as now used. Old French had an intermediate stage, to which M. Littr6 attaches great importance, in which subject and object were distinguished by hooks — all objective relations being expressed by a common hook. As Italian is com- monly taught it is made to display case ; but it is poor teaching. King Case is dead ; King Position reigns in new Latin. The first step in the revolution was to make an article; old Latin had no article. But in many constructions the A. GRAMMATICAI, BEVOLUTIOST. 197 demonstrative iUe (that) did in later Latin writers do the work of an article. We find ille so used as far back as Quinctilian. The patch was, however, a very small one. But at the end of the revolution all the new Latin tongues had articles, and they had made them out of ille. Eeturning to Italian, we find that ille has become an article and ceased to be a demonstrative ; it means the, not that. The small patch has become the garment. It is hooked to designate singular and plural and masculine and feminine {il, la, i, le), but it has no case. What looks like case is an habitual combination of prepositions with adjectives, with euphonic changes. The Old Latin ad (to) is in Italian a. If I wish to say in Italian to the garden, I must say al gia/rdvno, as though it were our custom to say toth ga/rden. To strengthen or smooth the sound (that is to say, for euphonic purposes), other changes are made ; but King Case does not give a sign of life. Unus (one) has become an indefinite article. No- tice, then, that all over the domain of the Konian speech the demonstrative has become a definite article ; and that (except a struggle in the speech of France to keep an objective case) all the elaborate machinery of case has been abandoned. The adjective follows the noun (all over the l^ew Latin territory), and has number and gen- der hooks, but no case-hooks. In the verbs the change is less complete ; some of the elaborate forms are retained in writing and to some extent in speech, but the auxiliary made from habere (have) has vastly ex- tended its dominion. The general result is that these New Latin tongues have little more inflection than Eng- lish has ; like it they are " grammarless," for grammar is technically used to describe the hook system. What has taken the place of the old grammar ? I answer, a gram,mar of position, or a grammar in which the gram- 198 BT-WATS OF LITERATURE. matical relations of words are fixed by their position in the sentence. In all the New Latin languages the adjective follows the noun closely. Its number and gender hooks will permit it to wander poetically or rythmically ; but in English the revolution is more com- plete, and the adjective is required to keep close to the noun, or to have its relation to the noun positionally de- termined by construction and punctuation. When we write : " He was a good man, true to his friends, zealous for his party, loyal to his country,' ' zealous and loyal are linked to man (though yWfiTW?* is the nearer word) by the construction and punctuation and by the pronoun his. It has long seemed to me to be highly probable that any modem grammar might be most successfully taught by first teaching as a set of stubborn facts the forms which are survivals. Here are certain old hooks, badly worn but still used, possessives in 's, s and d in loves and loved ; here are distinctions of number and gender ; here are strong verbs {drink, drank, drunk) and strong nouns {goose, geesi) ;'let us master this set of facts which once had vitality in living principles ; let us get an understanding of our place, time, and relation vrovAs, (adverbs, conjimctions, prepositions and pronouns) and master them all as so many facts that have no rhyme or reason. Having conquered the irrational element, we are ready to begin the study of grammatical principles, and these principles are principles of position — facts of position for which reasons can be given. It is possible that this order might be reversed. The rational portion of a study is always delightful, and it might be possible to suppress any considerations of the stubborn old etymological facts until the pupil had become familiar with syntax by position. But to return to our revolution, two very important A GRAMMATICAL REVOLUTION. 199 questions present themselves. What were the causes of this revohition ? What advantages has the modern world derived from it ? The first question has had many answers, none of which are very satisfactory. The revolution went on in the dark. We must judge of its causes by keeping in view the two ends of it. We are a little helped by a great shadow which traversed the field in the night of the dark ages. It is the great Teu- tonic invasion with Germanic languages in its mouth. Some have thought tliis vast invasion a suflBcient expla- nation of the revolution in Latin grammar. It does explain some things, such as changes in words, but it does not satisfactorily explain those in the grammar. The Germans were obliged to learn Latin. It was everywhere the speech of the majority, and it mastered them by its breadth and dignity. To know it made them richer in their own eyes ; and they inevitably spoke it badly. Their own language was inflected (used case- hooks), and some have laid down a rule that when two groups of inflections meet in the same mouth, both are exterminated in the conflict. This Ttmy be the reason why in northern Italy, where the Italian has been in conflict here with German and there with French, the vowelled beauty of the number and gender terminations has disappeared from the Piedmontese and Lombard dialects. But it is only a guess, and all other theories of the barbarian influence in the dark ages are also guesses. It is safest to assume that the Teutonic invaders co- operated with the influences at work in the Eomanic populations to bring about the grammatical changes. We are not to forget that there were four New Latin tongues in the ninth century, two in France (one in the north and one in the south), one in Italy, and another in Spain. Each had its own territory. The invaders 200 BY-WAYS OF LITEKATUEE. would not have produced a different 'New Latin in each country, though it is true that they helped on the local movement in each. Some have said that the whole change must have been begun in each country in the fifth century, and that if the Roman Empire had endured to the ninth century, the changes would have come about as they actually did come about. But though the invasion may not have even hastened the change, it is clear enough that the Old Latin would have lived on if it had been the official speech, and had its literary prestige and the schoolmasters to support it. But when all these supports fell away with the fall of the Empire and the deluge of ignorance that followed the fall of Rome, the people who spoke Latin were at liberty to speak as they listed. And when men be- thought them at last, after fifteen generations of popular speech, to take up this vernacular and write it — or rather when new impulses provoked men to utter popular feel- ing in popular songs^the vernaculars of the various countries were found to be substantially what they now are. Dropping Provengal as being practically dead, we find that in three countries, three peoples emancipated for generations from dictionaries and grammars had built out of the old a new tongue, each for itself, departing from the old on common lines, and diverging from each other in many respects. We must credit the divergences to some local causes ; we must assign a general reason for the common type. Respecting the cause of the common type, it may be said that some believe that the people never spoke the langnage of the books. They do not speak the modern book language in Italy. Each province has its dialect. Italian has been said to be older than the Latin of the Roman writers. This, also, is a guess based upon an A Grammatical BBVoLUTioiff. 301 exaggeration of the facts that : (1) It is not probable that the elaborate Latin grammar was employed by the uneducated mass. (2) That to this day an Italian gentleman has two tongues, the dialect learned from his nurse and playmates (and in some districts habitually spoken), and the literary language which he learned at school and often uses only as a suit of fine Sunday clothes. (3) That there are traces of the distinction between rustic and literary Latin in the old Eoman writers. (But the rustic Latin was not modern Italian.) (4) That the divergences in the New Latin tongues are such as could only be accounted for by local popular usage. These points do not prove that Italian is older than Latin, but they do establish a probability that the popular dialects all over the empire used Latin loosely and inaccurately, and disregarded everywhere the more elaborate parts of the inflection. And we are almost compelled to suppose that when the people were left pretty much to them- selves they dropped off the case-hooks from the nouns (if they had used them before), and instinctively settled into the syntax of position. "W^e do not know that this happened exactly in this way ; but we do know that the result came about in popular hands without the help of schoolmasters ; and we must remember that four hundred years is a long time — long enough for great changes in speech when literary and governmental pressure was withdrawn. In another paper of this series, 1 have pointed out that each language has a point of stress, something which is especially sacred and dear to those who speak it, some- thing which social and literary influences foster.* What was that point in Latin ? If we are to judge from Latin * See chapter xi. 303 BT-WAYS OP LITBRATUEE. poetry, it was the quantity of the vowels — the distinction of long and short in the use of them. But if we are to judge by events, the stress in Latin was just where it is in Enghsh — I mean the greater stress in general speecL The literary classes, doubtless, handled their vowels with scrupulous care, and this care extended to the case-end- ings. But in the day of adversity, there were no literary classes, and the main popular stress reveals itself in the result. That stress rested on accent. All over the old field the Latin words are spoken with the accent just where it rested in the mouth of Cicero. The exceptions are not numerous enough to shake the rule. The one thing the grammatical revolution did not change was the accent of a Latin word. It is a grave error, by the way, to say that French has no accent. The best proof is that French poetry is built upon accent, as English poetry is. French accent has not the intense character of the English ; but it is strong enough to compel the obedience of its speakers. These facts of accent show us how the Latin words fared in the dark ages. The stress in popular use being on accent, careless and ignorant people using their lan- guage chiefly for purposes of conversation — where half a word always passes for the whole — naturally dropped off the case-endings and as naturally developed the construc- tions with prepositions. In simple life few words are much used, and simple constructions met all speech wants. The unaccented syllables in the case-endings fell off as in unconscious states of society ail such syllables are liable to fall off ; nothing but grammatical self-con- sciousness in speakers (supported, of course, by diction- aries and schoolmasters) keeps English words together. Half of those in common use are habitually clipped in conversation ; but the accented syllables are uttered be- /f X GRAMMATICAL EEVOLUTION. 