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 ENGLISH 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT
 
 ENGLISH 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT 
 
 BY 
 
 RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D.D. 
 
 ARCHBISHOP 
 
 FOURTEENTH EDITION 
 
 REVISED AND IN PART REWRITTEN 
 
 BY 
 
 A. L. MAYHEW, M.A. 
 
 JOINT-AUTHOR OF ' THE CONCISE MIDDLE ENGLISH DICTIONARY* 
 
 LONDON 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, & CO., i PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1889
 
 { T%e tights of translation and of reproduction are reserved)
 
 T7Ze. 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE PRESENT EDITION. 
 
 IT is exactly thirty years ago since I was 
 first introduced to Trench's ' English Past 
 and Present' I remember the day as if it was 
 yesterday — it was some day in June 1859 — 
 when my schoolmaster, Charles Pritchard, the 
 present Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 
 the University of Oxford, put into my hands 
 ' English Past and Present,' not as a class-book, 
 but as a book recommended for private reading. 
 The book (the third edition, revised) lies before 
 me at the present moment, having been care- 
 fully treasured as a precious relic of the past. 
 I have to thank Charles Pritchard for many 
 good things, but especially for having introduced 
 me to this book. I have always looked upon 
 this event as an epoch in my life. For English 
 ' Past and Present ' opened my eyes to a new 
 world — the fascinating World of Words. I was 
 
 630495
 
 vi Preface. 
 
 made to see that every word has a history, and 
 that the history of many of our common every- 
 day words is as eventful and romantic, as full of 
 human interest, as the external history of nations 
 and dynasties. 
 
 With this intense personal interest in this 
 little book it gave me great pleasure to under- 
 take at the publishers' request the task of re- 
 vising it. Apart from personal considerations 
 I felt that the book had strong claims to be 
 kept before the public as a text-book on the 
 English language. It is the work of a man of 
 extensive learning, conversant with many lan- 
 guages and many literatures, and endowed with 
 an exquisite literary taste. The numberless 
 examples and illustrations cited in these pages 
 are not culled from dictionaries or philological 
 works, they are the result of the author's wide 
 reading extending over nearly a whole lifetime. 
 Down to very nearly the close of his long and 
 useful life the Archbishop was revising and 
 correcting and adding to this and his other 
 philological books. With him the 'study of 
 words ' was always a beloved study. 
 
 A few words will describe what has been 
 done by the reviser in the present edition. An 
 attempt has been made to purge the book of all
 
 Preface. vii 
 
 false or doubtful etymologies ; a great number 
 of corrections have been silently made in the 
 text and in the notes in small matters of detail. 
 Some portions of the book have been rewritten, 
 and there have also been added passages in the 
 text, as well as some footnotes. All portions 
 rewritten and all editorial additions, whether in 
 the text or in the notes, are inclosed in square 
 brackets. Hearty thanks are due to Prof. Skeat, 
 who has most kindly revised the proofs, and 
 has suggested many important corrections, 
 especially in matters pertaining to the period 
 of Chaucer and Piers Plowman. It is hoped 
 that the new edition may contain as little as 
 possible that may be inconsistent with the im- 
 portant discoveries in philology in these latter 
 days. The following is a list of authorities 
 referred to in the editorial additions. 
 
 Cotgrave : French and English Diet., 1673. 
 
 Darmesteter : The Life of Words, 1886. 
 
 Davies : Supplementary English Glossary, 1881. 
 
 Douse: Gothic of Ulfilas, 1886. 
 
 Halliwell : Diet, of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1874. 
 
 Kluge : Etymologisches Worterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 
 
 1888. 
 Kluge, N. S. : Nominale Stammbildungslehre, 1886. 
 Matzner : Altenglisches Worterbuch [A — I], 1888. 
 Mayhew and Skeat : Concise Diet, of Middle English, 1888. 
 Nares : Glossary, 1876. 
 
 a
 
 viii Preface. 
 
 N. E. D. : New English Diet., ed. Murray, [A— CASS]. 
 
 Oliphant : The New English, 1886. 
 
 Promptorium : ed. Way, Camden Soc., 1865. 
 
 Shakspere : Schmidt's Lexicon, 1875. 
 
 Sievers : An Old English Grammar, ed. A. S. Cook, 1SS7. 
 
 Skeat : Diet, of English Language, 1S84. 
 
 Wright- Wiilcker : Vocabularies, 1884. 
 
 Yule: Hobson-Jobson, Anglo-Indian Words, 1887. 
 
 A. L. MAYHEW. 
 
 Wadham College, Oxford 
 1S89.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The English Vocabulary r 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 English as it might have been .... 47 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 Gains of the English Language .... 92 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 Gains of the English Language— continued . . 144 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 Diminutions of the English Language . . 192 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 Diminutions of the English Language— continued 253 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 Changes in the Meaning of English Words . 296
 
 Contents. 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 I' AGE 
 
 Changes in the Spelling of English Words . 331 
 
 Index of Subjects 377 
 
 Index of Words and Phrases .... 383
 
 ENGLISH 
 
 PAST AND PRESENT. 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 THE ENGLISH VOCABULARY. 
 
 ' A VERY slight acquaintance with the history of 
 JL\. our own language will teach us that the speech 
 of Chaucer's age is not the speech of Skelton's, that 
 there is a great difference between the language under 
 Elizabeth and that under Charles the First, between 
 that under Charles the First and Charles the Second, 
 between that under Charles the Second and Queen 
 Anne ; that considerable changes had taken place 
 between the beginning and the middle of the last 
 century, and that Johnson and Fielding did not write 
 altogether as we do now. For in the course of a 
 nation's progress new ideas are evermore mounting 
 above the horizon, while others are lost sight of and 
 sink below it : others again change their form and 
 aspect : others which seemed united, split into parts. 
 And as it is with ideas, so it is with their symbols, 
 words. New ones are perpetually coined to meet the 
 demand of an advanced understanding, of new feelings 
 that have sprung out of the decay of old ones, of ideas
 
 2 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 that have shot forth from the summit of the tree of 
 our knowledge ; old words meanwhile fall into disuse 
 and become obsolete ; others have their meaning 
 narrowed and defined ; synonyms diverge from each 
 other and their property is parted between them; nay, 
 whole classes of words will now and then be thrown 
 overboard, as new feelings or perceptions of analogy 
 gain ground. A history of the language in which all 
 these vicissitudes should be pointed out, in which the 
 introduction of every new word should be noted, so 
 far as it is possible — and much may be done in this 
 way by laborious and diligent and judicious research 
 — in which such words as have become obsolete 
 should be followed down to their final extinction, in 
 which all the most remarkable words should be traced 
 through their successive phases of meaning, and in 
 which moreover the causes and occasions of these 
 changes should be explained, such a work would not 
 only abound in entertainment, but would throw more 
 light on the development of the human mind than all 
 the brainspun systems of metaphysics that ever were 
 written.' 
 
 These words are not my own, but the words of a 
 greatly honoured friend and teacher, who, though we 
 behold him now no more, still teaches, and will teach, 
 by the wisdom of his writings, and the remembered 
 nobleness of his life. They are words of Archdeacon 
 Hare. I have put them in the forefront of my 
 lectures ; anticipating as they do, in the way of mas- 
 terly sketch, all or nearly all which I shall attempt 
 to accomplish ; and indeed drawing out the lines of 
 very much more, to which I shall not venture to put
 
 I. Love of Our Own Tongue. 3 
 
 my hand. At the same time the subject is one which, 
 even with partial and imperfect handling, will, I trust, 
 find an answer and an echo in the hearts of all whom 
 I address ; which every Englishman will feel of near 
 concern and interest to himself. For, indeed, the love 
 of our native language, what is it, in fact, but the love 
 of our native land expressing itself in one particular 
 direction ? If the noble acts of that nation to which 
 we belong are precious to us, if we feel ourselves made 
 greater by the greatness, summoned to a nobler life by 
 the nobleness of Englishmen, who have already lived 
 and died, and have bequeathed to us a name which 
 must not by us be made less, what exploits of theirs 
 can well be worthier, what can more clearly point out 
 their native land and ours as having fulfilled a glorious 
 past, as being destined for a glorious future, than that 
 they should have acquired for themselves and for us 
 a clear, a strong, an harmonious, a noble language ? 
 For all this bears witness to corresponding merits in 
 those that speak it, to clearness of mental vision, to 
 strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them who have 
 gradually shaped and fashioned it to be the utterance 
 of their inmost life and being. 
 
 To know concerning this language, the stages which 
 it has gone through, the sources from which its riches 
 have been derived, the gains which it has made or is 
 now making, the perils which are threatening it, the 
 losses which it has sustained, the capabilities which 
 may be yet latent in it, waiting to be evoked, the points 
 in which it transcends other tongues, the points in 
 which it comes short of them, all this may well be the 
 object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may 
 we hope to be ourselves guardians of its purity, and 
 
 b 2
 
 4 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 not corrupters of it; to introduce, it may be, others 
 into an intelligent knowledge of that, with which we 
 shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial 
 acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who come after 
 us not worse than we received it ourselves. ' Spartam 
 nactus es ; hanc exorna,' — this should be our motto 
 in respect alike of our country, and of the speech of 
 our country. 
 
 Nor is a study such as this alien or remote from 
 the purposes which have brought us hither. It is 
 true that within these walls we are mainly occupied 
 in learning other tongues than our own. The time we 
 bestow upon it is small as compared with that bestowed 
 upon those others. And yet one of our main objects 
 in learning them is that we may better understand this. 
 Nor ought any other to dispute with it the first and 
 foremost place in our reverence, our gratitude, and 
 our love. It has been well and worthily said by an 
 illustrious German scholar, ' The care of the national 
 language I consider as at all times a sacred trust and 
 a most important privilege of the higher orders of 
 society. Every man of education should make it the 
 object of his unceasing concern, to preserve his lan- 
 guage pure and entire, to speak it, so far as is in his 
 power, in all its beauty and perfection. ... A 
 nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, 
 must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to every- 
 thing else. A nation which allows her language to go 
 to ruin, is parting with the best half of her intellectual 
 independence, and testifies her willingness to cease to 
 exist.' ' 
 
 ' F Schlegel, History of Literature, Lecture 10. Compare 
 what Milton has said on this matter : Verba enim partim inscita
 
 I. Duty to Our Own Tongue. 5 
 
 But this knowledge, like all other knowledge which 
 is worth attaining, is only to be attained at the price 
 of labour and pains. The language which at this day 
 we employ is the result of processes which have been 
 going forward for hundreds and for thousands of years. 
 Nay more, — it is not too much to affirm that processes 
 modifying the English which we now write and speak, 
 have been operating from the first day that man, being 
 gifted with discourse of reason, projected his thought 
 from himself, and embodied and contemplated it in 
 his word. Which things being so, if we would under- 
 stand this language as it now is, we must know some- 
 thing of it as it has been ; we must be able to measure, 
 however roughly, the forces which have been at work 
 upon it, moulding and shaping it into the forms, and 
 bringing it into the conditions under which it now 
 exists. 
 
 At the same time various prudential considerations 
 must determine for us how far up we will endeavour 
 to trace the course of its history. There are those 
 who may seek to trace our language to the forests of 
 Germany and Scandinavia, to investigate its relation 
 to all the kindred dialects that were there spoken ; 
 again, to follow it up, till it and they are seen de- 
 scending from an elder stock ; nor once to pause, till 
 they have assigned to it its proper place not merely 
 in that smaller group of languages which are immedi- 
 ately round it, but in respect of all the tongues and 
 
 et putida, partim mendosa et perperam prolata, quid si ignavos 
 et oscitantes, et ad servile quidvis jam olim paratos incolarum 
 animos haud levi indicio declarant ? I have elsewhere quoted 
 this remarkable passage at full [Study of Words, 20th edit. 
 p. 107;.
 
 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 languages of the earth. I can imagine few studies of a 
 more surpassing interest than this. Others, however, 
 must be content with seeking such insight into their 
 native language as may be within the reach of all who, 
 unable to make this the subject of especial research, 
 possessing neither that vast compass of knowledge, 
 nor that immense apparatus of books, not being at 
 liberty to yield to it that devotion almost of a life 
 which, followed out to the full, it would require, have 
 yet an intelligent interest in their mother tongue, and 
 desire to learn as much of its growth and history and 
 construction as may be fairly within their reach. To 
 such I shall suppose myself to be speaking. I assume 
 no higher ground than this for myself. 
 
 I know, indeed, that some, when invited at all to 
 enter upon the past history of the English language, 
 are inclined to answer — ' To what end such studies 
 to us ? Why cannot we leave them to a few anti- 
 quaries and grammarians ? Sufficient to us to know 
 the laws of our present English, to obtain an ac- 
 quaintance as accurate as we can with the language 
 as we now find it, without concerning ourselves with 
 the phases through which it has previously passed.' 
 This may sound plausible enough ; and I can quite 
 understand a real lover of his native tongue, who has 
 not bestowed much thought upon the subject, taking 
 up such a position as this. And yet it is one which 
 cannot be maintained. A sufficient reason why we 
 should occupy ourselves with the past of our language 
 is, that the present is only intelligible in the light of 
 the past, often of a very remote past indeed. There 
 are in it anomalies out of number, which the pure logic 
 of grammar is quite incapable of explaining ; which
 
 i. The Past Explains the Present. 7 
 
 nothing but an acquaintance with its historic evolu- 
 tions, and with the disturbing forces which have made 
 themselves felt therein, will ever enable us to under- 
 stand ; not to say that, unless we possess some such 
 knowledge of the past, we cannot ourselves advance a 
 single step in the unfolding of the latent capabilities 
 of the language, without the danger of doing some 
 outrage to its genius, of committing some barbarous 
 violation of its very primary laws. l 
 
 The scheme which I have proposed to myself in 
 these lectures is as follows. In this my first I shall 
 invite you to consider the language as now it is, to 
 decompose some specimens of it, and in this way to 
 make proof of what elements it is compact, and what 
 functions in it these elements severally fulfil. Nor 
 shall I leave this subject without asking you to admire 
 the happy marriage in our tongue of the languages of 
 the North and South, a marriage giving to it advan- 
 tages which no other of the languages of Europe 
 enjoys. Having thus before us the body which we 
 wish to submit to scrutiny, and having become ac- 
 quainted, however slightly, with its composition, I shall 
 invite you in my next to consider with me what this 
 actual language might have been, if that event, which 
 more than all other put together has affected and 
 modified the English language, namely the Norman 
 
 1 Littre (Hist, dela Langue Francaise, vol. ii. p. 485) : Une 
 langue ne peut etre conservee dans sa purete qu'autant qu'elle 
 est etudiee dans son histoire, ramenee a ses sources, appuyee a 
 ses traditions. Aussi l'etude de la vieille langue est un element 
 necessaire, lequel venant a faire defaut, la connaissance du lan- 
 gage moderne est sans profondeur, et le bon usage sans racines. 
 Compare Pellissier, La Langue Francaise, p. 259.
 
 8 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 Conquest, had never found place. In the lectures 
 which follow I shall seek to institute from various 
 points of view a comparison between the present Ian-' 
 guage and the past, to point out gains which it has 
 made, losses which it has endured, and generally to 
 call your attention to some of the more important 
 changes through which it has passed, or is at this 
 present passing. 
 
 I shall, indeed, everywhere solicit your attention not 
 merely to the changes which have been in time past 
 effected, but to those also which at this very moment 
 are going forward. I shall not account the fact that 
 some are proceeding, so to speak, under our own 
 eyes, a sufficient ground to excuse me from noticing 
 them, but rather an additional reason for so doing. 
 For indeed these changes which we are ourselves 
 helping to bring about, are the very ones which we 
 are most likely to fail in observing. So many causes 
 contribute to withdraw them from notice, to veil their 
 operation, to conceal their significance, that, save by 
 a very few, they will commonly pass wholly unobserved. 
 Loud and sudden revolutions attract and even com- 
 pel observation ; but revolutions silent and gradual, 
 although with issues far vaster in store, run their course, 
 and it is only when their cycle is nearly or quite com- 
 pleted, that men perceive what mighty transforming 
 forces have been at work unnoticed in their very midst. 
 
 Thus, in this matter of language, how few aged 
 persons, even among those who retain the fullest pos- 
 session of their faculties, are conscious of any serious 
 difference between the spoken language of their early 
 youth, and that of their old age ; are aware that words 
 and ways of using words are obsolete now, which were
 
 I. Changes Unnoticed. 9 
 
 usual then ; that many words are current now, which 
 had no existence at that time ; that new idioms have 
 sprung up, that old idioms have past away. And yet 
 it is certain that so it must be. A man may fairly be 
 assumed to remember clearly and well for sixty years 
 back ; and it needs less than five of these sixties to 
 bring us to the age of Spenser, and not more than 
 eight to set us in the time of Chaucer and Wiclif. 
 No one, contemplating this whole term, will deny the 
 greatness of the changes which within these eight 
 memories have been wrought. And yet, for all this, 
 we may be tolerably sure that, had it been possible to 
 interrogate a series of eight persons, such as together 
 had filled up this time, intelligent men, but men 
 whose attention had not been especially awakened to 
 this subject, each in his turn would have denied that 
 there had been any change worth speaking of, perhaps 
 any change at all, during his lifetime. It is not the 
 less certain, considering the multitude of words which 
 have fallen into oblivion during these four or five 
 hundred years, that there must have been some lives 
 in this chain which saw those words in use at their 
 commencement, and out of use before their close. 
 And so, too, of the multitude of words which have 
 sprung up in this period, some, nay, a vast number, 
 must have come into being within the limits of each 
 of these lives. 1 There are indeed times when from 
 one cause or another the change is so rapid as to force 
 
 1 See on this subject the deeply interesting chapter, the 23rd, 
 in Sir C. Lyell's Antiquity of Man, with the title, Origin and 
 Development of Languages and Species compared. I quote a 
 few words : ' Every one may have noticed in his own lifetime 
 the stealing in of some slight alterations of accent, pronuncia-
 
 io . The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 itself on the attention of thoughtful men, above all of 
 men whose training or occupation fits and predisposes 
 them for the observing of this. But there are few to 
 whom this is brought so distinctly home as it was to 
 Caxton, who writes, ' our language now used varieth 
 far from that which was used and spoken when I was 
 born. 5 Men are the agents, but for the most part they 
 are the unconscious agents of the mighty transforma- 
 tions in languages which, under their eye and by 
 their influence, are evermore going forward. 
 
 Nor is it hard on a little reflection to perceive how 
 this going and coming of words have alike been hid 
 from the notice of almost all. In the nature of things, 
 words which go excite little or no observation in their 
 going. They drop out of use little by little, no one 
 noticing the fact. The student, indeed, of a past 
 epoch of our literature finds words to have been freely 
 
 tion, or spelling, or the introduction of some words borrowed 
 from a foreign language to express ideas of which no native term 
 precisely conveyed the import. He may also remember hearing 
 for the first time some cant terms or slang phrases, which have 
 since forced their way into common use, in spite of the efforts of 
 the purists. But he may still contend that " within the range of 
 his experience " his language has continued unchanged, and he 
 may believe in its immutability in spite of minor variations. 
 The real question, however, at issue is, whether there are any 
 limits to this variability. He will find, on further investigation, 
 that new technical terms are coined almost daily, in various arts, 
 sciences, professions, and trades, that new names must be found 
 for new inventions ; that many of these acquire a metaphorical 
 sense, and then make their way into general circulation, as 
 "stereotyped" for instance, which would have been as mean- 
 ingless to the men of the seventeenth century as would the new 
 terms and images derived from steamboat and railway travelling 
 to the men of the eighteenth.'
 
 I. Gradual Disuse of Words.   I t 
 
 used in it which are not employed in his own ; and 
 these, when all brought into a vocabulary, an innu- 
 merable company, the dead in some departments of 
 the language almost or quite as many as the living. 
 But it was only one by one that they fell out of sight, 
 and this by steps the most gradual ; being at first 
 more rarely used, then only by those who affected a 
 somewhat archaic style, and lastly not used at all. 
 And as with the outgoers, so in a measure also is it 
 with the incomers. The newness and strangeness of 
 them, even where there is knowledge and observation 
 sufficient to recognize them as novelties at all, wears 
 off very much sooner than would be supposed. They 
 are but of yesterday ; and already men employ them 
 as though they had existed as long as the language 
 itself. Nor is it words only which thus steal out of 
 the language or steal into it, unobserved in their 
 coming and their going. It is the same with numbers, 
 tenses, and moods, with old laws of the language 
 which gradually lose their authority, with new usages 
 which gradually acquire the force of laws. Thus it 
 would be curious to know how many have noticed the 
 fact that the sign of the subjunctive mood is at this 
 very moment perishing in English. One who now 
 says, ' If he call, tell him I am out ' — many do say it 
 still, but they grow fewer every day — is seeking to 
 detain a mood, or rather the sign of a mood, which 
 the language is determined to get rid of. The 
 English-speaking race has come to the conclusion 
 that clearness does not require the maintenance of 
 any distinction between the indicative and subjunctive 
 moods, and has therefore resolved not to be at the 
 trouble of maintaining it any more. But the dropping
 
 1 2 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 of the subjunctive, important change as it is, goes on for 
 the most part unmarked even by those who are them- 
 selves effecting the change. On this matter, however, 
 I shall have by and by something more to say. 
 
 With these preliminary remarks I address myself 
 to our special subject of to-day. And first, starting 
 from the recognized fact that the English is not a 
 simple but a composite language, made up of several 
 elements, so far at least as its vocabulary is concerned, 
 just as are the people who speak it, I would suggest 
 to you the profit to be derived from a resolving of it 
 into its component parts — from taking, that is, some 
 passage of English, distributing the words of which 
 it is made up according to the sources whence they 
 are drawn ; estimating the relative numbers and 
 proportion which these languages have severally con- 
 tributed to it ; as well as the character of the words 
 which they have thrown into the common stock. 
 Thus, suppose the English language to be divided 
 into a hundred parts ; of these, to make a rough 
 distribution, forty-five might be Anglo-Saxon, or Old 
 English, as now some prefer to call them ; forty-five 
 Latin (including of course the Latin which has come 
 to us through the French) ; five perhaps would be 
 Greek. We should in this way have allotted ninety- 
 five parts, leaving the other five to be divided among 
 all the other languages which have made their several 
 smaller contributions to the vocabulary of our English 
 tongue. It is probable that, all counted, they would 
 not amount to this five in the hundred. 
 
 [Let me now set down in order some of these 
 naturalized miscellaneous words from various sources.
 
 i. Celtic and Scandinavian Words. 1 3 
 
 It would be impossible to attempt here an exhaustive 
 enumeration of them, but a small sample will be 
 sufficient to show what an important and serviceable 
 portion of our everyday working English they form. 
 We will take first the Celtic element, setting down 
 only a few of the most important words of Celtic 
 origin, and only mentioning those about which there 
 can be no doubt at all. It is very remarkable how 
 few of these Celtic words were introduced into the 
 oldest English. The English conquerors borrowed 
 but very few words from the Britons. 
 
 Many of the Celtic words here given have been 
 quite recently introduced into the language, and some 
 of them may perhaps not belong to the original Celtic 
 word-treasury. Here is the list: — 'bannock,' 'ban- 
 shee,' 'bard,' 'bawn' (enclosure), 'bog,' 'brock' (bad- 
 ger), 'brogues,' 'bugaboo,' 'cairn,' 'cantred,' 'caper- 
 cailzie,' ' cateran,' ' cistvaen,' ' clan ' (perhaps of Latin 
 origin), 'claymore,' 'colleen,' 'crag,' 'creel,' 'cromlech,' 
 'crowd' (fiddle), 'Culdee,' 'dolmen' (Breton), 'flan- 
 nel,' 'flummery,' ' gallow-glass,' 'gilly,' 'glen,' 'kern,' 
 'philibeg,' 'reel' (a Highland dance), 'shamrock,' 
 'shanty,' 'shillelagh,' 'slogan,' 'Tory,' 'usquebaugh' 
 ('whiskey'). 
 
 Let us now take the Scandinavian element. For 
 words of this origin we are mainly indebted to the 
 Danish settlements in the north of England, although 
 some are of comparatively modern introduction. For 
 example : — 'aloft,' 'anger,' 'awe,' 'awn,' 'bag,' 'bait' 
 (food), 'bang' (vb.), 'bask' (vb.), 'batten' (vb.), 
 'bloom,' 'bole' (stem of a tree), 'boon,' 'booth,' 
 'bound' (ready for starting), 'brink,' 'busk' (vb.), 
 'cake,' 'calf (of leg), 'call'(vb.), 'cast ' (vb.), 'clip'
 
 14 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 (vb.), 'cow' (vb.), 'crave' (vb.), 'crawl' (vb.), 'cross' 
 (from Latin probably through Irish), ' die ' (vb.), 
 ' droop ' (vb.), ' fell ' (mountain), ' fellow,' ' flat,' ' force ' 
 (waterfall), 'gad' (as in 'gad '-fly), 'geysir,' ' ghyll ' 
 (ravine), ' gust,' ' hap ' (chance), ' haven,' ' hit ' 
 (vb.), 'husband,' 'hustings,' 'ill,' 'irk' (vb.), 'jolly' 
 (through French), ' keg,' ' kid,' ' law,' ' lee ' (place 
 sheltered from the wind), ' leg,' ' lemming,' ' low ' 
 (adj.), 'mawk' (whence 'mawkish'), 'meek,' 'mire,' 
 'narwhal,' 'oaf (Icel. 'alfr'), 'odd,' 'plough,' 'race' 
 (a swift current), ' ransack,' ' rash ' (hasty), ' riding ' 
 (third part of shire), 'roan,' 'roe' (ova piscium), 
 'saga,' 'seat,' 'shirt,' 'skate' (the fish), 'skill,' 'skin,' 
 'sky,' 'sleight,' 'sly,' 'stern' (of a ship), 'stithy,' 
 'tarn,' 'thrall,' 'thrift,' 'thrust,' 'tike,' 'tungsten,' 
 'ugly,' 'Valhalla,' 'wall-eyed,' 'walrus' (through the 
 Dutch), 'wand,' 'want' (vb.), 'wapentake,' 'whirl' 
 (vb.), 'windlass' (Icel. ' vindil-ass '), 'window,' 
 'wreck,' 'wrong.' 
 
 Then too there are words of Dutch and Low 
 German origin, especially sea-terms, which have found 
 their way into English, as, 'avast,' 'beleaguer/ 
 'blunderbuss' (cp. Du. 'donderbus,' i.e. thunder- 
 gun), ' boer ' (in South Africa), ' boom,' ' boy ' 
 (Friesic), 'brandy' (cp. Du. 'brande-wijn,' i.e. burnt 
 wine), 'caboose,' 'cashier' (cp. Du. 'casseren'— from 
 the French), 'cruise,' 'deck,' 'dogger' (a fishing- 
 vessel), 'doit,' 'dollar,' 'foist,' 'freebooter,' 'girl' (cp. 
 O. Low Ger. ' gor '), 'groat' (O. Low Ger.), 'hoist,' 
 'hoy '(a ship), 'isinglass,' 'kilderkin,' 'kraal' (from 
 Sp. 'corral'), 'lack' (vb.), 'landscape,' 'lansquenet' 
 (through French), 'loiter' (vb.), 'measles,' 'minx,' 
 'mud' (O. Low Ger.), ' orlop,' ' pink ' (a small boat),
 
 i. Italian Words in English. 15 
 
 'plunder' (O. Low Ger.), 'quacksalver' (whence 
 ' quack '), ' skates,' ' sketch ' (Du. ' schets ' from It. 
 'schizzo'), 'sloop,' 'smack' (fishing-boat), 'toy,' 
 'trigger,' 'tub' (Friesic), 'yacht.' 
 
 We have a goodly number of Italian words, as, 
 ' archipelago,' ' balcony,' ' baldachino,' ' balloon,' 
 'ballot,' 'bandit' ('bandetto' in Shaks.), 'battalia' 
 (in Shaks.), 'becco' (see Nares), 'belladonna,' 
 'biretta,' 'bona roba ' (in Shaks.), 'bordello' (in Ben 
 Jonson), 'botargo' (see N. E. D.), 'bravo,' 'bravura,' 
 'broccoli,' 'buffoon,' 'busto,' 'cameo,' 'campanile,' 
 ' cantata,' ' canto,' ' canzonet,' ' caricature,' ' carnival,' 
 'cartoon,' 'casino,' 'catacomb,' 'cicerone,' 'contra- 
 band,' ' conversazione,' ' coranto ' (in Shaks.), ' cornuto ' 
 (see Nares, s. v. 'becco'), 'corridor,' 'credence' 
 (table), 'cupola,' 'curvet,' 'dado,' 'dilettante,' 'ditto,' 
 'doge' (Venetian), 'domino,' 'dragoman' (from 
 Byzantine Greek), 'ducat,' 'extravaganza,' 'fantasia,' 
 'fantastico' (in Shaks.), 'farfalla' (a moth— in Syl- 
 vester, see Davies), 'fiasco,' 'folio,' 'fresco,' 'gene- 
 ralissimo,' 'gondola,' 'gonfalon,' 'grotto' ('grotta' in 
 Bacon), 'gusto,' 'imbroglio,' ' impresa ' (device on a 
 shield — see Nares), 'innamorato,' 'influenza,' 'intaglio,' 
 'junket' ('juncate' in Spenser), 'lagoon,' 'lava,' 
 ' lavolta ' (a dance), 'lazaretto,' 'libretto,' 'macaroni,' 
 'madonna,' 'madrigal,' 'magnifico' (in Shaks.), 'mal- 
 grado' (see Nares), 'mandilion' (in Chapman), 'mani- 
 festo,' 'maraschino,' 'maroon' (the colour), 'mascarata' 
 (in Hacket), 'mezzotint,' ' motett,' 'motto,' 'mounte- 
 bank ' (It. ' monta in banco '), ' mustachio ' (in Shaks., 
 cp. 'mostaccio' in Ben Jonson), 'nuncio,' 'opera,' 
 'oratorio,' 'pantaloon,' 'pianoforte,' 'piaster,' 'piazza,' 
 ' poco curante,' 'portico,' 'regatta,' 'ridotto' (an
 
 1 6 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 evening entertainment in H. Walpole), 'rocket,' 
 'seraglio,' 'soda,' 'solo,' 'soprano,' 'stanza,' 'stiletto,' 
 ' stoccata ' (see Nares), 'stucco,' 'studio,' 'tarantula,' 
 'terracotta,' 'tint' (through Dutch), 'torso,' 'traver- 
 tine,' 'trillo' (in Butler), 'trombone,' 'tucket' (in 
 Shaks. = It. 'toccata'), 'tufa,' 'umbrella,' 'vermi- 
 celli,' 'viliaco ' (a scoundrel, in Ben Jonson), ' violon- 
 cello,' 'virtuoso,' 'vista,' 'volcano,' 'zany.' 
 
 The following Italian words came to us through 
 the French: — 'Alarm,' 'attitude,' 'bagatelle,' 'balus- 
 trade,' 'banquet,' 'brave,' 'brusque,' 'burlesque,' 
 'cadence,' 'canteen,' 'caprice,' 'capuchin' (through 
 French of the 16th century), 'cartouche,' 'cascade, 
 'catafalque,' 'cavalcade,' 'charlatan,' 'citadel,' 'colonel,' 
 'colonnade,' 'concert,' 'gabion,' 'gazette,' 'guitar,' 
 'madrepore,' 'paladin,' 'parapet,' 'pedant/ 'poltroon,' 
 'ruffian,' 'scaramouch,' 'serenade,' 'sonnet,' 'terrace,' 
 'vedette.' 
 
 Our words of Spanish origin are nearly as numer- 
 ous as our imported Italian words. It would be 
 nothing wonderful if they were more, for although our 
 literary relations with Spain have been slight indeed as 
 compared with those which we have maintained with 
 Italy, we have had other points of contact, friendly 
 and hostile, with the former much more real than we 
 have known with the latter. Thus we have from the 
 Spanish, ' albatross ' (in Drayton ' alcatras '), ' alferes ' 
 (ensign, see Nares), 'alguazil,' 'alligator ' ('el lagarto '), 
 'anchovy,' 'armada,' 'armadillo,' 'asinego,' 'bastinado,' 
 ' booby,' ' bolero ' (a dance), ' borachio' (Sp. ' boracho,' 
 a drunkard, see N. E. D.), ' bravado,' ' brocade/ 
 ' camarilla,' ' cambist,' ' camisado,' ' cannibal,' ' canyon' 
 (also 'canon'), 'carbonado,' 'cargo,' 'chapin' (in
 
 I. Spanish Words in English. 1 7 
 
 Massinger, see Nares, s.v. ' chioppine '), ' chinchilla,' 
 'cid' (from Arabic), 'cigar,' ' cockroach,' ' cuerpo ' 
 (see Nares), 'desperado,' 'don,' 'duenna,' 'eldorado,' 
 'embargo,' 'fandango ' (perhaps of W. Indian origin), 
 ' filibuster ' (of Teutonic origin), ' flota ' (the treasure- 
 fleet from the Indies), 'flotilla,' 'gala,' 'galleon,' 'gar- 
 rotte,' 'grandee,' 'guerilla,' 'hidalgo,' 'infanta,' 'in- 
 termese ' (in Evelyn, Sp. ' entremes '), ' jade ' (the 
 green stone), 'junto,' ' lagune ' (in Dampier), 'lasso,' 
 'manchineel,' ' maravedi,' ' matachin' (a sword-dance), 
 'matador,' 'merino,' 'morris' (Sp. 'morisco'), 'mos- 
 quito,' ' mostacho ' (in Florio), ' mulatto ' (probably 
 from Arabic), 'mustang,' 'olio,' 'ombre' (game at 
 cards), 'paragon,' 'parasol,' 'peccadillo,' 'picaroon' 
 (also 'picaro,' see Nares), 'pistacho,' 'platina,' ' pri- 
 vado' (in Fuller), 'puntillo' (now 'punctilio'), 'quellio' 
 (see Nares, Sp. 'cuello'), 'quintal,' 'ranch' (of Teu- 
 tonic origin), 'reformado' (see Nares), ' renegado ' (in 
 Massinger), 'salver' (Sp. 'salva'), ' sarsaparilla,' 'sas- 
 safras,' 'savannah,' 'sherry' (' sherris ' in Shaks.), 
 'silo,' 'stampede,' 'stevedore,' 'tornado,' 'vanilla,' 
 'zabra' (a Biscayan vessel, in Oldys). 
 
 Here we add some Spanish words which came to 
 us through the French, such as ' caracole, ' caravel,' 
 ' casque ' (a helmet), ' cochineal,' ' Creole,' ' doubloon,' 
 ' dulcimer,' ' farthingale ' (Fr. verdugalle in Cotgrave), 
 'grenade,' 'indigo,' 'jennet,' 'maroon' (a runaway 
 negro, Sp. ' cimarron,' so ' symaron ' in Hawkins), 
 'parade,' 'pavane' (a dance), 'saraband.' 
 
 We have a few Portuguese words, such as 
 'albino,' 'bayadere' (through the French), 'binna- 
 cle' (Ft. 'bitacola'), 'buffalo,' 'caste,' 'cobra,' 'cru- 
 sado ' (a coin, in Pepys), ' dodo ' (a Pt. form of an 
 
 c
 
 1 8 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 English word), 'emu,' ' fetish," flamingo,' 'gentoo,' 
 ' mandarin ' (from Sanskrit), ' marmalade,' ' moidore,' 
 'negro,' 'pagoda,' 'palanquin,' 'palaver,' 'pimento,' 
 'port,' 'tank,' 'verandah.' 
 
 A few words have reached us from Slavonic 
 nations. From Russia come 'drosky,' 'eland' 
 (through German), ' hetman ' (of Ger. origin, com- 
 pare ' hauptmann'), 'hospodar,' 'knout' (the Russian 
 word is of Scandinavian origin), ' kopeck,' ' mam- 
 moth' (of Tartar origin), 'morse,' 'rouble,' 'sable' 
 (through French), 'steppe,' 'tsar' (of Latin origin), 
 'ukase,' 'verst'. 
 
 From Poland we have 'britzka,' 'mazurka,' 
 'polka.' 
 
 ' Calash ' and ' howitzer ' are Bohemian, and 
 ' vampire ' is a Servian word. 
 
 We have a certain number of Hebrew words, most 
 of them due to the influence of the Hebrew text of 
 the Old Testament, or to the Rabbinical students of 
 the same ; as ' amen,' ' behemoth ' (this Hebrew word 
 is perhaps of Egyptian origin), 'cabala,' 'cherub,' 
 ' cider ' (through French, Latin, and Greek), ' cinna- 
 mon,' 'ephod,' 'gehenna' (through the Greek), 'halle- 
 lujah,' ' hosanna,' ' Jew,' 'jubilee,' 'leviathan,' 'manna,' 
 'Messiah," Pharisee,' 'Rabbi,' 'sabaoth,' 'sabbath,' 
 'sack,' 'Satan,' 'seraph,' 'shibboleth,' 'Talmud.' 
 
 Our Arabic words are more numerous. As the 
 Arabs were the chemists, astronomers, and arithme- 
 ticians of the middle ages, many of our arithmetical, 
 astronomical, and chemical terms are of Arabic origin. 
 Many plants, fruits, drugs, animals, and other articles 
 of commerce were first introduced to the notice of 
 Western Europe by Arab merchants. The names of
 
 Oriental Words. 19 
 
 these in many cases testify to the activity of the Arab 
 trader, as they are found to be either of pure Arabic 
 origin or non-Arabic words changed by passing 
 through the mouths of Arabs. Then we have also 
 many Arabic words designating the various institutions, 
 religious and political, of the Mohammedan world, as 
 well as the various objects of art and literature for 
 which the Arabs were famous. The following list will 
 give some idea of the varied character of the Arabic 
 words which were spread by the contact of war or 
 commerce through Western Europe : — 'Admiral,' 
 'alcohol,' 'alcove,' 'alembic' (ultimately from Gr. 
 aft/?i£), 'algebra,' 'algorithm,' 'alkali,' 'Allah,' 'am- 
 ber,' 'apricot ' (' abrecocke,' 'apricock' in Shaks., the 
 Ar. 'al-burquq,' ultimately of Latin origin), 'arrack,' 
 'arsenal,' 'artichoke," assassin,' ' azimuth,' ' barragan' 
 (a fine stuff), 'borax,' 'burnous,' 'cadi,' 'caffre,' 
 'caliph,' 'camphor,' 'carat' (perhaps of Greek origin), 
 'caraway,' 'cipher,' 'coffee,' 'cotton,' 'divan, 'dow' 
 ('dhow,' see Yule), 'elixir' (ultimately from Gr. 
 grjpov, dry), 'emir,' 'fakir,' 'fellah,' 'gazelle,' 'ghazi' 
 (warrior), 'ghoul,' 'giraffe,' 'hadji,' 'harem,' 'hegira,' 
 'henna,' 'hookah,' 'howdah,' 'imaum,' 'Islam,' 'jer- 
 boa,' 'jerreed,' ' kermes,' 'Koran,' ' lilac ' (of Persian 
 origin), 'lute,' 'magazine,' 'mamaluke,' 'marabout,' 
 'mask' ('masker' in Sir T. More), 'mattress,' 
 'minaret,' ' mohair,' ' monsoon,' 'mosque,' 'muezzin,' 
 'mufti,' 'mummy,' ' mussulman,' 'nabob,' 'nadir,' 
 'nizam,' 'ramadan,' 'rayah,' 'razzia' (an Algerian 
 form), 'rebeck,' 'saffron,' 'salaam,' 'senna,' 'sequin,' 
 ' sheik,' ' sherbet,' ' shrub,' ' simoom,' ' sirocco,' ' sirup,' 
 'sofa,' 'sugar' (from an Ar. form of Gr. aaKxapov of 
 Eastern origin), ' sultan,' ' sumach,' ' talc,' ' talisman ' (a 
 
 c 2
 
 20 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 charm — ultimately of Greek origin), ' talisman ' (a 
 learned man — see Yule, supplement), ' tamarind,' 
 'tarif,' 'ulema,' 'vizier,' 'wady, ; ' zenith,' 'zero.' 
 
 Of Persian words we have these : ' attar ' (also 
 'otto' — ultimately of Arabic origin, see N. E. D.), 
 'azure,' 'baksheesh,' 'bazaar,' ' bezoar,' 'calabash,' 
 'calender' (a mendicant dervish), 'caravan,' 'cara- 
 vanserai,' 'check' (through Arabic), 'chess,'' 'dervish,' 
 ' durbar,' ' firman,' 'houri ' (a Pers. form of an Arabic 
 word), 'jackal,' 'jasmine.' 'julep,' 'khedive,' 'lascar,' 
 ' lemon,' ' lime,' ' mirza ' (the common style of honour 
 in Persia), 'nylghau,' 'orange,' ' padishah,' 'peri,' 
 ' pillau,' 'pistachio ' (through It. ' pistacchio '), ' rook ' 
 (in chess), ' sash,' ' scarlet,' ' sepoy,' ' shah,' ' shawl,' 
 ' taffeta,' ' turban ' (of which ' tulip : is a variant), 
 'zemindar,' 'zenana.' 
 
 We have also several Turkish words, such as: 
 ' agha,' 'bashaw,' 'bergamot' (a kind of pear, see 
 N.E.D.), 'bey,' 'caftan,' 'caique/ ' caviare, 7 ' chibouk,' 
 ' chouse ' (' chiaus ' = interpreter in Ben Jonson), 
 ' dey,' 'horde' (of Tatar origin), 'janissaries,' ' kiosk,' 
 'odalisque,' 'ottoman,' 'pasha,' 'shabrack,' 'shagreen/ 
 ' uhlan,' ' xebek,' ' yataghan.' 
 
 The three following words are Hungarian : 'hussar,' 
 'shako,' 'tokay.' And we may mention two from 
 modern Greek, namely : ' caloyer ' (through French 
 from KaXoyrjpo^), and 'effendi' (through Turkish, 
 ultimately from Gr. av6evrrj<;). ' Gherkin ' is due to 
 the Byzantine ayyovpiov t coming to us by Russia, Bo- 
 hemia, Germany, and Holland (see Academy, No. 798). 
 
 But to look now farther abroad. The following 
 have come to us from India: 'avatar,' 'bangle,' 'ban- 
 yan,' 'bhang,' 'bungalow,' 'calico,' 'candy,' 'cheeta,' 
 'chintz,' 'chutny,' 'cowry,' ' dacoit,' 'dingy' (a boat),
 
 i. Words from the Nezv World. 21 
 
 'gamboge' (formerly 'camboge,' see Yule), 'Guicowar,' 
 ' jungle/ ' lac ' (of rupees), ' lac ' (in ' shell-lac '), ' lac- 
 quer,' ' lake ' (the colour), ' loot,' ' mandarin ' (through 
 Portuguese), 'nautch,' 'nirvana,' 'nullah '(see Davies), 
 'polo,' 'puggery,' 'punch' (the beverage), 'pundit,' 
 ' punkah,' ' rajah,' ' rajpoot,' ' rupee,' ' shampoo,' 
 ' shaster,' 'suttee,' 'thug,' 'toddy,' 'tom-tom.' These 
 are Tamil words: 'catamaran,' 'cheroot,' 'curry,' 
 ' mango,' 'mulligatawny,' 'pariah.' 
 
 The following come to us from Malay: 'amuck' 
 (as in the phrase ' to run amuck'), 'caddy,' ' cajuput,' 
 'cassowary,' 'cockatoo,' 'crease' (a dagger), 'gong,' 
 'gutta-percha,' 'junk,' ' lory,' ' mangostan,' 'ourang- 
 outang,' 'paddy,' 'proa' ('praw'in Herbert), 'rattan,' 
 'sago,' ' upas.' 
 
 ' Banxring' is Javanese (see N.E.D.), and 'bantam ' 
 is supposed to be named from the place Bantam in 
 . the north-west of Java. ' Bamboo ' is Canarese. 
 
 A few words have come to us from China, mostly 
 connected with the trade in tea, as ' bohea,' ' hong ' (a 
 warehouse), 'hyson,' 'kow-tow,' 'nankeen,' 'sampan' 
 (a boat), 'satin' (from 'Zaitun,' the name by which 
 Chinchew was known to Western traders in the middle 
 ages, see Yule), 'souchong,' 'tea,' 'typhoon.' 
 
 The words 'calpac,' 'khan,' are Tatar, 'koumiss' 
 is Mongolian, 'lama 'comes from Tibet, while 'bonze,' 
 ' soy,' 'tycoon ' have reached us from Japan. 
 