203' cause they must be — ^respect for their rights is enforced by the language consciousness. Our grammatical revolution was, therefore, a popular one. The great forces of the world fell out and wrangled for centuries over great political questions ; and while the wrangle went on the people of the Roman world quietly reformed their speech. I use the word reformed with intention. It looked like anarchy ; the old manu- scripts even of the thirteenth century look to a Latin scholar (who is onh/ a Latin scholar), like anything else but an improved Latin. Cicero, if he were brought back to earth, would probably regard French as a very degen- erate Latin ; and yet French is doubtless a more con- venient speech and a richer speech than Cicero's — it is more easily used and is -a more suflScient instrument of thought. I have already dogmatically answered my second ques- tion ; the revolution in Latin grammar has given the Eoman peoples in France, Spain, and Italy a better Latin. I shall not attempt to prove this. It is, I be- lieve, the general judgment of scholars in this branch of study. A few facts will make the grounds of this judg- ment clear. In the first place, Old Latin had no article ; and the article is an instrument of precision, the impor- tance of which was appreciated by the Latin authors who had the Greek article before them and regretted this item of Latin poverty. But for our present purpose, the more important fact is that a set of case-hooks, such as Latin had, necessarily consumed more or less of the attention of speakers. Our spelling has been charged with wasting a fourth part of our lives, and the charge has some show of reason. But the waste of our time in spelling is certainly much less than that which cafie-hooks caused the Eomans. 304 BY- WATS OF LITERATURE. We have a single case-hook, the possessive in '« / but fortunately we do not use it much. Now, take a com- parison. Mr. Fronde's essay on the Book of Job con- tains about 18,000 words. In that essay Mr. Froude uses the possessive in '« only 28 times. It is a curious coincidence that the Book of Job. contains nearly as many words (about 800 less), and the Authorized Yersion of it has 27 possessives made in 's. Mr. Froud e is, I believe, the best living master of English ; and the pro- portion of possessives in '« in his other writings is not, I think, greater than in the essay on the Book of Job. The ratio may be stated, making some allowance for overlooked possessives in my counting, as one possessive sign 's (or one case-ending) in each 600 words. We may write good English, the best English, and use this one single case-ending only once (on an average) in each 600 words. Compare with this a Latin page in any classical author, and you will see at once a very great difference. On the Latin page one half of the words have case-endings attached to nouns, adjectives, and par- ticiples. There are 300 noun-inflections or hooks in Latin to one in English. The Bomanic (New Latin) tongues show less difference because the fictitious gender of Latin is preserved and the articles have the distinctions both of gender and number. The Romanic languages have rid themselves of only about three fourths of the load of hooks ; but the gain is still very large. It is safe, I suppose, to assume that the management of these case-endings re- quired a considerable expenditure of mental energy. It is also true that the case-ending system was a kind of strait-jacket for thought. Latin was an imperial tongue, wonderfully fitted to express plain and rugged ideas, large formulas, and clearly- defined conceptions. But in A GRAMMATICAL EBVOLCTION. 205 the power to distinguish shades of thought, or to express the swing of emotions, French, Italian, and Spanish far surpass Latin. You cann ot tr ansla te any g reat muj[pm a uthor into Latin . If is not a question of words ; it is a question of syntax, of tlie case-ending method with its inevitable restrictions upon expression and its heavy tax on the energy of the mind. It may be replied that position syntax also requires mental energy and might seem to restrict expression — because each word must be in its proper place. The answer to this is that syntax by position has but few niles that are unbending ; that, for example, an English sen- tence admits of several arrangements. Perhaps in a majority of cases there may be as many arrangements as words — if we aim only at intelligibility. A good deal that is properly rhetoric passes for syntax, and we uncon- sciously think of the best arrangement as a grammatical one, when it is in fact a rhetorical one. Grammar requires a sentence to be intelligible ; rhetoric requires it to be the best possible arrangement. Wyclif translated the Gospel verse describing the catastrophe of the house built upon the sand as follows : ^^And it fell down, and the falling down thereof was great y Tyndale, the rhetorician of the English New Testament, changed this climax sentence so that it reads : '^And itfdl, and great was the fall of it. ' ' The statement is equally intelligible in both forms ; but Tyndale's version is much the more forcible and impressive. But the sentence may be arranged diflEerently ^rom either. For example : 3. Of it the fall was great. 4. Was great of it the fall. 5. Great was of it the fall. 6. Was great the fall of it. 206 BY-WAYS OF LITERATCEE. Here are six grammatical arrangements of six words. I do not say that the last four are good or idiomatic ; I only say that they are intelligible. I take another sen- tence, a longer one, from Earle's " Philology of the Eng- lish Tongue." He writes : " Philology makes more use of the signification of. words than grammar does." Let us try some other arrangements. 2. Of the signification of words philology makes more use than grammar does. 3. Philology makes more use than grammar does of the signification of words. 4. More use than grammar does philology makes of the signification of words. 5. Philology more use makes than grammar does of the signification of words. 6. Than grammar does philology more use makes of the signification of words. Mr. Earle's arrangement is the best ; but the next two are good English. The other three are awkward, but intelligible ; and six other arrangements might be made which would be more awkward than 5, 6, and 7, but Avould still be intelligible. This capacity in English for talking out its meaning when put head first or feet first, and in any position, is one reason why foreigners learn English easily. It is also true that our speech put into strange combinations always gives us a certain pleasure. "W e like to see it dressed in German, French, ItaUan, or Spanish idioms ; and these idioms usually transpose the words. In most cases, the transposed sentence is still clear in meaning. Syntax by position preserves as much freedom as syntax by noun-hooks had of placing the members of a sentence in different places ; while in Latin, as in English, rhetoric dictated a choice of posi- A GRAMMATICAL EEVOLUTION. 207 tions — as much in Latin as in English. The gain, there- fore, is a gain without an appreciable amount of discount. The Eomanic tongues have gained substantially what English has gained ; but rhetoric (or the rules of the best constructions) haa obtained a greater influence in , those tongues, and diminished their flexibility in com- ' parison with English. I reminded my readsr on a former page that Old Eng- lish was written with case-hooks. We are now prepared to measure the English grammatical revolution — ^by com- paring it with the Latin one. When the revolution began in Latin, the Old English people were speaking an Engh'sh language which was as "rich" in case-endings as Latin; and between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries English grammar under- went the change which I have described in Latin. There were about 300 of these case-endings in every 600 words — or 300 times as many as we now have on every page. This was, however, in the language of the literary people, and, as we cannot assume that the tongue King Alfred wrote was substantially the same as the spoken tongue of his people, we are not obliged to believe that a people will, in any circum- stance, preserve a burdensomely artificial speech for centuries. English dropped off its grammatical, finery — not suddenly, but gradually — and the change greatly in- creased the value of the inheritance into which we were born. That great grammatical change cleared the way for many others. I have before me an Old English sen- tence (or a part of one) written by King Alfred. It is as follows (dropping the case-hooks and translating some of his obsolete words into their substitutes in Modern Eng- lish) : " Will then divide they this property that there to 208 BY-WAYS OF LITEKATUBl!. remainder is into five or six, at times into more, accord- ing as of the property the value is." I think this sen- tence is intelligible ; the reader will see at once that it is German in construction. These inversions of what seems to us the natural order of the terms were favored, if not produced, by the case-endings. The fall of King Case prepared the way for the simpler and more direct modern sentence. Other influences combined to breed a habit of stating a subject first and then saying about it what we desire to say. But, I repeat, this is rather rhetoric than grammar. If King Alfred's sentence is intelligible without its inflections, the modem arrange- ment of the words is simply a better or best arrangement. King Alfred's sentence stripped of its grammatical ruffles and furbelows may also suggest that the change came to English (and to Latin as well) through an uncon- scious discovery that the ruffles and furbelows did not make the dress either warmer or more beautiful — that the inflections were useless. It was a later discovery that the plain syntax is by far the best. This last piece of knowledge may be added to the vast heap of nine- teenth-centnry science. In considering Latin, we found reasons for believing that the people never swallowed the grammar with hooks ; in Old English, 1 firmly believe there was never a popular speech such as King Alfred wrote. That fine breadth of inflection is not a thing for the farmhouse and the camp. A large inference follows : the litera,ry English of the fourteenth century — less its French patches — was a growth out of popular English that had long been spoken. In the fourteenth century in Eng- land, the literary people adopted the popular speech, just as two or three centuries earlier the literary people on the continent adopted the popular Latin. Our gram- A GEAMMATICAL KEVOLU-TION. 209 matical