 And now to cross over to the New World. The 
 following are due to the aboriginal inhabitants of the 
 northern parts of North America: 'caribou,' ' manito ' 
 (a spirit, god), ' mocassin ' (Algonquin), ' mohawk,' 
 ' moose ' (Algonquin), ' papoose," pemican,' 'sachem,' 
 'sagamore,' 'samp,' 'skunk' (Algonquin), 'squaw'
 
 22 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 (Alg.), ' tomahawk ' (Alg.), ' totem,' ' wampum,' ' wapa- 
 too' (Oregon), 'wapiti' (Iroquois), 'wigwam' (Alg.) 
 The word 'catalpa' comes from Carolina and 'opos- 
 sum ' and ' racoon ' are Virginian. The following 
 are Mexican: 'axolotl,' 'cacao,' ' chilli,' ' chocolate, 
 ' cocoa,' 'copal,' 'coyote, 'jalap,' 'ocelot,' 'tomato. 
 These are Haitian : ' barbecue,' ' cacique,' ' canoe, 
 'cassava,' 'guaiacum,' ' hurricane,' 'iguana,' 'maize, 
 'manatee,' 'potato' ('botata'), 'tobacco,' 'yucca. 
 The following are Caribbean: Caoutchouc,' 'cayman, 
 'pirogue.' These came to us from the West Indies: 
 'hammock,' 'hominy,' while 'guava'is said to be a 
 Darien word. The following belong to South America: 
 'cayenne,' 'curare,' 'wourali' from Guiana, 'tolu'from 
 New Granada, and 'peccary' from Orinoko. Brazil 
 has given us 'acajou,' 'agouti,' 'buccaneer' (from 
 ' buccan,' a wooden framework on which meat was 
 smoked over a fire), 'ipecacuanha,' 'jaguar,' 'mandioc,' 
 'petunia,' 'tapioca,' 'tapir,' 'toucan.' We have from 
 Peru : ' alpaca,' ' ananas ' (also ' anana '), ' charqui ' 
 (compare 'jerked beef,' once 'jerkin beef), 'condor,' 
 'guano,' 'inca,' 'llama,' 'pampas,' 'puma,' 'quinine.' 
 The word ' taboo ' is of Polynesian origin, ' tattoo ' is 
 said to come from Tahiti ; 'pah' is the only word 
 which has reached us from New Zealand. The natives 
 of Australia will bequeath to us ' boomerang,' ' cooey,' 
 'kangaroo,' ' parramatta,' 'wombat.' 
 
 Finally, various African dialects have given us: 
 'assegai,' 'banana,' 'chimpanzee,' 'gnu,' ' quagga,' 
 ' yam;' 'zebra.'] 
 
 Now I have no right to assume that any among 
 those to whom I speak are equipped with that know- 
 ledge of other tongues which shall enable them to
 
 Its Varioiis Elements. 2 t, 
 
 -j 
 
 detect at once the nationality of all or most of the 
 words which they meet — some of these greatly dis- 
 guised, and having undergone manifold transforma- 
 tions in the process of their adoption among us ; but 
 only that you have such helps at command in the 
 shape of dictionaries and the like, and so much dili- 
 gence in the use of these, as will enable you to trace 
 out their birth and parentage. But possessing this 
 much, I am confident to affirm that few studies will 
 be more fruitful, will suggest more various matter of 
 reflection, will more lead you into the secrets of the 
 English tongue, than an analysis of passages drawn 
 from different authors such as I have just now pro- 
 posed. Thus you will take some passage of English 
 verse or prose — say the first ten lines of faradise Lost 
 — or the Lord's Prayer — or the 23rd Psalm ; you will 
 distribute the whole body of words which occur in 
 that passage, of course not omitting the smallest, 
 according to their nationalities — writing, it may be, 
 A over every Anglo-Saxon word, L over every Latin, 
 and so on with the others, should any other find room 
 in the portion submitted to examination. This done, 
 you will count up the number of those which each lan- 
 guage contributes ; again, you will note the character 
 of the words derived from each quarter. 
 
 Yet here, before passing further, let me note that 
 in dealing with Latin words it will be well also to 
 mark whether they are directly from it, and such 
 might be marked L 1 , or only mediately, and to us 
 directly from the French, which would be L 2 , or Latin 
 at second hand. A rule holds generally good, by 
 which you may determine this. If a word be directly 
 from the Latin, it will have undergone little or no
 
 24 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 modification in its form and shape, save only in the 
 termination. Lat. ' edictum ' will have become 
 'edict,' and 'factum' will have become 'fact,' but 
 this will be all. On the other hand, if it comes 
 through the French, it will have undergone a process 
 of lubrication ; its sharply defined Latin outline will 
 in good part have disappeared ; thus ' crown ' is from 
 ' corona,' but through the Anglo-French form 
 ' coroune,' found in Chaucer and other early English 
 writers; 'treasure' is from 'thesaurus,' but through 
 ' tresor ; ' ' emperor ' is the Latin ' imperatorem,' but it 
 was through ' empereur.' It will often happen that the 
 substantive has thus reached us through the interven- 
 tion of the French ; while we have only felt at a later 
 period our need of the adjective as well, which we 
 have proceeded to borrow direct from the Latin. 
 Thus 'people' is 'populus,' but it was old French 
 'pueple' first, while ' popular' is a direct transfer of a 
 Latin vocable into our English glossary ; ' enemy ' is 
 ' inimicus,' but it was first softened in the French, and 
 had its Latin physiognomy in good part obliterated, 
 while 'inimical' is Latin throughout; 'parish' is 
 ' paroisse,' but ' parochial ' is ' parochialis ; ' ' chapter ' 
 is 'capitulum,' but through the old French 'chapitre,' 
 while ' capitular ' is ' capitularis ; ' ' chair ' is old 
 French 'chaere,' Lat. 'cathedra,' but 'cathedral ' is 
 ' cathedralis.' 
 
 Sometimes you will find a Latin word to have been 
 twice adopted by us, and now making part of our 
 vocabulary in two shapes, each of these being doublet 
 of the other. There is first the older word, which the 
 French has given us ; but which, before giving, it had 
 fashioned and moulded ; clipping or contracting, it
 
 i. Double Adoption of Words. 25 
 
 • 
 
 may be, by a syllable or more, for the French de- 
 vours letters and syllables ; and there is the younger, 
 borrowed at first hand from the Latin. The num- 
 ber of these double adoptions, ' doublets ' as Skeat 
 names them, is not small. Thus ' abbreviate ' and 
 ' abridge ; ' ' adamant ' and ' diamond ; ' ' aggravate ' 
 and 'aggrieve;' 'asphodel' and 'daffodil;' 'bal- 
 sam ' and ' balm ; ' ' benediction ' and ' benison ; ' 
 ' blaspheme ' and ' blame ; ' ' cadence ' and ' chance ;' 
 ' calix ' and ' chalice ; ' ' captain ' and ' chieftain ; > 
 ' captive ' and ' caitiff ; ' ' chorus ' and ' quire ; ' ' coffin ' 
 and ' coffer ; ' ' compute ' and ' count ; ' ' concept ' 
 and ' conceit ; ' ' conduct ' and ' conduit ; ' ' dactyl ' 
 and 'date' (the fruit); 'desiderate' and 'desire;' 
 ' dignity ' and ' dainty ; ' ' dormitory ' and ' dorter ' 
 (this last common in Jeremy Taylor) ; 'estimate ' and 
 'esteem;' 'fabricate' and 'forge;' 'fragile' and 
 'frail;' 'faction' and 'fashion;' 'fidelity' and 
 ' fealty ; ' ' granary ' and ' garner ; ' ' fact ' and ' feat ; ' 
 ' hospital ' and ' hotel ; ' ' indurate ' and ' endure ; ' 
 'legal' and 'loyal;' 'major' and 'mayor;' 'male- 
 diction ' and ' malison ; ' ' native ' and ' naive ; ' ' ora- 
 tion ' and ' orison ; ' ' paganism ' and ' paynim ; ' 
 'paradise' and 'parvis;' 'paralysis' and 'palsy;' 
 ' pauper ' and ' poor ; ' ' penitence ' and ' penance ; ' 
 'persecute' and 'pursue;' 'phantasm' and 'phan- 
 tom ; ' ' potion' and ' poison ; ' ' probe ' and ' prove ; ' 
 ' quiet ' and ' coy ; ' ' radius ' and ' ray ; ' ' rapine ' and 
 ' ravine ; ' ' ration ' and ' reason ; ' ' regal ' and ' royal ; ' 
 ' redemption ' and ' ransom ; ' ' respect ' and ' respite ; ' 
 ' sacristan ' and ' sexton ; ' ' scandal ' and ' slander ; ' 
 ' secure ' and ' sure ; ' ' species ' and ' spice ; ' ' super- 
 ficies ' and ' surface ; ' ' theriac ' and ' treacle ; ' ' tract '
 
 26 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 • 
 
 and 'trait;' 'tradition' and 'treason;' 'viaticum' 
 and 'voyage;' 'zealous' and 'jealous.' I have in 
 the instancing of these, named always the Latin form 
 before the French ; but the reverse has been no doubt 
 in every instance the order in which the words were 
 adopted by us ; we had 'pursue' before 'persecute,' 
 'spice' before 'species;' 'royal' before 'regal,' and 
 so with the others. 
 
 [There are some doublets in modern English which 
 are due to the fact that we have the Latin word in 
 two forms, (i) as modified by its having come to us 
 through Anglo-Saxon, and (2) as borrowed at a later 
 period from Latin or Romanic : such are ' inch ' and 
 'ounce' from Lat. 'uncia,' 'minster' and 'monas- 
 tery' from Lat. 'monasterium,' 'mint' and 'money' 
 from Lat. 'moneta,' 'priest' and 'presbyter' from 
 Lat. 'presbyter,' 'shrine' and 'serine' from Lat. 
 'scrinium,' 'font' and 'fount' from Lat. 'fontem.' 
 The words 'bishop' (=Lat. 'episcopus') and 'dea- 
 con' (=Lat. 'diaconus') come to us from Anglo- 
 Saxon forms, but we have to borrow their respective 
 adjectives ' episcopal ' and ' diaconal ' directly from 
 the Latin. 
 
 Some doublets in our modern language are variants 
 from one original Teutonic source, different forms 
 coming to us either from two different dialects of Old 
 English, or even from two different Teutonic lan- 
 guages ;such are ' bough ' and ' bow ' (of a ship), ' deal ' 
 and 'dole,' 'dike' and 'ditch,' 'down' and 'dune,' 
 'elder' and 'older,' 'hale' and 'whole,' 'heathen' 
 and 'hoyden,' 'nock' and 'notch,' 'scale' (of a 
 balance) and ' shale,' ' screech ' and ' shriek,' ' ship ' 
 and 'skiff,' 'shirt' and 'skirt,' 'shred' and 'screed,'
 
 Double Adoption of Words. 27 
 
 ' shrew ' and ' screw,' ' thatch ' and ' deck,' ' thwaite ' 
 and 'doit,' 'tight' and 'taut,' 'wain' and 'wagon,' 
 ' wight ' and ' whit,' ' whirl ' and ' warble.' 
 
 We have some doublets which are variants of the 
 same original Romanic word ; such are ' ancient ' and 
 'ensign' (in Shaks.), 'cape' (headland) and 'chief,' 
 ' costume ' and ' custom,' ' cross ' and ' cruise,' 'dame ' 
 and 'duenna,' 'doge' and 'duke,' 'feeble' and 
 'foible,' 'influence' and 'influenza,' 'manure' and 
 'manoeuvre,' 'parson' and 'person,' 'puny' and 
 ' puisne,' ' paladin ' and 'palatine,' ' parole ' and ' para- 
 ble,' 'patron' and 'pattern,' 'porch' and 'portico,' 
 'renegade' and 'runagate,' 'taint' and 'tint,' 'ticket' 
 and ' etiquette,' ' valet ' and ' varlet,' 'wage' and 'gage,' 
 ' warden ' and ' g jardian,' ' warranty ' and ' guarantee,' 
 'wile' and 'guile,' 'wise' (manner) and 'guise.' 
 
 We may add that ' cipher ' and ' zero ' are forms 
 of the same Arabic word ; ' crowd ' and ' rote ' are 
 different adoptions of the same Celtic word ; and 
 ' zither ' and ' guitar ' are variants — the one German, 
 the other Italian — of the same Greek word.] 
 
 The explanation of this more thorough change 
 which the earlier form has undergone, is not far to 
 seek. Words introduced into a language at a period 
 when as yet writing is rare, and books are few or none, 
 when therefore orthography is unfixed, or being purely 
 phonetic, cannot properly be said to exist at all, have 
 for a long time no other life save that which they 
 live upon the lips of men. 1 The checks therefore 
 to alterations in the form of a word which a written, 
 and still more which a printed, literature imposes are 
 
 1 [This is rank heresy from the point of view of the modern 
 philologist.]
 
 28 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 wanting ; and thus we find words out of number alto- 
 gether reshaped and remoulded by the people who 
 have adopted them, so entirely assimilated to their 
 language in form and termination, as in the end to be 
 almost or quite indistinguishable from natives. On 
 the other hand, a most effectual check to this process, 
 a process sometimes barbarizing and defacing, even 
 while it is the only one which will make the newly 
 brought in entirely homogeneous with the old and 
 already existing, is imposed by the existence of a 
 much-written language and a full-formed literature. 
 The foreign word, being once adopted into these, can 
 no longer undergo a thorough transformation. Gene- 
 rally the utmost which use and familiarity can do with 
 it now, is to cause the gradual dropping of the foreign 
 termination : not that this is unimportant ; it often 
 goes far to make a home for a word, and to hinder it 
 from wearing any longer the appearance of a stranger 
 and intruder. 1 
 
 1 The French language in like manner ' teems with Latin 
 words which under various disguises obtained repeated admit- 
 tance into its dictionary,' with a double adoption, one popular 
 and reaching back to the earlier times of the language, the 
 other belonging to a later and more literary period, ' popular ' 
 and ' learned ' they have been severally called ; on which sub- 
 ject see Genin, Recreations Philologiques, vol. i. pp. 162-166 
 Littre, Hist, de la Langue Francaise, vol. i. pp. 241-244 
 Fuchs, Die Roman. Sprachen, p. 125 ; Mahn, Etymol. For 
 schung. pp. 19, 46, and passim ; Pellissier, La Langue Fran 
 caise, pp. 205, 232. Thus from ' adamantem,' ' aim ant 
 (lodestone) and ' adamant ; ' from ' captivum,' ' caitif,' ' chetif 
 and 'captif;' from ' capitulum,' ' chapitre ' and ' capitule ' (a 
 botanical term) ; from ' catena,' ' chaine ' and ' cadene ; ' from 
 'causa,' 'chose' and 'cause;' from 'consumere,' 'consommer 
 and ' consumer ; ' from ' decimare,' ' dimer ' and ' decimer ;
 
 Latin and Anglo-Saxon. 29 
 
 But to return from this digression. I said just now 
 that you would learn much from making an inventory 
 of the words of one descent and those of another 
 occurring in any passage which you analyse ; and 
 noting the proportion which they bear to one another. 
 Thus analyse the diction of the Lord's Prayer. Of 
 the seventy words whereof it consists only the follow- 
 ing six claim the rights of Latin citizenship — the noun 
 ' trespasses,' the verb ' trespass,' ' temptation,' ' deliver,' 
 'power,' 'glory.' Nor would it be very difficult to 
 substitute for any one of these an Old English word. 
 Thus for 'trespasses' might be substituted 'sins;' for 
 
 from ' designare,' ' dessiner ' and 'designer;' from 'factio,' 
 'facon,' 'faction' and 'fashion;' from ' fragilem,' ' frele ' and 
 • fragile ; ' from ' gehenna,' ' gene ' and ' gehenne ; ' from 
 ' homo,' ' on ' and ' homme ' ( = ' hominem ') ; from ' immuta- 
 bilem,' 'immutable' and ' inimitable ; ' from ' imprimere,' 
 'imprimer' and ' empreindre ; ' from ' ligare,' ' lier ' and 
 'liguer;' from 'medulla,' 'moelle' and the adjective ' me- 
 dullaire ; ' from ' ministerium,' ' metier ' and ' ministere ; ' from 
 ' monasterium,' ' moiitier ' and ' monastere ; ' from 'natalem,' 
 ' noel ' and ' natal ; ' from ' nativum,' ' naif and ' natif ; ' from 
 'pastor,' ' patre,' a shepherd in the literal, and ' pasteur 
 ( = ' pastorem ') in the figurative sense ; from ' parabola,' ' parole 
 and 'parabole;' from 'paradisian,' ' parvis ' and ' paradis ; 
 from ' pensare,' 'peser' and ' penser ; ' from ' peregrinum, 
 ' pelerin' and ' peregrin ; ' from ' pietatem,' ' pitie ' and ' piete ; 
 from ' rigidum,' ' roide ' and ' rigide ; ' from ' sacramentum, 
 ' serment ' and ' sacrement ; ' from 'sapidum,' 'sade' and 
 ' sapide ; ' from ' scandalum,' ' esclandre ' and ' scandale ; 
 from 'scintilla,' 'etincelle' and ' scintille ; ' from 'separare, 
 ' sevrer,' to separate from the mother's breast, and ' separer ; 
 from ' simulare,' ' sembler ' and 'simuler;' from ' sollicitare, 
 ' soucier ' and ' solliciter ; ' from ' strictum,' 'etroit' and 
 'strict ;' from ' vigilantem,' ' veillant ' and ' vigilant.'
 
 6 
 
 o The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 ' trespass ' ' sin ; ' for ' deliver ' free ; ' for ' power ' 
 ' might ; ' for glory ' brightness ; ' which would only 
 leave ' temptation ' about which there could be the 
 slightest difficulty. This is but a small percentage, six 
 words in seventy, or less than ten in the hundred; and 
 we often light upon a still smaller proportion. Take, 
 for example, the first three verses of the 23rd Psalm: 
 — ' The Lord is my Shepherd ; therefore can I lack 
 nothing; He shall feed me in a green pasture, and 
 lead me forth beside the waters of comfort ; He shall 
 convert my soul, and bring me forth in the paths of 
 righteousness for His name's sake.' Here are forty- 
 five words, and only the three in italics are Latin; 
 for each of which it would be easy to substitute one 
 of home growth ; little more, that is, than the pro- 
 portion of seven in the hundred ; while in five verses 
 out of Genesis, containing one hundred and thirty 
 words, there are only five not English, — less, that is, 
 than four in the hundred; and, more notably still, the 
 first four verses of St. John's Gospel, in all fifty-four 
 words, have no single word that is not English. 1 
 
 Shall we therefore conclude that these are the 
 proportions in which the Old English and Latin 
 elements of the language stand to one another ? Not 
 so ; the Old English words by no means outnumber 
 the Latin to the extent which the analysis of those 
 passages would seem to imply. It is not that there 
 
 1 On the numerical proportions between Old English and 
 Romance words in our present English, and the character and 
 value of the several contributions, see Pott, Ely in. Forsch. 
 vol. ii. part i. pp. 96-101. I certainly in former editions of 
 this book put the number of Romance words too low.
 
 Proportion of Latin and English. 31 
 
 are so many more Anglo-Saxon words, but that the 
 words which there are, being words of more primary 
 necessity, do therefore so much more frequently recur. 
 The proportions which the analysis of the dictionary, 
 that is, of the language at rest, would furnish, are very 
 different from those instanced just now, and which 
 the analysis of sentences, or of the language in motion, 
 gives. Thus if we analyse by aid of a Concordance 
 the total vocabulary of the English Bible, not more 
 than sixty per cent, of the words are native ; but in 
 the actual translation the native words are from ninety 
 per cent, in some passages to ninety-six in others. 1 
 The proportion in Shakespeare's vocabulary of native 
 words to foreign is much the same as in the English 
 Bible, that is, about sixty to forty in every hundred ; 
 while an analysis of various plays gives a proportion 
 of from eighty-eight to ninety-one per cent, of native 
 among those in actual employment. Milton gives 
 results more remarkable still. We gather from a Con- 
 cordance that only thirty-three in a hundred of the 
 words employed by him in his poetical works are of 
 
 1 See Marsh, Mamial of the English Language, Engl, ed., 
 p. 88, sqq. It is curious to note how very small a part of the 
 language writers who wield the fullest command over its re- 
 sources, and who, from the breadth and variety of the subjects 
 which they treat, would be likely to claim its help in the most 
 various directions, call into active employment. Set the words 
 in the English language at the lowest, and they can scarcely be 
 set lower than sixty thousand ; and it is certainly surprising to 
 learn that in our Bible somewhat less than a tenth of these, 
 about six thousand, are all that are actually employed, that 
 Milton in his poetry has not used more than eight thousand 
 words, nor Shakespeare, with all the immense range of subjects 
 over which he travels, more than fifteen thousand.
 
 9 2 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 o 
 
 Anglo-Saxon origin; while an analysis of a book of 
 Paradise Lost yields eighty per cent, of such, and of 
 U Allegro ninety. Indeed a vast multitude of his 
 Latin words are employed by him only once. 
 
 The notice of this fact will lead us to some impor- 
 tant conclusions as to the character of the words which 
 the Teutonic and the Latin severally furnish; and prin- 
 cipally to this: — that while English is thus compact in 
 the main of these two elements, their contributions 
 are of very different characters and kinds. The Anglo- 
 Saxon is not so much what I have just called it, one 
 element of the English language, as the basis of it. 
 All the joints, the whole articulation, the sinews and 
 ligaments, the great body of pronouns, conjunctions, 
 prepositions, numerals, auxiliary verbs, all smaller 
 words which serve to knit together and bind the 
 larger into sentences, these, not to speak of the gram- 
 matical structure, are English. The Latin may con- 
 tribute its tale of bricks, yea, of goodly stones, hewn 
 and polished, to the spiritual building; but the mortar, 
 with all which binds the different parts of it together, 
 and constitutes them a house, is English throughout. 
 Selden in his Table Talk uses another comparison; 
 but to the same effect : ' If you look upon the language 
 spoken in the Saxon time, and the language spoken 
 now, you will find the difference to be just as if a man 
 had a cloak which he wore plain in Queen Elizabeth's 
 days, and since, here has put in a piece of red, 
 and there a piece of blue, and here a piece of green, 
 and there a piece of orange-tawny. We borrow words 
 from the French, Italian, Latin, as every pedantic man 
 pleases.' Whewell sets forth the same fact under 
 another image: 'Though our comparison might be
 
 I. The Radical Constitution Teutonic. ^ 
 
 bold, it would be just if we were to say that the English 
 language is a conglomerate of Latin words bound to- 
 gether in a Saxon cement ; the fragments of the Latin 
 being partly portions introduced directly from the 
 parent quarry, with all their sharp edges, and partly 
 pebbles of the same material, obscured and shaped by 
 long rolling in a Norman or some other channel.' 
 
 This same law holds good in all composite lan- 
 guages ; which, composite as they are, yet are only 
 such in the matter of their vocabulary. There may 
 be a motley company of words, some coming from 
 one quarter, some from another ; but there is never 
 a medley of grammatical forms and inflections. One 
 or other language entirely predominates here, and 
 everything has to conform and subordinate itself to 
 the laws of this ruling and ascendant language. The 
 Anglo-Saxon is the ruling language in our present 
 English. This having thought good to drop its gen- 
 ders, the French substantives which come among us 
 must in like manner leave theirs behind them ; so too 
 the verbs must renounce their own conjugations, and 
 adapt themselves to ours. l ' The Latin and the French 
 deranged the vocabulary of our language, but never 
 its form or structure.' 2 A remarkable parallel to this 
 
 1 W. Schlegel {Indische Bibliothek, vol. i. p. 284) : Coeunt 
 quidem paullatim in novum corpus peregrina vocabula, seel 
 grammatica linguarum, unde petita sunt, ratio perit. 
 
 2 Guest, Hist, of English Rhythms, vol. ii. p. 108. ' Lan- 
 guages,' says Max Midler, ' though mixed in their dictionaries, 
 can never be mixed in their grammar. In the English dictionary 
 the student of the science of language can detect by his own 
 tests Celtic, Norman, Greek, and Latin ingredients : but not a 
 single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system 
 
 D
 
 34 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 might be found in the language of Persia, since the 
 conquest of that country by the Arabs. The ancient 
 Persian religion fell with the government, but the lan- 
 guage remained totally unaffected by the revolution, 
 and in its grammatical structure and organisation for- 
 feited nothing of its Indo-germanic character. Arabic 
 vocables, the only exotic words found in Persian, are 
 found in numbers varying with the object, and quality, 
 style and taste of the writers, but pages of pure idio- 
 matic Persian may be written without employing a 
 single word from the Arabic. 
 
 At the same time the secondary or superinduced 
 language, though powerless to force its forms on the 
 language which receives its words, may yet compel 
 that other to renounce a portion of its own forms, by 
 the impossibility which is practically found to exist 
 of making these fit the new-comers ; and thus it may 
 exert, although not a positive, yet a negative, influence 
 on the grammar of the other tongue. It has proved 
 so with us. ' When the English language was inundated 
 by a vast influx of French words, few, if any, French 
 forms were received into its grammar ; but the Saxon 
 forms soon dropped away, because they did not suit 
 the new roots ; and the genius of the language, from 
 having to deal with the newly imported words in a 
 rude state, was induced to neglect the inflections of 
 the native ones.' 1 
 
 of the English language. The grammar, the blood and soul of 
 the language, is as pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the 
 British Isles, as it was when spoken on the shores of the German 
 Ocean by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes of the Continent.' 
 
 1 J. Grimm, quoted in The Philological Museum, vol. i. 
 p. 667.
 
 I. Pttre Anglo-Saxon. 35 
 
 If you wish to make actual proof of the fact just 
 now asserted, namely, that the radical constitution of 
 the language is 'Saxon,' try to compose a sentence, let 
 it be only of ten or a dozen words, and the subject 
 entirely of your own choice, employing therein none 
 but words of a Latin derivation. You will find it im- 
 possible, or next to impossible, to do so. Whichever 
 way you turn, some obstacle will meet you in the face. 
 There are large words in plenty, but no binding power ; 
 the mortar which should fill up the interstices, and 
 which is absolutely necessary for the holding together 
 of the building, is absent altogether. On the other 
 side, whole pages might be written, not perhaps on 
 higher or abstruser themes, but on familiar matters of 
 every-day life, in which every word should be of Teu- 
 tonic descent ; and these, pages from which, with the 
 exercise of a little patience and ingenuity, all appear- 
 ance of awkwardness should be excluded, so that none 
 would know, unless otherwise informed, that the writer 
 had submitted himself to this restraint and limitation, 
 and was drawing his words exclusively from one sec- 
 tion of the English language. Sir Thomas Browne 
 has given several long paragraphs so constructed. 
 Here is a little fragment of one of them : ' The first 
 and foremost step to all good works is the dread and 
 fear of the Lord of heaven and earth, which through 
 the Holy Ghost enlighteneth the blindness of our sin- 
 ful hearts to tread the ways of wisdom, and lead our 
 feet into the land of blessing.' • This is not stiffer 
 than the ordinary English of his time. 2 
 
 1 Works, vol. iv. p. 202. 
 
 '-' What Ampere says of Latin as constituting the base of the 
 Frenc'.i {Formation de la langue franfaise, p. 196 , we may say 
 
 D 2
 
 36 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 But because it is thus possible to write English, 
 foregoing altogether the use of the Latin portion of 
 the language, you must not therefore conclude this 
 latter portion to be of little value, or that we should 
 be as rich without it as with it. We should be very far 
 indeed from so being. I urge this, because we hear 
 sometimes regrets expressed that we have not kept our 
 language more free from the admixture of Latin, and 
 suggestions made that we should even now endeavour 
 to restrain our employment of this within the narrowest 
 possible limits. I remember Lord Brougham urging 
 upon the students at Glasgow that they should do their 
 best to rid their diction of long-tailed words in ' osity ' 
 
 of Anglo-Saxon as constituting the base of our present English : 
 II ne s'agit pas ici d'un nonibre plus ou moins grand de mots 
 fournis a notre langue ; il s'agit de son fondement et de sa sub- 
 stance. II y a en francais, nous le verrons, des mots celtiques 
 et germaniques ; mais le francais est une langue latine. Les 
 mots celtiques y sont restes, les mots germaniques y sont venus ; 
 les mots latins n'y sont point restes, et n'y sont point venus ; ils 
 sont la langue elle-meme, ils la constituent. II ne peut done 
 etre question de rechercher quels sont les elements latins du 
 francais. Ce que j'aurai a faire, ce sera d'indiquer ceux qui ne 
 le sont pas. Koch, in some words prefixed to his Historic 
 Grammar of the English Language, has put all this in a lively 
 manner. Having spoken of the larger or smaller contingents 
 to the army of English words which the various languages have 
 furnished, he proceeds : Die Hauptarmee, besonders das Volks- 
 heer, ist deutsch, ein grosses franzosisches Hilfs- und Luxuscorps 
 hat sich angeschlossen, die andern Romanen sind nur durch 
 wenige Ueberlaufer vertreten, und sie haben ihre nationale 
 Eigenthiimlichkeit seltener bewahrt. Ein starkeres Corps stellt 
 das Lateinische ; es hat Truppen stossen lassen zum Angel- 
 sachsischen, zum Alt- und Mittelenglischen, und sogar noch zum 
 Neuenglischen.
 
 i. Latin and Anglo-Saxon. 37 
 
 and 'ation.' Now, doubtless there was sufficient 
 ground and warrant for the warning against such 
 which he gave them. Writers of a former age, Samuel 
 Johnson in the last century, Henry More and Sir 
 Thomas Browne in that preceding, gave beyond 
 all question undue preponderance to the learned, or 
 Latin, element in our language ; and there have never 
 wanted those who have trod in their footsteps ; while 
 yet it is certain that nearly all of the homely strength 
 and beauty of English, of its most popular and happiest 
 idioms, would have perished from it, had they suc- 
 ceeded in persuading the great body of English writers 
 to write as they had written. 
 
 But for all this we could almost as ill spare this 
 Latin portion of the language as the other. Philo- 
 sophy and science and the arts of an advanced civili- 
 zation find their utterance in the Latin words which 
 we have made our own, or, if not in them, then in the 
 Greek, which for present purposes may be grouped 
 with them. Granting too that, all other things being 
 equal, when a Latin and an English word offer them- 
 selves to our choice, we shall generally do best to 
 employ the English, to speak of 'happiness' rather 
 than 'felicity,' 'almighty' rather than 'omnipotent,' a 
 ' forerunner ' rather than a ' precursor,' a ' forefather ' 
 than a ' progenitor,' still these latter are as truly 
 denizens in the language as the former ; no alien 
 interlopers, but possessing the rights of citizenship as 
 fully as the most English word of them all. One part 
 of the language is not to be unduly favoured at the 
 expense of the other ; the English at the cost of the 
 Latin, as little as the Latin at the cost of the English. 
 • Both,' as De Quincey, himself a foremost master of
 
 
 
 8 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 English, has well said, ' are indispensable ; and speak- 
 ing generally, without stopping to distinguish as to 
 subject, both are equally indispensable. Pathos, in 
 situations which are homely, or at all connected with 
 domestic affections, naturally moves by Saxon words. 
 Lyrical emotion of every kind, which (to merit the 
 name of lyrical) must be in the state of flux and re- 
 flux, or, generally, of agitation, also requires the Saxon 
 element of our language. And why 1 Because the 
 Saxon is the aboriginal element ; the basis and not 
 the superstructure : consequently it comprehends all 
 the ideas which are natural to the heart of man and to 
 the elementary situations of life. And although the 
 Latin often furnishes us with duplicates of these ideas, 
 yet the Saxon, or monosyllabic part, has the advan- 
 tage of precedency in our use and knowledge ; for it 
 is the language of the nursery whether for rich or poor, 
 in which great philological academy no toleration is 
 given to words in " osity " or " ation." There is 
 therefore a great advantage, as regards the consecra- 
 tion to our feelings, settled by usage and custom upon 
 the Saxon strands in the mixed yarn of our native 
 tongue. And universally this may be remarked — that 
 whenever the passion of a poem is of that sort which 
 uses, presumes, or postulates the ideas, without seeking 
 to extend them, Saxon will be the " cocoon " (to 
 speak by the language applied to silk-worms), which 
 the poem spins for itself. But, on the other hand, 
 where the motion of the feeling is by and through the 
 ideas, where (as in religious or meditative poetry- 
 Young's for instance, or Cowper's) the pathos creeps 
 and kindles underneath the very tissues of the think- 
 ing, there the Latin will predominate ; and so much
 
 Latin and Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 so that, whilst the flesh, the blood, and the muscle 
 will be often almost exclusively Latin, the articulations 
 only, or hinges of connexion, will be Anglo-Saxon.' 
 On this same matter Sir Francis Palgrave has expressed 
 himself thus : ' Upon the languages of Teutonic origin 
 the Latin has exercised great influence, but most 
 energetically on our own. The very early admixture 
 of the Langne (TOil, the never interrupted employ- 
 ment of the French as the language of education, and 
 the nomenclature created by the scientific and literary 
 cultivation of advancing and civilized society, have 
 Romanized our speech ; the warp may be Anglo- 
 Saxon, but the woof is Roman as well as the em- 
 broidery, and these foreign materials have so entered 
 into the texture, that, were they plucked out, the web 
 would be torn to rags, unravelled and destroyed.' ' 
 
 We shall nowhere find a happier example of the 
 preservation of the golden mean than in our Author- 
 ized Version of the Bible. Among the minor and 
 secondary blessings conferred by that Version on the 
 nations drawing their spiritual life from it, — a blessing 
 only small by comparison with the infinitely greater 
 blessings whereof it is the vehicle to them,— is the 
 happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which its 
 authors have kept clear in this matter from all exag- 
 geration. There has not been on their parts any 
 futile and mischievous attempt to ignore the full rights 
 of the Latin element of the language on the one side, 
 nor on the other any burdening of the Version with so 
 many learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit 
 its homely character, and shut up large portions of it 
 
 1 History of Normandy and England, vol. i. p. 7S.
 
 40 The English Vocabulaiy. Lect. 
 
 from the understanding of plain and unlearned men. 
 One among those who in our own times abandoned 
 the communion of the English Church for that of the 
 Church of Rome, has expressed in deeply touching 
 tones his sense of all which, in renouncing our Trans- 
 lation, he felt himself to have foregone and lost. 
 These are his words : ' Who will not say that the 
 uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the 
 Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds of 
 heresy in this country ? It lives on the ear, like a 
 music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of 
 church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he 
 can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost 
 things rather than mere words. It is part of the 
 national mind, and the anchor of national serious- 
 ness The memory of the dead passes into it. 
 
 The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in 
 its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a 
 man is hidden beneath its words. It is the repre- 
 sentative of his best moments, and all that there has 
 been about him of soft and gentle and pure and peni- 
 tent and good speaks to him for ever out of his 
 
 English Bible It is his sacred thing, which 
 
 doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. 
 In the length and breadth of the land there is not a 
 Protestant with one spark of religiousness about 
 him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon 
 Bible.' » 
 
 Certainly one has only to compare this Version of 
 
 1 These words occur in an Essay by the late Dr. Faber on 
 ' The Characteristics of the Lives of the Saints,' prefixed to a 
 Life of St. Francis of Assisi, p. 116.
 
 I. Rhemisk Version of Scripture. 41 
 
 ours with the Rhemish, at once to understand why he 
 should have thus given the palm and preference to 
 ours. I urge not here the fact that one translation is 
 from the original Greek, the other from the Latin 
 Vulgate, and thus the translation of a translation, 
 often reproducing the mistakes of that translation ; 
 but, putting all such higher advantages aside, only the 
 superiority of the diction in which the meaning, be it 
 correct or incorrect, is conveyed to English readers. 
 Thus I open the Rhemish Version at Galatians v. 19, 
 where the long list of the 'works of the flesh,' and of 
 the 'fruit of the Spirit,' is given. But what could a 
 mere Ens;lish reader make of terms such as these — 
 ' impudicity,' 'ebrieties,' ' comessations,' 'longanimity,' 
 all which occur in that passage ; while our Version 
 for ' ebrieties ' has ' drunkenness,' for ' comessations ' 
 has 'revellings,' for 'longanimity' 'long-suffering'? 
 Or set over against one another such phrases as these, 
 — in the Rhemish, ' the exemplars of the celestials ' 
 (Heb. ix. 23), but in ours, 'the patterns of things in 
 the heavens.' Or suppose if, instead of what we read 
 at Heb. xiii. 16, 'To do good and to communicate 
 forget not ; for with such sacrifices God is well 
 pleased,' we read as in the Rhemish, ' Beneficence 
 and communication do not forget ; for with such 
 hosts God is promerited' !— Who does not feel that 
 if our Version had been composed in such Latin- 
 English as this, had been fulfilled with words like the 
 following — 'agnition,' 'coinquinations,' ' contristate,' 
 'donary,' 'odible,' 'postulations,' 'suasible,' 'zealatour,' 
 —which all, with many more of the same mint, are 
 found in the Rhemish Version, — our loss would have 
 been great and enduring, such as would have been
 
 42 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 felt through the whole religious life of our people, in 
 the very depths of the national mind ? l 
 
 There was indeed something deeper than love of 
 sound and genuine English at work in our Translators, 
 whether they were conscious of it or not, which hin- 
 dered them from presenting the Scriptures to their 
 fellow-countrymen dressed out in such a semi-Latin 
 garb as this. The Reformation, which they were in 
 this translation so effectually setting forward, was just 
 a throwing off, on the part of the Teutonic nations, of 
 that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would fain 
 have held them ; an assertion that they were come 
 to full age, and that not through her, but directly 
 through Christ, they would address themselves unto 
 God. The use of Latin as the language of worship, 
 as the language in which alone the Scriptures might 
 be read, had been the great badge of servitude, even 
 as the Latin habits of thought and feeling which it 
 promoted had been most important helps to the con- 
 tinuance of this servitude, through long ages. It lay 
 deep then in the essential conditions of the conflict 
 which the Reformers were maintaining, that they 
 should develope the Teutonic, or essentially national, 
 element in the language ; while it was just as natural 
 that the Roman Catholic Translators, if they must 
 render the Scriptures into English at all, should yet 
 render them into such English as should bear the 
 nearest possible resemblance to that Latin Vulgate, 
 which Rome, with a wisdom that in such matters has 
 
 1 There is more on this matter in my book, On the Autho- 
 rized Version of the New Testament, pp. 33-35 ; ar >d in West- 
 cott, History of the English Bible, 1868, p. 333.
 
 I. CompaiHson of Versions. 43 
 
 never failed her, would gladly have seen as the only 
 version of the Book in the hands of the faithful. 1 
 
 Let me again, however, recur to the fact that what 
 our Reformers did in this matter, they did without 
 exaggeration ; even as they have shown the same wise 
 moderation in matters higher than this. They gave 
 to the Latin side of the language its rights, though 
 they would not suffer this to encroach upon and usurp 
 those of the other. It would be difficult not to be- 
 lieve, even if many outward signs did not suggest the 
 same, that there is an important part in the future for 
 that one language of Europe to play, which thus 
 serves as connecting link between the North and the 
 South, between the languages spoken by the Teutonic 
 
 1 Where the word itself which the Rhemish translators em- 
 ploy is a perfectly good one, it is yet instructive to observe how 
 often they draw on the Latin portion of the language, where we 
 have drawn on the Saxon, — thus ' corporal ' where we have 
 'bodily' (I Tim. iv. 8), ' irreprehensible ' where we have 
 •blameless' (i Tim. iii. 2), 'coadjutor' where we have 'fellow- 
 worker ' (Col. iv. n), ' prescience ' where we have ' foreknow- 
 ledge ' (Acts ii. 23), ' contristate ' where we have ' grieve ' 
 (Ephes. iv. 30), ' impudicity ' instead of ' uncleanness ' (Ephes. 
 iv. 19), 'canticle' where we have 'song' (Ephes. v. 19), 
 ' dominator ' where we have ' Lord ' (Jude 4), ' cogitation ' 
 where we have ' thought ' (Luke ix. 46), ' fraternity ' where 
 we have ' brotherhood ' (1 Pet. ii. 17), ' senior ' where we have 
 'elder' (Rev. vii. 13), 'annunciation' where we have 'mes- 
 sage' (1 John i. 5), ' supererogate ' where we have 'spend 
 more' (Luke x. 35), ' exprobrate ' where we have 'upbraid' 
 (Mark xvi. 14), 'prohibit' where we have 'forbid' (2 Pet. 
 ii. 16), 'incontinent' where we have 'straightway' (Mark 
 ix. 24), 'stipends' where we have 'wages' (Luke iii. 14), 
 ' artificer ' where we have ' craftsman ' (Acts xix. 24), 'inex- 
 plicable ' where we have ' hard ' (Heb. v. 11).
 
 44 The English Vocabulary. lect. 
 
 nations of the North and by the Romance nations of 
 the South ; which holds on to and partakes of both. 1 
 There are who venture to hope that the English 
 Church, having in like manner two aspects, looking 
 on the one side toward Rome, being herself truly 
 Catholic, looking on the other toward the Protestant 
 communions, being herself also protesting and re- 
 formed, may have reserved for her in the providence 
 of God an important share in that reconciling of a 
 divided Christendom, whereof we are bound not to 
 despair. And if this ever should be so, if, notwith- 
 standing our sins and unworthiness, so blessed an 
 office should be in store for her, it will be no small 
 assistance to this, that the language in which her 
 mediation will be effected, is one wherein both parties 
 may claim their own, in which neither will feel that it 
 is receiving the adjudication of a stranger, of one who 
 must be an alien from its deeper thoughts and habits, 
 because an alien from its words, but a language in 
 which both must recognize very much of that which 
 is deepest and most precious of their own. 2 
 
 1 See a paper, On the Probable Future Position of the English 
 Language, by T. Watts, Esq., in the Proceedings of the Philo- 
 logical Society, vol. iv. p. 207 ; and compare the concluding 
 words in Guest's Hist, of English Rhythms, vol. ii. p. 429. 
 
 2 Fowler {English Grammar, p. 135): 'The English is a 
 medium language, and thus adapted to diffusion. In the Gothic 
 family it stands midway between the Teutonic and the Scandi- 
 navian branches, touching both, and to some extent reaching 
 into both. A German or a Dane finds much in the English 
 which exists in his own language. It unites by certain bonds of 
 consanguinity, as no other language does, the Romanic with the
 
 I. Grimm on English. 45 
 
 Nor is this prerogative which I have just claimed 
 for our English the mere dream and fancy of patriotic 
 vanity. The scholar most profoundly acquainted with 
 the great group of the Teutonic languages in Europe, 
 a devoted lover, if ever there was such, of his native 
 German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself 
 very nearly to the same effect, and given the palm 
 over all to our English in words which you will not 
 grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring 
 this lecture to a close. After ascribing to our language 
 ' a veritable power of expression, such as perhaps 
 never stood at the command of any other language of 
 men, 5 he goes on to say, ' Its highly spiritual genius, 
 and wonderfully happy development and condition, 
 have been the result of a surprisingly intimate union 
 of the two noblest languages in modern Europe, the 
 Teutonic and the Romance. — It is well known in 
 what relation these two stand to one another in the 
 English tongue ; the former supplying in far larger 
 proportion the material groundwork, the latter the 
 spiritual conceptions. In truth the English language, 
 which by no mere accident has produced and upborne 
 the greatest and most predominant poet of modern 
 times, as distinguished from the ancient classical 
 poetry (I can, of course, only mean Shakespeare), may 
 with all right be called a world-language; and, like the 
 English people, appears destined hereafter to prevail 
 with a sway more extensive even than its present over 
 
 Gothic languages. An Italian or a Frenchman finds a large 
 class of words in the English which exist in his own language, 
 though the basis of the English is Gothic'
 
 46 The English Vocabulary. Lect. 
 
 all the portions of the globe. 1 For in wealth, good 
 sense, and closeness of structure no other of the lan- 
 guages at this day spoken deserves to be compared 
 with it — not even our German, which is torn, even as 
 we are torn, and must first rid itself of many defects, 
 before it can enter boldly into the lists, as a com- 
 petitor with the English.' 2 
 
 1 A little more than two centuries ago a poet, himself abun- 
 dantly deserving the title of ' well-languaged,' which a contem- 
 porary or near successor gave him, ventured in some remarkable 
 lines timidly to anticipate this. Speaking of his native English, 
 which he himself wrote with such vigour and purity, though 
 deficient in the passion and fiery impulses which go to the 
 making of a first-rate poet, Daniel exclaims : 
 
 ' And who, in time, knows whither we may vent 
 The treasure of our tongue ? to what strange shores 
 This gain of our best glory shall be sent, 
 To enrich unknowing nations with our stores ? 
 What worlds in the yet unformed Occident 
 May come refined with the accents that are ours ? 
 
 Or who can tell for what great work in hand 
 
 The greatness of our style is now ordained ? 
 