revolution, as well as the Latin one, came out o^ the popular mind and heart. Since writing the foregoing estimate of the value of this revolution, I hare lighted upon a passage in Mr. Earle's " Philosophy of the English Tongue," which sug- gests that we may have lost by that change. Mr. Earle * contrasts the English : " A time t o cast away siapes and a time to ga ther stqngs toe;et]ier" with the Latin: " Tempus sporgendi lapides et tempus coUigendi. " The English sentence chosen is unnecessarily diffuse ; we could say, " A time to scatter and at time to gather stones." But T believe that if - we followed the Latin construction as closely as possible, and said : " A time for scattering and a time for gathering stones, ' ' we should say a little. more than the Latin words say at small cost in breath. The Latin gets rid of the for and a, but we certainly say something with the a that is not said in Latin, and if the/br represents a loss here, it stands for gain elsewhere. But turning to another page of Mr. Earle's book, where he is treating of symbolic words — such as a, the, m, for, where, acGordingVy — we find a very satisfactory defence of symbolism. In English, he tells us, sixty per cent, of the words used in good writing are symbolic, and it is a field-grown symbolism. Latin symbolism is a hot-house and artificial product, and very defective. " The symbolical element, which is to the mode of thought the essential element in &Dery phrase in which it is present, did not grow in the open air as in Greece, but it was the product of artificial elaboration and studied adaptation. And it still sits upon the Latin as a ceremonious garment. . . . That rich and free outflow of the symbolic which marks the Greek is the • Page 32. 210 BY-WATS OF LITERATURE. hadge cmd characterwtio of modernism in language. . . . We have suflBcient ground for, treating flexion as an ancient and symbolism, as a modern phenomenon. One reason is that in the foremost languages of the world flexion is waning while symbolism is waxing. ' ' * The real fact is that Latin was weak through the want of symbolic fulness ; and the comparison to be just should be made not with Latin but with Greek. ' Mr. Earle furnishes the comparison in this text : English : Blessed are the pure in heart. Greek : - Maxdpcoi ol Kodapol ry Kapdia, Latin : Beati mundo corde. The amount of it is, that much as we may admire " the musc ular collecte dness" of the Latin , we feel that it does not speak out the full sense ; while the English without inflections says all that the Greek says in the sariie spagg witl^in flections . It is further true that the symbolic growths aid in the expression of fine shades of meaning and in building up style into structural beauty and magnificence. The beauty is often indefinable. Mr. Earle himself quotes : " And to watch as the little bird watches When the falcon is in the air." And asks : " Where is the man who can handle lan- guage so skilfully as to describe and define the value of these articles?" And Principal Shairp notes "the strange power there is in "Wordsworth's simple preposi- tions. The star is on the mountain top ; the silence is m the starry sky ; the sleep is aTnong the hills ; the gentleness of heaven is on the sea — ^not ' broods o'er,' as the later editions have it." f * Page 210 and following. The italics are mine. f " Studies in Poetry and Philoaophy," p. 72. CHAPTEK XI. OUE SPOKEN ENGLISH. Most of us pay so little attention to the sounds we utter when we pronounce words — and are so unconscious- ly governed by custom, by which we merely give back "as good as we get" — that we mast make an effort to realize that language is always changing, that it is scarcely the same for ten years together, that in a cen- tury a considerable change passes upon the sound struct- ure of the words we use. The means of measurement for these vocal changes are very imperfect. We cannot, except in a few words, compare even our youth with our manhood ; to compare this century with the last, or the nineteenth with the fourteenth century, is much more difficult. Each of us undergoes the changes of his time in speech, and if we lived a thousand years we could not get much behind the times. We pick out of the poets proofs that accent has shifted, or syllables lost bulk, or vowels become silent ; but at the end of all such research, we are painfully aware that we know only some detached -facts which may no more be a system than a daisy grow- ing among the wheat is a field of flowers. Still, there is a fascination in the pursuit of this kind of knowledge. We even take pleasure in looking back to a time when they said " balcony" and a scholar could write, " bahonj makes me sick.'' The fact has no large meaning, but it belongs to a mysterious world which, though it seems to be in our very mouths, tantalizes us by movements that 312 BY-WATS OF LITBBATURE. we cannot measure. I am sure, therefore, that my reader will not refuse to go with me across country in search of facts illustrative of the largest changes in spoken English. The new and altogether unparalleled strain put upon the English language in this country by the use of the literary dialect for all purposes, by all sorts of people, might result in new forms of corruption in sounds. It is the first exp ajme nt of democracy in speech. Hitherto, the literary classes have hadfheir choice, ripe, and flow- ing idioms mostly to themselves, and the circle has been so narrow that it has been easy to maintain a nearly uni- form practice in orthoepy, as well as in orthography. To this day, in all lands but ours, the masses speak dia- lects which they often share with the cultivated, who have, besides the common vernacular, a book-tongue for solemn or grave occasions. An Italian professor talks to his servants, wife, and children in dialect, but lectures to his students in the stately tongue used in books. In other countries, especially England, the dialects are less universally spoken ; but everywhere outside of America, the rude, vulgar idiom is separated by a pretty broad line from its polite brother, and so takes off the brunt and waste of the worst sorts of usage. How this experi- ment will end is a matter of much interest, not to scholars only, but to us all. For language is the only universal human tool — we do everything with it ; and if it were ruined or even seriously blunted by democratic changes, we should all suffer. Democracy in this matter means that our speech is constantly used by persons who do not understand it ; that its fine clothes are used in the street, the field, and the miU. What will the people do with it now that they have wrested the literary tongue from the cultured classes ? In democratic progress the wise conservative sees infinite dangers because he dis- OUR SPOKEN ENGLISH. 213 trusts popular virtue and judgment. It is easy to answer that popular virtue has never been of worse quality or less strength than that of the aristocrats of birth and breeding, and that godd judgoient is conditioned upon disinterestedness rather than learning j thei aristocrats are never disinterested ; the people sometiniei are. -But kti. argument of this kind — even if it be of much wotth in politics — is worth nothing in language. A powerful language like ours is highly organized; it has compli- cated and refined structure ; its usages are not things of plain, general logic, but of idiomatic and traditional sym- bolism. The first effect of popular use of fine language is a combat between the inherited custom and the logical faculties of the less-educated speakers and writers. " I live," says a Londoner, " in Kegent Street." "I live," says a Chicagoan, "on Adams Street." The American logician remarks: "Why, you cannot live in a street. Arid, come to think of it, you cannot live on a street." Prepositional usage in this case is simply arbitrary. There is no reason why m should be used as it is, except the fact that it has become settled usage through the subtle experience of our ancestors. When, therefoi'e, the critic says, " Beggars live in the street," and " bawds live on the street," and asks us to say ^' on one side of the street,'''' he is doing what he can to destroy an idiom, slowly and painfully acquired by the speakers of English, and to go back to the use of four words for one ; and when he gets back there he will find that he has not yet expressed himself, and that on one side of is merely a symbol in four pieces. The methods of studying grammar, which have prevailed among us have developed a mass of critical observations and judg- ments having the general character of the example just 21-i BY-WAY3 OF LITEKATUKE. given. Unless we can secure a change in teaching, which puts a check on brute l ogic , our speech must lose much that it has gained in the hands of the classically-educated few. "We have to begin, in a language, by accepting custom, or good usage. After much study, in the old age of a Methuselah we may understand a part of the mental processes and verbal experiments by wliich an idiomatic usage came to be. When we shut our eyes and let ourselves go, we go pretty safely. " Wheat is selling o^.the street ;" " his notes are discredited on the street," and " money is four per cent. o» the street," are examples of unconscious modern work which is well done. The first danger which was apprehended from popular use of literary English was the development of an American dialect. It was believed that in England the popular pressure was much less (being relieved by tho dialects) and the cultured classes much more influential. But there is as yet no sign of a great American dialect of English ; though the spohen lomguage does greatly differ in the twp cov/ntries. Another danger which was feared was (not one great continental dialect, of which we should be rather proud, but) a dozen or two of local dia- lects north, south, east, west, etc. ; and if as a people we abhor anything, it is a contemptible little localism in any- thing. We are too national to be a nation ;, for a nation is " many members of one body," each pegging away in its own locality to build the nation. Happily, there need be no serious fear of local dialects in this country ; those which have a certain rudimentary existence are not any such large popular institutions as the dialects of England. They are facts, but small facts having no well-defined character and no obstinate vitality. On the one hand, they only partially vary the spoken language ; are rather hints of coming comiption than OUR SPOKEK ENGLISH. 215 systematic and universal corruption. Even a Hoosier speaks prevailingly in the book-language. On the other hand, none of these dialectical tendencies are the out- growths of old, popular dialects. Making an exception here and there for a transplanted provincialism, most of our popular peculiarities are corruptions of book-words by people who did not inherit a low-born vernacular. The collision of languages in our country has developed some popular words which are not properly called dia- lectic, being nearly legitimate formations, . and passing readily into the written tongue. Hwiiker might be cited as an example. It might be added that the incessant in- termixture of our population by intermigration prevents the stagnation of any group of peculiarities into a ver- nacular for a province. It is difficult to see how a dialect can form under such conditions as ours,* and it is easy to believe that the old dialects of Europe must yield to the railroad and the schoolmaster. The breaking up of a popular idiom in dense communities, where most are little learned in books, where aU know their fellows from their youth up, and strange faces are rarely seen, is just such a task as the breaking up of a national speech. The Russian Empire, which has attempted the last in Poland would probably discourage our hope that Italy and Germany will succeed in the former. It is quite another matter for a dialect to form in a * Professor Whitney is very hopeful of American-English, but he seems to think the danger of dialects to be worth some attention. " This [variety of usage] needs only a change in degree to make it accord with the distinction between any literary language which his-, tory offers to our knowledge, and any less cultivated dialects whicl^ have grown up in popular usage by its side,- and by which it has been finally overthrown and supplanted. " But when before, in huriian history, did a literary language have a national field all, or nearly all, to itself ? — See " Language and the Study of Language, " p. 174. 216 BT-WATS OF LITEBATUBE. population whose elements are changing every year. Only a national speech, however badly it be treated, can serve as a means of communication among the inhabi- tants of a village peopled from all parts of a vast nation. In spite of the varieties of accent, the mixture in some sections of different languages, and the broadly marked peculiarities of other sections, we conclude that we neither have, nor can ever have, true dialects. In a few years you may listen vainly for Hoosier on the Wabash or the Ohio, and find all its peculiarities in every State of the Union, and many of them in that national litera- ture which we are promised. What we are to expect, and if possible avert, is the corruption of the literary language by every-day use on the tongaes of a hundred millions of people scattered over half the surface of the globe, and mostly knowing a large psirt of their words at first only from books or newspapers.* English orthoepy is already subjected to severe press- ure from the democracy, and it is doubtful whether the etymological canons will not have to yield to analogy established as a universal rule. So many people know how to read without knowing how to pronounce, our orthoepical principles are so entangling to moderate in- telligence, and the ignorant or half -educated may exer- cise such a constant pressure upon the educated few, that we are disposed to prophesy the victory of the people whenever they agree in opposing the scholars. If you wish to say roman'ce or demon' strate, you must daily fortify yourself against the influence of ro'mcm.ce and dem'onstrate hurtling into your ears from the popular tongue. Especially when words of foreign origin be- come an instrument of daily life, the pronunciation * I refer here to the whole English-tongued population of the world. OUB SPOKEIf ENGLISH. 217 founded upon analogy must prevail. Fmcmoe will be accented on tlie first syllable by ninety -nine in every hundred Americans in spite of all the dictionaries and scholars, and before they are aware the scholars will be heard imitating the people. So far popular influences may be highly useful. Historical pronunciation has its value to the scholar ; but the principle of analogy is of use to all speakers. What we want is to make and keep English the best tool for all the uses of speech. The his- tory of its parts printed on a spade adds nothing to its usefulness. There is a portion of history which is to be respected and a portion which is to be neglected and forgotten. It is worth considering whether the new popular con- ditions do not demand of scholars some effort to render our orthoepy more simple, to come at first gracefully to concessions of things which will in the end be won even over their most stubborn resistance. There is no statute of limitations beyond which a word cannot wear a for- eign accent. On one side, it parts with its brogue the next day after it gets into the newspapers ; on the other, it keeps up a pretence of foreign flavor for an indefinite period. Since we have no rule ourselves, why not adopt the popular one ? In most cases the foreign air is sadly parodied in our speech. What Frenchmen would recognize ourjmcm'ce ? It is neither French nor English ; we have hung it up in an orthoepical limbo, and will never have the courage to take it down. The people have naturalized it, and will force us to accept it as a citizen of the tongue. It is diSicult to see why one of these changes from foreign to English pronunciation is any more safe or proper for ex- tending through an indefiuite period, and being accom- plished only after a generation of scholars have wasted 218 BT-TVATS OF LITEEATUKE. their protoplasm in nervousness and indignation at "popular stupidity." "We have not yet fully comprehended that we are in a new world, which is not, and cannot be, governed by the few best speakers ; certainly not upon the old system. Pure models in actual speech and the dictionary wiU both fail to reach a multitude, educated in the common schools, rushing into mercantile and political life, and becoming in turn models for admiring friends and con- stituencies. How few of them will ever doubt the appli- cation of the principle of analogy, or, if they doubt, will have or take the time to consult a dictionary. Orthog- raphy is in the hands of one or two hundred publishers, and these can successfully resist the ravages of democracy in the written forms ; but the phonetic forms are under no such vassalage to any aristocracy. In this field, the most that is now possible is to call attention to the influ- ence of popular pronunciation, the difliculties of main- taining a heterogeneous orthoepy, and the apparent necessity of modifying our canons, for accent at least, so as to give a wider application to the law of analogy, especially for new or recently-introduced foreign words. A larger field is presented by the play of the laws of the decay and renewal of sounds in the English spoken in America. There is some vagueness in the use of the term pho- netic decay, resulting from its application to three quite distinct linguistic phenomena. If all cha"nge is decay, the resolution of a consonant into its elements, or, more strictly, its separation into two or more letters, may be called decay ; but whether it be a phonetic change is not absolutely settled, though it is probably such. In the Greek dis, and the Latin lis (Sanscrit dms), we prob- OUR SPOKEN- ENGIilSH. '219 ably have a labial and a dental developed from an older and more vague, of more complex, sound.* In tlie same way, a few early-formed consonants have furnished by their expansion and division the consonantal wealth of .modern tongues. This species of growth is so far removed from any proper decay that no case of it ought ever to be designated as an example of corruption. Another set of phenomena involves local phonetic loss without affecting the sound-volume of the language. ■When rondus becomes found, local decay carries off the syllable us ; but the sounds thus dropped from a word are retained in the speech, and local loss in the number of sounds is actually attended with an increment in force. Scholars have attached great importance to these local losses, and not without reason, for they are the pivot of growth and decay in language. What they have sometimes failed to do is to mark the distinction between phonetic change affecting the sound-shell, and change iii the intelligent contents of this shell. Max Miiller's use of the French adverbial particle rnent (Latin-, mente) shows such a confusion of widely different things, the change noticed having but slightly affected the vol- ume of sound of the word in French, and not at all in Italian and Spanish. What has occurred is a change of meaning and use, arising from forgetfulness of the orig- inal meaning. Ment (Latin, mente) has ceased to mean with the mind, and has become a symbol, just as like with us has passed into the meaningless ly. There is still another set of facts, of wider application and more difficult of treatment, relating to the loss and renewal of the sounds of a language. Changes begin- ning in the attenuation of sounds are carried forward by * See Gamett's "Philological Essays," p. 241. 220 BY-WAYS OF LITERATURE. tlie ■unconscious speakers until the phonetic elements eoncenied are pushed altogether out of the living tongue. These are true losses of phonetic wealth, even though they extend no farther than the subtilizing of our vocal implements. Unlettered dialects are probably protected by their poverty from being robbed by their speakers, who are believed to expend more energy upon their few sounds than is used by cultivated people upon the same elements. The ear is so easily deceived in this kind of induction, that one might challenge the claim for barbaric phonetic force, if it did not seem to rest on well-supported prin- ciples. Since only so much strength will be used for speaking, it is reasonable to assert that this force ex- pended on a few sounds will give them greater volume than can' be obtained when the same force is spread over a larger number. Besides, the barbarian or provincial peasant is believed to employ more energy in his vocal exertions than is employed in the elocution of his edu- cated neighbors. It is to be desired that linguistic acoustics were enough studied, and sufficiently fortified by trustworthy observations, to justify implicit confi- dence in these general principles, for upon them rests the theory that dialects regenerate the phonesis of cultivated languages. That the ruder dialects renew the w^ste of words in the more advanced, but still unwritten ones, is established upon a very wide induction ; but whether a quite modern form of waste, resulting from the prepon- derance of reading over speaking, and from other causes, is compensated by dialectic additions to vocabularies, and dialectic practice by their speakers, is a new question, dependent for its solution upon the relative strength, fulness, and volume of barbaric and provincial enuncia- OUB SPOKEN ENGLISH. 