 What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command, 
 
 What thoughts let out, what humours keep restrained, 
 
 What mischief it may powerfully withstand, 
 
 And what fair ends may thereby be attained ? ' 
 
 2 Ueber den Ur sprung der Sprache, Berlin, 1832, p. 50. 
 Compare Philarete Chasles, Etudes stir F Allemagne, pp. 12-33.
 
 [I. The Norman Couq?iest. 47 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 ENGLISH AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN. 
 
 WE have seen that many who have best right to 
 speak are strong to maintain that English has 
 gained far more than it has lost by that violent inter- 
 ruption of its orderly development which the Norman 
 Conquest brought with it, that it has been permanently 
 enriched by that immense irruption and settlement 
 of foreign words within its borders, which followed, 
 though not immediately, on that catastrophe. But 
 there here suggests itself to us an interesting and not 
 uninstructive subject of speculation : what, namely, 
 this English language would actually now be, if there 
 had been no Battle of Hastings ; or a Battle of 
 Hastings which William had lost and Harold won. 
 When I invite you to consider this, you will under- 
 stand me to exclude any similar catastrophe, which 
 should in the same way have issued in the setting up 
 of an intrusive dynasty, supported by the arms of a 
 foreign soldiery, and speaking a Romanic as distin- 
 guished from a Teutonic language, on the throne ot 
 England. I lay a stress upon this last point— a 
 people speaking a Romanic language ; inasmuch as 
 the effects upon the language spoken in England 
 would have been quite different, would have fallen far 
 short of those which actually found place, if the great 
 Canute had succeeded in founding a Danish, or
 
 48 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 Harold Hardrada a Norwegian dynasty in England — 
 Danish and Norwegian both being dialects of the same 
 Teutonic language which was already spoken here. 
 Some differences in the language now spoken by 
 Englishmen, such issues — and one and the other were 
 at different times well within the range of possibility — 
 would have entailed ; but differences inconsiderable 
 by the side of those which have followed the coming 
 in of a conquering and ruling race speaking one of 
 the tongues directly formed upon the Latin. 
 
 This which I suggest is only one branch of a far 
 larger speculation. It would be no uninteresting 
 undertaking if one thoroughly versed in the whole con- 
 stitutional lore of England, acquainted as a Palgrave 
 was with Anglo-Saxon England, able to look into the 
 seeds of things and to discern which of these con- 
 tained the germs of future development, which would 
 grow and which would not, should interpret to us by 
 the spirit of historic divination, what, if there had 
 been no successful Norman invasion, would be now 
 the social and political institutions of England, what 
 the relations of the different ranks of society to one 
 another, what the division and tenure of land, what 
 amount of liberty at home, of greatness abroad, 
 England would at this day have achieved. It is only 
 on one branch of this subject that I propose to enter 
 at all. ' 
 
 It may, indeed, appear to some that even in this I 
 am putting before them questions which are in their 
 very nature impossible to solve, which it is therefore 
 
 1 I need hardly say that, when these lectures were first 
 delivered, neither Stubbs nor Freeman had written.
 
 ii. The Effect of the Norman Invasion. 49 
 
 unprofitable to entertain; since dealing, as here we 
 must, with what might have been, not with what 
 actually has been or is, all must be mere guesswork 
 for us ; and, however ingenious our guesses, we can 
 never test them by the touchstone of actual fact, and 
 so estimate their real worth. But such an objection 
 would rest on a mistake, though a very natural one. 
 I am persuaded we can know to a very large extent 
 how, under such conditions as I have supposed, it 
 would have fared with our tongue, what the English 
 would be like which, in such a case, the dwellers in 
 this island would be speaking at this day. The laws 
 which preside over the development of language are 
 so fixed and immutable, and capricious as they may 
 seem, there is really so little caprice in them, that if 
 we can at all trace the course which other kindred 
 dialects have followed under such conditions as 
 English would then have been submitted to, we may 
 thus arrive at very confident conclusions as to the 
 road which English would have travelled. And there 
 are such languages ; more or less the whole group of 
 the related Teutonic languages are such. Studying 
 any one of these, and the most obvious of these to 
 study would be the German, we may learn very much 
 of the forms which English would now wear, if the 
 tremendous shock of one ever-memorable day had not 
 changed so much in this land, and made England and 
 English both so different from what otherwise they 
 would have been. 
 
 At the same time I would not have you set too 
 high the similarity which would have existed between 
 the English and other languages of the Teutonic 
 family, even if no such huge catastrophe as that had
 
 50 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 mixed so many new elements in the one which are 
 altogether foreign to the other. There are always 
 forces at work among tribes and people which have 
 parted company, one portion of them, as in this in- 
 stance, going forth to new seats, while the other tar 
 ried in the old ; or both of them travelling onward, 
 and separating more and more from one another, as 
 in the case of those whom we know as Celts and 
 Italians, who, going forth from those settlements 
 where they once dwelt together, occupied each a re- 
 gion of its own; or, again, as between those who, like 
 the Britons of Wales and of Cornwall, have been 
 violently thrust asunder and separated from one 
 another by the intrusion of a hostile people, like a 
 wedge, between them ; there are, I say, forces widen- 
 ing slowly but surely the breach between the languages 
 spoken by the one section of the divided people and 
 by the other, multiplying points of diversity between 
 the speech of those to whom even dialectic differences 
 may once have been unknown. This, that they should 
 travel daily further from one another, comes to pass 
 quite independently of any such sudden and immense 
 catastrophe as that of which we have been just speak- 
 ing. If there had been no Norman Conquest, nor any 
 event similar to it, it is yet quite certain that English 
 would be now a very different language from any at 
 the present day spoken in Germany or in Holland. 
 Different of course it would be from that purely con- 
 ventional language, now recognized in Germany as 
 the only language of literature ; but very different too 
 from any dialect of that Low German, still popularly 
 spoken on the Frisian coast and lower banks of 
 the Elbe, to which no doubt it would have borne a
 
 ii. Dissimilating Forces. 5 1 
 
 far closer resemblance. It was indeed already very 
 different when that catastrophe arrived. The six 
 hundred years which, on the briefest reckoning, had 
 elapsed since the Saxon immigration to these shores 
 — that immigration having probably begun very much 
 earlier — had in this matter, as in others, left their 
 mark. 
 
 I will very briefly enumerate some of the dissimi- 
 lating forces, moral and material, by the action of 
 which those who, so long as they dwelt together, 
 possessed the same language, little by little become 
 more or less of barbarians to one another. 
 
 One branch of the speakers of a language engrafts 
 on the old stock numerous words which the other 
 does not in the same way make its own ; and this 
 from various causes. It does so through intercourse 
 with new races, into contact and connexion with 
 which it, but not the other branch of the divided 
 family, has been brought. Thus in quite recent times, 
 South-African English, spoken in the presence of a 
 large Dutch population at the Cape, has acquired 
 such words as these : 'foreloper,' 'gemsbok,' 'kloof,' 
 'kranz,' 'laager,' 'roer,' 'spoor,' 'springbok,' 'spruit,' 
 ' steinbok,' ' veld,' ' wildbeest,' ' to inspan,' ' to outspan,' 
 ' to treck ; ' which, in these shapes at least, we do not 
 here know at all. In like manner the great English 
 colony in India has acquired ' ayah,' ' bungalow,' 
 'coolie,' 'cutchery,' 'dacoit,' 'dhooly,' 'durbar,' 'how- 
 dah,' ' loot,' ' maharajah,' ' mahout,' ' nabob,' ' nautch,' 
 'nullah,' 'pariah,' 'pundit,' 'punkah,' 'rajah,' 'ranee,' 
 'rupee,' 'ryot,' 'suttee,' 'tiffin,' 'thug,' 'tulwar,' 'zemin- 
 dar,' ' zenana,' with many more. It is true that we too 
 have adopted some of these, and understand them all. 
 
 e 2
 
 52 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 But suppose there were little or no communication 
 between us at home and our colony in India, no pass- 
 ing from the one to the other, no literature common 
 to both, here are the beginnings of what would grow 
 in lapse of years to an important element of diversity 
 between the English of England and of India. Or 
 take another example. The English-speaking race in 
 America has encountered races which we do not 
 encounter here, has been brought into relation with 
 aspects of nature which are quite foreign to us here. 
 For most of these they have adopted the words they 
 found ready made to their hands by those who occu- 
 pied the land before them, or still occupy it side by 
 side with them ; they have borrowed, for example, 
 ' boss ' from the Dutch of New York ; ' mocassin ' and 
 'opossum' from the Indian; 'bayou' (boyau), 1 
 'cache,' 'crevasse, 1 'chute,' 'levee,' 'portage,' from 
 the French of Louisiana or of Canada ; 'adobe,' 
 'canyon' (canon), 'chaparral,' 'corral,' 'hacienda,' 
 'lariat,' 'mustang,' 'placer,' 'rancho' or ' ranche,' 
 'sierra,' 'tortilla,' with the slang verb 'to vamose' 
 (the Spanish ' vamos,' let us go), from the Spaniards 
 of Mexico and California. In like manner 'back- 
 woodsman,' 'lumberer,' 'pine-barren,' 'prairie,' 'squat- 
 ter,' are words born of a condition of things with 
 which we are unfamiliar. And this which has thus 
 happened elsewhere, happened also here. The 
 Britons— not to enter into the question whether they 
 added much or little — must have added something, 
 and in the designation of places and geographical 
 
 1 ' How have you nowhere encountered my Gabriel's boat 
 on the bayous ? ' — LONGFELLOW, Evangeline.
 
 ii. Why Woi'ds Perish. 53 
 
 features, as in 'aber,' 'pen.' and 'avon,' certainly 
 added much to the vocabulary of the English immi- 
 grants into this island, of which those who remained 
 in their continental home knew nothing. Again, the 
 Danish and Norwegian inroads into England were 
 inroads not of men only, but also of words. In all 
 this an important element of dissimilation made itself 
 felt. 
 
 Then too, where languages have diverged from 
 one another before any definite settlement has taken 
 place in the dictionary, from among the numerous 
 synonyms for one and the same object which the 
 various dialects of the common language afford, one 
 people will perpetuate one, and the other another, 
 each of them after a while losing sight altogether of 
 that on which their choice has failed to fall. That 
 mysterious sentence of death which strikes words, we 
 cannot tell why, others not better, it may be worse, 
 taking their room — for it is not here always ' a sur- 
 vival of the fittest '—will frequently cause a word to 
 perish from one branch of what was once a common 
 language, while it lives on, and perhaps unfolds itself 
 into a whole family, in another. Thus of the words 
 which the Angles and Saxons brought with them 
 from beyond the sea, some have lived on upon our 
 English soil, while they have perished in that which 
 might be called, at least by comparison, their native 
 soil. Innumerable others, with an opposite fate, have 
 here died out, which have continued to flourish there. 
 As a specimen of those which have found English air 
 more healthful than German we may instance ' bairn.' 
 This, once common to all the Teutonic languages, is 
 now extinct in German and Dutch, and has been so
 
 54 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 for centuries, ' kind ' having taken its place ; while it 
 lives with us in the northern speech and on the lips 
 of the Scandinavian family. Others, on the contrary, 
 after an existence longer or shorter with us, have 
 finally disappeared here, while they still maintain a 
 vigorous life on the banks of the Elbe and the Eyder. 
 A vulture is not here any more a ' geir ' (Holland), 
 nor, except in some local dialects, a rogue a ' skellum ' 
 (Urquhart), as little is he a ' schalk ; ' neither is an 
 uncle (a mother's brother) an ' eame,' and this while 
 ' geier ' and ' schelm ' and ' schalk ' and ' oheim ' still 
 maintain a vigorous existence there. Each of these 
 words which has thus perished, and they may be 
 counted by hundreds and thousands, has been re- 
 placed by another, generally by one which is strange 
 to the sister language, such as either it never knew, 
 or of which it has long since lost all recollection. 
 There is thus a twofold process at work for the 
 estrangement of the one from the other. In what has 
 gone a link between them has been broken ; in what 
 has come in its room an element of differentiation 
 has been introduced. Sometimes, even where a word 
 lives on in both languages, it will have become pro- 
 vincial in one while it keeps a place in the classical 
 diction of the other. Thus ' klei ' is local and pro- 
 vincial in Germany, 1 while 'clay' has everywhere free 
 currency with us. 
 
 Or where a word has not actually perished in one 
 section of what was once a common language, it will 
 have been thrust out of general use in one, but not 
 in the other. Thus ' ross,' earlier ' hros,' is rare and 
 
 1 See Grimm, Worterbuck, s. v.
 
 II. Divergence in Meaning. 55 
 
 poetical in German, very much as ' steed ' with us, 
 having in every-day use given way to ' pferd ; ' while 
 ' horse ' has suffered no corresponding diminution in 
 the commonness of its use. ' Head ' in like manner 
 has fully maintained its place ; but not so ' haupt,' 
 which during the last two or three centuries has been 
 more and more giving way to ' kopf.' 
 
 Again, words in one language and in the other 
 will in tract of time and under the necessities of an 
 advancing civilization appropriate to themselves a 
 more exact domain of meaning than they had at the 
 first, yet will not appropriate exactly the same ; or one 
 will enlarge its meaning and the other not ; or in 
 some other way one will drift away from moorings to 
 which the other has remained true. [Our ' beam ' is the 
 same word as the German ' baum ; ' but it has not 
 precisely the same meaning. The same may be said 
 of ' acre ' and ' acker,' ' clean ' and ' klein,' ' clock ' and 
 ' glocke,' ' craft ' and ' kraft,' ' dapper ' (borrowed from 
 the Dutch) and ' tapfer,' ' deer ' and ' thier,' ' dish ' and 
 ' tisch,' ' dull ' and ' toll,' ' dust ' and ' dunst,' ' Dutch ' 
 and ' Deutsch,' 'fee' and ' vieh,' 'fey ' (in Scotch) and 
 ' feige,' ' funk ' and ' funke,' ' hide ' and ' haut,' ' idle ' 
 and ' eitel,' ' keen ' and ' kiihn,' ' knave ' and ' knabe,' 
 ' knight ' and ' knecht,' ' mist ' (nebulous vapour) and 
 'mist' (dung), 'reek' and ' rauchen,' 'rudder' and 
 'ruder' (oar), 'silly' and 'selig,' 'sore' and 'sehr,' 
 ' stove ' and ' stube,' ' sward ' and ' schwarte,' ' tether ' 
 and 'zitter' (pole of a wagon, see Schade, p. 1285), 
 'thatch' and 'dach,' 'tide' and 'zeit,' 'tidy' and 
 'zeitig,' 'timber' and ' zimmcr,' 'toy' (of Dutch 
 origin) and 'zcug'.] Much of this divergence in 
 meaning is the work of the last two or three hundred
 
 56 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 years, so that the process of dissimilation is still 
 going forward. Thus ' elders ' were parents in Eng- 
 land not very long ago, quite as much as ' eltern ' are 
 parents to this day in Germany. l ' To grave ' was 
 once to bury, as ' graben ' is still. ' Taufer ' in Ger- 
 man is solemn, ' dipper ' in English is familiar, or con- 
 temptuous. The English of England and the English 
 of America are already revealing differences of a like 
 kind. ' Corn ' on the other side of the Atlantic means 
 always maize, ' grain ' means always wheat ; while we 
 know nothing here of these restrictions of meaning. 
 Nay, similar differences may be traced nearer home. 
 By ' blackberries ' in Scotland are meant what we call 
 black currants. A ' merchant ' there is not what we 
 know in England by this name, but a shopkeeper ; 2 
 while in Ireland by a 'tradesman' is meant not a 
 grocer, butcher, or other engaged in the distribution 
 of commodities, but an artisan, a bricklayer, glazier, 
 carpenter, or the like. In Northumberland wheat is 
 'sheared,' and the reapers are 'shearers,' while sheep 
 are 'dipt.' Here is another force at work which is 
 evermore tending to make more distinctly two what 
 at the outset had been only one. 
 
 Nor is this all. ' Languages,' as Max Miiller has 
 said, ' so intimately related as Greek and Latin have 
 fixed on different expressions for son, daughter, bro- 
 ther, woman, man, sky, earth, moon, hand, mouth, 
 tree, bird.' It could scarcely have been otherwise ; 
 for the primary law of all naming is that the name 
 
 1 See my Select Glossary, 5th edit., s. v. Elders. 
 s Kdirr)Aos, not i/xnopos.
 
 ii. Lazu of Naming. 57 
 
 shall be drawn from that which strikes the namers as 
 the most prominent and characteristic feature of the 
 thing to be named. But it will generally happen that 
 complex objects have not one characteristic only, but 
 many ; and these very often with about equal claims 
 to be represented and embodied in the word, while 
 yet this in its narrow limits can rarely seize or embody 
 more than one. Thus when the different seasons of 
 the year claimed to have each a distinct connotation 
 of its own, it became necessary, among the rest, to 
 designate the winter season. But from how many 
 points of view this might be regarded. It might be 
 looked at as the season when the days are shortest ; 
 and evidently this is one of the points about it which 
 strikes the most; as such it is Latin 'bruma' = 
 '*brevima.' Or again, it might be regarded as the 
 snowy time ; as such it is x^f"^? to which ' hiems ' is 
 nearly related. Or it might be spoken of as 'the 
 white season,' which may be the meaning of 'winter.' 1 
 Or take another illustration. It is necessary to 
 designate an army by some name or other. It may 
 fitly derive this name from the fact that it is an 
 assemblage of armed and not of unarmed men. It 
 does this in our 'army' and in the French 'armee.' 
 Or it may be contemplated not merely as an assembly 
 of men with weapons in their hands, ' men with mus- 
 quets ; ' but of men trained and exercised to the use 
 of these weapons. This was what the Romans had in 
 their eye when they called it ' exercitus.' In the Ger- 
 man ' heer ' there is, probably, the notion of a host 
 
 1 See Kluge (s. v. Winter).
 
 58 English as it might have been, Lect. 
 
 assembled for ' war ; ' while in the Greek o-rpaTos the 
 notion which has suggested, and is embodied in, the 
 word is that of huge multitudes camping out and 
 stretching themselves over vast regions of space. 
 
 Sometimes indeed there is one peculiarity which 
 so impresses itself upon eye or ear that it is impossible 
 to overlook it, or to avoid a reference to it in the 
 name which the object bears. Take an example of 
 this on a small scale, but such as will serve quite as 
 well as one upon a larger, our own 'water-wagtail.' 
 Most of us will have watched the quick incessant 
 motion of the tail, which is so distinctive a feature of 
 this graceful little bird that it has in all or nearly all 
 European languages drawn its name from it ; as in 
 our 'wagtail,' in the Greek a-eiaovpa, in the Latin 
 'motacilla,' in the Dutch 'kwikstaartje,' in the Italian 
 ' codatremola,' in the French ' hochequeue.' So in 
 like manner the cuckoo could hardly escape, and as 
 far as I know, has not anywhere escaped, obtaining a 
 name from its peculiar cry. 
 
 But cases such as these last are quite the excep- 
 tions. In most instances there will be various aspects 
 or features of a thing, which will compete for the 
 honour of finding expression in its name ; and no one 
 of them with rights absolutely superior to those of 
 every other. One will be preferred to all the others 
 by one people, and one by another ; such as gain 
 the day probably putting the others quite out of use, 
 or reducing them to a merely provincial existence. 
 There is here a principle and process of differentia- 
 tion at work, by aid of which languages, though 
 proceeding from the same root, and not going out of 
 themselves to seek words from abroad, may acquire
 
 II. Rich Languages and Poor. 59 
 
 a totally different nomenclature for the commonest 
 objects. 1 
 
 But further, in the same way as the arm of one 
 man increases in bulk and no less in sinewy strength, 
 being put to vigorous use, while the same limb in 
 another, who had not called forth the energies which 
 are latent in it, shows no corresponding growth, even 
 so it fares with man's speech. It is indeed marvel- 
 lous how quickly a language will create, adopt, adapt, 
 words in any particular line of things to which those 
 who speak that language are specially addicted ; so 
 that while the language may remain absolutely poor 
 in every other domain, it will prove nothing less than 
 opulent in this. 2 It will follow that where races 
 
 1 Compare on this divergence of dialects Marsh, Origin 
 and History of the English Language, p. 82 sqq. 
 
 2 Pott {Etym. Forschiing. vol. ii. p. 134) supplies some 
 curious and instructive examples of this unfolding of a language 
 in a particular direction. Thus in the Zulu, where the chief or 
 indeed entire wealth consists in cattle, there are words out of 
 number to express cows of different ages, colours, qualities. 
 Instead of helping themselves out as we do by an adjective, as 
 a white cow, a red cow, a barren cow, they have a distinctive 
 word for each of these. We do not think or talk much about 
 cocoa-nuts, and only seeing them when they are full ripe, have 
 no inducement to designate them in other stages of their growth ; 
 but in Lord North's Island, where they are the main support of 
 the inhabitants, they have five words by which to name the 
 fruit in its several stages from the first shoot to perfect maturity. 
 In the Hebrew there are four different words to designate the 
 locust in four successive stages of its development (Ewald on 
 Joel, i. 4). In the Dorsetshire dialect there are distinct names for 
 the four stomachs of ruminant animals (Barnes, Glossary, p. 78). 
 In Lithuanian there are five different names for as many kinds of 
 stubble (Grimm, Gesch. der Deutschen Sfrache, vol. i. p. 69).
 
 6o English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 occupying once the same seats separate off from one 
 another, and one group or both seek new seats for 
 themselves, the industrial tendencies of the divided 
 groups, as influenced by the different physical aspects 
 and capabilities of the regions which they occupy, 
 will evoke a large development in each of words and 
 phrases wherein the other will have no share. Thus 
 the occupants of this Island became by the very con- 
 ditions of their existence, and unless they were content 
 to be indeed what the Latin poet called them, 'al- 
 together separated from the whole world,' a seafaring 
 people. It has followed that the language has grown 
 rich in terms having to do with the sea and with the 
 whole life of the sea, far richer in these than are the 
 dialects spoken by the people of Germany. They, on 
 the contrary, poor in this province of words, are far 
 better furnished than we are with terms relating to 
 those mining operations which they pursued much 
 earlier, on a scale more extended, and with a greater 
 application of science and skill, than we have done. 
 
 There has been for centuries a vigorous activity of 
 political life in England which has needed, and need- 
 ing has fashioned for itself, a diction of its own. Ger- 
 many, on the contrary, is so poor in corresponding 
 terms, that when with the weak beginnings of consti- 
 tutional forms in our own day some of these terms 
 became necessary, it was obliged to borrow the word 
 ' bill ' from us. 
 
 The same word will obtain a slightly different pro- 
 nunciation, or spelling, in the one language and the 
 other. Where there is no special philological train- 
 ing, a very slight variation in the former will often 
 effectually conceal from the ear, as in the latter from
 
 II. Differences of Spelling. 61 
 
 the eye, an absolute identity, and for all practical 
 purposes constitute them not one and the same word 
 common to both languages, but two and different. 
 Most of us in attempting to speak a foreign language, 
 or to understand our own as spoken by a foreigner, 
 have had practical experience of the obstacles to 
 understanding or being understood, which a very 
 slight departure from the recognized standard of 
 pronunciation will create. And quite as effectual as 
 differences of pronunciation for the ear, are differences 
 of spelling for the eye, in the way of making recog- 
 nition hard, or even impossible. It would be curious 
 to know how many Englishmen who have made fair 
 advances in German, as commonly taught, have 
 recognized the entire identity of 'deed' and 'that,' of 
 'eye' and 'auge,' of 'fowl' and ' vogel,' of ' vixen ' 
 and 'fiichsinn,' of 'dough' and 'teig,' of 'oath' and 
 'eid,' of 'through' and 'durch,' of 'dreary' and 
 ' traurig,' of ' even ' and ' abend,' of ' death ' and ' tod,' 
 of 'quick' and 'keck,' of 'deal' and ' theil,' of 
 'enough' and 'genug;' or of other pairs of words 
 out of number which might be quoted. It is only 
 too easy for those who are using the very same words, 
 to be, notwithstanding, as barbarians to one another. 
 When I hear or read of Gaelic-speaking people 
 making themselves at this day intelligible in Brittany, 
 with other marvellous stories of like kind, I decline 
 to give to such any credence whatever. The parties 
 may have understood one another by gesticulation or 
 otherwise, but not by aid of speech. 
 
 Again, what was the exception at the time of 
 separation will in one branch of the divided family 
 have grown into the rule, while perhaps in the other
 
 62 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 branch it will have been disallowed altogether. So 
 too idioms and other peculiar usages will have ob- 
 tained allowance in one branch, which, not finding 
 favour with the other, will in it be esteemed as viola- 
 tions of the law of the language, or at any rate de- 
 clensions from its purity. Or again, idioms which 
 one people have overlived, and have stowed away in 
 the unhonoured lumber-room of the past, will still 
 be in use and honour with the other ; and thus it will 
 sometimes come to pass that what seems, and in fact 
 is, the newer swarm, a colony which has gone forth, 
 will have older idioms than the main body of a people 
 which has remained behind, will retain an archaic air 
 and old-world fashion about the words they use, their 
 way of pronouncing, their order and manner of com- 
 bining them. Thus after the Conquest our insular 
 French gradually diverged from the French of the 
 Continent. The Prioress in Chaucer's Canterbury 
 Tales could speak her French ' ful faire and fetysly ; 
 but it was French, as the poet slily adds, 
 
 ' Aftur the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, 
 For Frensch of Parys was to hire unknowe.' ' 
 
 One of our old chroniclers, writing in the reign of Eliza- 
 beth, informs us that by the English colonists within 
 the Pale in Ireland numerous words were preserved 
 in common use, — 'the dregs of the old ancient 
 Chaucer English,' as he contemptuously calls them, 
 — which were quite obsolete and forgotten in England 
 itself. Thus they called a spider an 'attercop' — a 
 
 1 For more on this subject, see Transactions of the Philo- 
 logical Society. 1S69, p, 355.
 
 ii. French Spoken in England. 6 
 
 o 
 
 word, by the way, still in popular use in the North ; — 
 a physician a 'leech,' as in poetry he is still styled; — 
 a dunghill a 'mixen,' — the word is common to this 
 day all over England ; a quadrangle or base-court a 
 ' bawn ; ' 1 they employed ' uncouth ' in the earlier 
 sense of ' unknown.' Nay more, their pronunciation 
 and general manner of speech was so diverse from 
 that of England, that Englishmen at their first coming 
 over often found it hard or impossible to comprehend. 
 Something of the same sort took place after the Revo- 
 cation of the Edict of Nantes, and the consequent 
 formation of colonies of French Protestant refugees in 
 various places, especially in Amsterdam and other 
 chief cities of Holland. There gradually grew up 
 among these what was called ' refugee French,' 2 which 
 within a generation or two diverged in several parti- 
 culars from the classical language of France ; the 
 divergence being mainly occasioned by the fact that 
 this ' refugee French ' remained stationary, while the 
 classical language was in motion ; that retained words 
 and idioms, which this had let go. 3 So, too, there is, 
 
 1 The only two writers whom Richardson quotes as using 
 this word are Spenser and Swift, both while writing in Ireland 
 and on Irish matters. [But batvn is certainly not an instance of 
 Chaucerian English, as it is an Irish Gaelic word ; bawn being 
 the English spelling of badhbhdhun, an enclosure, fortress ; see 
 O'Reilly.] 
 
 - There is an excellent account of this ' refugee French ' in 
 Weiss's History of the Protestant Refugees of France. 
 
 3 Lyell (On the Antiquity of Alan, p. 466) confirms this 
 from another quarter : — ' A German colony in Pennsylvania was 
 cut off from frequent communication with Europe, for about a 
 quarter of a century, during the wars of the French Revolution 
 between 1792 and 1S15. So marked had been the effect even
 
 64 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 as I am assured, a marked difference between the 
 Portuguese spoken in the old country and in Brazil, 
 as certainly there is between the Dutch spoken in 
 Holland and in South Africa. ' An outlying colony,' 
 in Oliphant's words, will keep words and sounds 
 dropt by the parent country. In such cases ' there is 
 a kind of arrest of development, the language of the 
 emigrants remaining for a long time at the stage at 
 which it was when emigration took place, and altering 
 more slowly than the mother tongue, and in a differ- 
 ent direction.' ' 
 
 Again, the wear and tear of a language, the using 
 up of its forms and flexions, the phonetic decay which 
 is everywhere and in all languages incessantly going 
 forward, will proceed at a faster rate in one branch of 
 
 of this brief and imperfect isolation, that when Prince Bernhard 
 of Saxe- Weimar travelled among them a few years after the 
 peace, he found the peasants speaking as they had done in Ger- 
 many in the preceding century, and retaining a dialect which at 
 home had already become obsolete (see his Travels in North 
 America, p. 1 23). Even after the renewal of the German emi- 
 gration from Europe, when I travelled in 1841 among the same 
 people in the retired valleys of the Alleghanies, I found the 
 newspapers full of terms half English and half German, and many 
 an Anglo-Saxon [French] word which had assumed a Teutonic 
 dress, as " fencen " to fence, instead of umzaunen, " flauer " for 
 flour, instead of mehl, and so on. What with the retention of 
 terms no longer in use in the mother country and the borrowing 
 of new ones from neighbouring states, there might have arisen in 
 Pennsylvania in five or six generations, but for the influx of new 
 comers from Germany, a mongrel speech equally unintelligible 
 to the Anglo-Saxon and to the inhabitants of the European 
 fatherland.' Compare Sir G. C. Lewis, On the Romance Lan- 
 guages, p. 49. 
 
 1 Ellis, On Early English Pronunciation, p. 20.
 
 ii. Climatic Influence on Language. 65 
 
 the divided language than in the other ; or, if not 
 faster, will not light upon exactly the same forms or 
 the same words ; or, if on the same, yet not exactly 
 upon the same letters. Thus, to take an example of 
 this last, the Latin ' sum ' and the Greek ei/u, the 
 same word, as I need hardly tell you, are both greatly 
 worn away, — worn away in comparison with words of 
 rarer use, as sixpences, passing oftener from hand to 
 hand, lose their image and superscription much faster 
 and much more completely than crowns, — but they 
 are not worn away in precisely the same letters ; each 
 has kept a letter belonging to an earlier form of the 
 word, which the other has not kept, and lost a letter 
 which the other has not lost. 1 This too, the unequal, 
 and as it seems to us, the arbitrary, incidence of 
 phonetic decay, will account for much. 
 
 Nor may we leave out of sight what the elder 
 Grimm has dwelt on so strongly, and brought into so 
 clear a light — namely, the modifying influence on the 
 throat and other organs of speech, and thus on human 
 speech itself, which soil and climate exercise — an 
 influence which, however slight at any one moment, 
 yet being evermore in operation, produces results very 
 far from slight in the end. We have here a main 
 explanation of the harsh and guttural sounds which 
 those dwelling in cold mountainous districts make 
 their own, of the softer and more liquid tones of such 
 as dwell in the plains and under a more genial sky. 
 These climatic influences indeed reach very far, not 
 merely as they affect the organs of speech, but also 
 the characters of those who speak ; which characters 
 
 SeeN.E.D(s. v. be).
 
 66 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 will not fail in their turn to utter themselves in the 
 language. Where there is a general lack of energy 
 and consequent shrinking from effort, this will very 
 soon manifest itself in a corresponding feebleness in 
 the pronunciation of words, while, on the other hand, 
 a Dorian strength will show itself in a corresponding 
 breadth and boldness of utterance. 
 
 But it would lead me too far, were I to attempt 
 to make an exhaustive enumeration of all the forces 
 which are constantly at work, to set ever farther from 
 one another in this matter of language those which 
 once were entirely at one. These causes which I 
 have instanced must suffice. The contemplation of 
 these is enough to make evident that, even could we 
 abstract all the influences upon English which the 
 Norman Conquest has exercised, it would still remain 
 a very different language at this day from any now 
 spoken by Old Saxon or Frisian, 1 that it would be 
 
 1 In the contemplation of facts like these it has been some- 
 times anxiously asked, whether a day will not arrive when the 
 language now spoken alike on this side of the Atlantic and on 
 the other, will divide into two languages, an Old English and a 
 New. It is not impossible, and yet we can confidently hope 
 that such a day is far distant. For the present at least, there are 
 mightier forces tending to keep us together than those which are 
 tending to divide. Doubtless, if they who went out from among 
 us to people and subdue a new continent, had left these shores 
 two or three centuries earlier than they did, when the language 
 was much farther removed from that ideal after which it was 
 unconsciously striving, and in which, once reached, it has in 
 great measure acquiesced ; if they had not carried with them to 
 their new homes their English Bible, their English Shakespeare, 
 and what else of worth had already uttered itself in the English 
 tongue ; if, having once swarmed, the intercourse between Old
 
 ii. American English. 6j 
 
 easy to rate far too highly the resemblance which 
 under other circumstances might have existed between 
 
 and New England had been entirely broken off, or only rare and 
 partial ; there would then have unfolded themselves differences 
 between the language spoken here and there, which, in tract of 
 time accumulating and multiplying, might already have gone 
 far to constitute the languages no longer one, but two. As it is, 
 however, the joint operation of those three causes, namely, that 
 the separation did not take place in the infancy or early youth 
 of the language, but only in its ripe manhood, that England and 
 America own a body of literature, to which they alike look up 
 and appeal as containing the authoritative standards of the 
 language, that the intercourse between the two peoples has been 
 large and frequent, hereafter probably to be larger and more 
 frequent still, has up to this present time been strong enough 
 effectually to traverse, repress, and check all those forces which 
 tend to divergence. At the same time one must own that there 
 are not wanting some ominous signs. Of late, above all since 
 the conclusion of their great Civil War, some writers on the 
 other side of the Atlantic have announced that henceforth 
 America will, so to speak, set up for herself, will not accept any 
 longer the laws and canons of speech which may here be laid 
 down as of ultimate authority for all members of the English- 
 speaking race, but travel in her own paths, add words to her 
 own vocabulary, adopt idioms of her own, as may seem the best 
 to her. She has a perfect right to do so ; either to make or 
 mar as it shall prove. The language is as much hers as ours. 
 There are on this matter some excellent remarks in Dwight's 
 Modern Philology, 1st ser. p. 141, with which compare Whitney, 
 Language and the Study of Language, p. 173- Still, for our 
 own sake, who now read so many books from America with 
 profit and delight, and look forward to a literature grander and 
 still more original unfolding itself there, for our own sake, that 
 I may not speak of hers, we must hope that 'to donate,' 'to 
 pacate,' 'to placate,' 'to berate,' 'to orate' (to speak, that is, 
 with a view to distant constituents), ' to reluct,' * to eventuate,' 
 'to conveyance,' 'to belittle,' 'to happify,' 'shortage,' 'expres- 
 
 F2
 
 68 English as it might have been. Lect 
 
 English and the other dialects of the Teutonic stock. 
 Still they would have then resembled one another far 
 more nearly than now they do. Let us endeavour a 
 little to realise to ourselves English as it might then 
 have been ; and in view of this consider the disturb- 
 ing forces which the Norman domination in England 
 brought with it, and what their action upon the lan- 
 guage was. We shall so be better able to measure 
 what the language in the absence of these influences 
 would have been. 
 
 The Battle of Hastings had been lost and won. 
 Whether, except for the strange and terrible coinci- 
 dence of the two invasions of England north and 
 south, almost at the same instant, the English battle- 
 axes might not have proved a match for the Norman 
 spears, we cannot now determine. But the die was 
 cast. The invader on that memorable day of St. 
 Calixtus had so planted his foot on English soil, that 
 all after-efforts were utterly impotent to dislodge him. 
 But it took nearly three centuries before the two races, 
 the victors and the vanquished, who now dwelt side 
 by side in the same land, were thoroughly reconciled 
 and blended into one people. During the first cen- 
 tury which followed the Conquest, the language of 
 the native population was, as they were themselves, 
 utterly crushed and trodden under foot. A foreign 
 dynasty, speaking a foreign tongue, and supported by 
 an army of foreigners, was on the throne of England. 
 
 sage,' 'declinature,' 'skrimpy,' 'scrimption,' ' unleisuredness,' 
 'retrogressionist,' 'resurrected,' ' factatively,' ' displurgingly, 
 and the like, are not fair specimens of the words which will 
 constitute the future differentia between the vocabularies of 
 America and of England.
 
 ii. Revival of English. 69 
 
 Norman ecclesiastics filled all the high places of 
 the Church, filled probably every place of honour 
 and emolument ; Norman castles studded the land. 
 During the second century a reaction may very dis- 
 tinctly be traced, at first most feeble, but little by 
 little gathering strength, on the part of the conquered 
 race to reassert themselves, and as a part of their re- 
 assertion to reassert the right of English to be the 
 national language of England. In the third century 
 after the Conquest it was at length happily evident 
 that Normandy was for ever lost (1206), that for 
 English and Norman-English alike there was no 
 other sphere but England ; this reassertion of the old 
 Saxondom of the land gaining strength every day ; 
 till, as a visible token that the vanquished were again 
 the victors, in the year 13S5 English and not French 
 was the language taught in the schools of this land. x 
 
 But the English, which thus emerged from this 
 struggle of centuries during which it had refused to 
 die, was very different from that which had entered 
 into it. The whole of its elaborate inflexions, its 
 artificial grammar, showed tokens of thorough dis- 
 organization and decay ; indeed most of it had already 
 disappeared. How this came to pass I cannot better 
 explain to you than in the words of the Professor of 
 
 1 On the whole subject of the relations in which the language 
 of a conquering people will stand to the language of the con- 
 quered, and on the causes which will determine the final triumph 
 of the one or the other, the reader is referred to Freeman's 
 Origin of the English Nation, Lecture III., in Mac mi llarfs 
 Magazine, May, 1870, pp. 31-46, and his Norman Conquest, 
 vol. v. p. 566 sqq. See also Sayce, Principles of Comparative 
 Philology, p. 175 sqq.
 
 jo English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. ' Great and speedy,' he ob- 
 serves, ' must have been the effect of the Norman 
 Conquest in ruining the ancient grammar. The lead- 
 ing men in the state having no interest in the ver- 
 nacular, its cultivation fell immediately into neglect. 
 The chief of the Saxon clergy deposed or removed, 
 who should now keep up that supply of religious Saxon 
 literature, of the copiousness of which we may judge 
 even in our day by the considerable remains that have 
 outlived hostility and neglect ? Now that the Saxon 
 landowners were dispossessed, who should patronise 
 the Saxon minstrel, and welcome the man of song in 
 the halls of mirth ? The shock of the Conquest gave 
 a deathblow to Saxon literature. The English lan- 
 guage continued to be spoken by the masses who 
 could speak no other   and here and there a secluded 
 student continued to write in it. But its honours and 
 emoluments were gone, and a gloomy period of de- 
 pression lay before the Saxon language as before the 
 Saxon people. The inflexion system could not live 
 through this trying period. Just as we accumulate 
 superfluities about us in prosperity, but in adversity 
 we get rid of them as encumbrances, and we like to 
 travel light when we have only our own legs to carry 
 us — just so it happened to the English language. For 
 now all these sounding terminations that made so 
 handsome a figure in Saxon courts ; the -an, the -um ; 
 the -era, the -ana ; the -igenne and -igendum ; all 
 these, superfluous as bells on idle horses, were laid 
 aside when the nation had lost its own political life, 
 and its pride of nationality, and had received leaders 
 and teachers who spoke a strange tongue.' 1 
 
 1 Earle, The Philology of the English Tongue, § 40.
 
 ii. Ruin of English Grammar 7 1 
 
 But another force, not from within but from with- 
 out, had been at work also for the disorganization of 
 the language and the effectual breaking up of its 
 grammar. A conquering race under the necessity of 
 communicating with a conquered in their own tongue 
 is apt to make very short work of the niceties of 
 grammar in that tongue, to brush all these away, as 
 so much trumpery, which they will not be at the 
 pains to master. If they can make their commands 
 intelligible, this is about all for which they are con- 
 cerned. They go straight to this mark ; but whether, 
 in so doing, adjective agree with substantive, or noun 
 duly follow verb, or preposition govern its proper case, 
 for all this they care nothing, if only they have made 
 themselves understood. And this is not all ; there is 
 a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, 
 in thus stripping the language of its grace and orna- 
 ment, outraging its laws, compelling it to novel forms, 
 showing, even while it is used, how little it is regarded, 
 and making thus not merely the wills, but the very 
 speech of the conquered, to confess its subjection. 1 
 
 Nor was it the grammar only which had thus 
 become a ruin. Those three centuries had made 
 enormous havoc in the vocabulary as well. Rich and 
 expressive as this had been in the palmy days of 
 Anglo-Saxon literature, abundantly furnished as un- 
 doubtedly then it was with words having to do with 
 matters of moral and intellectual concern, and in the 
 nomenclature of the passions and affections, it was 
 very far from being richly supplied with them now. 
 
 1 Compare Sir G. C. Lewis, On the Romance Languages, 
 pp. 21-23.
 
 J 2 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 Words which dealt with the material interests of every- 
 day life could scarcely help remaining familiar and 
 vernacular; but those pertaining to the higher domains 
 of thought, feeling, and passion, and to all loftier cul- 
 ture either moral or material, had in vast multitudes 
 dropt out of use and been forgotten. Curious illus- 
 trations have been given of the destruction which had 
 been wrought in some of the most illustrious and far- 
 branching families of words, so that of these there did 
 not half a dozen, of others there did not one repre- 
 sentative, survive. 1 
 
 The destruction of grammatical forms was, it is 
 true, only the acceleration and the more complete 
 carrying out of what would anyhow have come to 
 pass, although perhaps not so thoroughly, as certainly 
 not at so early a date. For indeed there is nothing 
 more certain than that all languages in that period of 
 their lives whereof it is possible to take historic cog- 
 nizance are in a continual process of simplifying 
 themselves, dropping their subtler distinctions, allow- 
 ing the mere collocation of words in their crude state 
 or other devices of the same kind to do what once 
 was done by inflexion. ' Had no Norman ever set 
 foot on our shores, the inflexional Old-English would 
 still have passed sooner or later into the non-inflexional 
 modern English.' 2 All which the Norman settlement 
 in England did was to hasten the inevitable process, 
 and to make it more complete. To this subject, 
 
 1 Thus see Marsh, Origin and History of the English Lan- 
 guage, pp. 113, 443 ; and on this particular matter more inte- 
 resting still, Oliphant, Old and Middle English, p. 4S8 sqq. 
 Kreeman, The Norman Conquest, vol. v. p. 509. 
 
 2
 
 ii. English and Norman. 73 
 
 however, I shall have occasion by and by to recur ; I 
 will not therefore dwell upon it here. But the in- 
 sufficiency of the vocabulary, consequent in part on 
 these losses which it had sustained, in part on the 
 novel thoughts and things that claimed now to find 
 utterance by it, was a less tolerable result of those 
 centuries of depression ; one, however, capable of 
 partial if not of complete remedy ; which the perish- 
 ing of grammatical forms, even if remedy had been 
 looked for, was not. 
 
 Two ways were open here. An attempt might 
 have been made to revive and recover the earlier 
 words which had been lost and let go ; and where 
 new needs demanded expression, to fabricate from 
 the vernacular words which should meet and satisfy 
 these new needs. Now, if the revival of English 
 nationality had meant the expulsion or destruction 
 of the dominant Norman race, this would very pro 
 bably have been the course taken ; and the reaction 
 would have put under a common ban language and 
 institutions alike. But happily it meant no such 
 thing. It meant the blending of the two races into 
 one, the forming of a new English nation by the 
 gradual coalition or rather fusion of the two, by the 
 growing consciousness that this England was the 
 equal heritage of both, its welfare the common interest 
 of both. It was on neither side a triumph, or rather, 
 as are all true reconciliations, it was on both sides a 
 triumph. Where indeed under these circumstances 
 should a supply of the new necessities be so naturally 
 looked for as from the French ? That was the lan- 
 guage of one of the parties in this happy transaction ; 
 of the one which, in respect of language, was giving
 
 74 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 up far the most, and which therefore might fairly look 
 for this partial compensation. Words of theirs, few 
 as compared with those which should hereafter find 
 an entrance into the English tongue, but not few in 
 themselves, had already effected a lodgement there ; 
 others, if not adopted, had become more or less 
 familiar to English ears ; not to say that the language 
 which they spoke owned at that time a literature far 
 in advance of any other in modern Europe, a litera- 
 ture eagerly read here as elsewhere in originals or 
 translations more or less free, representing, as it did, 
 that new world which was springing up, and not, as 
 the Anglo-Saxon did, an old world which was passing 
 or had passed away. 
 