221 tion. If we are not to have dialects in this country, we cannot expect any help from this quarter — whatever forces may exist here. Do we find reasons for believing that our spoken Eng- lish is undergoing a process of gradual attenuation of its vocal elements, and how far is this decay compensated by regenerating influences ? It may be that the opposing forces keep matters in even balance, but ours will not for that reason be a profitless inquiry. If there be any pleasure in witness- ing a contest, it is when the combatants are well-matched, and, if we are concerned for either contestant, we shall probably seek to lend him some assistance. Tendencies in language are often arrested by attracting public atten- tion to what is going on. Some general statements of facts neglected by our grammars will help us to estimate the problem. The first in order is the deficiency of our written notation. Our twelve English vowels are rather clusters of sounds than atomic elements. We see this in the a group, con- cerning which it has been debated whether there are four, five, six, or seven versions, and it is pretty clear that the evidence for more than four would make a good case for seventy while vindicating Seven. There are two phonetic phenomena at the root of these diverging theo- ries, one of which is that every new consonantal accom- paniment slightly modifies the sound of the vowel, and the other is what the astronomers call the personal equa- tion. The same principles involve consonantal phonesis in a perpetual diversity. New combinations modify the sev- eral elements, and each man has his special rendering of all sounds, just as in a rural congregation every man may 233 BY-WATS OF LITERATURE. have a private notation for Mear or Dundee.* . Of course the range of diversity is very narrow, and seldom, passes the line beyond wliich it would be observed. It is only insisted tliat tie variation exists, and establishes instability in what may be figuratively called the molec- ular constitution of our words. Dr. Latham speculates upon the fate of sounds which have become unstable ; what destiny awaits a language all of whose phonal factors are already affected with instability ? One thing seems clear, that is to say, that the shghter, feebler, more subtile forms may readily take precedence, and even monopolize the speech, if there be in operation causes- tending to the diminution of the volume of sounds. The way is open for change ; no implacable lines of law hem in and protect the phonetic atoms ; each sound has already a great growth of resembling forms, and natural or artificial selection must do the rest. That such a result might occur, or rather that some change is to be expected, is sufficiently shown by the expansion of three or seven consonants into twenty or thirty in linguistic grovrth ; and that a selection may take place in the elements of a sound really compound, is proved by the case of his and dis, from dvis, already cited. It is rather suggested than asserted that another gen- eral principle may be applied to our phonesis with valu- able results. We know that barbarians usually have few * Instances of variation which are conceded may be cited. The Greek spirilus lenis is an aspirate generally omitted in notation. It occurs in ache, in sounding which a bubble of breath precedes the a. Our w and y in wet and yd are ooet and id, to which, when sounded rapidly, an aspirate is added. This slight aspirate we mark ; but in union the io takes on a stronger aspiration, which does not appear in our notation. OUK SPOKES ENSIJSH. 233 Sounds. The Polynesian dialects are given only seven or eiglit by the grammars, and so long as the people remain in a low intellectual condition we should not expect them to develop new consonants ; but, looking at the history of language,, we should expect civilization to enlarge their phonesis. "Well, then, does culture lead people to discriminate in sounds ? If it does induce division and increment, where does this tendency cease ? Leaving out individual defects of acoustic apparatus for testing sounds, we must conclude that,. since phonetic diflEerences are produced and perceived by the intellect of man making use of vocal- and hearing instruments, the more cultivated members of society must surpass the relatively ignorant in power to express a large phonetic notation. The complications of hereditary forces and early acquired habits are freely admitted. Still it may be believed that neither of these can permanently resist the backward movement of a language which, for other reasons, may be losing its phonetic wealth. If a people may rise from seven to twenty consonants through civil- ization, it cannot be doubted that they will return to seven? when they fully return to barbarism. How far the divergence of the many from the few in culture may affect phonetic expression is, of course, a matter of pure conjecture; that some divergence of phonesis will appear seems highly probable^ We have an unusual proportion of readers in our population ; but the really learned element is certainly not larger than in Germany, where the unlettered do not use the cultivated tongue. If we examine the facts we shall find that, although no. completely satisfactory induction is possible, there is in our dialectic forms a decided tendency to obscuration or neglect of sounds. The writer has known persons in whose speech a had but three pounds ; and 324 BY-WATS OF LITEKATUBB. every reader will bear witness that the sound of a in command is changed into another sound of the same letter by a large part of our population. The power to read does not confer the intellectual discrimination necessary for maintaining the integrity of phonal ele- ments. We have, then, a phonetic apparatus brought to its present range of expression by the intellectual action of man rising into culture, and this instrument is placed in the hands, or mouth, of a whole population unprecedentedly, but still imperfectly, educated. Will they play the whole tune f A proiitable subject for observation would be to col- lect evidence upon the question whether reduction of the number of consonants and vowels is not an element in some of our dialectical variations. With much less confidence that any useful result can follow inquiry, it is suggested that, since language never becomes so wholly artificial as to escape utterly fi-om the control of natural and intellectual laws, a transplanted phonesis may suffer from a change of natural and moral scenery. Man holds nothing simply because it has been once conquered from nature. Inventions, arts, and even languages have been lost. Our spoken English grew in another soil, its phonal music was learned in communion with other seas and mountains, and other climatic condi- tions favored the rendition by human organs of the sounds we are discoursing under new skies. Unhappily, we know less than we need to know how phonetic sys- tems suffered or expanded in the old migrations ; for it is open to a doubter to claim that the old alphabets do not cover the whole breadth of the phonesis. Some precious facts, precious even though not alto- gether pleasant, seem to vindicate a place for natural law in the current movement of language. American elocii- OUR SPOKKN ENGLISH. 225 tion is less round and fuU-volumed than English, and ours is almost universally marked hy a nasal quality un- known in the home-land of our tongue. It is amusing tahear the citizens of difiEerent sections accusing each other of a nasal twang' which is heard all over our country. The reduction of volume, especially in chest soxmds, and the play of our noses in our English, would seem to be capable of only one explanation, and that is, that they are a tribute paid to the empire of climate. The only other supposition is pure conjecture : that the collision of English in this country with many other tongues, the effect of these collisions reaching at length the whole body of our people — as with Dutch in New York, Ger- man in Pennsylvania, French in several sections, African dialects in the South, and Indian dialects everywhere — that these collisions might, by some unknown phonetic equation, develop a nasal element in our language. Even those changes which seem to be dependent upon our will are by no means under the control of caprice. All men naturally seek to reduce the exertions necessary to procure the satisfaction of their desires, or, to borrow from political economy, to buy in the cheapest market. It requires an effort to speak, and we observe here the same fact which appears in other fields of action, that man is not inclined to indulge in superfluous industry. If a combination is difficult, it is made easy by changing or omitting sounds. We have an example in si/rentli for strength. Take tliis series of steps toward facility : I do not know, I donH know, I don know, I'd 'now. If the last will buy the goods, it will be the common currency. Nothing is gained by calling this laziness ; men are not required to do works of supererogation in language any more than they are in religion. For colloquial pur- 326 BY-WATS OF LITERATURE. poses the shorter forms are preferable ; and we should hot complain of their use if they could be set aside, branded dialectic, and restrained from mixing in literary society. But our dialectic abbreviations hover constantly on the verge of the cultivated speech, and form in us habits of negligence, which appear in the graver forms of expression. The evil fruit is gathered, not only in the lax utterance of speakers, but also in the accustoming of all ears to accept a part of a word, or a part of a sound, for the whole ; in an intellectual refining of our speech down toward a barren symbolism. The moment we have reached a familiar acquaintance with the attenu- ated skeletons, we begin to loathe the full-fleshed and living harmonies as a kind of rant or affectation. An example of a progress toward phonetic loss, at- tended with a repugnance to full enunciation, is afforded by the sound v, which has altogether lost with us its full rolling power. A faint shadow remains in our pronunci- ation of initial and final r's, but in medial positions it is now rarely heard at all. Lord, word, are uttered as though r had become a vowel ; and the worst of it is, that these phonetic sinners are often people who ought to know better.* But the worst feature of the case is, that a full r is unpleasant to our ears, being associated by some with vulgar bogs, being painful to most by its boisterous noisiness. And as to the sound r, it is worth remember- ing that many of the dialects of the American Indians lack it also ; a suggestion of the possible influence of cli- mate in modifying vocalization. * The statement in the text is too favorable to our pronunciation of final r' s. Eoar is rendered roah ; and one of our popular maga- zines once published a poem, with a chorus, in which the rhyme required a final r to stand for the sound of a in fall. OUR SPOKEN- ENGLISn. 227 The use of a literary speedi for the liousehold life of millions of people is an experiment, all the results of which cannot be wholesome. The volume of our pho- netic elements must be affected by force of the general principle, that the needs of domestic life are satisfied by a narrower phonesis, and therefore the tendency must be steadily toward loss or attenuation, as well as by the operation of special home influences among our people. On the rule that we do not habitually make needless vocal exertions, family life requires a minimum of phonal breadth. The effects of isolation and fanailiarity, of common sympathies and employments, find their fullest result in the dialects of tribes ; similar conditions in our house- holds, taking up, as they do, a very large share of our lives, cannot be exactly similar, for we start with a different intellectual capital ; but the effects will ap- pear somewhere in our speech. We may learn where to expect them by examining some less close associations. A company of carpenters, working together and con- vei-sing about the technical matters of their trade, will unconsciously reduce their vocal efforts in technical terms to a minimum, and the inexpert would catch only a part of the sounds. But if one of these carpenters were required to speak with a person ignorant of the trade, he might quite unconsciously give a more distinct rendering of such terms ; but this would depend upon the strength of his careless habits. A sailor, on the other hand, says hos'n, and scarcely recognizes a landsman's hoatswam as the same word. The effect of these class associations is to cut down the words and sounds to the merest skele- tons, not to say shadows. Now in a. larger way home-life attenuates the phonesis of our people, especially of our children. , Many forms 328 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUKE. of speech have often to be repeated, and become so familiar that fractions of them will represent the whole. Take a book and ask a child to read from another copy while you follow by the eye, and you will not need that he shall speak distinctly, for yon know what he should say. In a similar way, we listen knowing what is to come, and stimulating our friends to hasten by significant signs that we are going faster than their tongues. So our vocal efEorts insensibly fall to the actual necessities of the fireside. Another element of this household corruption of speech is oar familiarity with the habits of speech and intonations of the persons with whom we pass most of our lives. The principle involved may be tested by a public speech. If we listen to one person weekly for years, onr attention is less and less strained as we grow accustomed to his voice and elocution. A stranger in the same place will ask more attention without being less distinct in enunciation. The grammatical order of words, usually nearly invariable, also economizes atten- tion in the household. The principle cuts a lai'ge figure in the formation of varieties in dialects.* A Swiss hotel servant will speak any European language with a fault- less intonation ; but he has really only learned a set of sentences by rote, and if you change the order of his words or your own he is immediately put to confusion. What is called "Pigeon-English" in China and San Francisco shows a yet more helpless dependence upon * Dififerences between closely related dialects are largely made np of simple changes in the order of words, or the substitntion of com- mon words for each other, the phenomena of phonesis being identical throughout the group. The Genoese group is an illustration of this fact ; and yet the inhabitants of conterminous valleys, or burghs, cannot speak with each other without a sense of difQcultyf OUR SPOKESr ENGLISH. 239 the recurrence of certain terminal sounds. In the family, children certainly learn words ; but they also learn to look for them in set combinations, and to under- stand them when half uttered. The household competes with the rostrum and the ■ pulpit for the honor of fixing the standard of energy in utterance. Where dialects prevail in the family, thie standard of correct taste is left to be maintained by public speaking of various kinds, in which the mere fact that many are to be addressed induces phonetic exact- ness. Italian is but slightly if at all affected by home use ; it is only a public dress for thought, and the pre- cision and exacting accuracy with which it is delivered is almost painful, and seems unnatural to foreign ears. It is nothing more, however, than the strange phenome- non of a whole and unmutilated phonesis being habit- ually reproduced. Contrast our own usage, which is so far short of this exacting precision that any speaker who should utter each sound distinctly would be listened to with pain and accused of affectation. Popular use of English in the family, and elsewhere, has probably pro- duced this dislike of a full phonesis by familiarizing us with a kind of phonal symbolism in which a part repre- sents perfectly the whole. "Why should men make use- less efforts ? If dipped coins pass current, who will pay a premium for unmutilated dollars ? The tendency of popular usage to diminish volume of utterance is shown by some phenomena attending the learning of a foreign speech. One may perfectly master French under a teacher in New York, and yet be quite at a loss to under- stand the French heard in social life in Paris. The in- structor unconsciously, or of set purpose, cultivates a full phonetic expression, such as is heard in the best public speaking. But only fractions, larger or smaller, of these 330 BT-WATS OF LITERATURE. phonetic elements are used by Frenchmen ; the stranger must learn to take a part for the whole before fepoken French will become intelligible. Foreigners, in -what- ever strange land they may wander, complain that the natives speak indistinctly. Even Italian, when used for conversation, loses some of its phonetic richness ; and if it ever becomes the social speech, even of the better half of the nation, its vowelled magnificence must decline. Another neglected orthoepical phenomenon facilitates the ravages of carelessness in speaking English. At an early stage in a language there are commonly several canons of good taste which have about equal impor- tance ; but, by a kind of volitional-natural selection, some one of these takes the supreme place of law, and tends to destroy all the others. This stress point of orthoepy is seldom, if ever, the same in two really dis- tinct speeches. In Greek, it probably lay in the peculiar- ly perfect system of accentuation ; in Latin the prosod- ical value of the vowels was, without much room to doubt, the field of cultivated stress. In Italian, the fulness of the vowels takes precedence of other canons ; and in English, what we call accent devours aU other rules. One of the most obvious facts is. that popular usage exaggerates the point of stress whenever it is simple enough to be popularly used at all. Genoese vocal ex- pression is in this way a parody on the stress point of Italian, a reckless contempt of the rights of consonants being one of its features.* This tendency appears in English in the increasing laxity of the prommciation of the unaccented syllables, * Genoese elides the consonants, without blending the vowels, and four rowels are sometimes uttered one after the other in the same word. Besides, these Towels are as plump as Tuscan wheat. OUK SPOKEN ENGLISH. 231 accompanied by an increase of accentual stress. It is a common observation that vowels not under the accent lose their distinctive quality. Initial vowels suffer least, preserving in some cases (as ache) their proper sounds, but in others (as accept and except) falling into confusion before a consonant favored with the accentual preroga- tive. But, in the medial and final positions, popular pronunciation has no mercy for the individuality of vowels ; they are all consigned to the limbo of a univer- sal u. The identity of the spoken word seems to be passing into the accent, and, if this be placed where we are accustomed to find it, all the rest of the word is taken in fractions of sounds. The stress of English orthoepy is wonderfully simple and convenient for popular use ; and, if proper care be taken in our public schools and colleges to counteract the tendency here noticed, we may congratulate ourselves on this happy facility of popularization ; but should these tendencies continue at their recent rate of progress, we may lind ourselves in the year 1950 with a national dia- lect rather than a national speech ; or, if the statement be preferred, a spoken English departing much more widely from its orthographical brother. The universal diffusion of newspapers and books is another new fact in the history of languages, and the first and most marked results of this influence will appear in the English spoken in America. The period over which the action of this force has extended is so brief, that any discussion of it must partake of the nature of speculation. That considerable consequences must ap- pear is evident. Most languages have spent their lives chiefly upon human tongues, rarely passing into literature at all, and then only for a very restricted form of exist- ence. The ear has' shaped, guided, and preserved their 333 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUKE. development. And in the outcome every language must submit to acoustic predominance.* But our language is addressed very largely to the eye ; and it is this which renders orthographical classicism so very easy, for all have a common interest in the conser- r vation of familiar fonns.f But the contrast presented between Old English and our American speech, ev^en in spelling, raises an expectation of wide-reaching con- sequences. Beyond this, we must advance by specu- lating upon the value and significance of a few facts ; and any one may lawfully expound the facts in another and more hopeful manner. The independence of the eye in reading is established only by much practice. From passages in the Latin rhetoricians, one may doubt whether the eye had ob- tained this emancipation among the educated classes at Rome. We observe that a child needs to repeat his words to his ear in order to understana them , anS older persons of very little education seem io require the same acoustic aid to intelligence. The power to read silently is acquired by practice, and most readers of newspapers have mastered the diflSculty. But when this power has been acquired, do the two renderings, oral and visual, subsist independently ? Certainly not, at first. An at- tentive self-observer may detect a kind of mufiied whis- per going on while the eye runs over the symbols of sounds. It has been maintained that this mind-reading * That is to say, whenever a spoken tongue or dialect departs ■widely from its orthography, a literature may be expected in the pop- ular branch, and the classic will pass away. I Orthographical (by a natural blunder often called phonetic) reform is resisted by an overwhelming majority of those who form public opinion, and the democracy are here conservative. If you doubt, print books in a reformed spelling and see whether the masses will buy them. OUR 8POKEK ENGLISH. 