 Now it is a very interesting question, and one 
 which often has been discussed, What proportion do 
 the French words which then found their way into the 
 language, or which have subsequently entered by the 
 door which was thus opened to them, by the declara- 
 tion then virtually made that their admission was not 
 contrary to the genius of the language, bear to the 
 original stock of language on which they were en- 
 grafted? A recent enquirer, who professes to have 
 made an inventory of the whole language, has arrived 
 at this result, namely, that considerably more than 
 one half of our words, not indeed of those which we 
 use in writing, still less in speaking, but more than 
 one half of those registered in our dictionaries, are 
 Romanic, 1 are therefore in one way or another the 
 result and consequence of the Norman Conquest, and 
 
 1 Thommerel, Recherches stir la Fusion du Franco-Normand 
 et de P Anglo-Saxon. Paris, 1841.
 
 ii. Numerous French Words. 75 
 
 except for it would with very few exceptions never 
 have found their way to us at all. 
 
 The proportion which he indicates is probably too 
 high. But without entering upon this question, let 
 us assume for our present purpose that there are in 
 round numbers one hundred thousand words in the 
 English language, — we can make them almost any 
 number we please, according to the scheme of enume- 
 ration upon which we start, can bring them up to half 
 as many again, or reduce them, as some have done, to 
 less than one half, 1 — and let us further suppose that 
 a multitude, I ask not exactly how many thousands 
 of these, have come to us through that contact with 
 France into which the Battle of Hastings and its con- 
 sequences brought us, and except for these would 
 never have reached us at all. Let us, I say, assume 
 this ; and a problem the most interesting presents 
 itself to us — namely, how should we, or whoever else 
 under the altered condition of England might in that 
 event have been at this moment living in England, 
 have supplied the absence of these words? What 
 would the people of this land have done if the lan- 
 guage had never received these additions ? It would 
 be a slight and insufficient answer, in fact no answer 
 at all, to reply, They would have done without them. 
 They could not have done without them. The words 
 which we thus possess, and which it is suggested 
 we might have done without, express a multitude of 
 facts, thoughts, feelings, conceptions, which, rising up 
 before a people growing in civilization, in knowledge, 
 
 1 Thus in Johnson's Dictionary the words beginning with Z 
 are 29 in number ; in Todd they are 47 ; in Webster, 89.
 
 7 6 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 in learning, in intercourse with other lands, in con- 
 sciousness of its own vocation in this world, must 
 find their utterance by one means or another, could 
 not have gone without some words or other to declare 
 them. The problem before us is, what these means 
 would have been ; by what methods the language 
 would have helped itself, if it had been obliged, like 
 so many sister-dialects, to draw solely on its own 
 resources, to rely on home manufactures, instead of 
 importing, as it was able to do, so many serviceable 
 articles ready made from abroad. 
 
 To this question I answer first and generally, and 
 shall afterwards enter into particulars, that necessity 
 is the mother of invention, and that many powers 
 of the language, which are now in a great measure 
 dormant, which have been only partially evoked, 
 would have been called into far more frequent and 
 far more vigorous exercise, under the pressure of those 
 necessities which would then have made themselves 
 felt. Take, for example, the power of composition, 
 that is, of forming new words by the combination of 
 old — a power which the language possesses, though 
 it is one which has grown somewhat weak and stiff 
 through disuse. This would doubtless have been 
 appealed to far more frequently than actually it has 
 been. Thrown back on itself, the language would 
 have evolved out of its own bosom, to supply its 
 various wants, a far larger number of compound words 
 than it has now produced. This is no mere guess of 
 mine. You have only to look at the sister German 
 language— ^rt^"-sister it is now, it would have been 
 whole sister but for that famous field of Hastings — 
 and observe what it has effected in this line, how it
 
 II. Formation of Compound Words. 7 7 
 
 has stopped the gaps of which it has gradually become 
 aware by aid of these compound words, and you may 
 so learn what we, under similar conditions, would have 
 done. Thus, if we had not found it more convenient 
 to adopt the French 'sceptre/ if English had been 
 obliged, like the spider, to spin a word out of its own 
 bowels, it might have put 'king-staff' together, like 
 the German 'herrscherstab.' This and other words I 
 shall suggest may sound strange to you at first hear- 
 ing, but would have long since left off their strange- 
 ness, had they been current for some hundreds of 
 years. If we had not the French ' massacre,' we 
 might have had 'blood-bath,' which would not be a 
 worse word in English than in German. So too, if 
 we had not had ' deluge,' the Latin ' diluvium,' we too 
 might have lighted on ' sin-flood,' as others have done. 
 A duel might have been a ' two-fight ' or ' twifight,' 
 following the analogy of 'twilight' and 'twibill.' 
 Instead of ' pirate ' we might have had ' sea-reaver ; ' 
 indeed, if I do not mistake, we have the word. We 
 should have needed a word for ' hypocrisy ; ' but the 
 German ' scheinheiligkeit ' at any rate suggests that 
 'shewholiness ' might have effectually served our turn. 
 This last example is from the Greek, but the Greek in 
 our tongue entered in the rear of the Latin, and would 
 not have entered except by the door which that had 
 opened. 
 
 At the same time it will be well to keep this in 
 mind, namely, that the fact of Germans having fallen 
 on these combinations does not make it in the least 
 certain that we should have fallen upon the same. 
 There is a law of necessity in the evolution of lan- 
 guages ; they pursue certain courses on which we
 
 78 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 may confidently count, courses not to be accelerated 
 nor yet defeated or thwarted by any forces which we 
 have at command. But there is a law of liberty no 
 less, and this liberty, making itself felt in this region, 
 together with a thousand other causes, leaves it quite 
 certain that in some, and possibly in all these instances, 
 we should have supplied our wants in some other 
 way, not travelled in exactly the same paths as they 
 nave struck out for themselves. Thus, nearly allied 
 as the Dutch is to the German, and greatly under Ger- 
 man influence as it has been, it has a number of com- 
 pound words of which the German knows nothing. 1 
 Still the examples which I have given sufficiently in- 
 dicate to us the direction which the language would 
 have taken. 
 
 But we are not here driven to a region of conjec- 
 tures, or to the suggesting what might have been done. 
 We can actually appeal to a very numerous company 
 of these compound words, which have been in the 
 language ; but which have been suffered to drop, the 
 Latin competitors for some reason or other having, 
 in that struggle for existence to which words are as 
 
 CO 
 
 much exposed as animals, carried the day against it. 
 Now we may confidently affirm that all, or very 
 nearly all, of these would have survived to the pre- 
 sent hour, would constitute a part of our present 
 vocabulary if they had actually been wanted ; and 
 they would have been wanted, if competing French 
 words, following in the train of the conquering race, 
 had not first made them not indispensable, and then 
 wholly pushed them from their places. When I say 
 
 1 See Jean Paul, Aesthetik, § 84.
 
 ii. New Formations of Words. 79 
 
 this I do not mean to imply that these words were all 
 actually born before the Norman Conquest, but only 
 that the Conquest brought influences to bear, which 
 were too strong for them and in the end cut shor 
 their existence. 
 
 Thus, if we had not proverb, ' soothsaw ' or ' by- 
 word ' would have served our turn ; ' sourdough ' 
 would have supplied the absence of leaven ; ' wellwill- 
 ingness ' of benevolence ; ' againbuying ' of redemp- 
 tion ; ' againrising ' of resurrection ; ' undeadliness ' 
 of immortality ; ' uncunningness ' of ignorance ; ' un- 
 mildness ' of asperity ; ' forefighter ' of champion ; 
 ' earthtilth ' of agriculture ; ' earthtiller ' of agricul- 
 turist ; ' comeling ' of stranger ; ' greatdoingly ' of 
 magnificently ; ' to afterthink ' (still in use in Lanca- 
 shire) might have stood for to repent ; to ' beforesay ' 
 for to prophesy ; ' medeful ' for meritorious ; ' unten- 
 able ' or ' unoutspeakable ' for ineffable ; ' deanvorth ' 
 for precious ; ' turngiddy ' for vertigo — many of which 
 are in Wiclif. How grand a word, and better even 
 than his 'undeadliness,' is ' undaethshildignesse,' which 
 occurs in the Or nudum, instead of 'immortality.' 
 Chaucer has ' forward ' for agreement ; ' bodeword ' 
 for prohibition ; and the Ancren Riwle ' goldhoard ' 
 for treasure. ' Tongueful ' (see Bosworth), or ' tungy ' 
 (Wiclif), might have stood for loquacious; 'welldeed' 
 for benefit; 'againcalling' for revocation; 'trueless- 
 ness ' for perfidy ; 'footfast' for captive. Hampole has 
 ' allwitty ' for omniscient, and ' godspeller ' for evan- 
 gelist. Jewel has ' foretalk ' for preface ; Coverdale 
 ' childship ' for adoption, ' shewtoken ' for sign, ' to 
 unhallow ' for to profane ; Holland ' sunstead ' for 
 solstice ; Rogers ' turnagains ' for reverses. As little
 
 So English as it might have been, lect 
 
 should we have let go ' bookcraft ' for literature, 
 ' shipcraft ' for navigation, ' leechcraft ' or ' leechdom ' 
 for medicine, ' wordcraft ' for logic, ' songsmith ' for 
 poet, ' warsmith ' for soldier, ' shapesmith ' for posture- 
 maker, ' tilman ' (Golding) for agriculturist, ' timber- 
 wright ' for carpenter. ' Starconner ' (Gascoigne) did 
 service once side by side with astrologer ; ' redesman ' 
 with counsellor ; ' halfgod ' (Golding) has the advan- 
 tage over demigod, that it is all of one piece ; 'to 
 eyebite ' (Holland) tells its story at least as well as to 
 fascinate ; ' to overwin ' as to vanquish ; ' weapon- 
 shew ' (the word, for us a little disguised, still lives in 
 Scotland) as review ; ' yearday ' (Promptorium) as 
 anniversary ; ' shriftfather ' as confessor ; ' unrestful- 
 ness ' (Spenser) as disquietude ; ' evenhood ' (Levins) 
 as equality ; ' betterment ' (Jackson) as amelioration ; 
 1 holdings ' (Pecock) as tenets ; ' unshunnable ' 
 (Shakespeare) as inevitable. ' Earshrift ' (Tyndale) 
 is only two syllables, while auricular confession is 
 eight; ' eyeproof ' has the same advantage over ocu- 
 lar demonstration ; ' watertight ' is preferable to our 
 awkward hydrophobia ; ' watersick ' is as good as 
 dropsical ; and 'squint,' if homelier than hagioscope, 
 might yet have served our turn as well. The annual 
 perambulation of the parish is in some parts of 
 England ' gang-days ' (A. S. ' gang-dagas,' Rogation 
 days).' The lamprey (lambens petram) would have 
 been, as in country parts it now is, the ' suckstone ' 
 or the ' lickstone ; ' and the anemone the ' wind- 
 flower.' For remorse of conscience we might have 
 had, and it exactly corresponds, ' ayenbite of inwyt,' 
 being, as this is, the title of a remarkable religious 
 treatise of the middle of the fourteenth century ;
 
 ii. Neednots, Pullbacks. 81 
 
 in which I observe, among other noticeable substi- 
 tutes for our Latin words, ' bookhouse ' for library, 
 and ' unlusthead ' for disinclination. Emigrants 
 would everywhere have been called what they are 
 now called in districts of the North, ' outwanderers ' 
 or ' outgangers ; ' natives would have been ' home- 
 lings ; ' aliens ' outborn ; ' so indeed they are by 
 Sir John Cheke ; apologies would have been ' off- 
 comes ' (Whitby dialect). A preacher who should bid 
 us to sacrifice some of our ' neednots ' (the word is in 
 Fuller), instead of some of our superfluities, to the 
 wants of others, would deliver his message as well, 
 perhaps better, than now. He might do the same 
 who should enumerate the many ' pullbacks ' (it is 
 a Puritan word), instead of the many hindrances, 
 which we find in the way of attaining to eternal life. 1 
 Then too with the absence from the language of 
 the Latin prefixes, the Saxon would have come far more 
 
 1 In his Outlines of English Speechcraft Barnes has suggested 
 a large number of thoroughly English words, which might with • 
 more or less advantage be made to exclude and take the place 
 of Greek, Latin, and French, which we now employ. In 
 these he is always ingenious, and although sometimes, it may 
 be, playing with his readers, still playing as only the accomplished 
 scholar could do. Here is a handful of his suggestions, being 
 of the number of such as have pleased me the most. Thus 
 for aeronaut he would suggest ' airfarer,' for accessory * deeds- 
 mate,' for anachronism 'mistiming,' for armistice 'warpause' 
 or ' weaponstay,' for annuity 'yeardole,' for adulation ' glaver- 
 ing,' for botany ' wortlore,' for burglary ' housebreach,' for 
 deciduous 'fallsome,' for democracy 'folkdom,' for domicile 
 'wonstead,' for equilibrium ' weightevenness,' for flexible ' bend- 
 some,' for bibulous 'soaksome,' for horizon 'skyline,' for fragile 
 ' breaksome,' for preface ' foresay '—but these will suffice. 
 
 G
 
 82 English as it might have been. Lect. 
 
 into use. The Latin which we employ the most fre- 
 quently, or rather which are oftenest found in words 
 which we have adopted, are ' sub ' as in ' subdue,' 
 ' subtract ; ' ' de ' as in ' descendant,' ' deprive ; ' 
 'circum' as in 'circumference,' 'circumvent;' and 
 ' pra? ' or ' pro ' as in ' predecessor,' ' progenitor.' Had 
 these been wanting, the Latin words to which they 
 are prefixed would have been wanting too. How 
 would the language have fared without them ? Not 
 so ill. They would have left no chasm which it 
 would not have been comj a atively easy to fill up. 
 Thus if the speakers of English had not possessed 
 ' subjugate ' they would have had ' underyoke ; ' if not 
 ' subvert,' yet still ' underturn ; ' and so on with many 
 more now to be found in Wiclif 's Bible and elsewhere. 
 There is not at the present moment a single word in 
 the English language — one or two may perhaps sur- 
 vive in the dialects — beginning with the prefix 'um,' 
 the Old English 'ymb,' the Greek d^<pi. 1 There were 
 once a great many. An embrace was an ' umgripe ' 
 or a gripe round ; a circuit an 'umgang' (Hampole), 
 the circumference or periphery of a circle was the 
 ' umstroke ; ' to surround was to 'umlapp' (Hampole) ; 
 to besiege on every side ' to umbesiege ' (Sibbald, 
 Glossary). The last appearance of ' umstroke,' if I 
 am not mistaken, is in Fuller, who uses it more than 
 once in his Pisgah Sight of Palestine, while it would 
 be difficult, if not impossible, to find so late an 
 example of any of the other words with this prefix. 
 We might have had, and probably should have had in 
 
 1 [We have still in English one word which contains this 
 prefix, namely ember in ember-days, see Skeat.]
 
 ii. Words we should have retained. 83 
 
 the case which I am imagining, a large group of such 
 words, in place of those now beginning with 'circum.' 
 In the absence of ' prae ' or ' pro,' ' fore,' which even 
 now enters into so many of our words, as ' foretell,' 
 'forewarn,' would have entered into more. As we 
 have just seen, for preface we should have ' foretalk, 
 or ' forespeech ' (Ayenbite) ; for predecessor ' fore- 
 ganger,' for presentiment ' forefeeling,' as indeed we 
 have 'foreboding,' for progenitor 'fore-elder;' — in 
 all this I am not guessing, but am everywhere adduc- 
 ing words which existed once in the language. 
 
 The prefix 'for,' adding an intensitive meaning, 
 one, that is, of thoroughness, and corresponding to the 
 German 'ver,' the Latin 'per,' to which we already owe 
 several excellent words, 'forlorn,' 'forbid,' 'forego,' 
 would have yielded us many more, each one of which 
 would have rendered some Latin word superfluous. 
 We can adduce the participles, ' forwandred ' (Piers 
 Plowman), ' forwounded,' 'forwept,' 'forpined,' ' for- 
 bruised,' with many more in Chaucer, ' for wearied,' 
 ' forwasted ' (Spenser), ' forwelked,' and the verb 
 'forfaren,' to go to ruin (exactly the Latin 'per-ire'), 
 ' forshapen ' (Piers Plow/nan), ' forwithered,' ' for- 
 faint' (Sackville), with other words not a few, as 
 samples of what further in this direction, if need had 
 urged, the language could have effected. ' Mis ' too, 
 which already does much work, as in 'misdeed,' 
 'mislead,' ' mishappen,' if this last may be claimed as 
 still existing, would have been called to do more ; in- 
 stead of to abuse we should have had ' to miscall ' 
 (the word is even now in popular use) ; and the like. 
 'To ' (= Latin ' dis- ') would have been still in use, as 
 in the Middle English ' tobreken,' to break in pieces, 
 
 G 2
 
 84 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 ' tobresten ' (Chaucer), ' tocleve,' ' tohewen,' ' to- 
 renden.' ' Out ' would have been put to more duty 
 than now it is; thus 'outtake' would have kept the 
 place from which now it has been thrust by ' except,' 
 as : outdrive ' has been by ' expel.' It would have 
 fared the same with ' after.' Instead of our successors 
 we should speak of our ' aftercomers ; ' consequences 
 would have been ' aftercomings ;' posthumous would 
 have been 'afterborn;' a postscript an 'aftertale.' 
 All these too existed once. ' To backjaw ' is current 
 in some of our dialects still, and would have been a 
 vigorous substitute for 'to retort.' 
 
 Something, again, may be concluded of what the 
 English-speaking race would have been able to effect, 
 if thrown exclusively on such resources as it possessed 
 at home, by considering the more or less successful 
 attempts of some who have chosen, without any such 
 absolute necessity, to travel the paths which, in that 
 case, there would have been no choice but to tread. 
 Thus Sir John Cheke, in his version of St. Matthew, 
 has evidently substituted, as often as he could, Saxon 
 words for Greek and Latin ; thus for proselyte he has 
 substituted ' freshman,' for prophet 'foreshewer ' and 
 'foresayer,' for lunatic 'mooned,' ' outpeopling ' for 
 carrying into captivity, ' outcalled ' for elect. Put- 
 tenham in the 'terms of art ' which he employs in his 
 Art of English Poesy has made a similar experiment, 
 though with no remarkable success. Fairfax, author 
 of a curious and in some ways an interesting book, 
 The Balk and Selvedge of the World, has done better. 
 He too would fain by his own example show how very 
 rarely even in subjects of a large range it is necessary 
 to employ any other words than such as are home-
 
 II. Unthoroughfaresomeness. 85 
 
 growths ; that ' moreness,' for example, does its work 
 as well as plurality, ' findings ' as inventions. I ex- 
 tract a brief passage from the Introduction, at once 
 for its bearing on the subject which we now have in 
 hand, and also as itself a testimony of the vigorous 
 English which it is possible under such self-imposed 
 limitations to write : ' I think it will become those of 
 us, who have a more hearty love for what is our own, 
 than wanton longings after what is others', to fetch 
 back some of our own words that have been jostled 
 out in wrong, that worse from elsewhere might be 
 hoisted in ; or else to call in from the fields and 
 waters, shops and workhousen, that well fraught world 
 of words that answers works, by which all learners are 
 taught to do, and not to make a clatter.' 
 
 This subject on one occasion being under familiar 
 discussion, and one present vaunting the powers of 
 our Anglo-Saxon tongue to produce words of its own 
 which should thus answer any and every want, so 
 that it need never be beholden to any foreign tongue, 
 another put him to the proof, demanding a sufficient 
 native equivalent for ' impenetrability.' ' Unthorough- 
 faresomeness ' was promptly produced. The word 
 may not be a graceful one, but take it to pieces, and 
 you will find nothing wanting to it. For what is 
 impenetrability? It is the quality in one thing which 
 does not allow it to be pierced or passed through by 
 another. And now dissect its proposed equivalent ; 
 and first, detaching from it its two prefixes, and 
 affixes as many, you have 'fare' or passage for the 
 body of the word ; you have next ' thoroughfare ' 
 or place through which there is a passage ; by 
 aid of the suffix 'some' you obtain the adjective
 
 86 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 ' thoroughfaresome,' or affording a passage through ; 
 the negative prefix ' un ' gives you ' unthoroughfare- 
 some,' the negation of this ; and the second suffix 
 ' ness,' ' unthoroughfaresomeness,' or the state which 
 refuses to afford a passage through, — in other words, 
 impenetrability. 
 
 We can thus, I think, trace, and not altogether 
 by mere guesswork or at random, some of the paths 
 along which English would have travelled, had it been 
 left to itself, and to its own natural and orderly 
 development, instead of being forced, by the stress of 
 external circumstances, into paths in part at least 
 altogether new. We can assert with confidence that 
 it would have been no unserviceable, shiftless, nor ig- 
 noble tongue ; and this, while we gladly and thankfully 
 acknowledge that it has done still better, being what it 
 is, the language namely in which our English Bible is 
 written, in which Shakespeare and Milton have garnered 
 for the afterworld the rich treasures of their mind. 
 
 Let us, before quite dismissing this subject, con- 
 template two or three points which broadly distin- 
 guish English as it is from English as it would then 
 have been. The language, we may be quite sure, 
 would in that case have been more abundantly sup- 
 plied with inflexions than at present it is. It was, 
 as we saw just now, during the period of extreme 
 depression which followed on the Conquest that it 
 stripped itself so bare of these. I do not of course 
 mean to imply that a vast number of inflexions would 
 not, according to the universal law of all languages, 
 anyhow have fallen away. But continuing, as it would 
 have done, the language of the Church, the Court, and
 
 ii. Duplicates in English. 87 
 
 of literature, it would never have become that mere 
 torso which it was, when at length it emerged vic- 
 torious from its three hundred years of conflict for 
 supremacy on this English soil. We should assuredly 
 have possessed a much more complex grammatical 
 system, probably as complex or nearly as complex as 
 the German possesses at the present day. Foreigners 
 complain even now that English is hard enough to 
 master ; it would assuredly have been much harder 
 then. There would have been many more distinc- 
 tions to remember. Our nouns substantive, instead of 
 being all declined in one uniform manner, would have 
 been declined some in one way, some in another ; they 
 would probably have had their three genders, — mas- 
 culine, feminine, and neuter ; and have modified ac- 
 cording to these the terminations of the adjectives in 
 regimen with them ; and very much more of this 
 kind, now dismissed, and on the whole happily dis- 
 missed, would have been retained. 
 
 The language is infinitely richer now in synonyms 
 than but for this settlement of French and Latin in its 
 midst it would have been — in words, I mean, covering 
 the same, or nearly the same, spaces of meaning. In 
 cases almost innumerable it has what we may call 
 duplicate words ; there can be very few languages in the 
 world so amply furnished with these. The way thas 
 obtained them is this. It has kept the Saxon word, 
 and superadded to this the Latin, or the French de- 
 rived from the Latin. Thus we have kept ' heavenly,' 
 but we have added ' celestial ; ' we have not dismissed 
 ' earthly,' though we have acquired 'terrestrial ; ' nor 
 ' fiery,' though we have adopted ' igneous ; ' ' provi- 
 dence ' has not put ' foresight ' out of use, nor ' flower'
 
 88 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 'bloom,' nor 'benediction' 'blessing,' nor 'reign' 
 ' kingdom,' nor ' omnipotent ' ' almighty,' nor ' pon- 
 derous ' ' weighty,' nor ' cordial ' ' hearty,' nor ' exone- 
 rate ' ' unburden,' nor ' lassitude ' ' weariness.' I 
 might go on instancing these duplicate words almost 
 without end, but I have dwelt more fully on this matter 
 elsewhere, 1 and here therefore will not urge it more. 
 
 Neither can it be said that this abundance is a mere 
 piece of luxury, still less that it is an embarrassment. 
 So far from this, it brings many substantial advantages 
 with it. It gives the opportunity of weaving now a 
 homelier, now a more scholarly tissue of speech, as 
 may seem most advisable for the immediate need. 
 Poetry is evidently a gainer by it, in the wider choice 
 of expressions which it has thus at command, to meet 
 its manifold exigencies, now of rhyme, now of melody, 
 and now of sentiment. And prose is not less a gainer, 
 demanding as it does rhythm and modulation and 
 cadence, though of another kind, quite as urgently as 
 poetry does, and having these much more within 
 reach through this ampler choice of words than 
 otherwise it would have had. Thus most of us have 
 admired in Handel's greatest composition the mag- 
 nificent effect of those words from the Apocalypse, 
 'For the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.' Now the 
 word which our Translators have here rendered 
 'omnipotent,' they have everywhere else rendered 
 'almighty;' but substitute ' almighty ' here, and how 
 manifest the loss. What a sublime variation have 
 they found in the possession of this word within their 
 reach. 2 
 
 1 Study of Words, 20th edit. p. 263. 
 
 2 I only know one in modern times, but he is one whose
 
 ii. ' Inkkorn Terms.' 89 
 
 These are manifest gains ; but for all this I would 
 not affirm that everything is gain. Thus if our Saxon 
 had never been disturbed, there would certainly have 
 been in the language a far smaller number of what 
 our ancestors called 'inkhorn terms,' the peculiar 
 property of the scholar, not used and not understood 
 by the poor and the illiterate. More words would be 
 what all words ought to be, and once were, ' thought- 
 pictures,' transparent with their own meaning, telling 
 their own story to everybody. Thus if I say that 
 Christ ' sympathizes ' with his people, or even if I say, 
 ' has compassion,' I am not sure that every one follows 
 me ; but if I were to say, He ' fellow-feels,' and the 
 word existed not long ago, as 'fellow-feeling' does 
 
 judgments must always carry great weight, Dr. Guest, who in 
 his History of English Rhythms takes a less favourable view of 
 the results of the large importation of French and Latin words 
 into the language : — ' The evils resulting from these importations 
 have, I think, been generally underrated in this country. When 
 a language must draw upon its own wealth for a new term, its 
 forms and analogies are kept fresh in the minds of those who so 
 often use them. But with the introduction of foreign terms, not 
 only is the symmetry— the science — of the language injured, but 
 its laws are brought less frequently under notice, and are the 
 less used, as their application becomes more difficult. If a new 
 word were added to any of the purer languages, such as the 
 Sanscrit, the Greek, or the Welsh, it would soon be the root of 
 numerous offshoots, substantives, adjectives, verbs, &c. , all 
 formed according to rule, and modifying the meaning of their 
 root according to well-known analogies. But in a mixed and 
 broken language few or no such consequences follow. The 
 word remains barren and the language is "enriched " like a tree 
 covered over with wreaths taken from the boughs of its neigh- 
 bour; which carries a goodly show of foliage and withers 
 beneath the shade.'
 
 90 English as it might have been. lect. 
 
 still, all would understand. 'Redemption' conveys 
 to our poor the vague impression of some great 
 benefit ; but ' againbuying ' would have conveyed a 
 far more distinct one. ' Middler ' — this word also is 
 to be found in Wiclif — would have the same advan- 
 tage over 'mediator.' Even our x\uthorized Version, 
 comparatively little as we have to complain of there, 
 would itself not have lost, but gained, if its authors 
 had been absolutely compelled to use the store of 
 English vocables at their command, if sometimes they 
 had been shut in, so to speak, to these ; for instance, 
 if instead of 'celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial,' 
 they had had no choice but to write ' heavenly bodies 
 and bodies earthly ' (i Cor. xv. 40). All would have 
 understood them then ; I very much doubt whether 
 all understand them now. 
 
 Other advantages too might have followed, if the 
 language had continued all of one piece. Thus in the 
 matter of style, it would not have been so fatally easy 
 for one writing bad English to fancy this bad to be 
 good, as now it is. That worst and most offensive 
 kind of bad English, which disguises poverty of 
 thought, and lack of any real command over the 
 language, by the use of big, hollow, lumbering Latin 
 words, would not have been possible. It is true that 
 on the other hand the opportunities of writing a grand, 
 sustained, stately English would not have been nearly 
 so great, except for the incoming of that multitude of 
 noble words which Latin, the stateliest of all languages, 
 has lent us. Something not very different indeed, not 
 immeasurably remote from Swift's or Dryden's prose, 
 might have existed ; but nothing in the least re- 
 sembling the stately march of Hooker's, of Milton's,
 
 ii. English amplified by Latin. 91 
 
 or Jeremy Taylor's, or Sir Thomas Browne's. A 
 good style would have been a much less complex 
 matter than now it is ; the language would have been 
 an instrument with not so many strings, an organ with 
 fewer pipes and stops, of less compass, with a more 
 limited diapason, wanting many of the grander re- 
 sonances which it now possesses ; but an instrument 
 easier to play on, requiring infinitely less skill ; not so 
 likely to betray into gross absurdities, nor to make an 
 open show of the incapacity of such as handled it 
 badly. 
 
 On the whole, then, while that Norman Conquest, 
 in the disturbing forces which it has exerted on the 
 English language, has no doubt brought with it losses 
 no less than gains, we may boldly affirm that the 
 gains transcend the losses. As so many things have 
 wrought together to make England what she is, as 
 we may trace in our 'rough island-story' so many 
 wonderful ways in which good has been educed from 
 evil, and events the most unpromising have left their 
 blessing behind them, not otherwise has it been here. 
 That which brought down our English tongue from 
 its pride of place, stript it of so much in which it 
 gloried, condemned it, as might have seemed, if not 
 to absolute extinction, yet to serve henceforward as 
 the mere patois of an illiterate race of subject bonds- 
 men and hinds, it was even that very event which in 
 its ultimate consequences wrought out for it merits 
 which it would never else have obtained. So strange 
 in their ultimate issues and results are the ways of 
 Providence with men.
 
 92 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 
 
 IT is with good right that we speak of some 
 languages as living, of others as dead. All 
 languages which are spoken still may be ranged in the 
 first class ; for as men will never consent to use a 
 language without more or less modifying it in their 
 use, will never so far suspend all active exertion of 
 their own, as to leave it exactly where they found it, 
 there follows from this that so long as it is thus the 
 utterance of men thinking and acting, it will inevitably 
 show itself alive, and that by many unmistakeable 
 proofs, by growth and misgrowth, by acquisition and 
 loss, by progress and decay. This title therefore of 
 living a spoken language abundantly deserves ; for it 
 is one in which, employed as it is by living men, vital 
 energies are still in operation. It is one which is in 
 course of actual evolution ; which, so far as the life 
 that animates it is a healthy one, is appropriating and 
 assimilating what it anywhere finds congenial to itself, 
 multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth ; while 
 at the same time it is casting off useless and cumber- 
 some forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of 
 which it finds no use, rejecting by a reactive energy 
 the foreign and the heterogeneous, that may for a
 
 in. Dead Languages do not Change. 93 
 
 while have forced themselves upon it. ' In the process 
 of all this it may easily make mistakes. In the desire 
 to simplify, it may let go distinctions which were not 
 useless, and which it would have been much better to 
 retain. The acquisitions which it makes are very far 
 from being all gains. It sometimes rejects as worth- 
 less, and suffers to die out and disappear, what served 
 for many and most necessary purposes, was most 
 worthy to have lived. So far as it falls into any of 
 these mistakes its life is not healthy ; it is not grow- 
 ing richer but poorer ; there are here tokens, however 
 remote and slight as yet, of disorganization, decay and 
 ultimate death. But still it lives, and even these 
 misgrowths and malformations, the rejection of this 
 good, the taking up into itself of that bad, these errors 
 are themselves the utterances and evidences of life. 
 A dead language knows nothing of all this. It is 
 dead, because books, and not now any generation of 
 living men, are the guardians of it ; and what they 
 guard, they have as little motive as they have power 
 in any way to change. Its course has been run, and 
 it is now equally incapable of gaining and of losing. 
 We may come to know it better ; but in itself it is 
 not, and never can be, other than it was before it 
 ceased from the lips of men. In one sense it is dead, 
 
 1 Renan (Les Langues Semitiques, p. 411): Les lan^ues 
 doivent done etre comparees aux etres vivants de la nature, et 
 non a ce regne immuable oil la matiere et la forme participent 
 au meme caractere de stabilite, ou l'accroissement se fait par 
 l'agglomeration exterieure, et non par intussusception ; leur vie, 
 comme celle de l'homme et de l'humanite, est un acte dissimi- 
 lation interieure, une circulation non interrompue du dehors au 
 dedans et du dedans au dehors, un fieri perpetuel.
 
 94 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 though in another, if the life which it once lived was 
 a glorious one, it may be more true to say of it that 
 it has put on immortality. 
 
 But there is another sense in which languages 
 may be affirmed to be living still. As men in a very 
 real sense live on in their children, so languages, 
 themselves no longer spoken tongues, may yet pro- 
 long their existence through other languages to which 
 in dying they have given birth ; so that what showed 
 in them as a process of decay, and in one sense was 
 nothing less, may be found in another sense to have 
 been the preparations and beginnings of a new life. 
 Thus Italian, Spanish, French, are daughter tongues 
 in which Latin still lives. But such a birth out of 
 death as theirs is too large a subject to speak of here, 
 nor does it belong to our immediate theme. 
 
 Our own is, of course, a living language still. It 
 is therefore gaining and losing. It is a tree in which 
 the vital sap is circulating yet ; and as this works, 
 new leaves are continually being put forth by it, old 
 are dying and dropping away. I propose to consider 
 some of the evidences of this life at work in it still. 
 In my present lecture and in that which follows I 
 shall take for my subject, the sources from which the 
 English language has enriched its vocabulary, the 
 periods at which it has made the chief additions to 
 this, the character of the additions which at different 
 periods it has made, and the motives which induced it 
 to seek these. 
 
 In my first lecture I dwelt with some emphasis 
 on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of 
 our language, is English ; so that, composite or 
 mingled as it is, it is such only in its vocabulary, not
 
 in. Effect of the Norman Conquest. 95 
 
 in its construction, inflexions, or generally its gram- 
 matical forms. These are all of one piece ; there is 
 indeed no amalgamation possible in these ; and 
 whatever of new has come in has been compelled to 
 conform itself to the old. The framework is native ; 
 only a part of the filling in is exotic ; and of this fill- 
 ing in, of these comparatively more recent accessions, 
 I now propose to speak. 
 
 The first great augmentation by foreign words of 
 our Old English vocabulary, and that which in im- 
 portance has very far exceeded all the others put 
 together, was a consequence, although not an im- 
 mediate one, of the Battle of Hastings. You will 
 have gathered from what I have said already that I 
 am unable to share in the sentimental regrets over 
 the results of that battle in which Thierry has led the 
 way. With the freest acknowledgment of the miseries 
 entailed for a while on the Saxon race by the Norman 
 Conquest, I can regard that Conquest in no other 
 light than as the making of England ; a judgment, 
 it is true, but a judgment and a mercy in one. It 
 was a rough and rude, and yet most necessary 
 discipline, to which the race which for so many 
 hundred years had occupied the English soil was 
 thereby submitted ; a great tribulation, yet one not 
 undeserved, and which could not have been spared ; 
 so grievously relaxed were all the moral energies of 
 Saxon England at the time of the Conquest, so far 
 had the vigour of those institutions by which alone 
 a nation lives, decayed and departed. God never 
 showed more plainly that He had a great part for 
 England to play in the world's story than when He 
 brought hither that aspiring Norman race. Heavily
 
 96 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 as for a while they laid their hand on the subject 
 people, they did at the same time contribute elements 
 absolutely essential to the future greatness and glory 
 of the land which they made their own. It is how- 
 ever only of their contributions in one particular 
 direction that we have now to speak. 
 
 Neither can it be said of these that they followed 
 at once. The actual interpenetration of our earlier 
 English with any large amount of French words did 
 not find place till a very much later day. Some French 
 words we find very soon after ; but in the main 
 the two streams of language continued for a long 
 while separate and apart, even as the two nations 
 remained aloof from one another, a conquering and 
 a conquered, and neither forgetting the fact. It was 
 not till the middle of the thirteenth century that 
 French words began to find their way in any very 
 large number into English. Then within a period 
 of some fifty years many more effected a permanent 
 settlement among us than had so done during the two 
 hundred years preceding. In the bringing in of these 
 too much has been ascribed to the influence and 
 authority of a single man. Some have praised, others 
 have blamed, 1 Chaucer overmuch for his share in this 
 work. Standing in the forefront of his time, he no 
 doubt fell in with and set forward tendencies in the 
 
 1 Thus Alexander Gil, head-master of St. Paul's School, in 
 his book, Logonomia Anglica, 1621, Preface: Hue usque pere- 
 grinse voces in lingua Anglica inauditse. Tandem circa annum 
 1400 Galfridus Chaucerus, infausto omine, vocabulis Gallicis et 
 Latinis poesin suam famosam reddidit. The whole passage, 
 which is too long to quote, as indeed the whole book, is 
 curious.
 
 in. Latin Words in ' Piers Plozvman! 97 
 
 language, yet these such, it is plain, as were in active 
 operation already. To assume that the greater num- 
 ber of French words which he employed had never 
 been employed before, were strange to English 
 ears, is to assume, as Tyrwhitt urges well, that his 
 poetry presented to his contemporaries a motley patch- 
 work of language, and is quite irreconcilable with the 
 fact that he took his place at once as the popular poet 
 of the nation. ' 
 
 It would be hardly too much to affirm that there 
 is quite as large a proportion of Latin words in Piers 
 Plowman as in Chaucer,- — certainly a very remarkable 
 fact, when we call to mind that Piers Plowman dates 
 some twenty or thirty years earlier than Chaucer's 
 more important poems, that in form it abides by the 
 old alliterative scheme of versification, and in sub- 
 stance evidently addresses itself not to the courtier 
 or the churchman, but claims to find, as we know it 
 actually found, its proper audience among the com- 
 monalty of the realm. Its religious, ecclesiastical, and 
 ethical terminology is abundant, and with rare excep- 
 tions is Latin throughout — which, when we keep in 
 mind the opulence in such terms of the earlier Anglo- 
 Saxon, signally attests the havoc which had been 
 wrought during the centuries of depression in all the 
 finer elements of the language. We meet there with 
 
 1 In the Testament of Love the anonymous author expresses 
 his contempt of Englishmen who would not clothe their thoughts 
 in an English garb : ' Let these clerkes endyten in Latyn, for 
 they have the propertye in science and the knowinge in that 
 facultye, and letle Frenchmen in their Frenche also endyte their 
 queynt termes, fur it is kyndly to theyr mouthes ; and let us 
 shewe our fantasyes as we learneden of our dames tonge.' 
 
 H
 
 98 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 'abstinence,' 'ampulle,' 'assoil,' 'avarice,' 'benigne,' 
 ' bounte,' 'cardinal vertues,' 'conscience,' 'charitee,' 
 ' chastitee,' ' confessour,' ' consistorie,' ' contemplatif,' 
 'contricion,' 'indulgence,' 'leaute,' ' mitigacion,' 
 'moniale,' 'recreant,' ' relyk,' 'reverence,' 'spirituel,' 
 ' temporalite,' 'unite.' Already we find in Piers 
 Plowman French words which the English language 
 has finally proved unable, or at any rate has declined, 
 to take up into itself, as ' chibolles,' ' creaunt,' ' devoir,' 
 ' entermeten,' 'fille,' ' losengerie,' 'mesel,' 'mestier,' 
 ' payn ' (= bread), ' prest ' (= ready). The real differ- 
 ence between the author of this poem and Chaucer 
 is that the former seems to us, as we read, only to have 
 imperfectly fused into one harmonious whole the two 
 elements whereof the language which he writes is 
 composed ; while the mightier artist has brought them 
 into so perfect a chemical combination, that we never 
 pause to consider from what quarter the ore which he 
 has wrought into such current money was extracted, 
 whether drawn from the old mines of the land, or 
 imported from other new ones, opened beyond the 
 sea. But the Romance of William of Palerne supplies 
 evidence more remarkable still. Madden puts 1350, 
 nearly half a century earlier than the Canterbury Tales, 
 as about the date of this poem. Here are some of 
 the words which it yields: 'aunter,' ' bacheler,' 
 1 defaute,' ' deraine,' ' digne,' ' duresse,' ' emperice,' 
 'eritage,' 'facioun,' ' feyntise,' 'hautein,' 'merciabul,' 
 'mesurabul,' 'paramour,' 'queyntise,' 'scowmfit,' 
 ' travail,' with very many more of like kind. 
 
 Other considerations will contend to the abating of 
 the exclusive merit or demerit of Chaucer in this matter. 
 There were other forces beside literature which at
 
 in. Technical Phraseology. 99 
 
 this time were helping to saturate English with as much 
 of French as it could healthily absorb. ' It is,' Marsh 
 says, ' a great but very widely spread error, to suppose 
 that the influx of French words in the fourteenth 
 century was due alone to poetry and other branches 
 of pure literature. The law, which now first became 
 organized into a science, introduced very many terms 
 borrowed from the nomenclature of Latin and French 
 jurisprudence ; the glass-worker, the enameller, the 
 architect, the brass-founder, the Flemish clothier, and 
 the other handicraftsmen, whom Norman taste and 
 luxury invited, or domestic oppression expelled from 
 the Continent, brought with them the vocabularies of 
 their respective arts ; and Mediterranean commerce —   
 which was stimulated by the demand for English 
 wool, then the finest in Europe — imported, from the 
 harbours of a sea where French was the predominant 
 language, both new articles of merchandize and the 
 French designation of them. The sciences too, medi- 
 cine, physics, geography, alchemy, astrology, all of 
 which became known to England chiefly through 
 French channels, added numerous specific terms to the 
 existing vocabulary, and very many of the words, first 
 employed in English writings as a part of the technical 
 phraseology of these various arts and knowledges, soon 
 passed into the domain of common life, in modified 
 or untechnical senses, and thus became incorporated 
 into the general tongue of society and of books.' 
 
 It is true that there happened here what will happen 
 in every attempt to transplant on a large scale the 
 words of one language into another. The new soil 
 will not prove equally propitious to all. Some will 
 take root and thrive ; but others, after a longer or 
 
 h 2
 
 ioo Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 shorter interval, will pine and wither and die. Not all 
 the words which Chaucer or the author of Piers Ploiv- 
 man employed, and for which they stood sponsors, 
 found final allowance with us. At the same time, 
 such an issue as this was no condemnation of their 
 attempt. Nothing but actual proof could show 
 whether the language needed, and would therefore 
 absorb these ; or, not needing, would in due time 
 reject them. 1 How little in excess Chaucer in this 
 matter was, how admirable his choice of words, is 
 singularly attested by the fact — I state it on Marsh's 
 authority — that there are not more than a hundred 
 French words used by him, such for example as ' ayel ' 
 (aieul), ' bourdon,' ' cierge,' ' gipon,' ' malure ' (mal- 
 heur), 'meubles,' ' misericorde,' 'penible,' 'racine,' 
 ' tas,' which have failed to win a permanent place 
 among us. I cannot say how many Piers Plowman 
 would yield, but we saw just now that it would yield 
 several; and Gower in like manner — such, for example, 
 as 'feblesse,' 'mestier,' 'tristesse.' Wiclif would furnish 
 a few, as for instance, ' creaunsour,' ' mesel,' 'roue,' 
 ' umbre ; ' though far fewer than either of those other ; 
 for indeed the non-English element in him, which the 
 
 1 Plautus in the same way uses a multitude of Greek words, 
 which Latin did not want, and therefore refused to absorb ; thus, 
 'clepta,' 'zamia,' 'danista,' 'harpagare,' 'apolactizare,' 'naucle- 
 rus,' 'strategus,' 'drapeta,' 'moras,' 'morologus,' 'phylaca,' 
 ' malacus,' ' sycophantia,' ' euscheme ' [iva-^rnxias), ' dulice ' 
 (SovXikws), [so 'scymnus' by Lucretius], none of which, I believe, 
 are employed except by him ; while others, as ' mastigia ' and 
 ' techna,' he shares with Terence. Yet only experience could 
 show that they were superfluous ; and it was well done to put 
 them on trial.
 
 in. French Words once in English. 101 
 
 language has finally refused to take up, consists not 
 so much of French, as of words which, by him drawn 
 directly from his Latin Vulgate, had been never shaped 
 or moulded in their passage through any intermediate 
 language. Of these the necessities, or if not the 
 necessities, yet the difficulties, of the case drove him 
 to employ not a few, as 'amphor,' ' architriclyn,' 'ar- 
 gentarie,' ' bilibre,' ' cultre,' ' cyconye,' ' diversory,' 
 'eruk' (eruca), 'jument,' 'lacert,' ' margarite,' 'platan,' 
 'proterve,' 'sambuke,' ' scrabroun,' 'signacle,' ' simul- 
 acre,' ' sindon,' ' spelunc,' ' sudarie,' ' tymiame,' ' vino- 
 lent,' ' volatil ' (= bird), and others ; which one and 
 all have wholly refused to take root. 1 
 
 It is curious to observe to how late a day some of 
 those adoptions from the French kept their ground ; 
 which, for all this, they have proved unable to keep 
 to the end. Thus ' mel ' (Sylvester) struggled hard 
 and long for a place side by side with honey ; ' roy ' 
 with king; this last quite obtaining one in the north- 
 ern dialect, or, as we call it, the Scotch. It has fared 
 not otherwise with 'aigredulce' (=soursweet), 'baine,' 
 'baston,' 'to cass,' 'dulce,' 'ecurie,' 'gite,' 'livraison,' 
 'mot,' 'mur,' 'ouvert,' 'pourprise,' 'sacre,' 'scantillon,' 
 'siffiing' (all in Holland); with 'accoil' (=accueillir), 
 'duress,' 'conge,' 'foi,' 'gree' (gre), 'jouissance,' 'no- 
 blesse,' 'rivage,' 'sell' ( = saddle), 'spalles'(=epaules), 
 ' surquedry,' ' tort ' (all occurring in Spenser) ; with 
 ' orgule ' (Sir T. Malory), and ' outrecuidance ' ; and 
 so too with ' reglement,' 'to serr ' (serrer), 'vive ' (used 
 all by Bacon); with 'amort,' 'bruit,' 'egal,' ' espe- 
 rance,' 'rondeur,' 'scrimer,' 'sans ' (all in Shakespeare). 
 