233 13 always a reproduction of the sounds to the mental ear — ^the sounds are fancied, and if they are not the reading is interrupted. "Whether this be universally and neces- sarily true is of course a matter for faith. "We do ob- serve, however, that we unravel tangled places by read- ing aloud or consciously muttering the different passages. Practically, however, the eye acquires independence of the eai', and the written language becomes a mere symbolic notation divorced from any consciously known relation to sounds. The apparent necessity of oral ex- pression is a fruit of habit, and passes away whenever Yocal exercise is wholly relinquished for a considerable period. If, therefore, a people read more than they speak, it would seem to follow that the spoken and written lan- guage would more and more separate ; the latter becom- ing a notation for the eye, and the former ceasing to be under the control of the literary orthography. Even if the habit of reading cannot extinguish the phonetic accompaniment, it certainly can and does attenuate it, and the results in this case must be as disastrous as in that of total loss of a mental phonesls. These are some of the reasons for supposing that our American English is losing orthoepic volume, and that, if the forces at work to produce decay are not arrested or checked, or balanced by counter-agents, the national speech will more and more separate from the old stand- ards, lay aside vocal elegance and compass, and become a popular dialect, with the novel peculiarity of being tho speech of a continent.* The task of phonetic degeneration is usually performed * In a recent address, Professor Whitney is reported to have ex- pressed the opinion that there is just now au apparent tendency to increase of vocal energy. 234 BY-WAYS OF LITEKATUKE. by dialects, which locally renew by furnishing new compounds for those which have been corrupted to the verge of annihilation, and replenish the volume of pho- nesis by the interaction of dialect and language pronun- ciation. The dialect usually has fewer sounds with fuller volume, and, when its words pass into the lan- guage, they carry, and for some time retain, their wealth of lusty energy,* just as foreign words keep for some time their old accents. The effort to speak these words wiU extend to others, and so swell out the volume of the sounds affected. What one dialect does for one class of sounds, another may do for another class, and thus a living force, springing out of dialects, constantly renews the wasting literary speech. English at home, that is, in England, is surrounded by a family of dialects which, doubtless, act powerfully against decay of phonetic energy. The dialect diction- aries give us from 20,000 to 40,000 words now in use in the dialects of England, and not in use in the language. The words of English proper do not nmnber 40,00 0, for teclmicaTterms and the most recent additions to the- lan- guage are not, phonetically speaking, truly English. They are not yet under the phonetic regimen of our tongue. Here, then, is another English speech of almost equal etymol^Dgical extent surrounding the literary tongue and pressing up into its society. These dialects, taken together, cover the whole range of English pho- nesis, and express it with more strength. Those who speak these rude vernaculars learn the book-language, * If it should be claimed that the theory of barbarian wealth in a narrow phonesis is not established, we should fall back upon the fact, chiefly operative in modem life, but equally applicable to dialects in. teriningling at any period, that a foreign word requires more vocal effort than a native word. This is solid ground. OUK SPOKEN ENGhrSH. 235 and bring to its expression the energy whicli the dialects i-equire of^ their voices. The influence of their example extends to others, and gradually to all, and dialect words from time to time enter the book-English and re-enforce its sounds. It is probably true that the uneducated classes speak with more force over a smaller range of sounds than the educated classes. In other words, that a dialectic phone- sis will always prevail among those who know little or nothing of books. If this be true, then we shall see how the non- reading classes do for us in this country what the. dialects do for the English — counteract in some de- gree the decay of our pronunciation. It is not meant that such a countervailing force is equal to the destructive force. Probably all the oppos- ing forces do not match the destructive in our American- English. If they did so the decay would be unob- served. But this is not the only barrier put up in this country against phonetic lapse. English is here subjected to a greater external pressure than in England. All the lan- guages of the civilized world are imported by their speakers, and brought into living contact with the Eng- lish. Dutch, German, and French have from the first contested the ground with the language of the Pilgrim Fathers, and in some sections they have taken a place in the etymology. Portions of New York are covered by Dutch influences, and a class of true dialect words arise out of this fact. In portions of Pennsylvania German has been long spoken with similar consequences. The German spoken there does not perhaps act sensibly upon English etymology, but it does act on English phonesis. In Louisiana and other parts of the Union, and in Canada, French lias been spoken longer than English, 236 BY-WAYS or literature. and it influences both etymology and orthoepy.* These cases would once have been local, and would have pro- duced no marked effect on the rest of the country ; but in our day rapid and incessant intercommunication spreads them over the entire land. The Indian dialects have doubtless done more for us than we know. The earliest periods of our history were marked by considerable intercourse between the savage and his invading oppressor. The names taken from the aborigines were at first sounded in imitation of them, and to this day they lay an unwonted tax on our vocal organs. Old inhabitants of Chicago expend more exer- tion upon that name than their children do. We have thus far referred only to languages which have been in the country from the first, and to fruits of these early struggles between them and our language ; but the immigration of Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Kelts, Spaniards, Eussians, Poles, Turks, and Chinese must be affecting the phonesis at this moment to an extent which we cannot hope to measure. The total phonesis of the race seems represented in these languages, which, brought to our shores, by foreigners, are spoken by them for a generation or two side by side in the same mouths, and in curious interrqixture of etymology and phonesis with English. If, then, dialectic regeneration acts feebly with us, foreign regeneration — if an awkward term be allowed — exercises a much greater force than dialects usually do. Even in England this foreign element is very strong. The different branches of Kelts contribute each a quota oi phonetic force. The Scotch Highlanders, the Welshj the Manxmen, the Irish, bring into English pronuncia- * Add African dialects in the Southern States. OUil SPOKEN- ENGLISH. 237 tion the energy and breadth of their own mother dialects. ' But this is not all ; London is more picturesque in the nationalities of its people than New York. To represen- tatives of all the peoples who come to us she adds natives of her antipodal possessions — Hindoo doctors and Aus- tralian peasants. But we not only receive immigrants representing all other countries, we also travel and learn the speech of other nations, and in our own mouths reverse the process of our new citizens to produce the same result. And this last fact must' be taken into ac- count as acting in every direction and upon all tongues. In an early age two tribes having four consonants each, by uniting, doubled their phonetic wealth. In our age cultivated tongues, by interchange, make common stock of the phonesis of mankind. Commerce and literary enterprise stimulate men to learn the languages of each other, and the number of persons who can speak two or three is perhaps doubled every year. There is, in every country, a set of men who speculate upon the probable triumph of their own tongue over all others. They usually know nothing of philology, and little of any other than their own tongues ; but it is worth while to notice what effects do" actually follow the rapid intercommunication of peoples. It is not the extension of the territory of one speech so much as the enrichment of the vocabularies of all, and the less, apparent, but not less certain, enrichment of the phonesis of all. And in this interchange it is the free traders who will triumph. The language which borrows most, which most rapidly absorbs the linguistic wealth of its neighbors, will most nearly realize the dream of a uni- versal language. The tongue which refuses to part with its gold for foreign goods because it believes the gold of more value than the goods, will not profit by the com- 238 BY-WAYS OF LITERATUKE. merce of language, or extend the boundaries of its em- pire. Englisli has ever beien a voracious consumer of foreign vocables. If it continued to devour the speech of every people it might, if it did not burst in the effort, become universal by swallowing all others. This much is certain, that for a long period to come the incessant action of foreign phonesis upon ours will help repair the ruin made by those decaying forces which are eating out the heart of our sound-system. The influence of classical study and classically-derived nomenclature upon our phonesis ought not to be omitted. The iirst invigorates the phonesis of all scholars, and in- directly affects all speakers. The second is even more powerful. The number of persons who are interested in these studies is large, and the words given them to speak are numerous and sufificiently difficult of utterance. Some readers may furnish an unconscious support for this argument by inquiring whether, after all, it is not the prerogative of a higher civilization with a vast litera- ture to dispense with a full phonetic system. One might reason that only the arts of oratory and poetry are strictly dependent upon orthoepy, and that these are already sickly, and probably destined to pass away with the diffusion of books and their culture. What orator can compete with a newspaper, and what promise is there of a crop of poets ? But such speculations, though ever so plausibly supported, depart so far from the plain world in which we live, and imply such an immense ad- vance along the whole line of civilization, that it is hardly safe to found optimistic hopes upon them. Our spoken English is the theatre of a great conflict, in which it has already lost orthoepical wealth. Whether these lossee are the beginning of widespread ruin, the OUR SPOKEN ENGLISH. 339 first steps toward a national dialect, and thereby to a new- written tongue, and the loss of the treasures contained in the classic speech^ depends upon the relative strength of the destructive agencies and those re-enforcements of the regenerating army which have entered the field too recently to have proved their prowess. NOTE D. Reform in English Spelling. The best scholars — especially those who pnrsne lin- guistic studies — favor a reform in our English orthogra- phy. Professor A. H. Sayee, in his " Introduction to the Science of Language," -writes : * " It is needless to enlarge here upon the practical evils of this curious system of symbolic expression, which obliges a child to learn by heart the spelling of almost every separate word in the dictionary, the consequence being that at least forty per cent, of the children edu- cated in our board-schools leave school unable to spell, and so, little by little, neglect to read or write at all, and fall back into the condition of their illiterate forefathers. Dr. Gladstone estimates that the money cost of teaching this modicum of learning in the elementary schools ' considerably exceeds £1,000,000 per annum,' and that in Italy, where the spelling is phonetic, a ' child of about nine years of age will read and spell at least as correctly as most English children when they leave school at thir- teen, though the Italian child was two years later in be- ginning his lessons. ' Nor need we do more than allude to the vicious moral training afforded by a system that makes irrational authority the rule of correctness, and a letter represent every other sound than that which it pro- fesses, or to the difficulty thrown in the way of learning * Vol. ii. p. 343, KEFOEM IN EKGLISH SPELLUSTG. Ml to speak a foreign language by the dissociation between sound and symbol to which the child has been accus- tomed from his earliest years. The language of the ear hag to be translated into the language of the eye before it is understood, and this is it -which makes the English and the French notoriously the worst linguists in Europe. The inadequacy of English spelling is exceeded only by that of Gaelic, and in the comparative condition of the Irish and Scotch Gaels on the one side, and the Welsh Cymry on the other, we may read a lesson of the prac- tical effects of disregarding the warnings of science. Welsh is phonetically spelled, the result being that the Wekh, as a rule, are well educated and industrious, and that their language is maintained in full vigor, so that a Welsh child has his wits sharpened and his mind opened by being able to speak two languages, English and Welsh. In Ireland and Scotland, on the contrary, the old language is fast perishing, and the people can neither read nor write, unless it be in Enghsh. " Professor Sayce considers the want which the world is trying to express in clamor for a spelling reform to be too large to be met by a so-called phonetic spelling of English. He says : * "To speak of spelling reform, however, is really to speak inaccurately. What is wanted is not a reformed spelling, which though it may approximately represent our present pronunciation, would become an antiquated abuse in the course of a generation or two, but a re- formed alphabet. For practical use, an alphabet of forty characters would sufficiently represent the principal varieties of sound heard in educated speech, each charac- ter, of course, denoting a distinct: sound, and one distinct ♦ Vol. ii. p. 347. 242 BT-WArs or litekatuhe. sound only. Tho scientific philologist woTild liare his own alphabet, ■whether Prince L. L. Bonaparte's, Mr. Melville Bell's, Mr. A. J. Ellis's, or Mr. Sweet's, for marking the minute shades of difference in English Bounds, as well as those sounds which do not occur in tho * Queen's English,' or in any form of English at alL But the practical phonetic alphabet, of which Mr. Pit^ man's, notwithstanding certain imperfections, may well serve as a model, would prove an inestimable benefit both to the educator and to the philologist. The child, on the one hand, would have to commit to memory only forty symbols and their values in order to know how to read and write, while the philologist would be able to discover the peculiarities of individual and dialectal pro- nunciation, as well as the changes undergone by sounds in a given number of years. But in order that a re- formed alphabet may have the support of the scientific philologist it is necessary that it should be international, that is to say, should assign to the symbols of the vowels (and wherever possible of the consonants also) the pho- netic powers they possess in the ancient Latin alphabet, and, generally speaking, in the modern and continental alphabets as well. The comparative philologist will gain but little, if any, help from an alphabet in which a, for instance, continues to have the value given to it in mane, or i the value given to it in T. The reformed alphabet must be based on a scientific one." These suggestions of Professor Sayce involve some doubtful matters. In Itahan, for instance, it would seem almost impossible to spell incorrectly ; but I per- sonally know that incorrect spelling abounds in Italy. I have had in my hands thousands of Italian letters abounding in the most wonderful variations from estab- lished orthography. Mr. George P. Marsh used to say BEFOBM I2Sr BNGLISH SPELLING. 343 that Italian experience was a strong proof of tlie fallacy of the argument that " phonetic orthography" makes it easy to spell correctly. Here is a fa,ct against a theory. Probably a man with two tongues is richer than a man ■with one in some cases / the subordination of one tongue to the other is a condition to be secured. A man with two mother tongues is likely enough to have no mother tongue — not to understand either. The Piedmontese are, many of them, in this case (speaking both French and Italian), and good observers compassionate their poverty. There cannot be two languages to think and feel with — to murmur xmconsciously when one meditates, and to speak with when the heart utters itself — but the second language may nourish thinking by its suggestiveness, while it is an instrument for social or commercial inter- changes with foreigners. INDEX, Accent, Englisb and French, 203 ; Eng- lish and Greek, 230 ; Latin, 19S. Adjectives, 193. AunED, King, 169, 176, 183, 20T. Ancbbn Eiwle, 12. Anqlo-Sazon, 36, 39, 84, 56, 93. Antont, Marc, 142, 147. Abchskt, Old English, 77. Abhold, Thomas, 117, 135. Abthubi King, 73, 84, 90. Abticlb, The, 190, 196, 210. AscHAU, Eoger, 33. AuavsTiHB the Monk, 179. B. Bacoh, Boger, 45. Bacon, Nicholaa, 43. Baixadb, English, 69, 80, 84 Basque, 36. Bertha, Qneen, 180. Bible, The, 13. 83, 138. Blackhobe, Mr., author of "Loma Doohe," 82. Boccaccio, 135. BoLETH, Sir Thomas, 42. Bokba, King, 74. Book for women, 10. Bofs, Edacation of, 86, 89, 44, 62, 69. BBiaAHDAGE, Italian, 86. Bbioht, John, 135. Bbutus, 144, 156, 158. C. CiESAB, Jnlins, 140, 155, 164. Calpubnia, Csesars wife, 142. Cahtebbttbt Tales, 113. Case, 188, 204. Cassius, ISO. Caxton, 9. CiOEBO, 148, 303, 210. Chaucxb, 111, 114, 132. Child, Professor, 70, 72. Childben flogged, 82 ; sent from home, 85. Christian ideal, 166. Chubch, Dignitaries bf , 76. Cleanliness, English, 52. Cliuate affecting sounds, 324, 382. Colleges, Origin of, 49, 65. CoHUONS, Living in, 57. Countbt life, 134. CllUSADEBS, 111. Danes, !)1, 178. Democbact iu speech, 312. Dialects, 313, 3.34, 386. Dials, The Seven, London, B& DiAVOLO, Era, 73. DiBDiN, Dr., 71. Dbess, Feminine, 19. Druidisu, a new, 80* Dbunkbnnbss, 29. Dutch, 173. E. Eablt English Text Society, B, 25. Eablb, Mr., 306, 309. Education, Eonses of, 40, 56 : Co-, 64, 66 ; Cost of, 44. 66. EsTFT, Mandeville's description of, 115. Enqlishmbn, 37, 52. 84, 92, 178. English langna?e, 30, 3.5, 40, 185. Epic of King Arthur, 106. Ebabmus, 62. euskablanb, 26, 91, 170, FAiTH-CtriiES, 119. Foundations, Educational, 40. FouNDBBS of English literature, 108. Fbance, Gentle manners of, 33. FSENCH language, 168, 196 ; learning to speak, 229 ; peoplCj 168, 304 ; roman- ces, 110. Frodde. J. A., 61, 83, 139. FmrarVALL, Mr. F, J., 85, 44, 53, 96. 246 JUDEX. Gakfielb, President, 14, 38. Gabibalui, 73. Gbndeb, 204. Gkofprst of Monmonlh, 97. GiBLS, 3i, 36, m. Gospels, Wyclifs, 116. Gbeatnbss, Shakeepeaie on, 133. Grkuk language, 210. Gkzek litcmturc. 111; sociefies, 38; study of, 6". Grauuar, Changes in, 193 ; Imperfect, 191 ; positional, 188. Gbeqort's pastoral care, 183. Grigsblda, Patient, 136. Grey, Lady Jane, 33. Quest, Dr., 96. H. Hereford, Bible translation, 128. HERODOTirs, 118. HOMIB, 7.3, 83. 90, 111. HoHiLiSTS, Old English, 182. Hood, Hobin, 74, 77, 91. Hnoo, Colonel, 73. r. iTAiT, Southern, 73. Italian brigandage, 86. iTAiiiAH language, 196, 199. Iditjictioiib, 193, 204. Jahttabius, St., 119. Jos, Book of, 204. K. Kelts, 93, 170. Keltic language, 138. Khiokebbockers, Dntcb, 173. L. Laholakd, 112, 129. Lattdrt the Knight, 10. Lansuase, Abbreviation of, 227 ; Goth- ic, 169 : collisions of, 225 ; Italian, 110, 200; French, 168, 196; Greek, 209; Old English, 174, 194 ; Latin, 168, 190, 194, 200 ; Provan9al, 187, 200. Latih people, 29. Life in cities, 134. LiNCOLir, Abraham, 157. London, English of, 120, 186. Ltdsate the poet, 49. M. Madoisna, Legends of the, 100. Mandbtille, Sir John, 113, 117. Mannino, Cardinal, 29. Marriage, Pecuniary view of, 62. Marsh, Geo. P., 99, 12.3, 128. Michel, Dan, 169. Milton, John, 106. Monasteries, 42, 48, 57. More, Sir Thomas, 41, 44. N. Names, Geographical, 175. Nature, Love of, 75, 80. Nennius, 97. Normans, 25, 94. Norm AN- La TIN, 121. NOBTHTJMBRIA, Civilization of, 176, 181. Nose, The, 18. Nouns, Cases of, 190, 193. OLTMPns, Deities of. 1-39. Old times, 29; English, 168, 1-74, 191 1 English people, 178, 181. Orthoepy, English, 216. Outlawry, Pbpalar, 82. Oxford University, 44, 66, 127. Pastor, Agnes, 31 ; Letters, 31, 45. Percy, Bishop, 69. Pearson, Charles H., 96. Phonetic decay, 218. Piers Ploughman, 117, 13Q. Poetry, Decline of, 114. Portia, wife of Brutus, 163. Possessive case, 188. PoLTHESiAH dialects, 223. Prater for the dead, 14: to Virgin Mary, 13 ; to the saints, 13. Priests as scholars, 13 ; households of» 43. Protestantism, 25, 76. Prov^ncai, romances, 110; language,. 199. Pronoticiation, Popular, 217. Psalms, 83. PuRHET, Bible reviser, 128. B. B., loss of the sound, 226. Beading, Excess of over hearing, 231 ; by ear, 238. Befinbment, 12. Beformation, The, 11, 35, 76. 120. '■ Belation of England," 35, 39. Bhetoric, 205. Religion, 16. Romances, French, 110 ; Bound Table, 111 ; Italian, 110. INDEX. 847 s. Satoe, Prof. A. H., 18S, 240. Satubdat Review, 30. Shaikp, Principal, 210. SHAEESPKA.BB, 138, 114, 176, 183. SCANDINATIAHS, 93, 110. Schools, Monastic, 48 ; Catbedral, 48. Sxxss, Separation of, in schools, 58, 64, 68. Spksch, Plainness of, 13, 137 ; reducing efforts In, 225. Sfsixihs, English. 203; Italian, 242. Sthtax by position, 206. T. Tknutsok. Alfred, 92, 307. Tikes, Medlseval, 13 ; old, 29. Tbbipt, Decay oi, 30, TRiBSs.Lost, 170. TURNBK, tihuroii, 05. Tthsale, 805. W. Welsh, Keltic, 99 ; mannscripta, 104. WmTGiTT, 47. WiLLiAUs College, 88. ■Widows, 63. WiTBS of irreligions husbands, 22; lieepers of keys, 31 ; thrif tful, 31 ; obedience of, 18 ; sins of, 20. WOMIH, 9, 60, 65. Words, Lost English, 169, 176 ; old and new, 176. WOBDSWOBTH thO pOCt, 210. Wbiqht, Thomas, 96. WtolO', 11, HI, 124, 129, 205. 249 THE STANDARD LIBRARY. WHAT BBPBESENTATIVB CLEBGYMEN SAY OF IT. Chas. R. Hall, D.D., Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, says : " Great book monopolies, like huge railroad syndicates, are now the mo- narchical relics against which the benevolence and radicaiiBm of the age, from different standpoints, are bound to wage war. 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