 1 Eadie, The English Bible, vol. i. p. 74.
 
 102 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 ' Clinquant ' (not jingling as Richardson has it, but 
 glistering), ' devoir,' ' dimes,' ' puissance ; ' ' aveugle,' 
 ' colline ' (both in State Papers), ' defaillance ' (J. 
 Taylor), 'to eloign,' 'pantoffle' (Stubbs), ' medisance' 
 (Montagu), ' pareil,' ' paysage ' (H. Vaughan), 'petit' 
 (South), 'plaisance' (J. Taylor), 'pucelle' (Ben Jon- 
 son), 'volunty' (Evelyn), 'volupty' (Sir T. Elyot), 
 with others more than I can enumerate here, were 
 English once, though most of them can scarcely now 
 be so called. 
 
 But to return. With Chaucer English literature 
 had made a burst, which it was not able to maintain. 
 Dreary days were before it still. Our morning star, 
 he yet ushered in no dawn which was at the point of 
 breaking. Chaucer has by Warton been well compared 
 to some warm bright day in the very early spring, 
 which seems to announce that the winter is over and 
 gone ; but its promise is deceitful ; the full bursting 
 and blossoming of the spring-time is yet far off. The 
 long struggle with France, the Hundred Years' War, 
 which began so gloriously, but which ended so disas- 
 trously, even with the loss of our whole ill-won domi- 
 nion there, the savagery of our wars of the Roses, 
 wars which were a legacy bequeathed to us by that 
 unrighteous conquest, leave a huge gap in our literary 
 history, nearly a century during which very little was 
 done for the cultivation of our native tongue, few im- 
 portant additions to its wealth were made. 
 
 The period, however, is notable as that during 
 which for the first time we received a large accession 
 of words directly drawn from the Latin. A small 
 settlement of these, for the most part ecclesiastical, 
 had long since found their home in the bosom of the
 
 in. Latin Words in English. 103 
 
 <s 
 
 '3 
 
 Anglo-Saxon itself, and had been entirely incorporated 
 with it. The fact that we had received our Christi- 
 anity from Rome, and that Latin was the constant 
 language of the Church, sufficiently accounts for these. 
 [Such were the Latin ecclesiastical terms (ultimately 
 of Greek origin), 'deacon,' 'bishop,' 'priest,' 'psalm,' 
 'psalter,' 'minster,' 'monk,' 'devil,' 'school;' also 
 'abbot ' (ultimately of Semitic origin), ' nun,' ' candle, 
 'mass,' 'noon;' as well as 'fan,' 'copper,' 'pea' (in 
 'pea'-cock), ' turtle '('turtur'), 'trout,' 'mint'('mentha'), 
 'mallow,' 'plum,' 'lily,' 'pepper'] ; which are all, with 
 slightly different spelling, words whose naturalization in 
 England reaches back to a period anterior to the Con- 
 quest. These, however, were exceptional, and stood 
 to the main body of the language, not as the Romance 
 element of it does now to the Teutonic, one power 
 over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian 
 or Arabic words in it stand to the remainder of the 
 language, and could not be affirmed to modify it 
 more. 
 
 So soon, however, as French words were brought 
 largely into it, and were found to coalesce kindly with 
 the native growths, this very speedily suggested the 
 going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly from 
 it ; and thus in the hundred years after Chaucer no 
 small amount of Latin had penetrated, if not into our 
 speech, yet into our books — words not introduced 
 through the French, for they are not, and some of 
 them have at no time been, French ; but yet such as 
 would never have established themselves here, if the 
 French, already domesticated among us, had not pre- 
 pared their way, bridged over the gulf that would have 
 otherwise been too wide between them and the Saxon
 
 104 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 vocables of our tongue ; and suggested the models on 
 which these later adoptions should be framed. 
 
 They were not for the most part words which it 
 was any gain to acquire. The period was one of great 
 depression of the national spirit ; and nothing sympa- 
 thizes more intimately with this, rising when it rises, 
 and sinking when it sinks, than does language. Not 
 for the first time at the Revival of Learning, but 
 already at this time began the attempt to flood our 
 English with pedantic words from the Latin. Take 
 as specimens of these 'facundious,' 'tenebrous,' 'sola- 
 cious,' 'pulcritude,' 'consuetude' (all these occur in 
 Hawes), with a multitude more of the same fashion 
 which the language has long since disallowed ; while 
 others which have maintained their ground, and have 
 deserved to maintain it, were yet employed in num- 
 bers quite out of proportion to the native vocables 
 with which they were mingled, and which they al- 
 together overtopped and overshadowed. Chaucer's 
 hearty English feeling, his thorough sympathy with 
 the people, the fact that, scholar as he was, he was 
 yet the poet not of books but of life, and drew his 
 best inspiration from life, all this had kept him, in the 
 main, clear of this fault. But it was otherwise with 
 those who followed. The diction of Lydgate, Hawes, 
 and the other verse-writers, — for to the title of poets 
 they have little or no claim, — who filled up the in- 
 terval between Chaucer and Surrey, is immensely 
 inferior to his ; being all stuck over with long and 
 often ill-selected Latin words. The worst offenders 
 in this line, as Campbell himself admits, were the 
 Scotch poets of the fifteenth century. ' The prevailing 
 fault,' he says, 'of English diction, in the fifteenth
 
 in. Anglicized Latin. 105 
 
 century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation 
 of anglicizing Latin words. In this pedantry and use 
 of " aureate terms " the Scottish versifiers went even 
 beyond their brethren of the south. . . . When they 
 meant to be eloquent, they tore up words from the 
 Latin, which never took root in the language, like 
 children making a mock garden with flowers and 
 branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither.' ' 
 It needs but to turn over a few pages of the Scotch 
 poetry of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to find 
 proofs abundant of this ; although happily very few 
 of these foreign adoptions remained as permanent 
 elements of the language. Thus I do not remember 
 to have met 'to offusk,' 'to resplend,' 'agrest,' 2 
 'amene,' 3 'facund,' 'lascive,' 'mansuete,' 'preclair,' 
 'venust' in any writer on this side of the Tweed ; all 
 which, with many more of like kind, may be found in 
 Sibbald's Glossary, or Murray's Dialect of the Southern 
 Counties of Scotland. 
 
 This tendency to latinize our speech received a new 
 impulse from the Revival of Learning, and the fami- 
 liar re-acquaintance with the masterpieces of ancient 
 literature which went along with this Revival. Happily 
 another movement followed hard on this ; a movement 
 in England essentially national ; and one which stirred 
 our people at far deeper depths of their moral and 
 spiritual life than any mere revival of learning could 
 have ever done : I refer, of course, to the Reformation. 
 
 1 Essay on English Poetry, p. 93. 
 
 2 [The word agrest was used by Foxe the martyrologist, 
 seeN.E.D.] 
 
 3 [For English quotations see N.E.D.]
 
 106 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 It was only among the Germanic nations of Europe, 
 as has often been remarked, that the Reformation 
 struck lasting roots ; it found its strength therefore in 
 the Teutonic element of the national character, which 
 also it in turn further strengthened, purified, and called 
 out. And thus, though Latin came in upon us now 
 faster than ever, and to a certain extent also Greek, 
 yet this found redress and counterpoise in the con- 
 temporaneous unfolding of the more radically popular 
 side of the language. Popular preaching and discus- 
 sion, the necessity of dealing with truths the most 
 transcendent in a way to be understood not by scholars 
 only, but by ' idiots ' l as well, all this served to evoke 
 the native resources of our tongue ; and thus the 
 relative proportion between the one part of the lan- 
 guage and the other was not dangerously disturbed, 
 the balance was not destroyed ; as it might easily have 
 been, if only the Humanists had been at work, and 
 not the Reformers as well. 
 
 The revival of learning, which made itself first felt 
 in Italy, extended to England, and was operative here, 
 during the reigns of Henry the Eighth and his imme- 
 diate successors. Having thus slightly anticipated in 
 time, it afterwards ran exactly parallel with, the period 
 during which our Reformation was working itself out. 
 The epoch was in all respects one of immense mental 
 and moral activity, and such epochs never leave a 
 language where they found it. Much in it is changed ; 
 much probably added ; for the old garment of speech, 
 which once served all needs, has grown too narrow, 
 and will serve them now no more. The old crust is 
 
 See Study of Words, 20th edit. p. ill.
 
 in. Influence of the Reformation. 107 
 
 broken up, and what was obscurely working before 
 forces itself into sight and recognition. ' Change in 
 language is not, as in many natural products, con- 
 tinuous ; it is not equable, but eminently by fits and 
 starts ; ' and when the foundations of the mind of a 
 nation are heaving under the operation of ideas which 
 it is now for the first time making its own, more 
 important changes will follow in fifty years than in 
 two centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. 
 Thus the activities and energies which the Reforma- 
 tion awakened among us, as they made themselves 
 felt far beyond the domain of our directly religious 
 life, so they did not fail to make themselves effectually 
 felt in this region of language among the rest. 1 
 
 1 Some lines of Waller reveal to us the sense which in his 
 time scholars had of the rapidity with which the language was 
 changing under their hands. Looking back at changes which 
 the last hundred years had wrought in it, he checked with mis- 
 givings such as these his own hope of immortality : — 
 ' Who can hope his lines should long 
 Last in a daily changing tongue ? 
 While they are new, envy prevails, 
 And as that dies, our language fails. 
 
 ' Poets that lasting marble seek 
 Must carve in Latin or in Greek: 
 We write in sand ; our language grows, 
 And like the tide our work o'erflows. ' 
 How his misgivings, which assume that the rate of change would 
 continue what it had been, have been fulfilled, every one knows. 
 The two centuries which have elapsed since he wrote, have 
 hardly antiquated a word or a phrase in his poems. If we 
 care very little for them now, this is owing to quite other 
 causes — to their want of moral earnestness more than to any 
 other.
 
 io8 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 The Reformation indeed had a scholarly, we might 
 say a scholastic, as well as a popular aspect. Add 
 this fact to that of the revived interest in classical 
 learning, and you will not wonder that a stream of 
 Latin, now larger than ever, began to flow into our 
 language ; so large that Sir Thomas Browne could 
 not forbear observing, ' We shall within a few years 
 be fain to learn Latin to understand English.' Thus 
 Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth's reign, 1 gives 
 a long list of words, some Greek, a few French and 
 Italian, but far the most Latin, which, as he affirms, 
 were of quite recent introduction into the language. 
 He may here and there mistake about some single 
 word, but what he asserts in the main is correct. And 
 yet some of these it is difficult to understand how 
 the language could so long have done without ; as 
 1 compendious,' ' delineation,' ' dimension,' ' figura- 
 tive,' 'function,' 'idiom,' 'impression,' 'indignity,' 
 ' inveigle,' ' method,' ' methodical,' ' metrical,' ' nume- 
 rous,' 'penetrable,' 'penetrate,' 'prolix,' 'savage,' 
 ' scientific,' ' significative.' All these he adduces with 
 praise. Others, not less commended by him, have 
 failed to hold their ground, as ' harmonical,' ' nume- 
 rosity,' 'placation.' In his disallowance of 'attemptat' 
 (attentat), 'facundity,' 'implete,' he only anticipated 
 the verdict of a later day. Other words which he 
 condemned no less, as 'audacious,' 'compatible,' 
 ' egregious,' have maintained their place. These 
 have done the same : ' despicable,' ' destructive,' 
 
 1 In his Art of English Poesy, London, 1589, republished in 
 Haslewood's Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and 
 Poesy, London, 1811, vol. i. pp. 122, 123.
 
 in. ' Words of Art. y 109 
 
 'homicide,' 'obsequious/ 'ponderous,' 'portentous,' 
 ' prodigious ; ' all of them by a somewhat earlier writer, 
 in a book of date 1577, condemned as ' inkhorn terms, 
 smelling too much of the Latin.' 
 
 It is curious to note the ' words of art,' as he calls 
 them, which Philemon Holland, a voluminous trans- 
 lator at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of 
 the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain 
 in a glossary appended to his translation of Pliny's 
 Natural History. ' One can hardly understand how 
 any who cared to consult the book at all would be 
 perplexed by words like these : 'acrimony,' 'austere,' 
 'bulb,' 'consolidate,' 'debility,' 'dose,' 'ingredient,' 
 ' opiate,' ' propitious,' ' symptom,' all of which as 
 
 1 London, 1601. Besides this work Philemon Holland 
 translated the whole of Plutarch's Moral/a, the Cyropcedia of 
 Xenophon, Livy, Suetonius, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Cam- 
 den's Britannia. Fuller, who has a brief notice of him among 
 the Worthies of Warwickshire, calls him ' Translator General of 
 his age.' His works make a part of the ' library of dulness ' in 
 Pope's Dunciad : — 
 
 ' De Lyra there a dreadful front extends, 
 And here the groaning shelves Pliilcmon bends '— 
 
 but very unjustly ; and Southey shows a far juster estimate of 
 his merits, when he finds room for two of these, Plutarch's 
 Jl/ora/ia and Pliny's Natural History, in the select library of 
 The Doctor. The works which Holland has translated are all 
 more or less important, and his versions of them a mine of 
 genuine idiomatic English, neglected by most of our lexico- 
 graphers, wrought with eminent advantage by Richardson ; but 
 capable of yielding much more than thus far they have yielded. 
 In Marsh's Origin and History of the English Language, p. 554, 
 there is an honourable testimony to the large debt which it owes 
 to these books of Philemon Holland.
 
 1 1 o Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 novelties he carefully explains. Certainly he has 
 words in his glossary harder and more technical than 
 these, but a vast majority present no more serious diffi- 
 culty than those just adduced. 1 The Rhemish Bible, 
 
 1 So too in French it is surprising to find how new are many 
 words, which now constitute an integral part of the language. 
 1 Bravoure,' 'desinteressement,' 'exactitude,' 'sagacite,' were 
 not introduced till late in the seventeenth century. ' Desagre- 
 ment,' ' emportement,' ' indelebile,' ' scavoir-faire,' ' renais- 
 sance,' were all recent in 1675 (Bouhours); ' impardonnable,' 
 ' indevot,' ' intolerance,' ' irreligieux,' were struggling into 
 allowance at the end of the seventeenth century, and not 
 established till the beginning of the eighteenth. ' Insidieux ' 
 was invented by Malherbe ; ' frivolite ' is wanting in the earlier 
 editions of the Dictionary of the Academy ; the Abbe de St. - 
 Pierre was the first to employ ' bienfaisance,' the elder Balzac 
 ' feliciter,' Sarrasin 'burlesque,' Rousseau ' investigation ' (see 
 Guesses at Truth, I S66, p. 220), the Abbe de Pons ' erudit. ' Mme. 
 de Sevigne exclaims against her daughter for employing 'effer- 
 vescence' (comment dites-vous cela, ma fille ? Voila un mot 
 dont je n'avais jamais ou'i parler). ' Demagogue ' was first 
 hazarded by Bossuet, and counted so bold a novelty that for 
 long none ventured to follow him in its use. Montaigne in- 
 troduced 'diversion' and ' enfantillage,' the last not without 
 rebuke from contemporaries. It is a singularly characteristic 
 fact, if he invented, as he is said to have done, ' enjoue.' 
 Desfontaines first employed ' suicide ; ' Caron gave to the 
 language ' avantpropos,' Ronsard ' avidite,' Joachim Dubellay 
 'patrie,' Denis Sauvage 'jurisconsulte,' Menage ' gracieux ' (at 
 least so Voltaire affirms) and ' prosateur,' Desportes 'pudeur,' 
 Chapelaine 'urbanite,' Mme. Dacier 'hospitalier,' while Etienne 
 first brought in, apologizing at the same time for the boldness 
 of it, 'analogie' (si les oreilles francoises peuvent porter ce 
 mot). ' Accaparer ' first appeared in the Dictionary of the 
 Academy in 1787 ; ' preliber' (praelibare) is a word of our own 
 day ; and Charles Nodier, if he did not coin, yet revived the
 
 in. Stately Latin Sentences. 1 1 1 
 
 published in 1582, has a table consisting of fifty-five 
 terms ' not familiar to the vulgar reader ; ' among which 
 are 'acquisition,' 'advent,' 'allegory,' 'co-operate,' 
 'evangelize,' 'eunuch,' 'holocaust,' 'neophyte,' 're- 
 suscitate,' 'victim.' More than one of these was 
 denounced by the assailants of this Version, as for 
 instance by our own Translators, who say in their 
 Preface, ' We have shunned the obscurity of the 
 Papists in the azims, tunicke, rational, holocausts, 
 prepuce, pasche, and a number of such-like, whereof 
 their late translation is full.' It is noticeable that 
 three out of the six which they here denounce by name 
 should have kept their place in the language. 
 
 The period during which this naturalization of 
 Latin words was going actively forward, extended to 
 the Restoration of Charles the Second, and beyond it. 
 It first received a check from the coming up of French 
 tastes, fashions, and habits of thought consequent on 
 that event. The writers whose style was already 
 formed, such as Cudworth and Barrow, continued still 
 to write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and 
 Latin in diction, but not so those of a younger gene- 
 ration. We may say of this influx of Latin that it left 
 the language vastly more copious, with greatly enlarged 
 capabilities, but somewhat burdened with its new 
 acquisitions, and not always able to move gracefully 
 under their load ; for, as Dryden has happily said, it 
 is easy enough to acquire foreign words, but to know 
 what to do with them after you have acquired, is the 
 difficulty. 
 
 obsolete ' siniplesse ' [see Romaitnt of the Rose, 954 (Morris)]. 
 — See Genin, Variations du Langage francais, pp. 308-319.
 
 1 12 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 Few, let me here observe by the way, have borne 
 themselves in this hazardous enterprise at once as 
 discreetly and as boldly as Dryden himself has done ; 
 who has thus admirably laid down the motives which 
 induced him to look abroad for words with which to 
 enrich his vocabulary, and the principles which guided 
 him the selection of such : ' If sounding words 
 are not of our growth and manufacture, who shall 
 hinder me to import them from a foreign country ? I 
 carry not out the treasure of the nation which is never 
 to return, but what I bring from Italy I spend in 
 England. Here it remains and here it circulates, for, 
 if the coin be good, it will pass from one hand to 
 another. I trade both with the living and the dead, 
 for the enrichment of our native language. We have 
 enough in England to supply our necessity, but if we 
 will have things of magnificence and splendour, we 
 must get them by commerce. Poetry requires adorn- 
 ment, and that is not to be had from our old Teuton 
 monosyllables ; therefore if I find any elegant word 
 in a classic author, I propose it to be naturalized 
 by using it myself ; and if the public approves of it, 
 the bill passes. But every man cannot distinguish 
 betwixt pedantry and poetry : every man therefore is 
 not fit to innovate. Upon the whole matter a poet 
 must first be certain that the word he would introduce 
 is beautiful in the Latin ; and is to consider in the next 
 place whether it will agree with the English idiom ; 
 after this, he ought to take the opinion of judicious 
 friends, such as are learned in both languages ; and 
 lastly, since no man is infallible, let him use this 
 licence very sparingly ; for if too many foreign words 
 are poured in upon us, it looks as if they were
 
 III. 
 
 Excluded Words. 1 1 3 
 
 designed not to assist the natives, but to conquer 
 them.' 1 
 
 It would indeed have fared ill with the language, if 
 all the words which the great writers of this second 
 Latin period proposed as candidates for admission 
 into it, had received the stamp of popular allowance. 
 But happily this was not the case. The re-active 
 energy of the language, enabling it to throw off that 
 which was foreign to it, did not fail to display itself 
 now, as it had done on former occasions ; nor is it 
 too much to affirm that in almost every instance 
 during this period, where the Alien Act was enforced, 
 the sentence of exclusion was a just one. Either 
 the word violated the analogy of the language, or was 
 not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or 
 sounded ill ; or some other valid reason existed for 
 its exclusion. A lover of his native tongue might well 
 tremble to think what that tongue would have become 
 if all the innumerable vocables introduced or en- 
 dorsed by illustrious names had been admitted to a 
 free course among us on the strength of their recom- 
 
 1 Dedication of the Translation of the JEneid. I cannot say 
 that I have observed very many of these words there. ' Irre- 
 meable' (s£n. vi. 575) is the only one which I could at once 
 adduce. On this matter a modern French writer has expressed 
 himself well : Celui qui l'essaye [le neologisme] doit pouvoir 
 justifier la liberie qu'il a prise avec la langue. Autrement dit, 
 il faut que le mot soit necessaire dans la circonstance donnee, 
 qu'il soit l'expression la plus nette ou la plus forte de l'idee a 
 representer. A cette condition, il sera pardonne ; bien plus 
 il meritera de durer et durera : c'est par des audaces de ce 
 genre que nos grands ecrivains out enrichi la langue. (Dar- 
 mesteter, De la Creation actuelle de Mots nouveaux dans la 
 Langue francaise. Paris, 1877, p. 33.) 
 
 1
 
 1 14 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 mendation : if ' torve ' and ' tetric ' (Fuller), ' cecity ' 
 (Hooker), ' fastide ' and ' trutinate ' {State Papers), 
 ' immanity ' (Shakespeare), ' insulse ' and ' insulsity ' 
 (Milton, prose), ' scelestick ' (Feltham), 'splendidious' 
 (Drayton), ' pervicacy ' (Baxter), 'stramineous,' 'arde- 
 lion' (Burton), ' lepid,' ' sufflaminate ' (Barrow), 'faci- 
 norous' (Donne), ' immorigerous,' 'naufrageous,' 'fu- 
 llest,' ' clancularly,' 'ferity,' 'ustulation,' ' stultiloquy,' 
 'lipothymy' (XemoOvfjila), ' hyperaspist,' ' deturpate,' 
 ' intenerate,' ' effigiate ' (all in Jeremy Taylor) ; if ' for- 
 mosity' (John Davies), if 'mulierosity,' 'subsannation,' 
 'coaxation,' 'ludibundness,' 'delinition,' 'illaqueation,' 
 'recidivist,' ' colluctation,' 'exenteration,' 'sangui- 
 nolency,' 'ascititious,' 'septemfluous,' ' medioxumous,' 
 'mirificent,' ' palmiferous ' (all in Henry More), ' pau- 
 ciloquy,' ' multiloquy ' (Beaumont, Psyche) ; if ' dys- 
 colous' (Foxe), 'ataraxy' (Allestree), 'humectation' 
 (Bacon), ' moliminously ' (Cudworth), ' luciferously,' 
 'meticulous,' 'lapidifical,' 'farraginous' (Sir Thomas 
 Browne), ' immarcescible ' (Bishop Hall), ' vertigo- 
 nous ' (Gauden), ' exility,' ' spinosity,' ' incolumity,' 
 'solertiousness,' 'lucripetous,' 'inopious,' ' eximious,' 
 ' eluctate ' (all in Hacket), ' arride ' (ridiculed by Ben 
 Jonson), with hundreds of other births, as monstrous 
 or more monstrous than are some of these, had not 
 been rejected and disallowed by the sound linguistic 
 instincts of the English-speaking race. 
 
 Many words too were actually adopted, but not 
 precisely as they had been first introduced among us. 
 They were compelled to drop their foreign termina- 
 tion, or whatever else indicated them as strangers, to 
 conform themselves to English ways, and only thus 
 were finally incorporated into the great family of Eng-
 
 in. Naturalization of Words. 115 
 
 lish. 1 Thus of Greek words take the following: 
 ' pyramis ' .and 'pyramides,' forms both employed by 
 Shakespeare (' pyramises ' in Jeremy Taylor), became 
 ' pyramid ' and ' pyramids ;' ' dosis ' (Bacon) ' dose; ' 2 
 'aspis' (Latimer) 'asp;' 'distichon' (Holland) 
 'distich;' ' aristocratia ' and 'democratia' (North) 
 ' aristocracy ' and ' democracy ; ' ' ochlocratia ' (Grime- 
 ston's Poly but s) ' ochlocracy ; ' ' symmetria ' (Stowe) 
 ' symmetry ; ' ' academia ' (North) ' academy ; ' ' ph.il- 
 anthropia ' (Bacon) ' philanthropy ; ' ' hemistichion ' 
 (North) ' hemistich ; ' ' apogason ' (Fairfax), or ' apo- 
 geum' (Browne), 'apogee;' 'sumphonia' (Lodge) 
 ' symphony ; ' ' myrrha ' (Golding) ' myrrh ; ' ' proto- 
 typon ' (Jackson) ' prototype ; ' ' synonymon ' (Jeremy 
 Taylor) or ' synonymum ' (Hacket), and ' synonyma ' 
 (Milton, prose), became severally 'synonym' and 
 ' synonyms ; ' ' parallelon ' (North) ' parallel ; ' ' helio- 
 tropion ' (Green) or ' heliotropium ' (Holland) ' helio- 
 trope ; ' 'parodia' (Marvell) 'parody;' 'ellipsis ' (J. 
 Taylor) 'ellipse.' So too 'syntaxis' (Fuller) became 
 ' syntax; ' 'extasis ' (Burton) ' ecstasy ; ' ' parallelogram - 
 mon ' (Holland) ' parallelogram ; ' ' hypotenusa ' (the 
 same) 'hypotenuse;' 'programma' (Warton) 'pro- 
 gram ; ' ' epitheton ' (Cowell) ' epithet ; ' ' epocha ' 
 (South) and ' epoche ' ' epoch ; ' ' magnes ' (Sir P. 
 
 1 J. Grimm ( Worterbuch, p. xxvi) : Fiillt von ungefahr ein 
 fremdes Wort in den Brunnen einer Sprache, so wird es so 
 lange darin umgetrieben, bis es ihre Farbe annimmt, und seiner 
 fremden Art zum Trotze wie ein heimisches aussieht. 
 
 - ' Dosis ' is current somewhat later. Thus in Vaughan's 
 Si/ex Scintillans : — 
 
 Sorrows in white ; griefs tuned ; a sugared dosis 
 Of wormwood ; and a death's head crowned with roses 
 
 I 2
 
 1 1 6 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 Sidney) ' magnet ; ' ' disenteria ' and ' epilepsis ' (both 
 in Sylvester) ' dysentery ' and ' epilepsy ; ' ' biographia ' 
 (Dryden) 'biography ; ' ' apostata ' {Piers Plowman) 
 'apostate;' 'despota' (Foxe) 'despot;' 'misanthropos' 
 (Shakespeare, compare 'misanthropi,' Bacon) 'mis- 
 anthrope ; ' ' psalterion ' (North) ' psaltery ; ' ' idylion ' 
 (Spenser), ' idilion ' (Sir E. Dyer), or ' idyllium ' (Dry- 
 den), 'idyl ; ' ' ostracismos ' (North) ' ostracism ; ' el^r]- 
 ixia-jxo^ (Jeremy Taylor) ' euphemism ; ' ' chasma ' 
 (Henry More) ' chasm ; ' ' autopsia ' (the same) ' au- 
 topsy ; ' ' amnestia ' (Howell) ' amnesty ; ' ' idioma ' 
 and ' prosodia ' (both in Daniel) ' idiom ' and ' pro- 
 sody ; ' ' energia ' (Sidney) ' energy ; ' ' Sibylla ' (Bacon) 
 ' Sibyl ; ' ' zoophyton ' (Henry More) ' zoophyte ; ' ' en- 
 thousiasmos ' (Sylvester) ' enthusiasm ; ' ' metaphora ' 
 (the same) ' metaphor ; ' ' phantasma ' (Shakespeare) 
 ' phantasm ; ' ' paraphrasis ' (Ascham) ' paraphrase ; ' 
 ' diaphragma ' (Florio) ' diaphragm ; ' ' cynosura ' 
 (Donne) ' cynosure ; ' ' galaxias ' (Foxe) ' galaxy ; ' 
 ' acrostichis ' (Montagu) ' acrostic ; ' ' ephemera ' 
 (Bacon) ' ephemerals.' ' 
 
 The same process has gone on in a multitude of 
 Latin words, which testify by their terminations that 
 they were, and were felt to be, Latin at their first em- 
 ployment ; though now they are such no longer. It 
 will be seen that in this list I include Greek words 
 which came to us through the medium of the Latin, 
 and bearing a Latin termination. Thus Bacon has 
 ' insecta ' for ' insects ; ' ' aequinoctia ' for ' equinoxes ; ' 
 
 [' Some of the instances in this and the following paragraphs 
 are new learned 17th century forms of words which had been 
 already introduced into Middle English through the French.]
 
 in. Naturalization of Words. 1 1 7 
 
 ' chylus ' for ' chyle ; ' Elyot ' intellectus ' for ' intel- 
 lect ; ' Coyerdale ' tetrarcha ' for ' tetrarch ; ' Latimer 
 ' basiliscus ' for ' basilisk ; ' Frith ' syllogismus ' for 
 ' syllogism ; ' Bishop Andrewes ' nardus ' for ' nard ; ' 
 Milton 'asphaltus' for 'asphalt,' 'amaranthus' for 
 ' amaranth ; ' Lord Shaftesbury ' rhythmus ' for 
 ' rhythm ; ' Clarendon ' classis ' for ' class ; ' Chaucer 
 ' zephyrus ' for ' zephyr ; ' Jackson ' mimus ' for 
 'mime;' Holland 'tonsilla' for 'tonsils.' So too 
 ' epitaphium ' (Trevisa) preceded ' epitaph ; ' ' cystis ' 
 ' cyst,' ' interstitium ' (Fuller) ' interstice ; ' ' philtrum ' 
 (Culverwell) ' philtre ;' 'depositum' (Howe) ' deposit;' 
 ' praedicatum ' ' predicate ; ' ' subjectum ' ' subject ' 
 (both in North) ; ' mandatum ' (Holinshed) ' man- 
 date ; ' ' hexametrum ' ( Ascham) ' hexameter ; ' ' ex- 
 pansum' (Jeremy Taylor) 'expanse;' 'vestigium' 
 (Culverwell) ' vestige ; ' ' preludium ' (Beaumont, 
 Psyche) ' prelude ; ' 'precipitium ' (Coryat) 'precipice;' 
 ' aconitum ' and ' balsamum ' (both in Shakespeare) 
 ' aconite ' and ' balsam ; ' ' helleborum ' (North) 
 ' hellebore ; ' ' vehiculum ' (Howe) ' vehicle ; ' ' tro- 
 chaeus ' and ' spondasus ' (Holland) ' trochee ' and 
 ' spondee ; ' ' dactylus ' (Ascham) ' dactyle ; ' ' tro- 
 phaeum ' (Holland) 'trophy;' ' transitus ' (Howe) 
 ' transit ; ' ' cuspis ' (Henry More) ' cusp ; ' and ' ma- 
 china ' (the same) ' machine.' We meet ' intervallum ' 
 in Shakespeare, and ' intervalla ' in Chillingworth ; 
 ' postulata,' not 'postulates,' in Swift; 'archiva,' not 
 'archives,' in Baxter ; 'postscripta,' not 'postscripts,' 
 in State Papers; 'atomi,' not 'atoms,' in Lord 
 Brooke ; ' adulti,' not ' adults,' in Rogers ; ' plebeii,' 
 not 'plebeians,' in Shakespeare; 'catechumeni,' not 
 'catechumens,' in Jewel ; ' hermaphroditi,' not ' her-
 
 1 1 8 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 maphrodites ' in Stubbs ; ' helotce,' not ' helots,' in 
 Holland; 'ascetos,' not 'ascetics/ in Hammond; 
 ' fauni,' not ' fauns,' in Browne's Pastorals ; ' trium- 
 viri,' not 'triumvirs,' and 'ephori,' not ' ephors,' in 
 North; ' demagogi,' not 'demagogues,' in Hacket ; 
 ' elegi,' not ' elegies,' 'rhythmi,' not 'rhythms,' 'pig- 
 maei,' not 'pigmies,' all in Holland; 'cryptse,' not 
 'crypts,' in our Homilies', 'pantomimus' in Bacon 
 and Ben Jonson for ' pantomime ; ' ' mystagogus ' for 
 ' mystagogue,' in Jackson and Henry More. In like 
 manner, ' sedilis ' (North) went before ' edile ; ' ' obe- 
 liscus ' (the same) before ' obelisk ; ' ' ductus ' (Ker- 
 sey) before ' duct ; ' ' effigies ' and ' statua ' (both in 
 Shakespeare) before ' effigy ' and ' statue ; ' ' abyssus ' 
 (Jackson) before 'abyss;' ' commentarius ' (Chap- 
 man) before ' commentary ; ' ' commentum ' (Henry 
 More) before ' comment ; ' ' vestibulum ' (Howe) be- 
 fore ' vestibule ; ' ' symbolum ' (Hammond) before 
 ' symbol ; ' ' spectrum ' (Burton) before ' spectre ; ' 
 while only after a while ' quaere ' gave place to 
 ' query ; ' ' audite ' (Hacket) to ' audit ; ' ' plaudite ' 
 (Henry More) to ' plaudit ; ' and the Low Latin 
 ' mummia ' (Webster) became 'mummy ;' and 'cam- 
 phora' (Spenser) 'camphor.' The change of 'indo- 
 lency ' into ' indolence,' is another specimen of the 
 same process of completed naturalization. 
 
 Nor is it unprofitable to note how slowly the 
 names of persons, things, and countries drop their 
 Greek or Latin, and assume an English form, as little 
 by little our literature familiarizes itself with the old 
 Greek and Roman world. Aristotle indeed had 
 so lived through the Middle Ages that we nowhere
 
 in. Naturalization of Words. 1 1 9 
 
 find his name in any save this popular shape ; but 
 Ascham speaks of ' Hesiodus,' Holland of 'Euclides,' 
 Bacon of ' Sallustius,' of ' Appianus,' of 'Livius,' 
 Baxter of ' Plinius,' Milton of ' Pindarus,' and this 
 both in prose and verse ; Coverdale of ' Hilarius ' and 
 'Cyprianus ; ' Jeremy Taylor of 'Priamus,' of ' Arria- 
 nus ; ' Jewel of certain philosophers called ' Epi- 
 curaei,' of 'Julianus Apostata.' When Christopher 
 Brooke wrote, the ' Argonauts ' were ' Argonautae ' 
 still. It is the same with places and countries. North 
 writes 'Antiochia,' 'Creta,' 'Hellespontus,' 'Syracuse,' 
 'Troia,' 'the sea Atlanticum,' ' the sea Euxinum,' 'the 
 mountains 'Pyrenei;' Ascham writes 'Sicilia;' Bacon 
 ' Thracia ; ' Milton ' Danubius ; ' Coverdale ' Nilus ; ' 
 Holland ' Tiberis ; ' while our English Bible has 
 'Grecia,' 'Palestina,' and 'Tyrus.' 
 
 The plural very often tells the secret of the foreign 
 light in which a word is still regarded, where the sin- 
 gular, being less capable of modification, would have 
 failed to do this. Thus when Holland writes 
 'archontes,' 'bisontes,' 'boas,' 'chori,' 'ibides,' 
 'ideae,' 'musaea,' 'phalanges,' 'sphinges,' it is clear 
 that 'archon,' 'bison,' 'boa,' 'chorus,' 'ibis,' ' idea,' 
 ' museum,' ' phalanx,' ' sphinx,' had in no sense 
 become English for him. So too 'rhinoceros' was 
 Greek for Purchas, writing as he does ' rhinocerotes ' 
 for the plural ; 'automaton' for Glanville when he em- 
 ployed ' automata ' for the plural ; ' dogma ' was such 
 for Hammond, and ' enigma ' for John Smith of Cam- 
 bridge, when they made ' dogmata ' and ' enigmata ' 
 severally the plurals of these ; ' isthmus ' for Hobbes, 
 when he wrote 'isthmi ' for its plural. Spenser, using
 
 120 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 'heroes' as a trisyllable, 1 plainly implies that it is 
 not yet naturalized for him ; indeed, as we have just 
 seen, the singular was ' heros ' half a century later. So 
 too, when 'dsemones' is for Greene trisyllabic, we 
 argue the same of ' demone.' ' Cento' is no English 
 word so long as the plural is not 'centos,' but ' cen- 
 tones,' as in the old anonymous translation of 
 Augustine's City of God ; 'specimen 'in like manner 
 is Latin, so long as it owns for plural ' specimina ' 
 (Howe) ; we say the same of ' asylum ' while its plural 
 is 'asyla,'as in Clarendon, and indeed as late as in 
 Milman, it is. Pope employing 'satellites' as a 
 quadrisyllable — 
 
 ' Why Jove's satellites are less than Jove ' — 
 
 intimates that it is still Latin for him ; just as ' ter- 
 minus,' which the necessities of railways have intro- 
 duced among us, will not be truly naturalized till it 
 has 'terminuses,' and not 'termini,' for a plural; 
 nor 'phenomenon,' till we have renounced 'pheno- 
 mena;' nor 'crisis,' while it makes 'crises;' nor 
 'fungus,' until the question is determined whether 
 its plum is ' fungi ' or 'funguses,' and in favour of the 
 latter. Sometimes both plurals have been retained, 
 with only the assignment of different meanings to 
 them, as in the case of ' indices ' and ' indexes,' of 
 'genii 'and 'geniuses,' of 'stamina' and 'stamens' 
 (botanical). 
 
 The same process has gone on with words from 
 other languages, as from the Italian and the Spanish ; 
 thus 'bandetto' (Shakespeare), or 'bandito' (Jeremy 
 
 ' 'And old heroes, which their world did daunt.' 
 
 Sonnet on Scanderbeg.
 
 in. Naturalization of Words. 121 
 
 Taylor), becomes ' bandit ; ' ' ciarlatano ' (Coryat) 
 ' charlatan; ' 'chocolata ' (Antony Wood) ' chocolate; ' 
 ' porcellana ' (Fuller) becomes ' porcelain ; ' ' ruffiano ' 
 (Coryat) ' ruffian ; ' ' concerto ' ' concert ; ' ' busto ' 
 (Lord Chesterfield) ' bust ; ' ' caricatura ' (the same) 
 'caricature ;' 'princessa' (Hacket) 'princess;' 'scara- 
 mucha ' (Dryden) ' scaramouch ; ' ' pedante ' (Bacon) 
 ' pedant ; ' ' pedanteria ' (Sidney) ' pedantry ; ' ' mas- 
 carata' (Hacket) 'masquerade;' 'grotesco' (Pope) 
 ' grotesque ' (but this last is as old as Milton) ; ' im- 
 presa ' ' impress ; ' ' capriccio ' (Shakespeare) be- 
 comes first ' caprich ' (Butler), then ' caprice ; ' 
 ' duello ' (Shakespeare) ' duel ; ' ' alligarta ' (Ben Jon- 
 son) ' alligator ; ' ' paraquito ' (Webster) ' parroquet.' 
 Not otherwise ' scalada ' (Heylin) or 'escalado ' 
 (Holland) becomes ' escalade ; ' ' granada ' (Hacket) 
 ' grenade ; ' ' parada ' (Jeremy Taylor) ' parade ; ' 
 ' emboscado ' (Holland), ' stoccado,' ' barricado,' 
 ' renegado,' ' hurricano ' (all in Shakespeare), ' brocado' 
 (Hakluyt), 'palissado' (Howel), these all drop their 
 foreign terminations and severally become ' ambus- 
 cade,' 'stockade,' 'barricade,' 'renegade,' 'hurricane,' 
 ' brocade,' ' palisade ; ' ' croisado ' (Bacon) in like man- 
 ner becomes ' crusado ' (Fuller), ' croisade ' (Jortin), 
 and then 'crusade;' 'quinaquina' or 'quinquina,' 
 ' quinine.' ' Other modifications of spelling, not always 
 in the termination, but in the body of a word, will in- 
 dicate its more entire incorporation into the English 
 language. Thus 'shash,' a Persian word, becomes 
 
 1 [But in many of the above cases the modern form is not 
 an English naturalization of the Italian or Spanish word, but is 
 French, having come to us through French literature.]
 
 122 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 'sash ; ' ' tulippa ' (Bacon) ' tulip ; ' ' quelques choses ' 
 ' kickshaws ; ' ' pultis ' (Fuller) ' poultice.' ' Restora- 
 tion ' was at first spelt ' restauration ; ' and so long as 
 ' vicinage' was spelt 'voisinage' ' (Sanderson), 'mirror' 
 ' miroir ' (Fuller), ' recoil ' ' recule,' 'voyage ' ' viage,' 
 and ' career ' ' carriere ' (all by Holland), they could 
 scarcely be esteemed the thoroughly naturalized 
 English words which now they have become. 
 
 Here and there even at this later period awkward 
 foreign words will have been recast in a more 
 thoroughly English mould ; 'chirurgeon,' used as late 
 as by South, will become ' surgeon ; ' ' hemorrhoid ' 
 'emerod ; ' ' squinancy,' first 'squinzey ' (Jeremy Tay- 
 lor), and then ' quinsy.' Yet the attempt will not 
 always be successful. ' Physiognomy ' will not give 
 place to ' visnomy,' though Spenser and Shakespeare 
 employ this familiar form ; nor ' hippopotamus ' to 
 ' hippodame ' at Spenser's bidding ; nor ' avant- 
 courier' to 'vancurrier' at Shakespeare's. Other 
 words also have finally refused to take a more popular 
 shape, although such was current once. Chaucer 
 wrote 'sawter' and 'sawtrie,' but we 'psalter' and 
 ' psaltery ; ' Holland ' cirque,' revived by Keats, but 
 we 'circus;' 'cense,' but we 'census;' ' interreign,' 
 but we 'interregnum;' Sylvester 'cest,' but we 
 'cestus;' 'quirry,' but we 'equerry;' ' colosse ' (so 
 also Henry More), but we 'colossus ; ' Golding 'ure,' 
 but we ' urus ; ' ' metropole,' but we ' metropolis ; ' 
 Dampier 'volcan,' but this has not superseded 'vol- 
 
 1 Skinner {Etymologicon, 167 1) protests against the word 
 altogether, as purely French, and having no right to be con- 
 sidered English at all. [On the form vicinage, see Skeat.]
 
 in. Assimilation of Words. 123 
 
 cano ; ' nor ' pagod ' (Pope) ' pagoda ; ' nor ' skelet ' 
 (Holland) ' skeleton ; ' nor ' stimule ' (Stubbs) ' stimu- 
 lus.' Bolingbroke wrote ' exode,' but we hold fast to 
 'exodus ; ' Burton ' funge,' but we 'fungus ; ' Henry 
 More 'enigm,' but we 'enigma; 'and 'analyse,' but 
 we 'analysis.' 'Superfice' (Dryden) has not put 
 ' superficies,' nor ' sacrary ' (Hacket) ' sacrarium,' nor 
 'limbeck' 'alembic,' out of use. Chaucer's 'potecary' 
 has given place to a more learned formation, ' apothe- 
 cary ; ' so has ' ancre ' to ' anchorite,' ' auntre ' to ' ad- 
 venture.' You can have hardly failed to notice, on 
 the part of many other English words drawn from the 
 Greek and Latin, a decided inclination to renounce 
 their popular shape and withal their popular spelling, 
 and to revert to their classical outline and form. Thus 
 Chaucer's ' delitable ' gave way long ago to ' delect- 
 able ; ' ' parfaite,' which was in Tyndale's Bible, to 
 'perfect;' 'aulter,' ' detter,' 'sutteltie,' 'vitailles ' (all 
 in Coverdale) to 'altar,' 'debtor,' 'subtlety,' 'victuals;' 
 so 'fauchon,' 'falchin,' to 'falchion,' 'anker' to 
 'anchor.' In most of these cases we may con- 
 clude that the word came first orally into the language, 
 and was written as pronounced ; presently however a 
 closer acquaintance with the literature of Greece and 
 Rome brought with it the temptation to reduce the 
 word to a nearer conformity to the shape in which 
 there it was found. But these are exceptions ; the 
 set of language is all in the opposite direction. 
 
 Looking at this process of the reception of foreign 
 words, with their after assimilation in feature to our 
 own, we may trace a certain conformity between the 
 genius of our institutions and that of our language. 
 It is the very character of our institutions to repel
 
 124 Gams of tJie English Language, lect. 
 
 none, but rather to afford a shelter and a refuge to all, 
 from whatever quarter they come ; and after a longer 
 or shorter while all the strangers and incomers have 
 been incorporated into the English nation, within one 
 or two generations have forgotten that they were ever 
 extraneous to it, have retained no other reminiscence 
 of their foreign extraction than some slight difference 
 of name, and that often disappearing or having disap- 
 peared. Exactly so has it been with the English lan- 
 guage No language has shown itself less exclusive ; 
 none has stood less upon niceties ; none has thrown open 
 its doors wider, with a fuller confidence that it could 
 make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, what- 
 ever it received into its bosom ; and in no language has 
 this confidence been more fully justified by the result. 
 Such are the two great augmentations from with- 
 out of our vocabulary. All other are minor and sub- 
 ordinate. Thus the Italian influence has been far 
 more powerful on our literature than on our language. 
 In Chaucer it makes itself very strongly felt on the 
 former, 1 his debts to Dante and to Boccaccio being 
 large and frequent, but very slightly upon the latter ; 
 and, as compared with the influence which French 
 exerted, it may be counted as none at all. And this 
 remained very much the condition of things for the 
 whole period during which the star of Italy was in the 
 ascendant here. When we consider how potent its 
 influences were, and how long they lasted, it is only 
 surprising that the deposit of Italian words left in the 
 language has not been larger. There was a time 
 when Italian was far more studied in England, and 
 
 1 See Kessner, Chaucer in seinen Beziehungen zur Italie- 
 nischen Literatur, Bonn, 1867.
 
 in. Italian known in England. 125 
 
 Italian books far more frequently translated, than 
 they are at this present. Thus Ascham complains of 
 the immense number of wicked Italian books, such 
 as those of that ' poisonous Italian ribald,' Aretine, 
 which were rendered into English ; ' nor can it be 
 doubted that for a period extending from the reign 
 of Henry VIII. to the end of that of Elizabeth, it 
 more concerned an accomplished courtier and man of 
 the world to be familiar with Italian than with French. 
 Almost every page of Spenser bears witness to his 
 intimate acquaintance with Ariosto, and with his own 
 contemporary, Tasso. His sonnets are 'amoretti ;' 
 ' amoret,' indeed, was a word already common enough 
 in the language. In the choice of names for persons 
 in his Fairy Queen, such as Archimago, Braggadoc- 
 chio, Decetto, Defetto, Despetto, Duessa, Fidessa, 
 Fradubio, Gardante, Grantorto, Humilta, Jocante, 
 Malbecco, Parlante, Speranza, Trompart, he as- 
 sumes the same familiarity with the language of Italy 
 on the part of his readers. He introduces words 
 purely Italian, as ' basciomani ' (handkissings), ' ca- 
 puccio ' (hood), or only not Italian, because clipped 
 of their final letter, as ' intendiment ' (understanding), 
 ' forniment ' (furniture) ; or words formed on Italian 
 models, as ' to aggrate ' (aggratare), ' retraitt ' (portrait), 
 compare Italian ' ritratto ' ; and sometimes only in- 
 telligible when referred to their Italian source, as ' to 
 affret' (= to encounter) from 'affrettare,' and 'to 
 affrap,' the Italian ' affrappare ; ' or words employed 
 not in our sense, but altogether in an Italian, as ' to 
 revolt ' in that of 'rivoltarc' i 
 
 1 7 'he Schoolmaster, edited by Rev. J. E. Mayor, 1863, p, 82. 
 * F. Q. iii. II, 25.
 
 126 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 Milton in his prose works frequently avouches the 
 peculiar affection to the Italian literature and language 
 which he bore, so that, next to those of Greece and of 
 Rome, he was most addicted to these. And his poetry 
 without any such declarations would itself attest the 
 same. He too calls his poems by Italian names, 
 ' U Allegro] ' 77 Penseroso.' His diction is enriched 
 with Italian words, as 'gonfalon,' 'libecchio,' or with 
 words formed on Italian models, as ' to imparadise,' 
 which beautiful word, however, was not of his inven- 
 tion ; Drayton, Southwell, Fletcher, Donne, had all 
 used it before him. He employs words in their Italian, 
 not their English acceptation ; thus ' to assassinate ' ' 
 not as to kill, but grievously to maltreat. His adjec- 
 tival use of 'adorn,' as equivalent to 'adorned,' he 
 must have justified by the Italian ' adorno ; ' so too 
 his employment of ' to force ' in that of ' sforzare,' to 
 vanquish or reduce (S. A. 1096). His orthography, 
 departing from the usual, approximates to the Italian ; 
 thus for ' admiral' he writes ' ammiral' (ammiraglio), 
 ' haralt ' (araldo) for herald, ' sovran ' (sovrano) for 
 sovereign ; ' desertrice ' where another would have 
 written 'desertress,' with which we may compare 
 'victrice' for 'victress' in Ben Jonson. 'Soldan,' 
 for sultan, he has in common with others who went 
 before him ; so too ' to 'sdeign,' a form no doubt 
 suggested by the Italian ' sdegnare.' 
 
 Jeremy Taylor's acquaintance with Italian, even if 
 it were not asserted in his Funeral Sermon, with his 
 assumption of a like acquaintance on the part of his 
 readers, is testified by his frequent use of Italian pro- 
 verbs (see above all in his Holy Living and Dying), 
 
 1 Samson Agonistes, 11 09.
 
 III. Spanish known in England. 127 
 
 and Italian words. He sometimes gives these an 
 English shape, as ' to picqueer ' l in the sense of to 
 skirmish ; but oftener leaves them in their own. It 
 would be easy to gather out of his writings a con- 
 siderable collection of these ; such as ' amorevolezza,' 
 'grandezza,' ' sollevamento,' 'avisamente,' 'miserabili' 
 (in the sense of the French 'miserables '), incurabili; ' 
 while, scattered here and there in our literature of the 
 first half of the seventeenth century, we meet other 
 Italian words not a few; as 'farfalla' (=butterfiy), 
 'amorevolous,' 'mascarata,' 'gratioso' (=favourite), 
 1 cimici,' ' bugiard ' (=liar), all in Hacket, ' capocchio ' 
 in Shakespeare, ' bordello ' in Bishop Hall, who makes 
 its plural 'bordelli,' ' leggiadrous,' in Beaumont's 
 Psyche and elsewhere. A list, as complete as I could 
 make it, of such as have finally obtained a place in 
 the language was given in my first lecture ; 2 doubt- 
 less many have escaped me. 
 
 There is abundant evidence that Spanish was 
 during the latter half of the sixteenth and the first 
 half of the seventeenth century very widely known in 
 England, indeed far more familiar than it ever since 
 has been. The wars in the Low Countries, in which 
 so many of our countrymen served, the probabilities 
 at one period of a royal match with Spain, the fact 
 that Spanish was almost as serviceable at Brussels, at 
 Milan, at Naples, and for a time at Vienna, not to 
 speak of Lima and Mexico, as at Madrid itself, and 
 scarcely less indispensable, the many points of contact 
 
 1 [Cp. Hudibras iii. 2. 448, see also Nares and Davies. The 
 word is probably connected with It. picchiere, a pikeman, 
 Florio).] 2 See p. 15.
 
 128 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 friendly and hostile, of England with Spain for well- 
 nigh a century, all this had conduced to a wide-spread 
 acquaintance with Spanish in England. It was popular 
 at court. Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were 
 both accomplished Spanish scholars. A passage in 
 Howell's Letters would imply that at the time of 
 Prince Charles' visit to Madrid, his Spanish was im- 
 perfect, and Clarendon affirms the same ; l but at a 
 later date, that is in 1635, a Spanish play was acted 
 by a Spanish company before him. 2 The statesmen 
 and scholars of the time were rarely ignorant of the 
 language. We might have confidently presumed 
 Raleigh's acquaintance with it, even if there were 
 not in his Discovery of Guiana and in other writings 
 abundant proof of this. Bacon gives similar evi- 
 dence, in the Spanish proverbs which he quotes, and 
 in the happy employment which he sometimes makes 
 of a Spanish word, where the English does not 
 offer an equivalent, as of ' desenvoltura ' in his essay 
 Of Forhaie. It was among the many accomplish- 
 ments of Archbishop Williams, who, when the Spanish 
 match was pending, caused the English Liturgy to be 
 translated under his own eye into Spanish. 3 Pistol is 
 ever ready with his 'Castiliano vulgo,' but whether 
 Shakespeare's knowledge of the language was not 
 really limited to a few chance words and phrases, as 
 'diablo,' 'passado,' 'figo,' 'cavaleiro,' ' punto reverso,' 
 ' labras ' (for ' labios '), ' bonos dies,' which last, I 
 suppose, must be accepted as Spanish, and 'paucas 
 
 1 History of the Rebellion, b. i. § 75. 
 
 2 Collier, Histo?y of English Dramatic Poetry, vol. ii. p. 69. 
 
 3 See Hacket, Life of Archbishop Williams, pt. i. p. 127.
 
 III. Spanish known in England. 129 
 
 palabras ' no less, it is difficult to say. But Jonson's 
 familiarity with it is evident. More than once, as 
 in The Alchemist (act iv. sc. 2), he introduces Spa- 
 nish so largely that he must have felt certain it 
 would not be altogether strange to his audience. 
 With Spanish oaths, and very ugly ones, Beaumont 
 and Fletcher were certainly acquainted ; Wycherley 
 too must have known the language. 1 Whether Fuller 
 did so I cannot confidently say ; but he uses more 
 than once ' intrado ' as equivalent to import duties 
 paid on foreign merchandise. There is no such word 
 in Spanish ; but no doubt he intended ' entrada,' 
 which has in Spanish this meaning. Of the Spanish 
 words which have effected a settlement in English, 
 so far as I know them, I have given a list already. 2 
 
 The introduction of French tastes by Charles the 
 Second and his courtiers returning from their en- 
 forced residence abroad, rather modified the structure 
 of our sentences than seriously affected our vocabu- 
 lary ; yet it gave us some new words. In one of 
 Dryden's plays, Mariage a la Mode, a lady displays 
 her affectation by constantly employing French idioms 
 in preference to English, French words rather than 
 native. Curiously enough, of these, thus meant to 
 render her ridiculous, several, as 'repartee,' 'grimace,' 
 'chagrin,' 'to be in the good graces of another,' are 
 excellent English now, and have nothing far-sought 
 or affected about them : but so it frequently happens 
 that what is laughed at in the beginning, is by all 
 admitted and allowed at the last. ' Fougue ' and 
 1 fraischeur,' which Dryden himself employed — being, 
 
 1 See The Gentleman Dancing-master, 1673. 
 
 2 See p. 16. 
 
 K
 
 130 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 it is true, a very rare offender in this line, and for 
 'fraischeur' having Scotch if not English authority — 
 have not been justified by the same success. 
 
 Nor indeed can it be said that this adoption and 
 naturalization of foreign words has ever wholly ceased. 
 There are periods, as we have seen, when a language 
 throws open its doors, and welcomes strangers with an 
 especial freedom ; but there is never a time, when one 
 by one these foreigners and strangers are not slipping 
 into it. The process by which this is done eludes for 
 the most part our observation. Time, the mightiest of 
 all innovators, manages his innovations so noiselessly, 
 spreads them over periods so large, and is thus able to 
 bring them about so gradually, that often, while he is 
 effecting the greatest changes, we have no suspicion 
 that he is effecting any at all. Thus how nearly im- 
 perceptible are the steps by which a foreign word is 
 admitted into the full rights of an English one. Many 
 Greek words, for example, quite unchanged in form, 
 have in one way or another ended in obtaining a home 
 and acceptance among us. We may in almost every 
 instance trace step by step the stealthy naturalization 
 of these ; the Greek letters with which many of them 
 were spelt for a while betraying the language to which 
 they were still considered to belong. But having in 
 this way won a certain allowance, and ceased to be 
 altogether unfamiliar, we note them next exchanging 
 Greek for English letters, and finally obtaining recog- 
 nition as words which, however drawn from a foreign 
 source, are yet themselves English. Thus ' acme,' 
 'apotheosis,' 'chrysalis,' 'criterion,' 'dogma,' ' ency- 
 clopedia,' ' euthanasia,' ' hyphen,' 'iota,' 'metropolis,' 
 'ophthalmia,' 'pathos,' 'phenomenon,' are all English
 
 in. Greek Words in English. 1 3 1 
 
 now, while yet South with many others always wrote 
 uk/xt/, Jeremy Taylor d7ro#ewo-is, evOavaata, iu>Ta, Cud- 
 worth KpLTijpiov, Henry More x/n>craAis (for xpuo-aAAis), 
 Holland i(pev. Hammond speaks of Soy/mra, Ben 
 Jonson of ' the knowledge of the liberal arts, which 
 the Greeks call eyKUKAoTraukiW l Culverwell writes 
 ^rpoVoXts and oc/>0aA/ua, Preston cpawofxeva, Sylvester 
 ascribes to Baxter not ' pathos ' but 7ra#os. 2 'H0os is 
 at the present moment preparing for this passage from 
 Greek characters to English, and certainly before long 
 will be acknowledged as English. The only cause 
 which for some time past has stood in the way of this 
 is the misgiving whether it will not be read ' ethos,' 
 and not 'ethos,' and thus not be the word intended. 3 
 
 1 He is not perfectly accurate here ; the Greeks spoke of 
 fV kvkKcii iraiSeia and iytcvicKws iraiSeia, but had no such com- 
 pound word as iyKUKAoiraidtla. We gather, however, from his 
 statement, as from Lord Bacon's use of ' circle-learning ' ( = ' orbis 
 doctrinre,' Quintilian), that 'encyclopedia' did not exist in their 
 time. ' Monomania ' is in like manner a modern formation, 
 of which the old Greek language knows nothing ; so too 
 'dipsomania.' 
 
 - See the passages quoted in my paper, On some Deficiencies 
 in our English Dictionaries, p. 38, published separately, and in 
 the Transactions of the Philological Society, 1857. 
 
 a The Greek words which we have thus adopted into the 
 language, without submitting them to any change of form what- 
 ever, are more numerous than might be supposed. Omitting 
 those just mentioned in the text, we have these, and probably 
 many more than these ; indeed, were I to introduce all medical 
 terms, which are very numerous, and all technical terms of 
 grammar, rhetoric, and the like, I could myself largely increase 
 the number: thus 'acacia,' 'acropolis,' 'aegis,' 'aloe,' 'seon,' 
 'alpha,' 'Amazon,' 'ambrosia,' ' amphisbaena,' 'analysis,' 
 ' anathema,' 'anemone,' 'anther,' 'anthrax,' 'antipodes,' 
 
 K 2
 
 132 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 Let us endeavour to trace this same process in 
 some French word, which is at this moment gaining 
 a footing among us. For 'prestige' we have mani- 
 festly no equivalent of our own. It expresses some- 
 thing which only by a long circumlocution we could 
 express ; namely, that real though undefinable in- 
 
 onyx,' ' scoria,' ' scorpion,' ' sepia,' ' siphon,' ' siren,' 
 skeleton,' 'sphinx,' 'spleen,' 'stigma,' 'strophe,' 'synopsis, 1 
 synthesis,' ' systole,' ' thesis,' ' thorax,' ' tiara,' ' titan,' 
 trachea,' 'tripos,' ' triton.'
 
 in. Greek Words in English. 133 
 
 fluence on others, which past successes, as the pledge 
 and promise of future ones, breed. It has thus natu 
 rally passed into frequent use. No one feels that in 
 employing it he is slighting as good a word of our 
 own. At first all used it avowedly as French, writing 
 it in italics to indicate this. Some write it so still, 
 others do not ; some, that is, count it still as foreign, 
 others consider that it is not so to be regarded any 
 more. 1 Little by little the number of those who write 
 it in italics will diminish ; and finally none will do 
 so. It will then only need that the accent be shifted 
 as far back as it will go, for such is the instinct of all 
 English words, that for ' prestige,' it should be pro- 
 nounced 'prestige,' as indeed we are learning to pro- 
 nounce it, even as within these few years for ' depot ' 
 we have learned to say ' depot,' and its naturalization 
 will be complete. I have no doubt that before many 
 years it will be so pronounced by the majority of 
 educated Englishmen, and that the pronunciation 
 more common now will pass away, just as ' oblige,' 
 once universal, has every where given place to 'obl/ge.' 2 
 
 1 We trace a similar progress in Greek words which were 
 passing into Latin. Thus Caesar (B. G. iii. 103) writes, quce 
 Graeci &dvra appellant ; but Horace (Carm. i. 16. 5), non adytis 
 quatit. Cicero writes avT'nrodes {Acad. ii. 39. 1 23), but Seneca 
 (Ep. 122), 'antipodes;' that is, the word for Cicero was still 
 Greek, while in the period that elapsed between him and 
 Seneca, it had become Latin. So too Cicero has flbwXov, but 
 the Younger Pliny ' idolon,' and Tertullian ' idolum ; ' Cicero 
 ffTparirynixa. (jV. D. iii. 6), but Valerius Maximus ' strategema.' 
 
 2 See in Coleridge's Table Talk, p. 3, the amusing story of 
 John Kemble's stately correction of the Prince of Wales for 
 adhering to the earlier pronunciation, ' oblige,' — ' It will 
 become your royal mouth better to say obh'ge.'
 
 134 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 I observe in passing, that the process of throwing 
 the accent of a word as far back as it will go, is one 
 which has been constantly proceeding among us. In 
 the time and writings of Chaucer there was much 
 vacillation in the placing of the accent ; as was to be 
 expected, while the adoptions from the French were 
 comparatively recent, and had not yet unlearned their 
 foreign ways or made themselves perfectly at home 
 among us. Some of his French words are still ac- 
 cented on the final syllable, thus 'beaute,' 'creature,' 
 'honour,' 'manere,' 'penance,' ' sentence,' ' service ; ' 
 others, as 'colour,' 'conseil,' 'tresour,' on the first; 
 while this vacillation displays itself still more markedly 
 in the fact that the same word is accented by him 
 sometimes on the one syllable and sometimes upon 
 the other ; he writing at one time ' nature ' and at 
 another ' nature,' at one time ' vertiie ' and at another 
 ' vertue ; ' so too ' visage ' and ' visage,' ' fortune ' and 
 ' fortune ; ' ' service ' and ' service,' with many more. 
 The same disposition to throw back the accent is 
 visible in later times. Thus 'captive,' 'cruel,' 'envf,' 
 'forest,' 'presage,' 'trespass,' in Spenser, and these, 
 'adverse,' 'aspect,' 'commerce,' 'comrade,' 'contest,' 
 'contrite,' 'edict,' 'egress,' 'exile,' 'impulse,' 'instinct,' 
 'insult,' 'precinct,' 'pretext,' 'process,' 'product,' 
 ' prostrate,' ' surface,' ' uproar,' in Milton, had all 
 their accent once on the last syllable ; they have 
 it now on the first. So too, ' theatre ' was ' theatre ' 
 with Sylvester, this American pronunciation being 
 archaic rather than vulgar ; while ' academy ' was 
 'academy' for Cowley and for Butler. 1 'Produce' 
 
 1 ' In this great academy of mankind.' 
 
 To the Memory of Du Val.
 
 in. Sk if ting of A ccent. 135 
 
 was 'produce' for Dryden ; 'essay' was 'essay' both 
 for him and for Pope ; he closes heroic lines with 
 one and the other of these substantives ; Pope does 
 the same with ' barrier' l and 'effort.' We may note 
 the same process going forward still. Middle-aged 
 men may remember that it was a question in their 
 youth whether it should be 'revenue' or 'revenue' 
 ' retinue ' or ' retinue ; ' it is always ' revenue ' and 
 ' retinue ' now. Samuel Rogers bewailed the change 
 which had taken place in his memory from ' balcony ' 
 to ' balcony.' ' Contemplate,' he exclaims, ' is bad 
 enough, but balcony makes me sick ; ' yet it has 
 effectually won the day. 'Apostolic,' which in Dryden's 
 use was ' apostolic ' (he ends an heroic line with it), 
 is a rare instance of the accent moving in the opposite 
 direction. 
 
 Other French words not a few, besides ' prestige ' 
 which I instanced just now, are at this moment 
 hovering on the confines of English, hardly knowing 
 whether they shall become such altogether or not. 
 Such are 'badinage," chicane,' 'ennui,' 'exploitation,' 
 ' finesse,' ' melee ' (Lord Tennyson already spells it 
 'mellay'), 'morne,' 'naive,' 'persiflage,' 'verve,' and 
 others. All these are often employed by us, — and it 
 is out of such frequent employment that adoption 
 proceeds — because expressing shades of meaning not 
 expressed by any words of our own. Some of them 
 will no doubt complete their naturalization ; others 
 will after a time retreat again, and become for us once 
 more avowedly French. ' Solidarity,' which we owe 
 to the French Communists, — signifying a fellowship 
 
 1 ' 'Twixt that and reason what a nice barrier.''
 
 136 Gains of the English Language. Lect, 
 
 in gain and loss, in honour and dishonour, in victory 
 and defeat, a being, so to speak, all in the same boat, — 
 is so convenient that it would be idle to struggle 
 against it. It has established itself in German, and in 
 other European languages as well. 'Banality,' by 
 Browning recently proposed for admission, will scarcely 
 have the same good fortune. 1 
 
 Or take an example of this progressive naturaliza- 
 tion from another quarter. In an English glossary, of 
 date 167 1, I do not find 'tea,' but 'cha,' which is 
 thus defined, ' the leaf of a tree in China, which being 
 infused into water, serves for their ordinary drink.' 
 Thirteen years later the word is no longer a Chinese, 
 but already a French one for us ; Locke in his Diary 
 writing it ' the.' Early in the next century the word 
 is spelt in an entirely English fashion, in fact as we 
 spell it now, but still retains a foreign pronuncia- 
 tion, — Pope rhymes it with ' obey,' — and this the last 
 note of its foreign origin it has only lately altogether 
 let go. 2 
 
 Greek and Latin words we still continue to adopt, 
 although now no longer in troops and companies, 
 but only one by one. The lively interest which 
 always has been felt in classical studies among us, 
 and which will continue to be felt, so long as English - 
 
 [' But see N.E.D. ; the oldest quotation for banality is 
 from Sala, who used it ten years before the date of Browning's 
 use of the word.] 
 
 [ 2 For the various forms of the Chinese word for tea see 
 Yule. The forms cha and tea came from different Chinese 
 dialects. We borrowed cha from the Portuguese, who still 
 retain the word in this form.]
 
 in. Scientific and Technical Terms. 137 
 
 men present to themselves a high culture of their 
 faculties and powers as an object of ambition, so long 
 as models of what is truest and fairest in art have any 
 attraction for them, is itself a pledge that accessions 
 from these quarters can never cease altogether. I 
 refer not here to purely scientific terms ; these, so 
 long as they do not pass beyond the threshold of the 
 science for whose use they were invented, have no 
 proper right to be called words at all. They are a 
 kind of shorthand, or algebraic notation, of the science 
 to which they belong ; and will find no place in a 
 dictionary constructed upon true principles, but will 
 be left to constitute a technical dictionary by them- 
 selves. They are oftentimes drafted into a dictionary 
 of the language ; but this for the most part out of 
 a barren ostentation, and that so there may be room 
 for boasting of the many thousand words by which it 
 surpasses all its predecessors. Such additions are 
 very cheaply made. Nothing is easier than to turn 
 to modern treatises on chemistry or electricity, or 
 on some other science which hardly existed, or did 
 not at all exist, half a century ago, or which — like 
 botany — have been in later times wholly new-named, 
 and to transplant new terms from these by the 
 hundred and the thousand, with which to crowd and 
 deform the pages of a dictionary. The labour is little 
 more than that of transcription ; but the gain is 
 nought. Indeed it is much less than nought ; for it 
 is not merely that a dozen genuine English words re- 
 covered from our older authors would be a truer gain, 
 a more real advance toward the complete inventory of 
 the wealth which we possess in words than a hundred 
 or a thousand of these ; but additions of this kind
 
 138 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 encumber and disfigure the work which they profess 
 to complete. 
 
 When we call to mind the near affinity between 
 English and German, which, if not sisters, are at any 
 rate first cousins, it is remarkable that almost since 
 the day when they parted company, each to fulfil its 
 own destiny, there has been little further commerce 
 in the way of giving or taking between them. Adop- 
 tions on our part from the German have been ex- 
 tremely rare. The explanation of this lies no doubt in 
 the fact that the literary activity of Germany did not 
 begin till very late, nor our interest in it till later still, 
 not indeed till the beginning of the present century. 
 Literature, however, is not the only channel by which 
 words pass from one language to another ; thus 'plun- 
 der ' was brought back from Germany about the begin- 
 ning of our Civil War by the soldiers who had served 
 under Gustavus Adolphus and his captains ; 1 while 
 'trigger,' which reached us about the same time, and 
 by the same channel, is manifestly the Dutch ' trek- 
 ker' ('tricker' in Hudibras). [The word 'dollar' 
 comes to us through the Dutch ' daler ' (now ' daal- 
 der '), the Low German equivalent of the original 
 German : thaler ' (see Franck).] ' Crikesman ' (' kriegs- 
 mann '), common in the State Papers of the sixteenth 
 century, found no permanent place in the language. 
 [The same may be said of ' brandshat ' from Dutch 
 ' brandschatten,' the ransom paid to an enemy for not 
 burning down your house or city (see N.E.D. s.v. 'bran- 
 skate '). The word ' crants ' (in Shaks.) was a borrow- 
 ing from the Dutch ' krans,' a garland.] ' Iceberg,' 
 
 1 See my Gustavus Adolphus in Germany, 2nd edit. p. 105.
 
 in. Words from the German. 139 
 
 quite a modern word, we must have taken whole from 
 the German or Danish, since a word of our own 
 putting together would have been not ' icQ-berg,' but 
 ' vat-mountain^ An English ' swindler ' is not exactly 
 a German ' schwindler ; ' yet a subaudition of the 
 knave, though more latent in the German, is common 
 to both ; and we must have drawn the word from 
 Germany (it is not in Johnson), late in the last cen- 
 tury. To this small contribution of words from the 
 German we may add 'waltz' (1813), 'poodle,' 'ba- 
 rouche ' (German ' barutsche ' of Romanic origin), 
 'huzzah,' ' howitzer ' (of Bohemian origin), 'landau,' 
 and 'easel,' this last the frame or little 'ass' on which 
 the painter supports his canvas. 1 We make a similar 
 use of horse. 
 
 There is indeed only one province of words in 
 which we are recent debtors to the Germans to any 
 considerable extent. Of the terms used by the mine- 
 ralogist and geologist many have been borrowed, and 
 in comparatively modern times, from them ; thus 
 'quartz,' 'feldspar,' 'cobalt,' 'nickel,' 'zinc,' 'bis- 
 muth,' 'shale,' 'hornblend;' while other terms em- 
 ployed by us are direct translations from the same ; 
 such for instance as ' fuller's-earth ' (walkererde), 
 ' pipeclay ' (pfeifenthon), ' pitchstone ' (pechstein). Of 
 very recent importations I hardly know one ; unless, 
 indeed, we adopt Koch's ingenious suggestion that 
 'to loaf and 'loafer,' which not long ago arrived in 
 England by way of America, are the German ' laufen ' 
 and ' laufer.' ' Meerschaum ' too, ' kindergarten,' and 
 ' zither ' may be regarded as naturalized now. 
 
 [' Probably borrowed from the Dutch ezel, see Sewcl.]
 
 140 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 But if we have not imported, we have been some- 
 what addicted of late to the imitating of, German 
 words, that is, to the framing words of our own on the 
 scheme and model of some which have so far taken 
 our fancy that we have thought to enrich our own 
 vocabulary with the like. [So for the old familiar 
 ' manual ' the word ' hand-book ' * is now constantly 
 used in imitation of the German ' handbuch ; ' for 
 ' dictionary ' or ' glossary ' we sometimes see ' word- 
 book ' after the pattern of ' worterbuch ; ' while ' fore- 
 word ' for ' preface ' is used by some in imitation of 
 the German ' vorwort.' The now common ' stand- 
 point' is quite a modern copy of ' standpunkt,' and 
 the useful geographical term ' watershed ' was suggested 
 by ' wasserscheide.'] ' Einseitig ' (itself modern) is 
 the pattern on which we have formed ' one-sided ' — a 
 word to which there clung a few years ago a certain 
 note of affectation, few using it save those who dealt 
 more or less in German wares ; it has however its 
 manifest convenience, and will hold its ground ; so 
 too, as it seems, will ' fatherland,' which Sir William 
 Temple observed long ago to be used by the Ger- 
 mans for ' native country ; ' and ' windbag,' an 
 evident translation of ' windbeutel ' — a word familiar 
 to all readers of Carlyle. 
 
 It is only too easy to be mistaken in this matter ; 
 
 [' Instances are given in Bosworth-Toller of an A.S. 
 hand-hoc, but the word seems to have been disused for 700 
 years. In 1833 Sir Nicholas Harris in his preface (p. xviii) 
 to his Chronology of History says, ' No labour has been spared 
 to render the volume, what the Germans would term, and 
 which if our language admitted of the expression, would have 
 been the fittest title for it, "The Handbook of History." ']
 
 in. New Words in English. 141 
 
 but, if I do not err, the following words have all been 
 born during the present century, some within quite 
 the later decades of this century ; a distribution of 
 them according to the languages from which they are 
 drawn would show that Greek and Latin are those 
 from which at the present day our own is mainly, 
 though by no means exclusively, recruited : ' abnor- 
 mal,' 'acrobat,' 'agnostic' (invented by Professor 
 Huxley), 'aeon,' 'aeonian' (Tennyson), 'aesthetics' 
 (these three must renounce their initial diphthong, 
 as ' economy,' ' ether,' and others have done, before 
 they can be regarded as quite at home with us) ; 
 'altruism,' 'ambulance,' 'analogue,' 'aniline,' 'aqua- 
 rium,' 'artistic,' 'atavism,' 'automatic,' 'autonomy,' 
 'bicycle,' 'bimetallic,' 'boredom,' 'boycott,' 'bromide,' 
 'burke,' 'bus,' 'cab,' 'cablegram,' ' canonicity,' 'cau- 
 cus,' 'celebrant,' 'celebration,' 'ceramic,' 'cereal,' 
 'chloral,' 'chloroform,' 'classics,' 'cleavage,' 'clipper,' 
 'codify,' 'collectivism,' 'communism,' 'competitive,' 
 'condone,' 'conversational,' 'crotchety,' 'cyclist,' 
 'dado,' 'damper,' 'defenestration,' 'delimitation,' 
 'demonetize,' 'demoralize,' 'demotic,' 'deplete,' 
 ' depletion,' ' desirability,' ' deterrent,' ' diggings,' 
 'digraph,' 'disendow,' 'disestablish,' 'dissimilation,' 
 'dude,' 'dynamic,' 'dynamite,' 'educational,' 'en- 
 lightenment,' 'ensilage,' 'eschatology,' 'esthete,' 
 'ethnography,' 'ethnology,' ' eurasian,' 'evidential,' 
 'evolutionist,' 'exceptional,' 'excursionist,' ' exegete,' 
 'exhaustive,' 'exploitation,' 'extradition,' 'fatherland,' 
 'fenian,' 'fernery,' ' fictionist,' 'finality,' 'finesse,' 
 'flange,' 'flunkey,' 'folklore,' 'formulate,' 'fortuitism,' 
 'garotter,' 'gastronomy,' 'glycerine,' 'grandiose,' 
 'haulage,' 'health-resort,' 'hedonist,' 'hegemony,'
 
 142 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 'heredity,' ' heterodynamic,' 'homoeopathy,' 'hoplite,' 
 'hygiene,' 'hymnal,' 'hymnary,' 'hymnology,' 'immi- 
 grant,' 'impecunious,' 'infalliblist/'inopportunist,' 'in- 
 sectivorous,' ' interpenetrate,' ' intransigeant,' ' iodine,' 
 'jingo,' 'khedive,' 'lacustrine,' 'linguistic,' 'loot,' 
 'lucidity,' 'macadamize,' 'mahdi,' 'masher,' 'maxi- 
 mize,' 'melic,' 'meliorist,' 'messianic,' 'migrant,' 
 'minimize,' 'mitrailleuse,' 'monograph,' 'morphine,' 
 'myth,' 'neutralization,' 'nihilist,' 'normal,' 'oldster,' 
 'onesided,' 'opportunism,' 'orchestration,' 'orna- 
 mentation,' 'outcome,' 'output,' 'outsider,' 'outturn,' 
 'overlord,' 'ozone,' 'paganity,' 'paraffin,' 'pastorate,' 
 'pervert,' 'pessimism,' 'pessimist,' 'petroleum' (but 
 why not 'rock-oil'?), 'philander,' 'phonetic,' 'photo- 
 graph,' 'phycology,' 'physicist,' 'pisciculture,' 'poly- 
 technic,' 'positivist,' 'postulant,' 'prayerful,' 'prehen- 
 sile,' 'prehistoric,' 'pretentious,' 'princekin,' 'prole- 
 tarian,' 'proletariat,' 'protoplasm,' 'puggaree,' 'ras- 
 caldom,' 'ratten,' 'realistic,' 'recidivist,' 'recoup,' 
 'recrudescence,' 'recuperative,' 'reformatory, l 're- 
 vert,' 'revivalist,' 'revolver,' 'rink,' 'ritualist,' 'rockery,' 
 'rowdy,' 'sanitary,' 'sanitation,' 'scamp,' 'scientist,' 
 'secularist,' 'secularization,' 'seismology,' 'sensational,' 
 'serial,' 'sewage,' 'shoddy,' 'shrinkage,' 'shunt,' 
 'siding,' 'silo,' 'skilly,' 'skit,' 'skyline,' 'skyscape,' 
 'slum,' 'sociology,' 'solidarity,' 'solidify,' 'specialist,' 
 
 1 ' Reliable,' which in some former editions of this book 
 found here its place, is now omitted, as having no right to 
 such. In the Academy, Sept. 22, 1877, it is shown to have 
 been used by Richard Montagu in 1624. Accomplishing no- 
 thing which ' trustworthy ' does not accomplish much better, 
 it might very well have been left in the obscurity which it 
 deserved.
 
 in. New Words in English. 143 
 
 'squatter,' 'stagy,' 'stampede,' 'standpoint,' 'statis- 
 tics,' 'statuesque,' 'stereoscope,' 'stereotype' (in- 
 vented by Didot), 'stodgy,' 'strategy,' 'strychnine,' 
 'stylist,' 'suggestive,' 'telegram, 'teleology,' 'tele- 
 phone,' 'thud,' 'tourist,' 'tractarian,' 'transliteration,' 
 'tricycle,' ' uniformitarian ' (Lyell), 'unlove,' 'utili- 
 tarian,' 'utilize,' 'variant,' 'velocipede,' 'viticulture,' 
 'vivisection,' 'waltz' (1813), 'watershed,' 'welcher,' 
 'wreckage.' It must be owned of some of these that 
 we could want them (in the older sense of ' to want '), 
 without the want being very seriously felt ; others 
 have been imposed upon us by necessities against 
 which it would be idle to struggle ; by new inventions, 
 by new discoveries of science, by new activities of 
 thought in this direction and in that, by much which 
 is healthy, and by something also which is unhealthy 
 among us ; and if they are not all particularly praise- 
 worthy, there yet are some in this list, by the posses- 
 sion of which we are manifestly gainers. I must 
 pause here, for the subject is very far from exhausted.
 
 144 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 GAINS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 
 
 (CONTINUED.) 
 
 TAKING up the subject where in my last lecture 
 I left off, I proceed to enumerate some other 
 devices by which we have made additions to our 
 vocabulary. 
 
 This we have done in .many ways. And first, we 
 have brought what we had already, two words or more, 
 into new combinations, and formed a new word out 
 of these. Much more is wanted here than merely to 
 link them together by a hyphen ; they must really 
 coalesce and grow together. Different languages, and 
 even the same language at different epochs of its life, 
 will possess this power in very different degrees. The 
 eminent felicity of the Greek has been always acknow- 
 ledged. 'The joints of her compounded words,' 
 says Fuller, 'are so naturally oiled, that they run 
 nimbly on the tongue, which makes them, though long, 
 never tedious because significant.' * Sir Philip Sidney 
 
 i 
 
 Holy Stale, b. ii. c. 6. Latin promised at one time to 
 display an almost equal freedom in forming new words by the 
 happy marriage of old. But at the period of its highest culture 
 it seemed possessed with a timidity which caused it voluntarily 
 to abdicate this with many of its other powers. In the Augustan 
 period we look in vain for new epithets like these, both occurring
 
 iv. Compound Epithets. 145 
 
 makes the same claim for our English, namely, that 
 ' it is particularly happy in the composition of two or 
 three words together, near equal to the Greek.' ' No 
 one has done more than Milton to justify this praise, 
 or to show what may be effected by this happy mar- 
 riage of words. Many of his compound epithets, as 
 'grey-hooded even,' 'coral-paven floor,' ' flowry-kirtled 
 
 in a single line of Catullus : ' Ubi cerva silvicultrix, ubi aper 
 nemorivagus ;' or again, as his 'fluentisonus,' as the ' salsipo- 
 tens ' of Plautus, the ' velivolus,' the ' noctivagus ' of Lucretius, 
 or as the ' imbricitor ' of Ennius. Nay, of those pregnant com- 
 pounds which the language once had formed, it let numbers 
 drop: 'parcipromus,' ' turpilucricupidus,' and many more, do 
 not extend beyond Plautus ; nor ' fallaciloquentia,' exactly 
 corresponding to the inQavoXoyla of St. Paul (Col. ii. 4), beyond 
 Accius. Quinctilian (i. 5. 70) : Res tota magis Gnecos decet, 
 nobis minus succedit ; nee id fieri natura puto, sed alienis 
 favemus ; ideoque cum Kvpravx^a mirati sumus, incurvicervicum 
 vix a risu defendimus. Elsewhere he complains of the little 
 generative power of the Latin, its continual losses being compen- 
 sated by no equivalent gains (viii. 6, 32) : Deinde, tanquam con- 
 summata sint omnia, nihil generare audemus ipsi, quum multa 
 quotidie ab antiquis ficta moriantur. Still the silver age of the 
 language did recover to some extent the abdicated energies of 
 its earlier times, reasserted among other powers that of com- 
 bining words, with a certain measure of success. 
 
 1 There is a certain exaggeration here. We can do much, 
 but in this matter the Germans are on a nearer equality with 
 the Greeks than we are. How rich is Goethe in such com- 
 pounds, though his earlier formations possess a certain natural 
 ease, which is sometimes wanting in his latter. Thus the First 
 Part of Faust yields us such as follow : ' gnadenpforte,' ' don- 
 nergang,' ' lebensfluth,' ' thatensturm ; ' but the Second such as 
 these: 'glitzerstand,' • glanzgewimmcl,' ' krackzegruss,' alto- 
 gether a poorer family. 
 
 L
 
 146 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 Naiades,' 'golden-winged host,' 'Night's drowsy- 
 flighted steeds,' ' night-foundered skiff,' ' tinsel- 
 slippered feet,' ' violet-embroidered vale,' ' dewy- 
 feathered sleep,' ' sky-tinctured grain,' ' vermeil- 
 tinctured lip,' ' amber-dropping hair,' are themselves, 
 like the 'tempest-footed steeds,' the 'night-wandering 
 stars ' of the Greek poet, like his ' golden-throned,' 
 ' saffron -robed,' 'fair-haired,' 'white-winged,' 'white- 
 steeded Aurora,' each of them a poem in miniature. 
 Not unworthy to be set beside these are Sylvester's 
 ' opal-coloured morn,' Drayton's ' silver-sanded shore,' 
 or, again, his 'sun-courting marigold,' Marlowe's 
 'golden-fingered Ind,' Beaumont and Fletcher's 
 'golden-tressed Apollo,' Spenser's 'sea-shouldering 
 whale,' with which Keats was so much delighted, 
 Shakespeare's 'heaven-kissing hill,' ' heavy-gaited 
 toad,' ' yellow-skirted fays,' ' fiery-footed steeds,' 
 'eagle-winged pride,' 'maid-pale peace,' Chapman's 
 'rosy-fingered morn,' Keats' ' yellow -girted bees,' 
 Tennyson's 'silver-coasted isle,' and 'rock-thwarted 
 waves,' Matthew Arnold's ' moon-blanch'd sand,' 
 'tawny-throated nightingale.' At the same time com- 
 binations like these remain so much the peculiar 
 property of their first author, they so little pass into 
 any further use, that they must rather be regarded 
 as evidences of poetical than augmentations of lin- 
 guistic wealth. Such words as 'international,' or as 
 'folk-lore,' are better examples of additions to our 
 every-day working vocabulary. ' International ' we 
 owe to Jeremy Bentham, one of the boldest, yet in 
 the main least successful among the fashioners of new 
 words by the putting together of old. But strange 
 and formless as is for the most part this progeny of his
 
 iv. Congregation, Convention. 147 
 
 brain, he has given us here a word which does such 
 excellent service, that it is difficult to understand how 
 the language, how diplomatists and statesmen above 
 all, contrived so long to do without it. [' Folk-lore ' 
 we owe to W. J. Thorns, the first editor of Notes and 
 Queries ; certainly the power of substituting this word 
 for 'popular antiquities ' is an unquestionable gain. 1 ] 
 
 We have further increased our vocabulary by form- 
 ing new words according to the analogy of formations 
 which in parallel cases have been already allowed. 
 Thus upon the substantives 'congregation,' 'conven- 
 tion,' were formed 'congregational,' 'conventional;' 
 yet these at a comparatively modern date ; ' congrega- 
 tional ' first rising up in the Assembly of Divines, or 
 during the time of the Commonwealth. 2 A few of 
 these having found allowance, the process is repeated, 
 not always with very gratifying results, in the case of 
 other words with the same ending. We are now used 
 to ' educational,' and the word is serviceable enough ; 
 but I can remember when a good while ago an ' Edu- 
 cational Magazine ' was started, a first impression was, 
 that a work having to do with education should not 
 thus bear upon its front an offensive, or at best a 
 very questionable, novelty in the English language. 
 These adjectives are now multiplying fast. We have 'in- 
 flexional,' ' exceptional,' ' denominational,' and on this 
 the monstrous birth 'denominationalism ; ' 'emotional ' 
 
 p The word was first used by Dr. Thorns in a communica- 
 tion to the Alhenccum of August 22, 1846, written under the 
 pseudonym of Ambrose Merton and headed ' Folk-Lore,' see 
 Notes and Queries, 4th S. x. 339.] 
 
 ' l Collection of Scarce Tracts, edited by Sir W. Scott, vol. vii. 
 p. 91. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 is creeping into books ; ' sensational,' name and 
 thing, has found only too ready a welcome among 
 us ; so that it is hard to say whether all words with 
 this termination will not finally generate an adjective. 
 Convenient as you may sometimes find these, you 
 will do Avell to abstain from all but the perfectly 
 well recognized formations. For as many as have no 
 claim to be arbiters of the language Pope's advice is 
 good, as certainly it is safe, that they be not among 
 the last to use a word which is going out, nor among 
 the first to employ one that is coming in. 
 
 ' Its,' the anomalously formed genitive of ' it,' was 
 created with the object of removing an inconvenience, 
 which for a while made itself seriously felt in the lan- 
 guage. The circumstances of the rise of this little 
 word, and of the place which it has secured for itself 
 among us, are sufficiently curious to justify a treatment 
 which might appear out of proportion with the import- 
 ance that it has ; but which none will deem so, who 
 are at all acquainted with the remarkable facts of our 
 language bound up in the story of the word. 
 
 Within the last few years attention has been drawn 
 to the circumstance that ' its ' is of comparatively 
 recent introduction into the language. The earliest 
 example which has yet been adduced is from Florio's 
 World of Words, 1598 j the next from the translation 
 of Montaigne by the same author, 1603. You will 
 not find it once in our English Bible, the office which 
 it fulfils for us now being there fulfilled either by ' his ' 
 (Gen. i. 11 ; Exod. xxxvii. 17 ; Matt. v. 15) or 'her' 
 (Jon. i. 15 ; Rev. xxii. 2), these applied as freely to 
 inanimate things as to persons ; or else by ' thereof 
 (Gen. iii. 6 ; Ps. lxv. 10) or 'of it' (Dan. vii. 5). Nor
 
 iv. 'Its' a recent Word in English. 149 
 
 may Lev. xxv. 5 be urged as invalidating this asser- 
 tion, as there will presently be occasion to show. To 
 Bacon ' its ' is altogether unknown ; he too had no 
 scruple about using ' his ' as a neuter ; as in the fol- 
 lowing passage : ' Learning hath his infancy, when it 
 is but beginning and almost childish ; then his youth, 
 when it is luxuriant and juvenile ; then his strength of 
 years, when it is solid and reduced ; and lastly his 
 old age, when it waxeth dry and exhaust.' l ' Its ' is 
 equally unknown to Spenser. Some rare examples 
 of it have been found in Ben Jonson, who however 
 knows nothing of it in his Grammar : in Shakespeare 
 too it occurs very seldom, in far the larger number of 
 his plays not at all ; indeed, all counted, not more 
 than fourteen times in the whole ; though, singularly 
 enough, three of these uses occur in one speech 
 of twelve lines in The Winter's Tale? Milton for the 
 most part avoids it ; though we find it a few times in 
 his poetry. 3 
 
 It is not hard to trace the motives which led to the 
 generation of this genitive, or the causes which have 
 
 1 Essay 58. - Act i. sc. 2. 
 
 3 As in P. L. i. 254 ; iv. 813. For all this it is employed 
 by him so rarely, that the use of it four times in the little poem 
 which has been recently ascribed to him, seems to me of it- 
 self nearly decisive against his authorship. It is worth while, 
 however, to see what has been urged to weaken this argument 
 in Mr. Morley's King and Commons. Unluckily, neither Mrs. 
 Cowden Clarke, to whom we owe so excellent a Concordance 
 of Shakespeare's Plays (but why not of his Poems as well ?), 
 nor Mr. Prendergast, to whom we are indebted for one of 
 Milton's Poetical Works, was aware of the importance of regis- 
 tering the very rare occurrences of 'its' in their several authors, 
 and we look in vain for any notice of the word in either.
 
 150 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 enabled it against much tacit opposition to hold its 
 own. So soon as ever it was forgotten that ' his ' was 
 the regular genitive of 'it' as well as of 'he,' a 
 manifest inconvenience attended the employment of 
 ' his ' both for masculine and neuter, or, to speak more 
 accurately, for persons and for things ; this, namely, 
 that the personifying power of ' his,' no unimportant 
 power for the poet, was seriously impaired, almost 
 destroyed, thereby. It would be often difficult, nay 
 impossible, to determine whether such a personifica- 
 tion was intended or not ; and even where the con- 
 text made perfectly evident that such was meant, the 
 employment of the same form where nothing of the 
 kind was intended, contributed greatly to diminish 
 its effect. Craik has noticed as a consequence of this 
 that Milton prefers, wherever it is possible, the femi- 
 nine to the masculine personification, 1 as if he felt 
 that the latter was always obscure from the risk of ' his ' 
 being taken for the neuter pronoun. There was room 
 too for other confusions. When we read of the Ancient 
 of Days, that ' his throne was like the fiery flame, and 
 his wheels as burning fire ' (Dan. vii. 9), who does 
 not now refer the second ' his ' as well as the first 
 to ' the Ancient of Days ' ? It indeed belongs to the 
 
 ' throne.' 
 
 So strongly had these and other inconveniences 
 made themselves felt, that there was already, and had 
 been for a long while, a genitival employment of ' it,' 
 whereby it was made to serve all the uses which ' its ' 
 served at a later day. In some dialects, in the West 
 
 ' Thus see P. L. ii. 4, 175, 584; ix. 1103; Comus, 396, 
 468.
 
 iv. ' Its ' a recent Word in English. 1 5 1 
 
 Midland for example, this dates very far back. 1 We 
 have one example of ' it,' so used, in the Authorized 
 Version of Scripture, Lev. xxv. 5 : 'That which 
 groweth of it own accord thou shalt not reap' —   
 which has silently been changed in later editions to 
 ' its own accord ; ' but ' it ' was the reading in the ex- 
 emplar edition of 161 1, and for a considerable time 
 following ; it is to be found so late as in an edition of 
 1668 ; though I believe not later; while already in 
 one of 1654 ' its ' had put in an appearance. Exactly 
 the same phrase, ' of it own accord,' occurs in the 
 Geneva Version at Acts xii. io.' 2 There are several 
 examples, thirteen have been counted, of this use of 
 ' it ' in Shakespeare ; thus in The Winter's Tale, iii. 2 : 
 ' The innocent milk in it most innocent mouth ; ' and 
 again in King John, ii. 3 : ' Go to it grandame.' And 
 they are by no means unfrequent in other writers of 
 the earlier half of the seventeenth century. In Ben 
 Jonson ' it ' as = ' its ' may be found, but very rarely. 
 In Rogers' Naaman the Syrian, published in 1642, but 
 the lectures delivered some eight years earlier, ' its ' 
 nowhere occurs, but a genitival ' it ' often ; thus, ' I 
 am at this mark, to withdraw the soul from the life of 
 it own hand' {Preface, p. 1) ; and again, ' The power 
 of the Spirit is such that it blows at it own pleasure ' 
 (p. 441); and again, 'The scope which mercy pro- 
 
 1 See Mayhew-Skeat, Did. of Middle English (s.v. 'hit '). 
 
 2 And also in Hooker, Eccles. Pol. i. 3. 5. In Keble's edition 
 this is printed ' of its own accord. ' Were this the original 
 reading, then, as the book was first published in 1594, we should 
 have an earlier example of ' its ' by four years than that in 
 Florio ; but in all editions up to that of 1632, 'of it own 
 accord ' is the reading.
 
 152 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 pounds to herself in the turning the soul to God, 
 even the glory of it own self (p. 442). l ' It,' where 
 we should use ' its,' occurs in a work published in 
 1656. I know of no later literary use ; but the same 
 is very common in Lancashire still. 
 
 No doubt we have here in this use of ' it ' a step- 
 ping-stone by which the introduction of ' its ' was 
 greatly aided. With all this the word was for long 
 very reluctantly allowed, above all in any statelier style. 
 It was evidently regarded as an unwelcome makeshift, 
 not always to be dispensed with, but to which recourse 
 should be had only when such was unavoidable. This 
 feeling is not even now extinct. I remember hearing 
 Lord Macaulay say that he always avoided employing 
 ' its ' when he could ; while to every writer of English 
 verse, who has any sense of melody, the necessity of 
 using it is often one from which he would most gladly 
 escape. 2 It is, in fact, a parvenu, which has forced 
 itself into good society at last, but not with the good 
 will of those who in the end had no choice but to 
 admit it. 
 
 There is indeed a very singular period in our 
 literature, extending over more than the first half of the 
 seventeenth century, during which the old grammati- 
 cal usages, namely, ' his ' applied to neuters as freely 
 
 1 See upon this whole subject Craik, Oft the English of 
 Shakespeare, 2nd edit. p. 97 ; Marsh, Manual of the English 
 Language, Engl. edit. p. 278 ; Transactions of the Philological 
 Society, vol. i. p. 280 ; Wright, The Bible Word-book, s. v. 'it;' 
 and the Essay on Milton's English, prefixed to Masson's edition 
 of his Poetical Works. 
 
 [ 2 But see Wordsworth's sonnet beginning, ' Yes, there is 
 holy pleasure in thine eye.']
 
 iv. ' Its' reluctantly employed. 153 
 
 as to masculines, or instead of this, 'thereof,' or 'of 
 it,' were virtually condemned — the first as involving 
 many possible confusions, the others as clumsy and 
 antiquated contrivances for escaping these confusions, 
 while yet at the same time the help of ' its ' is claimed 
 as sparingly as possible, by some is not claimed at 
 all. Thus I have carefully examined large portions 
 of Daniel and Drayton — the first died in 16 19, the 
 second in 1631 — without once lighting upon the word, 
 and am reasonably confident that it occurs in neither ; 
 but, which is very much more noticeable, I have done 
 this without lighting upon more than one or two pas- 
 sages where there was even the temptation, if the poet 
 shrank from the employment of ' its,' to employ any 
 of the earlier substitutes ; so that it is hardly too much 
 to say that the whole fashion of their sentences must 
 have been often shaped by a conscious or unconscious 
 seeking to avoid the alternative necessities either of 
 using, or else evidently finding a substitute for, this 
 unwelcome little monosyllable. Dryden, I suppose, 
 had no conscious scruple about employing ' its,' and 
 yet how rarely he did so, as compared with a modern 
 writer under the same inducements, a fact like this 
 remarkably attests, namely, that in his rendering of 
 the second book of the Aineid, on which I made the 
 experiment, 'its' occurs only three times, while in 
 Conington's translation of the same no fewer times 
 than twenty-six. We may further note that many 
 who employed the newly invented possessive, ever 
 and anon fell back on 'his,' or 'her,' or 'thereof,' as 
 though the other did not exist. It is thus continually 
 with Fuller, and, though not so often, with Jeremy 
 Taylor. Thus the former says of Solomon's Temple :
 
 154 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 1 Twice was it pillaged by foreign foes, and four times 
 by her own friends before the final destruction there- 
 of? x He turns to 'thereof for help ten times for 
 once that ' its ' finds allowance with him. And in 
 Jeremy Taylor a construction such as the following is 
 not unusual : ' Death hath not only lost the sting, but 
 it bringeth a coronet in her hand.' 
 
 How soon, with all this, the actual novelty of ' its ' 
 was forgotten is strikingly evidenced by the fact that 
 when Dryden, in one of his moods of fault-finding 
 with the poets of the preceding generation, is taking 
 Ben Jonson to task for general inaccuracy in his 
 English diction, among other counts of his indict- 
 ment, he quotes this line from Catiline, 
 
 • Though heaven should speak with all his wrath at once,' 
 
 and proceeds, ' heaven is ill syntax with his ; ' and 
 this, while in fact till within forty or fifty years of the 
 time when Dryden began to write, no other syntax 
 was known ; and to a much later date was exceed- 
 ingly rare. Curious, too, is it to note that in the 
 earnest controversy which followed on the publication 
 by Chatterton of the poems ascribed by him to the 
 monk Rowley, who should have lived in the fifteenth 
 century, no one appealed to the following line \_^lla, 
 
 st. 112], 
 
 ' Life and all its good I scorn,' 
 
 as at once deciding that the poems were not of the 
 age which they pretended. Warton, who denied, 
 though with some hesitation, their antiquity, 2 giving 
 
 1 Pisgah Sight of Palestine, p. 40. Compare Marsh, Lectures 
 on the English Language. New York, 1S60, p. 399. 
 
 2 History of English Poetry, vol. ii. p. 463 sqq.
 
 iv. Many Words recovered. 1 5 5 
 
 many and sufficient reasons for this denial, failed to 
 take note of this little word, which betrayed the 
 forgery at once. 
 
 Again, languages enrich their vocabulary ; our own 
 has largely done so, by recovering treasures which 
 had escaped them for a while. Not that all which 
 drops out of use and memory is loss : there are words 
 which it is gain to be rid of, and which none would 
 wish to revive ; words of which Dryden says truly, 
 though in a somewhat ungracious comparison — they 
 do ' not deserve this redemption, any more than the 
 crowds of men who daily die, or are slain for sixpence 
 in a battle, merit to be restored to life, if a wish could 
 revive them.' ' Bat there are others which it is a 
 real advantage to draw back again from the tempo- 
 rary oblivion into which they had fallen, and such 
 recoveries are more numerous than might at first be 
 supposed. 
 
 You may remember that Horace, tracing in a few 
 memorable lines the fortune of words, and noting 
 that many, once in use, were in his time no longer 
 current, did not therefore count that of necessity their 
 race was for ever run. So far from this, he confi- 
 dently anticipated a palingenesy or renewed existence 
 for many among them. 2 They had set, but they 
 should rise again : what seemed death was only sus- 
 pended animation. Such indeed is constantly the 
 
 1 Postscript to his Translation of the JEneid. For Gray's 
 judgment on the words recovered or recalled by Dryden, see 
 Letter 43, to West. 
 
 2 Multa renascentur, qua; jam cecidere. 
 
 Ars Poet. 46 72; cf. Ep. ii. 2. 115.
 
 156 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 fact. Words slip almost or quite as imperceptibly 
 back into use as they once slipped out of it. There 
 is abundant evidence of this. Thus in 1534 it was 
 found necessary to gloss as archaisms the following 
 words, 'behest,' 'chieftain,' 'desert,' 'thrall,' 'thral- 
 dom.' So too in the contemporary gloss which an 
 anonymous friend of Spenser furnishes to his Shep- 
 herd's Calendar, first published in 1579, 'for the 
 exposition of old words,' as he declares, he includes 
 the following in his list : 'askance,' 'bevy,' ' coronal,' 
 'dapper,' 'embellish,' 'fain,' ' flowret,' 'forestall,' 'for- 
 lorn,' 'glee,' 'keen,' 'scathe,' 'seer,' 'surly,' 'welter,' 
 'wizard,' with others quite as familiar as these. In 
 the table of words ' not familiar to the vulgar reader,' 
 and explained in the first edition of the Rhemish 
 Bible (1582), the following are included: 'acquisi- 
 tion,' 'advent,' 'adulterate,' 'allegory,' 'co-operate,' 
 'evangelize,' 'eunuch,' ' prsescience.' In Speght's 
 Chaucer (1667), there is a long list of 'old and ob- 
 scure words in Chaucer explained ; ' these ' old and 
 obscure words ' including 'anthem,' 'bland,' 'Withe,' 
 'carol,' 'chaplet,' 'deluge,' 'franchise,' 'illusion,' 
 'problem,' 'recreant,' 'sphere,' 'tissue,' 'transcend,' 
 with very many easier than these. In Skinner's 
 Etymologicon (167 1), there is another such list of 
 words which have quite gone out of use, 1 and among 
 these he includes 'to dovetail,' 'to interlace,' 'elvish,' 
 ' encumbred,' ' gawd,' ' glare,' ' malison,' ' masca- 
 rade,' 'oriental,' 'phantom,' 'plumage,' 'pummel,' 
 
 1 Etymologicon vocum omnium antiquarum quce usque a 
 Wilhelmo Vict ore invahtentnt, et jam ante parentum cztatem in 
 usu esse desierunt.
 
 iv. Many Words recovered. 157 
 
 'shapely.' Again, there is prefixed to Thomson's 
 Castle of Indolence, in which, as is well known, he 
 affects the archaic, an ' explanation of the obsolete 
 words used in this poem.' They are not very many, 
 but they embrace 'appal,' 'aye,' 'bale,' 'blazon,' 
 'carol,' 'deftly,' 'gear,' 'glee,' 'imp,' 'nursling,' 'prankt,' 
 'sere,' 'sheen,' 'sweltry,' 'thrall,' 'unkempt,' 'wight;' 
 many of which would be used without scruple in the 
 prose, the remainder belonging to the recognized 
 poetical diction, of the present day. West, a con- 
 temporary of Thomson, whose works have found their 
 way into Johnson's Poets, and who, like Thomson, 
 fancied that he was writing 'in the manner of Spenser,' 
 counts it necessary to explain 'assay,' 'astound,' 
 'caitiff,' 'dight,' 'emprise,' 'guise,' 'kaiser,' 'palmer,' 
 ' paragon,' 'paramour,' 'paynim,' 'prowess,' 'trench- 
 ant,' 'welkin;' with all which our poetry is familiar 
 now. Gray, writing in 1771, regarded 'eschew,' 
 ' forth,' ' gaud,' 'meed,' 'sheen,' and 'wight' as ob- 
 solete. A bookseller's edition of Shakespeare, pub- 
 lished in 1798, has a Glossary of obscure and difficult 
 words appended. Among these are 'gourd,' 'guer- 
 don,' 'grime,' 'kirtle,' 'scan,' 'shrift,' 'stole,' 'tether,' 
 'tiny,' and such like. 
 
 It is well-nigh incredible what words it has been 
 sometimes proposed to dismiss from our English 
 Bible on the plea that they ' are now almost or 
 entirely obsolete.' Wemyss, writing in 1816, desired 
 to get rid of 'athirst,' 'ensample,' 'garner,' 'haply,' 
 'jeopardy,' 'lack,' 'passion,' 'straightway,' 'twain,' 
 ' wax,' with a multitude of other words not a whit more 
 remote from our ordinary use. Purver, whose New 
 and Literal Translation of the Old and New Testa-
 
 158 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 ment appeared in 1764, has an enormous list of ex- 
 pressions that are ' clownish, barbarous, base, hard, 
 technical, misapplied, or new coined ; ' and among 
 these are ' beguile,' 'boisterous,' 'lineage,' 'perseve- 
 rance,' 'potentate,' 'remit,' 'seducer,' 'shorn,' 'swerve,' 
 'vigilant,' 'unction,' 'unloose,' 'vocation.' And the 
 same worship of the fleeting present, of the transient 
 fashions of the hour in language, with the same con- 
 tempt of that stable past which in all likelihood will 
 be the enduring future, long after these ephemeral 
 fashions have passed away and are forgotten, mani- 
 fests itself to an extravagant degree in a recent Ver- 
 sion of the American Bible Union. It needs only 
 for a word to have the slightest suspicion of age 
 upon it, to have ceased but for an hour to be the 
 current money of the street and the market-place, 
 and there is nothing for it but peremptory exclusion. 
 'To better,' 'to chasten,' 'to faint,' 'to quicken,' 
 'chastening,' 'conversation,' 'saints,' 'straitly,' 'where- 
 fore,' ' wroth,' with hundreds more, are thrust out, 
 avowedly upon this plea ; and modern substitutes 
 introduced in their room. I can fancy no more 
 effectual scheme for debasing the Version, nor, if it 
 were admitted as the law of revision, for the lasting 
 impoverishment of the English tongue. One can only 
 liken it to a custom of some barbarous tribes, who, 
 as soon as their kindred begin to show tokens of old 
 age, bury them alive, or by some other means put 
 them out of the way. These, however, might plead 
 that their old would grow older still, more useless, 
 more burdensome, every day. It is very far from 
 faring so with the words which, on somewhat similar 
 grounds, are forcibly dismissed. A multitude of these,
 
 iv. Many Words recovered. 159 
 
 often the most precious ones, after a period of semi- 
 obsoleteness, of temporary withdrawal from active 
 service, enjoy a second youth, pass into free and un- 
 questioned currency again : words 
 
 ' whilom flourishing 
 Pass now no more ; but, banished from the court, 
 Dwell with disgrace among the vulgar sort ; 
 And those which eld's strict doom did disallow, 
 And damn for bullion, go for current now.' 
 
 But nothing would so effectually hinder this rejuve- 
 nescence as the putting a ban upon them directly they 
 have passed out of common use ; the resolution, that 
 if they have withdrawn for ever so brief a time from 
 the every-day service of men, they shall never be 
 permitted to return to it again. A true lover of his 
 native tongue will adopt another course : 
 
 Obscurata diu populo bonus eruet, 
 
 and valuable words which are in danger of disappear- 
 ing, he, instead of bidding to be gone, will do his best 
 to detain or recover. 
 
 Who would now affirm of the verb ' to hallow ' that 
 it is even obsolescent? yet Wallis two hundred years 
 ago observed — 'it has almost gone out of use' (fere 
 desuevit). It would be difficult to find an example of 
 the verb ' to advocate ' between Milton and Burke. 
 Franklin, an admirable master of the homelier English 
 style, considered the word to have sprung up during 
 his own residence in Europe. l In this, indeed, he was 
 mistaken ; it had only during this period revived. 
 Johnson says of 'jeopardy ' that it is a 'word not nov 
 
 [> See the passage quoted in N.E.D. (s. v. advocate).]
 
 160 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 in use;' which certainly is no longer true. 1 He 
 affirms the same of the verb ' to succumb ; ' ' woman- 
 hood' he declares to be obsolete. He has never 
 heard of 'to smoulder,' but as he recognises the 
 participle 'smouldering,' guesses there must be such a 
 verb. 
 
 I am persuaded that in easiness of being under- 
 stood, Chaucer is not merely as near, but much nearer, 
 to us than he was felt by Dryden and his contem- 
 poraries to be to them. They make exactly the same 
 sort of complaints, only in still stronger language, 
 about his archaic phraseology and the obscurities it 
 involves, which we still sometimes hear at the present 
 day. Thus in the Preface to his Tales from Chaucer, 
 having quoted some not very difficult lines from the 
 earlier poet whom he is modernizing, Dryden proceeds : 
 'You have here a specimen of Chaucer's language, 
 which is so obsolete that his sense is scarce to be un- 
 
 1 In like manner La Bruyere {Caractcrcs, c. 14) laments 
 the extinction of a large number of French words which he 
 enumerates. At least half of these have now free course in the 
 language, as 'valeureux,' 'haineux,' ' peineux,' ' fructueux,' 
 ' mensonger,' ' coutumier,' ' vantard,' ' courtois,' ' jovial,' 
 ' fctoyer,' 'larmoyer,' 'verdoyer ;' and may every one be found 
 in Littre's great Dictionary. A genuine scholar such as Adelung 
 regarded in 1789 the following German words as archaisms 
 worn out and not serviceable any more : ' eiland,' ' entsprechen,' 
 1 fehde,' 'heimath,' ' lamkknecht,' 'mahl,' ' obhut,' 'reissig,' 
 ' schlacht,' ' sippschaft ; ' while the following he counted as un- 
 acceptable novelties : ' beabsichtigen,' ' entgegnen,' ' ingrimm,' 
 ' gemeinplatz,' 'liebevoll. ' In Grimm's W'drterbuch ' gebilde, 
 forgotten for centuries, and absent from all modern Dictionaries, 
 reappears, and vindicates its right to reappear.
 
 iv. Fuller on Chaucer. 1 6 1 
 
 derstood.' 1 And Fuller to the same effect: 'In a 
 century of years languages grow strangers to them- 
 selves ; as now an Englishman needs an interpreter 
 to understand Chaucer's English.' Nor did it fare 
 thus with Chaucer only. These wits and poets of the 
 Court of Charles the Second were conscious of a 
 wider gulf between themselves and the Elizabethan 
 era, separated from them by little more than fifty years, 
 than any of which we are aware, divided from it by 
 two centuries more. It was not merely that they felt 
 themselves further removed from its tone and spirit 
 it is easy to understand how this should be ; 2 but they 
 evidently found more difficulty and strangeness in the 
 language of Spenser and Shakespeare than we find at 
 this day ; it seemed to them far more crowded with 
 obsolete terms than it seems to us at the present. 
 Only so can one explain the tone in which they are 
 accustomed to speak of these worthies of the near 
 
 1 But for all this Dryden thought him worth understanding. 
 Not so Addison. In a rapid review of English poets he accounts 
 ' the merry bard ' — this is his characteristic epithet for the most 
 pathetic poet in the language — as one the whole significance of 
 whose antiquated verse has for ever passed away : 
 
 ' But age has rusted what the poet writ, 
 Worn out his language, and obscured his wit. 
 In vain he jests in his unpolished strain, 
 And tries to make his readers laugh in vain.' 
 
 2 Addison takes credit for this inability of his own age to 
 find any satisfaction in that which Spenser sang for the delight 
 of his : 
 
 ' But now the mystic tale, that pleased of yore, 
 Can charm our understanding age no more ; 
 The long-spun allegories fulsome grow, 
 While the dull moral lies too plain below.' 
 
 M
 
 1 62 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 past. I must again cite Dryden, the truest representa- 
 tive for good and for evil of literary England during 
 the later decades of the seventeenth century. Of 
 Spenser, whose death was separated from his own 
 birth by little more than thirty years, he speaks as of 
 one belonging to quite a different epoch, counting it 
 much to say, ' notwithstanding his obsolete language, 
 he is still intelligible ; at least after a little practice.' ' 
 Nay, hear his judgment of Shakespeare himself, so far 
 as language is concerned : ' It must be allowed to the 
 present age that the tongue in general is so much re- 
 fined since Shakespeare's time, that many of his words 
 and more of his phrases are scarce intelligible. And 
 of those which we understand, some are ungrammati- 
 cal, others coarse ; and his whole style is so pestered 
 with figurative expressions, that it is as affected as it 
 is obscure.' 2 
 
 Sometimes a word emerges from the lower strata 
 of society, not indeed new, but yet to most seeming 
 new, its very existence having been forgotten by the 
 larger number of those speaking the language ; although 
 it must have somewhere lived on upon the lips of men. 
 Thus, since the gold-fields of California and Australia 
 
 1 Preface to Juvenal. 
 
 - Preface to Troilus and Cressida. In justice to Dryden, and 
 lest he should seem to have spoken poetic blasphemy, it should 
 not be forgotten that ' pestered,' which has no connexion with 
 ' pest,' had in his time no such offensive a sense as it has now. 
 It meant no more than inconveniently crowded (see my Select 
 Glossary, s. v. ) ; and still it is wonderful to hear him saying, as 
 he does elsewhere, that ' Shakespeare had rather written happily, 
 than knowingly or justly,' when indeed his art is quite as 
 marvellous as his nature, supposing it possible to distinguish 
 the one from the other.
 
 iv. One Word becomes two. 163 
 
 have been opened, we hear often of a 'nugget' of 
 gold ; being a lump of the pure metal ; and it has been 
 debated whether the word is a new birth altogether, 
 or whether it is the utilisation of a dialect word, which 
 for a long time had remained unused in books. It is 
 most probably this latter, seeing that ' niggot ' occurs 
 in a writer of the sixteenth century. 1 There can be 
 little doubt of the identity of 'niggot' and 'nugget.' 
 ' To shunt,' an obscure provincialism before the era of 
 railways, is now in everybody's mouth, or at any rate 
 is understood by everybody, and has already acquired 
 a secondary and figurative meaning. 
 
 There is another very fruitful source of increase 
 in the vocabulary of a language. What was once one 
 word separates into two, takes two forms, or even 
 more, and each of these asserts an existence inde- 
 pendent of the other. The impulse and suggestion 
 to this is in general first given by differences in pro- 
 nunciation, which are presently represented by dif- 
 ferences in spelling ; or it will sometimes happen that 
 what at first were no more than precarious or dialect 
 variations in spelling come in the end to be regarded 
 as words altogether distinct : they detach themselves 
 from one another, not again to reunite ; just as acci- 
 dental varieties in fruits or flowers, produced by a 
 
 1 Thus in North's Plutarch's Lives, ed. 1676, p. 499 : ' After 
 the fire was quenched, they found in niggots of gold and silver 
 mingled together, about a thousand talents ; ' and again, p. 323 : 
 ' There was brought a marvellous great mass of treasure in 
 niggots of gold.' [North's translation of Plutarch appeared in 
 1580. It would, I think, be difficult to find the word niggot in 
 any earlier writer. ] 
 
 M 2
 
 164 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 happy chance, have permanently separated off, and 
 settled into different kinds. They have each its own 
 distinct domain of meaning, as by general agreement 
 assigned to it ; dividing between them the inheritance 
 which before they held in common. No one who has 
 not watched and catalogued these words as they have 
 fallen under his notice, would believe how numerous 
 they are. 
 
 [We will first give a few examples of doublets in 
 modern English, springing from one Anglo-Saxon or 
 Teutonic original, and now differentiated in their 
 meanings: — 'Bow' (of a ship) = Icel. 'bogr,' and 
 'bough'=OE. 'bog,' from a common Teutonic stem ; 
 'cloths' and 'clothes,' from OE. 'clathas;' 'deal' and 
 'dole,' from OE. <dSl' ('dal'); 'dent' and 'dint,' 
 from OE. 'dynt ;' 'elf (OE. 'self') and 'oaf (Icel. 
 'alfr'), from a common Teutonic stem; 'goodman,' 
 and 'good man;' 'heap' (OE. 'heap') and 'hope,' 
 in 'forlorn hope,' where 'hope'=Dutch 'hoop;' 
 'hold' (OE. 'healdan') and 'halt' (to stop, Ger. 
 'halten'); 'hussy' (an impudent girl), 'hussif (a 
 needle-case) and ' house-wife,' from OE. 'hus-f-wif;' 
 ' knap ' (mountain-top in Holland's ' Pliny ') and 
 ' knob ; ' ' lee ' (OE. ' hleo ') and ' lew' (OE. ' hleow') ; 
 'nib' and 'neb,' from OE. 'nebb;' 'not 'and 'nought,' 
 from OE. 'nawiht ;' 'one' and 'an,' from OE. 'an ;' 
 ' paddock ' and ' parrock ' (in Palsgrave), from OE. 
 ' pearruc ; ' ' rack ' (light vapoury clouds) and ' wrack ' 
 ('wreck') ; 'road' and 'raid,' from OE. 'rad ;' 'saw' 
 (OE. ' sagu ') and ' saga ' (Icel. ' saga ') ; ' shabby ' and 
 ' scabby ; ' ' shatter ' and ' scatter ; ' ' shoal ' (of fishes) 
 = OE. 'scolu' and 'school' (of porpoises) = Dutch 
 ' school ; ' ' shrub ' and ' scrub,' from OE. ' scrob ; '
 
 iv. One Word becomes two. 165 
 
 ' simper ' and ' simmer,' see Skeat (s.v. ' simmer ') ; 
 'stave' and 'staff;' 'than' and 'then ;' 'thrill' (OE. 
 'thyrlian') and 'drill' (Dutch 'drillen') ; 'tingle' and 
 ' tinkle ; ' ' troth ' and ' truth ; ' ' trust ' and ' tryst ; ' 
 ' twang ' (sharp in sound) and ' tang ' (sharp in taste) — 
 the words are probably onomatopoetic ; ' weald ' (of 
 Kent) and 'wold,' from OE. 'weald' ('wald'); 
 'whole' and 'hale,' from OE. 'hal.' 
 
 The following doublets are of Teutonic origin, 
 one form coming to us through the French, the other 
 being the direct representative of the Old English 
 word. Such are ' bank' (a seat) and ' bench ; ' ' bray ' 
 (OF. ' breier,' mod. F. ' broyer ') and ' break ' (OE. 
 'brecan'); 'creche' (a public nursery) and 'crib' 
 (OE. 'cribb'); goal (OF. 'gaule,' 'waule') and 
 'wale' (in gun-' wale'), cp. O. Fries, 'walu,' a rod; 
 'lawn,' 'laund' (OF. Mande') and 'land;' 'harangue' 
 and ' ring ' (OE. ' hring ') ; ' rob ' (OF. ' rober ') and 
 'reave' (OE. 'reafian'); 'warble' (OF. 'werbler') 
 and ' whirl,' cp. Icel. ' hvirfla.' 
 
 Another class of doublets may be formed of 
 English variants derived from one French original. 
 Such are ' alarum ' and ' alarm,' from F. ' alarme ; ' 
 ' arrant ' and ' errant,' from OF. ' errer,' to travel ; 
 'band' and 'bond,' from OF. 'bande,' of Teutonic 
 origin ; ' bet ' and ' abet,' from OF. 'abeter ; ' ' chand- 
 ler ' and ' chandelier ; ' ' cheat ' and ' escheat,' from 
 OF. 'eschet,' pp. of 'escheoir;' 'corpse' ('corse') 
 and 'corps;' 'crew' and 'accrue,' see N.E.D; 'curtsy' 
 and 'courtesy,' from OF. 'courtoisie;' 'dam' and 
 'dame;' 'damson 'and 'damasine' (Damascene), from 
 OF. 'damaisine;' 'dies' and 'dice,' two plurals of 
 'die,' OF. 'dei' (mod. F. 'de') ; 'doll' and 'Dorothy,'
 
 1 66 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 from OF. 'Dorothee;' 'dungeon' and 'donjon;' 
 ' fancy ' and ' fantasie ' (in Shaks.) ; ' flounce ' (to fold) 
 and ' frounce ' (to wrinkle), from OF. ' froncer ; ' 
 'flower' and 'flour,' from OF. ' flour' (' flur ') ; 'fusee' 
 and 'fusil' (a gun), from F. ' fusil,' a steel for striking 
 fire (Cotgrave) ; 'gipsy' and 'Egyptian,' from OF. 
 ' Egiptien ; ' ' grig ' and ' Greek,' from OF. ' Grec ; ' 
 'grog' and 'grogram' from F. 'grosgrain;' 'hatch- 
 ment ' and ' achievement ' from F. ' achievement ; ' 
 'jest' and 'geste' (a romance); 'joist' and 'gist,' 
 from OF. 'giste' (mod. F. 'gite') ; 'lance' (vb.) and 
 ' launch,' from OF. ' lancier ; ' ' lawn ' (the stuff) and 
 ' Laon ; ' ' limn ' and ' enlumine,' fromF. ' enluminer; ' 
 'lumber' and 'Lombard;' 'manure 'and 'manoeuvre,' 
 from F. ' manceuvrer ; ' ' mask ' (on the face) and 
 ' masque ' (an entertainment) ; ' mister ' (Mr.) and 
 'master,' from OF. -maistre' ('meistre'); 'mettle' 
 and ' metal ; ' ' ordnance ' and ' ordinance,' from OF. 
 ' ordenance ; ' ' pawn ' (a pledge) and ' pane ' (of 
 glass), from OF. 'pan ; ' 'parson ' and 'person ; ' ' pat- 
 tern ' and 'patron;' 'peal' and 'appeal,' from F. 
 ' appel ; ' ' personalty ' and ' personality ; ' ' pilcrow ' 
 and ' paragraph ; ' ' porridge ' and ' pottage,' from F. 
 ' potage ; ' ' pose ' (to question, puzzle) and ' oppose ; ' 
 ' posy ' and ' poesy ; ' ' preen ' and ' prune ; ' ' puny ' 
 and 'puisne,' from OF. 'puis ne;' 'reprieve' and 
 'reprove,' cp. OF. 'reprover' (' il reprueve ') ; 'scrim- 
 mage' and 'skirmish,' from OF. 'eskermir' (also 
 ' escrimer ') of Teutonic origin ; ' sergeant ' and ' Ser- 
 jeant,' from OF. ' serjant ; ' ' sexton' and 'sacristan,' 
 from F. ' sacristain ; ' ' shagreen ' and ' chagrin ; ' ' sir ' 
 and 'sire;' 'size' and 'assize,' from OF. 'assise;' 
 ' souse ' and ' sauce ; ' ' splay ' and ' display,' from OF.
 
 iv. One Word becomes two. \6y 
 
 ' despleier ; ' ' sprite ' and ' spirit,' from OF. ' espirit ; ' 
 ' spruce ' and ME. ' Pruce ' (Prussia), from OF. 
 ' Pruce ; ' ' squire ' and ' esquire,' from OF. ' esquier ' 
 (mod. F. ' ecuyer ') ; ' state ' and ' estate,' from OF. 
 ' estat ; ' ' suit ' and ' suite ; ' ' tamper ' and ' temper,' 
 from F. 'temperer' (Cotgrave) ; 'tawny' and 'tenne' 
 (in heraldry), from OF. ' tane ; ' ' ticket ' and ' eti- 
 quette ; ' ' tittle ' and ' title ; ' ' travel ' and ' travail ; ' 
 ' trifle ' and ' truffle,' from F. ' trufie ; ' ' trump ' and 
 'triumph;' 1 'tune' and ' tone,' from OF. 'ton' ('tun')- 
 ' tun ' and 'ton ; ' ' villain ' and ' villein.' 
 
 The following doublets are differentiated by ac- 
 cent, as 'antic' and 'antique ;' 'conjure' and 'con- 
 jure ; ' ' custom ' and ' costume ;' ' essay ' and ' assay ; ' 
 ' gallant ' and ' gallant ; ' ' human ' and ' humane ; ' 
 'jaunty' and 'genteel;' 'minute' and ' minute ;' 
 ' story ' and 'history ; ' ' urban ' and ' urbane.' 
 
 The following doublets are twofold separate adop- 
 tions of the same foreign word with differentiation of 
 meaning. For further particulars the student is re- 
 ferred to Prof. Skeat's Dictionaries. ' Ague ' and 
 'acute;' 'allay' (to dilute) and 'alloy,' seeN.E.D; 
 ' balm ' and ' balsam ; ' ' Bedlam ' and ' Bethlehem ; ' 
 'bourn' and 'bound;' 'cage' and 'cave;' 'caitif 
 and ' captive ; ' ' calender ' and ' cylinder ; ' ' caliver ' 
 (in Shaks.) and 'calibre ;' 'canker' and 'cancer' (the 
 sign in the Zodiac) ; ' cannon ' and ' canon ; ' ' card ' 
 and ' chart ; ' ' cattle ' and ' capital ; ' ' chaste ' and 
 1 caste ; ' ' campaign ' and ' champagne ; ' ' charge ' 
 and ' cark ; ' ' chant ' and ' cant ; ' ' check ' and 
 
 1 See Latimer's famous Sen/ion on Cards, where 'triumph ' 
 and ' trump ' are interchangeably used.
 
 1 68 Gams of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 ' shah j ' ' chevalier ' and ' cavalier ; ' ' chivalry ' and 
 ' cavalry ; ' ' close ' (sb.) and ' clause ; ' ' cockatrice ' 
 and ' crocodile ; ' ' code ' and ' codex ; ' ' coffre ' and 
 ' coffin ; ' ' coign ' (corner) and ' coin ; ' ' compliment ' 
 and ' complement ; ' ' cord ' and ' chord ; ' ' couch ' 
 (vb.)and 'colloc(ate);' 'count' (vb.) and 'compute;' 
 ' cravat ' and ' Croat ; ' ME. ' crouch ' (= OE. ' cruc ') 
 and ' cross ; ' ' dainty ' and ' dignity ; ' ' dolphin ' and 
 ' dauphin ; ' ' dais ' and ' disk ; ' ' demesne ' and 
 ' domain; ' ' die ' and ' dado ; ' ' display ' and 'deploy;' 
 ' dram ' and ' drachm ; ' ' dungeon ' and ' dominion ; ' 
 ' entire ' and ' integer ; ' ' estreat ' and ' extract ; ' ' ex- 
 ploit ' and ' explicit ; ' ' farm ' and ' firm ; ' ' faro ' 
 and ' Pharaoh ; ' ' fauteuil ' and ' faldstool ; ' ' fife ' and 
 ' pipe ; ' ' filibuster ' and ' freebooter ; ' ' fester ' and 
 ' fistula ; ' ' fetish ' and ' factitious ; ' ' foible ' and 
 ' feeble ; ' ' forge ' and ' fabric ; ' ' fresh ' and ' fresco ; 
 'gallop ' and ' wallop' (to boil) ; 'grief and 'grave ; 
 ' grot ' and ' crypt ; ' ' inch ' and ' ounce ; ' ' influenza 
 and ' influence ; ' ' invoice ' and ' envoys ; ' ' jacinth 
 and 'hyacinth;' 'jane' (the stuff) and 'Genoa; 
 'jealous ' and ' zealous ; ' ' jot ' and ' iota ; ' 'journal 
 and ' diurnal ; ' ' kennel ' (a gutter) and ' canal ; 
 ' lace ' and ' lasso ; ' ' laver ' and ' lavatory ; ' ' limpet 
 and ' lamprey; ' ' lodge ' and ' lobby,' see Kluge 
 ' madeira ' and ' matter ; ' ' matin ' and ' matutine ; 
 ' maudlin ' and ' Magdalene ; ' ' mayor ' and ' major ; 
 'mean' (sb.) and ' mizen ; ' 'menu' and 'minute 
 (adj.); 'mistery' (play) and 'ministry;' 'mew' and 
 ' moult,' see Kluge ; ' Mogul ' and ' Mongol ; ' ' mood 
 (in grammar) and ' mode ; ' ' muzzle ' and ' morsel 
 (mors- + ellum) ; ' neat ' and ' net ; ' ' noise ' and 
 ' nausea ; ' ' onion ' and ' union ' (a pearl) ; ' orison '
 
 iv. One Word becomes two. 1 69 
 
 and ' oration ;' ' ospray ' and ' ossifrage ; ' ' palsy ' and 
 ' paralysis ; ' ' peer ' (' parem ') and ' par ; ' ' pie ' (a ser- 
 vice book) and ' pica ' (a kind of type) ; ' pilch ' and 
 ' pelisse ; ' ' pimento ' and ' pigment ; ' ' plum ' and 
 ' prune; ' ' poison ' and ' potion; ' ' poor 5 ('pauperem') 
 and 'pauper;' 'pose'(sb.) and 'pause;' 'pounce' 
 and ' pumice ; ' ' property ' and ' propriety; ' ' pursy ' 
 and ' pulsative ; ' ' raisin ' and ' raceme ; ' ' ray ' and 
 ' radius ; ' ' reason ' and ' ration ; ' ' respite ' and 
 'respect;' 'sample' and 'example;' 'savine' and 
 ' Sabine ; ' ' scaffold ' and ' catafalque ; ' ' sennet ' (in 
 Shaks.) and 'signet;' 'sherry' and ' Xeres ; ' 'silk' 
 and ' serge ; ' ' sire ' and ' senior ; ' ' slave ' and ' Slav ; ' 
 ' sovran ' and ' soprano ; ' ' spunk ' (touchwood) and 
 ' sponge ; ' ' strait ' and ' strict ; ' ' street ' and ' stra- 
 tum' ('strat-'); 'suite' and 'sect;' 'sure' and 
 ' secure ; ' ' syrup ' and ' shrub ' (a drink) ; ' taint ' and 
 ' tint ; ' ' taunt ' and ' tempt ; ' ' term ' and ' ter- 
 minus ; ' ' timbre ' and ' tympanum ; ' ' tulip ' and 
 ' turban ; ' ' vair ' (in heraldry) and ' various ; ' ' varlet ' 
 and 'valet;' 'vie' and 'invite;' 'viol 'and 'fiddle,' see 
 Kluge ; 'voyage' and ' viaticum ; ' 'vow ' and 'vote ;' 
 'wivern' and 'viper;' 'zest' and 'schist' (in geology).' 1 
 
 1 The same happens in ether languages. Thus in Greek 
 avdQifxa and avd8rifj.a both signify that which is devoted, though 
 in very different senses, to the higher powers ; Bdpaos, boldness, 
 and dpdffos, temerity, were at first but different pronunciations 
 of the same word ; so too yplnos and yplcpos, edos and ■f/Oos, 
 PpuKiv and Pp^x^ '• anc l probably o/3eAos and d{io\bs, re?xos and 
 ro?xos, (xopbs and capos. In Latin 'penna' and 'pinna' differ 
 only in form, and signify alike a 'wing;' while yet 'penna' 
 has come to be used for the wing of a bird, ' pinna ' (the diminu- 
 tive, ' pinnaculum,' giving us ' pinnacle ') for that of a building ;
 
 170 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 There is another very sensible gain which the 
 language has made, although this of a different kind 
 altogether. For a long time past there has been a 
 tendency to bring the component parts of the words 
 which we use into linguistic harmony, where this is 
 wanting ; so that the body of a word shall not any 
 longer be Latin, with a Saxon prefix or affix attached 
 to it ; or vice versa the body of a word Saxon, and 
 the prefix or affix or both Latin. This homogeneous 
 character was evidently wanting in words such as 
 'unsatiable,' ' unglorious,' ' undiscreet,' ' uncredible,' 
 'unvisible,' 'untolerable,' ' unreligious ' (all inWiclif) ; 
 which have now severally given place to ' insatiable,' 
 'inglorious,' 'indiscreet,' and the rest; while 'un- 
 timely,' 'unwitting,' and many more, in which there 
 existed no such disagreement between the parts, re- 
 main as they were. In the same way 'unpure' (Barnes) 
 has been replaced by 'impure,' 'unfirm' (Shakespeare) 
 
 so it is with ' Thrax ' a Thracian, and ' Threx ' a gladiator ; with 
 ' codex ' and ' caudex ; ' ' anticus ' and ' antiquus ; ' ' inface- 
 tus ' and ' inficetus ; ' ' providentia ' and ' prudentia ; ' ' cohors ' 
 and ' cors ; ' 'vertex' and 'vortex.' It is the same in 
 German with [rabe and rappe ; knabe and knappe ; reiter 
 and fitter ; schenen and scheuchen ; jungfrau and jung 
 fer ;] ' schlecht ' and ' schlicht ; ' ' golden ' and ' gulden ; ' 
 ' hofisch ' and ' hiibsch ; ' ' ahr.den ' and ' ahnen ' (see a very 
 interesting notice in Grimm's Wb'rterbuch) ; ' biegsam ' and 
 ' beugsam ; ' ' fiirsehung ' and ' vorsehung ; ' ' deich ' and 
 ' teich ; ' ' trotz ' and ' trutz ; ' ' born ' and ' brunnen ; ' ' athem' 
 and 'odem.' So in French: ' harnois,' the armour or 'har- 
 ness' of a soldier, and ' harnais ' of a horse; 'foible' and 
 ' faible ; ' ' Zephire ' and ' zephir ; ' ' chaire ' and ' chaise,' 
 the latter having been once nothing more than a Parisian pro- 
 nunciation of the former, and many more.
 
 iv. Words strive to be homogeneous. 1 7 1 
 
 by 'infirm,' 'uneffectual' (the same) by 'ineffectual,' 
 'immoveable' (Authorized Version) by 'immoveable,' 
 'untemperate' (the same) by ' intemperate,' 'unnoble' 
 (Drayton) by 'ignoble," unimitable' (Sidney) by 'in- 
 imitable,' ' unmeasurable ' (North) by 'immeasurable,' 
 1 unreverent ' (the same) by ' irreverent,' ' unvincible ' 
 (the same) by ' invincible,' ' uncapable ' (Hooker) by 
 'incapable,' 'impatient' (Coverdale) by 'impatient,' 
 ' unpartial ' (Jackson) by ' impartial,' ' undecent ' 
 (Cowley) by ' indecent,' ' uncessant ' (Milton) by ' in- 
 cessant,' ' unactive ' (the same) by ' inactive,' ' im- 
 properly ' (Ascham) by 'improperly.' 'Unpossible,' 
 the correct reading of our Authorized Version at Matt. 
 xvii. 20 ; xix. 26, and throughout, has been silently 
 changed into ' impossible ; ' ' unperfect,' however, still 
 remains (Ps. cxxxix. 16). In the same way 'unhonest' 
 (Holland) has given way to ' dishonest ; ' and ' un- 
 honestly ' (Coverdale) to ' dishonestly,' ' misorderly ' 
 (the same) to 'disorderly,' 'miscontent' (Golding) to 
 ' discontent.' Here and there, but very rarely, the 
 tendency has been in the opposite direction — to create 
 these anomalies, not to remove them. Thus Shake- 
 speare's ' incertain ' has given place to ' uncertain,' his 
 ' infortunate ' to ' unfortunate,' while Milton's ' in- 
 chastity,' 'ingrateful,' to the less correct 'unchastity,' 
 ' ungrateful ; ' ' unmusical ' (Jackson) to ' unmusical,' 
 'illimited' (Field) to 'unlimited.' 
 
 And as with the prefix, so also it has fared with 
 the suffix. A large group of our Latin words for a long 
 while had not a Latin, but a Saxon termination. We 
 have several of these in the Bible and in the Prayer 
 Book; 'pureness,' for example, 'frailness,' 'disquiet- 
 ness,' ' perfectness,' and ' simpleness.' 'Pureness'
 
 172 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 may perhaps be said still to survive ; but for the others 
 we have substituted ' frailty ' (recalled it, we may say, 
 for it was already in Piers Plowman), ' disquietude, 
 'perfection,' 'simplicity.' The same has happened 
 with a multitude of others ; 'jolliness' (Chaucer) has 
 given way to 'jollity ;' ' poverness ' {Piers Plowman) 
 to ' poverty,' ' gayness ' (Shakespeare) to ' gaiety,' 
 'subtleness' (Sidney) to 'subtlety,' ' fertileness ' (the 
 same) to 'fertility,' 'divineness' (Bacon) to 'divinity,' 
 'ableness' (Spenser) to ' ability,' ' ferventness ' (Cover- 
 dale) to 'fervency,' ' cruelness' (Golding) to 'cruelty,' 
 'desolateness' (Andrewes) to 'desolation;' 'desperate- 
 ness ' (Fuller) to 'desperation;' 'partialness ' (Frith) 
 to 'partiality;' 'spiritualness,' 'vainness,' 'activeness,' 
 'realness,' 'vulgarness,' 'immoralness' (all in Rogers), 
 severally to 'spirituality,' 'vanity,' 'activity,' 'reality,' 
 ' vulgarity,' ' immorality ; ' ' stableness ' (Coverdale) to 
 1 stability ; ' ' doubleness ' and ' graveness ' (Shake- 
 speare) to ' duplicity ' and ' gravity ; ' ' chasteness ' 
 (Chapman)to 'chastity,' 'unequalness' (Jeremy Taylor) 
 to 'inequality,' 'solemnness' (Shakespeare) to 'solem- 
 nity,' 'dejectedness' (Bishop Hall) to 'dejection,' 'in- 
 sensibleness ' (Florio) to ' insensibility,' ' splendidness,' 
 ' immutableness,' ' famousness ' (all in H. More) to 
 ' splendour,' ' immutability,' ' fame ; ' ' impureness ' 
 (Milton, prose) to ' impurity.' ' Furiousness,' ' terrible- 
 ness,' ' irresistibleness ' (Fuller), ' valiantness,' ' in- 
 satiableness,' 'rigorousness, 'generousness ' (J. Beau- 
 mont), ' difhcilness ' (Bacon), ' dolorousness,' ' rabid- 
 ness ' (both in J. Taylor), ' naturalness ' (South), 
 ' curiousness ' (Herbert) have all been felt to be words 
 ill put together, and have silently been dropped ; nor 
 would it be difficult to add immensely to this list.
 
 iv. Words strive to be homogeneous. 173 
 
 We might, I think, very well have consented to want 
 ' inerrancy,' used by Mr. Gladstone as a variation 
 of ' infallibility ; ' while yet it is certainly an improve- 
 ment on ' inerrableness,' employed by some of our 
 elder divines. Thus too, though we have not at this 
 day altogether rejected words in which the French 
 termination ' able ' is combined with a Saxon root, as 
 ' unspeakable ' and the like, still there has been an 
 evident disposition among the writers and speakers of 
 English to diminish their number. There were once 
 far more of these, as ' findable,' ' unlackable,' ' un- 
 gainsayable ' (all in Pecock), ' matchable ' (Spenser), 
 1 praisable' (Lord Berners), ' mockable ' (Shakespeare), 
 'woundable' (Fuller), 'brookable' (North country), 
 1 speakable ' (Milton), than there are now. 'The re- 
 jection of these hybrid words,' as has been well said, 1 
 ' from the modern vocabulary is curious, as an instance 
 of the unconscious exercise of a linguistic instinct by 
 the English people. The objection to such adjectives 
 is their mongrel character, the root being Saxon, the 
 termination Romanic ; and it is an innate feeling of 
 the incongruity of such alliances, not the speculative 
 theories of philologists, which has driven so many of 
 them out of circulation.' 
 
 But changes not unlike to those which I have just 
 noted have come over words, where there was no such 
 inducement arising from a sense of incongruity in 
 their component parts ; where, on the contrary, they 
 were already of one substance throughout. In these 
 instances the language seems, so to say, to have hesi- 
 
 1 Marsh, Origin and History of the English Language, 2nd 
 Series, p. 475.
 
 i/4 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 tated for a while before making up its mind which 
 suffix it would employ, and has often in later times 
 rejected one which in earlier it appeared disposed to 
 adopt, and in the stead of this adopted another. The 
 suffix ' ness,' which, as we just now saw, has lost its 
 hold on a great many Latin words, with which it 
 certainly had no right to be joined, has more than 
 made good these losses by gains in other directions. 
 Many words that ended for a while in ' ship,' now end 
 in 'ness,' as 'gladship' {Ormulum), 'idleship,' 'meek- 
 ship,' ' mildship ' (all in Hali Meidenhad), ' gentle- 
 ship ' (Ascham), ' goodship ' (see Stratmann), ' guilti- 
 ship ' (Geneva Bible) ; which are now severally 
 'gladness,' 'idleness,' 'meekness,' 'mildness,' 'gen- 
 tleness,' 'goodness,' and 'guiltiness.' 'Cleanship' 
 and ' cleanness ' were both found in our Early 
 English : but ' cleanness ' has proved too strong for 
 ' cleanship ; ' even as ' business ' for ' busiship.' More 
 numerous are those which, terminating once in ' head,' 
 or ' hood,' have finally settled down with ' ness ; ' such 
 as ' wearihede,' ' holihede,' ' newhede,' ' godlihede,' 
 ' swifthede,' ' greenhede,' ' vilehede,' ' bitterhed,' 
 ' blisedhede ' (all in The Ayenbite) ; ' giddihed ' (Old 
 English), 'wickedhed,' 'pensivehed,' ' lowlihed ' (all in 
 Chaucer) ; ' manlihed,' ' noblehed ' (both in The Tale 
 of Melusine) ; 'comlihed' (Gower), ' onehed,' 'world- 
 lihood ' (Pecock) ; ' fulsomehed,' ' fairhed ' (both in 
 King Horn) ; ' sinfulhed,' ' rightwisehed,' 'chasthed,' 
 ' tamehed' (all in The Story of Genesis), ' wantonhed,' 
 ' evenhood ' {Promptoriwn) ; ' fulhed,' ' mightihed,' 
 ' cursedhed,' ' filthehed,' ' drunkenhed,' ' nakedhed ' 
 (all in Wiclif) ; ' heedlesshood,' ' seemlihed,' ' dreari- 
 hed,' ' drowsihed,' ' livelihed,' ' goodlihed,' ' beastli-
 
 iv. Changed Suffixes of Words. 175 
 
 hed ' (all in Spenser). In place of these we have 
 'weariness,' 'holiness,' and so on with the rest. 
 
 Then, again, words not a few, once ending in 
 ' head ' or ' hood,' have relinquished this in favour of 
 ' ship ; ' thus ' postlehead' (Wiclif), now 'apostleship,' 
 ' disciplehood,' 'headhood' (both in Pecock), 'ap- 
 prenticehood ' (Shakespeare), have all done this. 
 Others, but they are fewer, for ' hood ' have taken 
 ' dom ; ' thus ' Christenhood ' (Pecock) is ' Christen- 
 dom' now; 'thralhed' is 'thraldom.' ' Ric,' too, 
 which survives only in 'bishopric,' has in like manner 
 given way ; ' heovenriche,' or kingdom of heaven, 
 ' eortheric,' or kingdom of earth \Ormitlum\ and 
 ' weorlderiche ' (the same) having long since disap- 
 peared ; while ' kingryke ' {Piers Plowman) or ' kun- 
 neriche' (Proclamation of Henry III.) is 'kingdom' 
 now. ' Ship ' too has given way, though rarely, to 
 ' dom ; ' thus ' heathenship ' (Layamon) to ' heathen- 
 dom.' Some other recent formations in 'dom,' as 
 ' rascaldom,' ' scoundreldom ' (Carlyle), ' crippledom ' 
 (Reach), ' flunkeydom,' 'tadpoledom,' 'potboydom' 
 (all three in Kingsley), 'devildom,' ' kitchendom ' 
 (Tennyson), 'folkdom,'to say nothing of 'prigdom,' 
 'pewdom,'and 'bumbledom,'attest that in this direction 
 some life is stirring in our English still. As between 
 'head' and 'hood,' which are variations of the same 
 form, ' hood ' has seriously encroached on the domain 
 once occupied by ' head.' I quote a few instances, 
 ' childhed,' ' manned,' ' womanhed,' ' bretherhed ' (all 
 in Chaucer) ; ' falsehed ' (Tyndale), 'hardihed,"wido\v- 
 hed' (Sibbald's Glossary) ; in all of which 'head' has 
 now given way to 'hood.' I can adduce no instances 
 in which the opposite tendency, ' head ' taking the
 
 176 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 place of hood,' has displayed itself. Then also many 
 adjectives ending in ' ful ' have changed this for 'ly ' 
 (= like); thus 'gastful,' 'loveful,' ' grisful ' (all inWic- 
 lif), are severally now 'ghastly,' 'lovely,' 'grisly.' I 
 shall note elsewhere the extensive perishing of adjec- 
 tives ending in ' some.' Many of these, however, still 
 survive, but with another suffix — often with one which 
 brings their component parts into linguistic accord 
 with one another ; thus ' humoursome ' survives in 
 'humorous,' ' laboursome ' in 'laborious,' 'clamour- 
 some' in 'clamorous,' 'adventuresome' (this however 
 has been revived by Keats) l in ' adventurous ; ' or 
 sometimes where no such motive of making the 
 word all of one piece can be traced, as in ' hatesum,' 
 which is now 'hateful,' 'friendsome,' which is now 
 ' friendly,' ' mirksome ' (Spenser), which is now 
 ' murky,' and ' thoughtsome,' which is now ' thought- 
 ful.' This chapter in the history of our language has 
 hitherto attracted little or no attention. No complete 
 catalogues of these words, so far as I know, have as 
 yet been so much as attempted. 
 
 Let me trace, before this lecture comes to an end, 
 the history of the rise of some words in the language, 
 noting briefly the authors who first introduced them ; 
 the motives out of which their creation or adoption 
 arose ; the resistance which they met ; the remon- 
 strances which they succeeded in overbearing. It is 
 a curious chapter in the history of the language, and 
 even a few scattered contributions to it will not be 
 without their value. 
 
 [' SeeN.E.D. (s.v.).]
 
 iv. Suicism, Suicide. 177 
 
 Sometimes a word has been created to supply an 
 urgent want, to fill up a manifest gap in the language. 
 For example, that sin of sins, the undue love of self, 
 with the postponing of the interests of all others to 
 our own, being a sin as old as the Fall, had yet for a 
 long time no word to express it in English. Help 
 was first sought from the Greek, and ' philauty ' or 
 'philautia' more than once put forward by our scholars, 
 by J. Beaumont, for example, in his Pscyhe ; but it 
 found no popular acceptance. This failing, men 
 turned to the Latin ; one writer proposing to supply 
 the want by calling the sin 'suicism,' and the man a 
 ' suist,' as one seeking his own things (' sua ') ; but 
 this met with no better success ; and our ethical ter- 
 minology was here still incomplete, till some of the 
 Puritan divines, drawing on our native resources, de- 
 vised 'selfish' and 'selfishness,' words to us seeming 
 obvious enough, but which in fact are little more than 
 two hundred years old. A passage in Hacket's Life 
 of Archbishop Williams marks the rise of ' selfish,' 
 and the quarter in which it rose : ' When they [the 
 Presbyterians] saw that he was not selfish (it is a 
 word of their own new mint),' &C. 1 In Whitlock's 
 Zootomia, 2 there is another indication of its novelty : 
 ' If constancy may be tainted with this selfishness (to 
 use our new wordings of old and general actings).' 
 It was Whitlock who in his Grand Schismatic, or Suist 
 Anatomized, first put forward the words ' suist ' and 
 ' suicism.' 3 ' Suicism ' had not in his time the obvious 
 
 1 Tart II. p. 144. 2 1654, p. 364. 
 
 3 ' Ichsucht,' a favourite word of Jean Paul, has altogether 
 failed to find favour in German. I am not aware of any other 
 writer who has used it. 
 
 N
 
 178 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 objection of resembling ' suicide ' too nearly, and 
 being liable to be confused with it ; for ' suicide ' did 
 not exist in the language till some twenty years later. 
 Its coming up is marked by this protest in Phillips' 
 New World of Words, 3rd edit, 167 1 : ' Nor less to 
 be exploded is the word "suicide" which may as well 
 seem to participate of sus a sow, as of the pronoun 
 sui.' In the Index to Jackson's Works, published two 
 years later, it is still ' suicidium ' — ' the horrid suicidium 
 of the Jews at York.' l 
 
 It would be a manifest gain to possess a collection, 
 as complete as the industry of the collectors could 
 make it, of all the notices in our literature which 
 serve as indications of the first appearance of words 
 before unknown, in our written or spoken language. 
 These notices are of the most various kinds. Some- 
 times they are protests and remonstrances, as that just 
 quoted, against some novel word's introduction ; some- 
 times they are gratulations at the same ; while many, 
 neither approving nor disapproving, merely state, or 
 allow us to gather, the fact that a word is recent in 
 our language. Many such notices are brought to- 
 gether in Richardson's Dictionary? Neither are they 
 
 1 ' Suicide ' is of later introduction into French. Genin 
 {Recreations Phi hi. vol. i. p. 194) places it about the year 173S, 
 and makes the Abbe Desfontaines its first sponsor. He is 
 wrong, as is plain, in assuming that we borrowed it from the 
 French, and that it did not exist in English till the middle of 
 last century. The French complain that the fashion of suicide 
 was borrowed from England. It is probable that the word 
 was so. 
 
 - Thus one from Lord Bacon under ' essay ; ' from Swift 
 under ' banter ; ' from Sir Thomas Elyot under ' mansuetude ;
 
 iv. Early Notices of New Words. 1 79 
 
 wanting in Todd's Johnson. But the work is one which 
 could only be accomplished by many scholars throw- 
 ing into a common stock the results of their several 
 studies. 1 Our Elizabethan dramatists would yield 
 
 from Lord Chesterfield under ' flirtation ; ' from The Spectator, 
 No. 537, under ' caricature ' (' those burlesque pictures which the 
 Italians call caricaturas ') ; from Roger North under ' sham ' 
 [Appendix) ; from Dryden under ' mob,' ' philanthropy,' and 
 'witticism,' which last word Dryden claims for his own ; from 
 Evelyn under ' miss ; ' and from Milton under ' demagogue.' 
 
 1 As a slight sample of what might be accomplished here 
 by the joint contributions of many, let me throw together refer- 
 ences to a few such passages, which have hardly found their way 
 into our dictionaries. Thus add to that which Richardson has 
 quoted on   banter,' another from The Tatler, No. 230, marking 
 the disfavour with which it was regarded at the first. On 
 'plunder' there are two instructive passages in Fuller's Church 
 History, b. xi. §§ 4, 33 ; and b. ix. § 4 ; and one in Heylin's 
 Animadversions thereupon, p. 196 ; on ' admiralty ' see a note in 
 Harington's Ariosto, b. xix. ; on ' maturity : Sir Thomas Elyot's 
 Governor, i. 22 ; and on ' industry : the same, i. 23 ; on ' neo- 
 phyte,' which made its first appearance in the Rheims Bible, a 
 notice in Fulke's Defence of the English Bible, Parker Society's 
 edition, p. 586, where he says ' neophyte is neither Greek, Latin, 
 nor English ; ' on ' fanatic ' a passage in Fuller, Mixt Contem- 
 plations on these Times, § 50 ; and another in Clarendon's 
 History of the Rebellion, book x. §82; on 'panorama,' and 
 marking its recent introduction (it is not in Johnson), a passage 
 in Pegge's Anecdotes of the English Language, first published in 
 1803, but my reference is to the edition of 1814, p. 306. On 
 ' accommodate,' and supplying a date for its first coming into 
 popular use, see Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV. act iii. sc. 2 ; ' one 
 of the perfumed words of the time ' Ben Jonson calls it ; on 
 ' shrub,' Junius' Etymologicon, s. v. ' syrup ; ' on ' cajole ' and 
 'sentiment' ('vox nuper civitate donata ') Skinner, s. vv., in 
 his Etymologicon ; on ' opera,' Evelyn's Memoirs and Diary, 
 
 N 2
 
 i8o Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 ample booty here ; even the worthless plays of Charles 
 the Second's time would yield something. Early 
 
 1827, vol. i. pp. 189, 190; on 'yacht' for pleasure-boat the 
 same, 1661 ; on ' fac-simile,' North's Life of Lord Guilford, 
 vol. i. p. 109 ; the earliest use of ' prudery ' is in The Tatler, 
 No. 126 (1709); on 'umbrella,' Torriano's Italian Proverbs, 
 1666, p. 58: ' ombrella is a certain canopy that in Italy we 
 use to shelter ourselves with from the sun and the rain ; ' see 
 also Florio's Montaigne, p. 549 : ' no weather is to me so con- 
 trary as the scorching heat of the parching sun ; for these 
 umbrels, or riding canopies, which the Italians use, do more 
 weary the arms than ease the head.' North {Plutarch's Lives, 
 p. 469) speaks of ' fencers at unrebated foils whom the Romans 
 call gladtatores.' Heylin writing in 1656 notes 'morass' as 
 • new and uncouth.' ' Starvation ' may have been an old word 
 in Scotland, but it was unknown in England until used by Mr. 
 Dundas, the first Lord Melville, therefore called ' Starvation 
 Dundas,' in a debate on American affairs in 1775 ( see Letters of 
 Horace Walpole and Mann, vol. ii. p. 396, and Pegge's Anec- 
 dotes of the English Language, 1814, p. 38). We learn from a 
 protest in The Spectator, No. 165, that ' pontoon,' ' fascine,' 
 ' to reconnoitre,' were in 1704 novelties, which under the in- 
 fluence of the frequent warlike bulletins were creeping into 
 English. From Horace Walpole, writing in 1755, we learn that 
 ' cabriolet ' was in his time purely a French word. He speaks 
 of 'la fureur des cabriolets, anglice one horse chairs.' Cowper 
 (i78i)uses 'superannuation,' but using, wonders if there be such 
 a word. Certainly he employs it not as we do now, but as 
 signifying decrepitude through age. The verb ' to militate ' is 
 not in Johnson's Dictionary, and from a passage in Boswell, 
 p. 656, Croker's edition, 1847, it is evident it was in his estimate 
 at once new and affected. ' Avoid quaint terms as " originate," ' 
 is John Wesley's advice to his preachers. Bentham in 1780, 
 using ' international,' observes, ' the word, it must be acknow- 
 ledged, is a new one, though it is hoped sufficiently analogous 
 and intelligible.' It cannot have made any signal fortune at 
 once, for seventeen years later, in 1797, he describes it as
 
 iv. Early Notices of New Words. 181 
 
 classical scholars like Sir Thomas Elyot, who wrote 
 when Latin words, good, bad, and indifferent, were 
 pouring into the language like a flood, and who from 
 time to time passed their judgment on these ; the early 
 translators, Protestant and Roman Catholic, of the 
 Bible, who, when they had exhausted more serious 
 invective, fell foul of one another's English, and 
 charged each other with bringing in new and un- 
 English words ; The Spectator, The Tatler, The Guar- 
 dian, and even the second and third-rate imitations 
 of these, might all be consulted with advantage. 
 Familiar letters, as those of Gray or Cowper, would 
 yield something. Indeed it is hard to say beforehand 
 
 ' new, though not inexpressive ; ' it is of his own coining, and 
 quite deserves the welcome which it has obtained. ' Bore ' in our 
 present use of the word appears in Mad. D'Arblay's Cecilia, 
 1782 ; [for various senses of the word see N.E.D. ; for the 
 passage in Cecilia see Davies.] Johnson denounces 'chaperon' 
 as an affected word, of very recent introduction. The exclusive 
 use of it for persons of the female gender is certainly a novelty 
 among us. In Barlow's Cohimbiad, published in 1807, those 
 on this side of the Atlantic first made acquaintance with the 
 verb ' to utilize ; ' in a review of the poem in the Edinburgh 
 Review, October, 1809, p. 25, there is an earnest, but as it has 
 proved an ineffectual, remonstrance against it. ' Millennial ' 
 comes there, as an American novelty, under the same condem- 
 nation ; but this novelty it is not ; Henry More continually 
 employs it. ' Crass,' too, which the same Reviewer styles 
 'radically and entirely new,' is employed by him, by Jeremy 
 Taylor and by Cud worth. Sydney Smith quarrels with 'mono- 
 graph,' and refuses to understand what it means (1843). [Lord 
 Macaulay in a letter to his sister tells her that Lady Holland 
 had protested against the words constituency, talented, in- 
 fluential, gentlemanly, see Life of Macaulay, ed. 1878, i. 
 
 2I3-]
 
 1 82 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 in what unexpected quarter notices of the kind might 
 not be met with. 
 
 A collection such as this which I imagine should 
 include passages which supply implicit evidence for 
 the non-existence of a word up to a certain date. It 
 may be urged that it is difficult, nay, often impossible, 
 to prove a negative ; yet when Bolingbroke wrote as 
 follows, it is reasonably certain that 'isolated 'did not 
 exist in our language : ' The events we are witnesses 
 of in the course of the longest life, appear to us very 
 often original, unprepared, signal, and unrelative : if I 
 may use such a word for want of a better in English. 
 In French I would say isoles.' l Compare Lord 
 Chesterfield, in a letter to Bishop Chenevix, of date 
 March 12, 1767: 'I have survived almost all my 
 contemporaries, and as I am too old to make new 
 acquaintances, I find myself isole.' ' Isolated,' says 
 the British Critic, Oct. 1800, 'is not English, and 
 we trust never will be.' Fuller would have scarcely 
 spoken of a 'meteor of foolish fire,' 2 if 'ignis fatuus,' 
 which has now quite put out ' firedrake,' the older 
 name for these meteors, had not, when he wrote, been 
 still strange to the language, or quite recent in it. 3 So 
 too when Sir Walter Raleigh spoke of ' strange visions 
 which are also called panici terrores] 4 it is tolerably 
 plain that ' panic ' was not yet recognized among us. 
 The use now of ' biland,' now of ' demy-isle ' by 
 Holland, makes it at least likely that 'peninsula' had 
 
 1 Notes and Queries, No. 226. 
 
 2 Comm. on Ruth, p. 38. 
 
 [ 3 The popular word for ignis fatuus is will 0' the wisp ; 
 with Fuller's term compare the Fr. feu follet.] 
 4 Hist, of the World, iii. 5, 8.
 
 iv. Early Notices of New Words. 183 
 
 not yet been adopted into English ; [see Davies]. In 
 like manner when the same author, translating Pliny's 
 elaborate account of the sculptors and sculpture of 
 antiquity, never once uses the word ' sculptor,' but 
 always 'imager' instead, others employing 'marbler'in 
 the same sense, we feel tolerably sure that ' sculptor ' 
 had not yet come into existence. The use of ' noct- 
 ambulones ' by Donne makes it at least possible 
 that in his time ' somnambulist ' had not been put 
 together ; of ' engastrimythi ' by Holland, that ' ven- 
 triloquist ' was still unknown ; not indeed but that 
 it is quite possible that for a little while the words 
 should have existed side by side, and contended 
 which should live and which die. When Hacket l 
 speaks of 'the amid in our bedsteads,' these un- 
 savoury insects had scarcely appropriated to them- 
 selves the name which now they bear. When the 
 anonymous annotator on Spenser's Shepherd's Calen- 
 dar speaks of ' ethice ' (r)0u<rj), we conclude that 
 ' ethics ' had not yet got a footing in the language. 
 So, too, it is tolerably certain that ' amphibious ' was 
 not yet English, when one writes (in 16 18) : 'We are 
 like those creatures called ajx^ifita, which live in water 
 or on land.' Fuller, somewhat later, likens Edward 
 the Third, as active on both elements, to an ' am- 
 phibion.' ZwoAoyta, as the title of an English book 
 published in 1649, makes it clear that 'zoology' was 
 not yet in our vocabulary, as £wo<£vrov (Jackson) 
 proves the same for ' zoophyte,' ckXcktikol (Rust ; 2 
 compare 'eclectici' in Fuller) for 'eclectics,' ei^yjfua-- 
 
 1 Life of Archbishop Williams, vol. ii. p. 182. 
 
 2 Funeral Sermon on Jeremy Taylor,
 
 184 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 fj.6<s (Jeremy Taylor) for ' euphemism,' OeoKparia (the 
 same) for ' theocracy,' aOeot (Ascham) for ' atheists,' 
 i<f>r)fxepoi (Cowley) for ' ephemerals,' and 7ro\v6eio-ix6<; 
 (Gell ; it is a word of his own coining) for 'poly- 
 theism;' while in Blount's Glossary, 1674, 'ornitho- 
 logy ' is noted as being ' the title of a late book.' 
 
 One precaution, let me observe, would be neces- 
 sary in the collecting, or rather in the adopting, of 
 any statements about the newness of a word — for the 
 statements themselves, even when erroneous, should 
 be noted — namely, that no one's affirmation ought to 
 be accepted simply and at once as to this novelty, 
 seeing that all here are liable to error. Thus more 
 words than one which Sir Thomas Elyot indicates as 
 new in his time, 'magnanimity' for example (The 
 Governor, ii. 14), are frequent in Chaucer. 'Senti- 
 ment,' which Skinner affirmed to have only recently, 
 in his own time, obtained the rights of English 
 citizenship, continually recurs in the same. Ascham 
 (The Schoolmaster, p. 13, ed. 1863) evidently sup- 
 poses that he is the first to put ' heady ' and ' brain- 
 sick,' 'fit and proper words' as he declares them, 
 into circulation ; which assuredly was not the case ; 
 ' heady,' indeed, is in Golding's Ovid. Wotton, using 
 ' character,' would imply that it was a comparative 
 novelty ; he will use it, he says, because ' the word 
 hath gotten already some entertainment among us' 
 (Survey of Education, p. 321); it is of constant re- 
 currence in Spenser, and is employed by Wiclif. 
 Dryden, in a note to his translation of the SEneid, 
 defends the verb ' to falsify,' and seems much pleased 
 with the thought that it is of his own invention, 
 but this is altogether a mistake. It is found in our
 
 iv. New Uses of Old Words. 185 
 
 English Bible (Amos viii. 5), in Browne's Pastorals, 
 and in others. A correspondent of Sir William Jones, 
 writing in 1781, condemns 'replete' as an objection- 
 able novelty ; it may be found in Wiclif's Bible (Phil, 
 iv. 18); in the earlier play of King John ('My life 
 "replete" with rage and tyranny'), and in Spenser. 
 Charles Boyle, in the controversy on the Epistles of 
 Phalaris, in which he so unluckily engaged ('impar 
 congressus Achilli '), excepts against Bentley's use, 
 among other words, of the following, 'concede,' 
 'idiom,' 'putid,' ' repudiate,' 'timid,' and 'vernacu- 
 lar;' 'every one of which,' Bentley replies, 'was in 
 print before I used them, and most of them before I 
 was born ' {Preface, p. 54). Gray actually believed 
 that Dryden had invented 'array,' 'to furbish' (both 
 in our English Bible), ' crone ' (in Chaucer), ' dis- 
 array,' 'mood,' 'roundelay' (all in Spenser), 'beldam,' 
 'beverage,' 'trim,' ' wayward ' (all in Shakespeare). 
 Cowper writing in 1793 speaks of 'to accredit' as a 
 'new diplomatic term.' It is used by Shelton in his 
 version of Do?i Quixote. On 'liable' Richardson 
 (Supplement) observes — 'a modern word introduced 
 into Johnson by Todd.' It is found in Samson 
 Agonistes, and used exactly as we use it. In Notes 
 and Queries, No. 255, there is a serviceable catalogue 
 of recent neologies in our speech, while yet at least 
 half a dozen in the list have not the slightest right to 
 be so considered. 
 
 It is not merely new words, but new uses of old 
 ones, which should thus be noted, with the time of 
 their first coming up. Thus Sir John Davies' epigram 
 ' Of a Gull ' tells us when this ' new term,' as he calls 
 it, was first transferred from foolish birds to foolish
 
 86 Gains of the English Language, lect. 
 
 men. 1 Or take the two following quotations, in proof 
 that our use of ' edify ' and ' edification ' first obtained 
 general currency among the Puritans ; this from 
 
 Oldham : 
 
 ' The graver sort dislike all poetry, 
 Which does not, as they call it, edify ; ' 
 
 and this from South : ' All being took up and busied, 
 some in pulpits and some in tubs, in the grand work 
 of preaching and holding forth, and that of edification, 
 as the word then went,' &c. A passage from Miss 
 Burney's Cecilia, published in 1782, shows that the 
 use of 'ticket' for visiting card (=etiquet) at that 
 date was quite a novelty, and little better than slang. 
 Here too the evidence may not be positive, but nega- 
 tive. Thus when I read in Fuller of ' that beast in the 
 Brazile which in fourteen days goes no further than 
 a man may throw a stone, called therefore by the 
 Spaniards pigritiaj I am tolerably certain that the ai, 
 as the natives call it, had not yet obtained among us 
 the name of ' sloth,' which now it bears. [See N.E.D. 
 (s. v. ' ai ').] 
 
 A few observations in conclusion on the deliberate 
 introduction of words to supply felt omissions in a 
 language, and the limits within which this or any 
 other conscious interference with it is desirable or 
 
 1 Of how many words of a character similar to this we should 
 like to know the occasion and cause of their first obtaining that 
 novel' use which evidently they have obtained ; as for example 
 'macaroni,' 'blood,' 'mohawk,' 'tarpaulin,' ' promoter '( = an 
 informer), or, to come nearer to our times, [epergne, lion (an 
 object of interest), tiger (a cheer like a growl), bore (a tedious 
 fellow), salt (a sailor), pliilistiue (an enemy of culture), masher 
 (a lady-killer).]
 
 iv. Limits of Interference. 187 
 
 possible. Long before the time when a people begin 
 to reflect upon their language, and to give an account 
 to themselves either of its merits or defects, it has 
 been fixed as regards structure in immutable forms ; 
 the sphere in which any alterations or modifications, 
 addition to it, or subtraction from it, deliberately 
 devised and carried out, are possible, is very limited 
 indeed. The great laws that rule it are so firmly 
 established that almost nothing can be taken from it, 
 which it has got ; almost nothing added to it, which 
 it has not got. It will travel indeed in certain courses 
 of change ; but it would be almost as easy for us to 
 alter the course of a planet as to alter these. This is 
 sometimes a subject of regret with those who see what 
 appear to them manifest defects or blemishes in their 
 language, and see at the same time ways by which, as 
 they fancy, these could be remedied or removed. 
 And yet this is well ; since for once that these re- 
 dressers of real or fancied wrongs, these suppliers of 
 things lacking, would mend, we may be tolerably con- 
 fident that ten times, probably a hundred times, they 
 would mar ; letting go what would better have been 
 retained ; retaining that which was overlived and out 
 of date ; and in many ways interfering with those pro 
 cesses of a natural logic, which in a living language' 
 are evermore working themselves out. The genius of 
 a language, unconsciously presiding over all its trans- 
 formations, and conducting them to definite issues, 
 will prove a far truer and far safer guide, than the 
 artificial wit, however subtle, of any single man, or of 
 any association of men. For the genius of a language 
 is the sense and inner conviction entertained by the 
 mass of those who speak it, of what it ought to be,
 
 1 88 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 and of the methods by which it will most nearly 
 approach its ideal perfection ; and while a pair of eyes, 
 or half a dozen pairs of eyes, may see much, a million 
 of eyes will certainly see more. 
 
 It is only with the words, and not with the forms 
 and laws of a language, that any interference is pos- 
 sible. Something, indeed much, may here be accom- 
 plished by wise masters, in the rejecting of that which 
 deforms or mars, the allowing and adopting of that 
 which will complete or enrich. Those who have set 
 such objects before them, and who, knowing the 
 limits of the possible, have not attempted to overleap 
 these, have sometimes wrought no little good. No 
 language affords a better proof and illustration of this 
 than the German. When the patriotic Germans 
 began to wake up to a consciousness of the enormous 
 encroachments which foreign languages, Latin, French, 
 and Italian, had made on their native tongue, the 
 lodgements which these had therein effected, 1 and the 
 danger which lay so near, that it should cease to be 
 a language at all, but only a mingle-mangle, a motley 
 patchwork of many tongues, without any unity or 
 inner coherence, various Societies, at the beginning 
 and during the course of the seventeenth century, set 
 themselves earnestly to the task of recovering what 
 was lost of their own, and at the same time expelling, 
 in part at least, what had intruded from abroad ; an 
 endeavour crowned with excellent results. 
 
 But more effectual than these learned Societies 
 were the efforts of single writers, several of whom in 
 
 1 See on these my Gitstavus AdolpJms in Germany, 2nd edit, 
 pp. 127-130.
 
 iv. New German Words. 189 
 
 this merited eminently well of Germany and of the 
 German tongue. 1 Numerous words now accepted by 
 the whole nation are yet of such recent introduction 
 that it is possible to designate the writer who first 
 substituted them for some affected Gallicism or pe- 
 dantic Latinism. Thus to Lessing his fellow-country- 
 men owe the substitution of ' zartgefiihl ' for ' delica- 
 tesse,' of 'wesenheit' for 'essence.' It was he who 
 suggested to the translator of Sterne's Sentimental 
 Journey, ' empfindsam,' as a word which would cor- 
 respond to our ' sentimental,' which indeed it only 
 partially does ; he too who recalled ' bieder,' with 
 which every schoolboy is familiar now, from the for- 
 getfulness of centuries. Voss (1786) first employed 
 1 alterthiimlich ' for ' antik,' Winckelmann 'denkbild' 
 for ' idee.' Wieland was the author or reviver of a 
 multitude of excellent words, for some of which he 
 had to do earnest battle at the first ; such were ' selig- 
 keit,' 'anmuth,' ' entziickung,' 'festlich,' 'entwirren,' 
 with many more. But no one was so zealous for the 
 expelling from the temple of German speech of un- 
 worthy intruders as Campe, author of the well-known 
 Dictionary. For ' maskerade,' he was fain to substi- 
 tute ' larventanz,' for ' ballet ' ' schautanz,' for ' lawine ' 
 ' schneesturz,' for ' detachement ' ' abtrab,' for ' electri- 
 citat ' ' reibfeuer.' It was a novelty when Biisching 
 called his great work on geography ' Erdbeschreibung ' 
 (1754) instead of 'Geographie ;' while ' schnellpost ' 
 
 1 There is an admirable essay by Leibnitz with this view 
 {Opera, vol. vi. part ii. pp. 6-51) in French and German, with 
 this title, Considerations sur la Culture ct la Perfection de la 
 Langue Allemande.
 
 190 Gains of the English Language. Lect. 
 
 for diligence,' 'zerrbild' for ' caricatur,' are also of 
 recent introduction. Of ' worterbuch ' itself Weigand 
 in his Dictionary tells us he can find no example 
 dating earlier than 1641. In Dutch the same pro- 
 cess, though it has not been watched with the same 
 interest, has gone forward. ' Schoonsicht ' has been 
 substituted for 'belvedere,' ' heelmeester ' for 'chi- 
 rurg,' and so on. 
 
 Some of these reformers, it must be owrfed, pro- 
 ceeded with more zeal than knowledge, while others 
 did what in them lay to make the whole movement 
 absurd — even as there ever hang on the skirts of a 
 worthy movement, be it in literature or politics or 
 higher things yet, some who by extravagance and 
 excess contribute their little all to bring ridicule and 
 contempt upon it. Thus in the reaction against 
 foreign interlopers, and in the zeal to rid the language 
 of them, some would have disallowed words conse- 
 crated by more than centuries of use ; thus Campe, 
 who in the main did such good service here, was fain 
 to replace ' apostel ' by ' lehrbote ; ' or they under- 
 stood so little what words deserved to be called 
 foreign, that they would fain have got rid of such 
 words as these, 'vater,' 'mutter,' 'wein,' 'fenster,' 
 ' meister,' ' kelch ; ' l the two former belonging to the 
 Teutonic dialects by exactly the same right as they do 
 to the Latin and the Greek ; while the other four 
 have been naturalized so long that to propose at this 
 day to expel them is as though, having passed an 
 
 1 Fuchs, Zur Geschichte und Benrtheilung der Fremdivorter 
 im Deutschen, Dessau, 1842, pp. 85-91. Compare Jean Paul, 
 Aesthetik, §§ 83-85.
 
 iv. New Mythological Terminology. 191 
 
 Alien Act for the banishment of all foreigners, we 
 should proceed to include under that name, and drive 
 from the kingdom, the descendants of the French 
 Protestants who found refuge here when Rochelle was 
 taken, or even of the Flemings who came over in the 
 time of our Edwards. One notable enthusiast pro- 
 posed to create an entirely new nomenclature for all 
 the mythological personages of the Greek and Roman 
 pantheons, although these, one would think, might 
 have been allowed, if any, to retain their Greek and 
 Latin names. Cupid was to be 'Lustkind,' Flora 
 ' Bluminne,' Aurora ' Rothin ; ' instead of Apollo 
 schoolboys were to speak of ' Singhold ; ' instead of 
 Pan of ' Schafiieb ; ' instead of Jupiter of ' Helfevater,' 
 with other absurdities to match. We may well beware 
 (and the warning extends much further than to the 
 matter in hand) of making a good cause ridiculous by 
 our manner of supporting it, by acting as though ex- 
 aggerations on one side were best redressed by equal 
 exaggerations on the other.
 
 192 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 LECTURE V. 
 
 DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 
 
 I OBSERVED in my latest lecture but one that it 
 is the essential character of a living language to 
 be in flux and flow, to be gaining and losing, assimi- 
 lating to itself and rejecting from itself ; and indeed 
 no one who has not given some attention to the sub- 
 ject, would at all imagine the enormous amount of 
 these gains, and not less the enormous amount of 
 these losses — or, for reasons already stated, and be- 
 cause all that comes is not gain, and all is not loss 
 that goes, let us say the enormous additions and dimi- 
 nutions which in a few centuries find place in that 
 domain of a language which is mainly liable to these 
 changes — I mean in its vocabulary, in its Dictionary, 
 that is, as contrasted with its Grammar. It is not 
 indeed with a language altogether as it is with a 
 human body, of which the component parts are said 
 to be in such unceasing flux and flow, with so much 
 taken from it, and so much added to it, that in a very 
 few years no particle of it remains unchanged. It is 
 not, I say, exactly thus. There are stable elements, 
 and, so to speak, constant quantities in a language, 
 which determine its character — the group, that is, or 
 family to which it belongs — secure its identity, and 
 attest its continuity. Such is the grammar of a Ian-
 
 v. Languages not immortal. 193 
 
 guage, being as it were the osseous structure and 
 framework of it ; which changes slowly, and in certain 
 leading characteristics changes not at all ; in all this 
 contrasting strongly with the vocabulary, which is as 
 the flesh that clothes these bones ; and in which we 
 may trace a never ceasing change, a coming and 
 going of its constituent parts, such as is nothing 
 less than astonishing, when we take means a little 
 to measure its amount. Of acquisitions which our 
 language has made something has been said al- 
 ready. Of the diminutions it is now our business 
 to speak. 
 
 It is certain that all languages must, or at least all 
 languages do in the end, perish. They run their 
 course ; not all at the same rate, for the tendency to 
 change is different in different languages, both from 
 internal causes (mechanism and the like), and also 
 from causes external to the language, and laid in the 
 varying velocities of social progress and social decline ; 
 but so it is, that, sooner or later, they have all their 
 youth, their manhood, their old age, their decrepitude, 
 their final dissolution. Not indeed that they dis- 
 appear, leaving no traces behind them, even when 
 this last has arrived. On the contrary, out of their 
 death a new life comes forth ; they pass into other 
 forms, the materials of which they were composed are 
 organized in new shapes and according to other laws 
 of life. Thus, for example, the Latin perishes as a 
 living language ; and yet perishes only to live again, 
 though under somewhat different conditions, in the 
 four daughter languages, French, Italian, Spanish, 
 Portuguese ; or the six, if we count the Provencal and 
 Roumanian. Still in their own proper being they pass 
 
 o
 
 194 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 away, and seeing that this is so, the possibilities of 
 decay and death must have existed in them from 
 the beginning. 
 
 Nor is this all ; in such strong-built fabrics as 
 these, the causes which thus bring about their final 
 dissolution must have been actively at work very long 
 before the results are so visible as that they cannot 
 any longer be mistaken. Indeed, very often it is with 
 them as with states, which, while in some respects 
 they are knitting and strengthening, in others are 
 already unfolding the seeds of their future and, it may 
 be, still remote dissolution. Equally in these and 
 those, in states and in languages, it would be a serious 
 mistake to assume that all up to a certain point and 
 period is growth and gain, while all after is decay and 
 loss. On the contrary, there are long periods during 
 which growth in some directions is going hand in 
 hand with decay in others ; losses in one kind are 
 being compensated, or more than compensated, by 
 gains in another ; periods during which a language 
 changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, 
 and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives 
 when the growth and gains, becoming ever fewer, 
 cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the 
 losses and the decay, which are ever becoming more ; 
 when the forces of disorganization and death at work 
 are stronger than those of life and of order. But 
 until that crisis and turning-point has arrived, we may 
 be quite justified in speaking of the losses of a lan- 
 guage, and may esteem them most real, without in the 
 least thereby implying that its climacteric is passed, 
 and its downward course begun. This may yet be far 
 distant : and therefore when I dwell on certain losses
 
 Losses and Gains. 195 
 
 and diminutions which our own has undergone or is 
 undergoing, you will not suppose that I am presenting 
 it to you as already travelling that downward course, 
 which it would seem that none in the en i may escape. 
 I have no such intention. If in some respects it is 
 losing, in others it is gaining. Nor is everything 
 which it lets go, a loss ; for this too, the parting with 
 a word in which there is no true help, the dropping of 
 a cumbrous or superfluous form, may itself be some- 
 times a most real gain. English is undoubtedly be- 
 coming different from what it has been ; but only 
 different in that it is passing into another stage of its 
 development ; only different, as the fruit is different 
 from the flower, and the flower from the bud ; not 
 having in all points the same excellencies which it 
 once had, but with excellencies as many and as real 
 as it ever had ; possessing, it may be, less of beauty, 
 but more of usefulness ; not, perhaps, serving the poet 
 so well, but serving the historian and philosopher 
 better than before. 
 
 With one observation more I will enter on the 
 special details of my subject. It is, indeed, only a 
 saying over again what I said at the opening of this 
 lecture. The losses or diminutions of a language 
 differ in one respect from the gains or acquisitions — 
 namely, that those are of two kinds, whilst these are 
 only of one. The gains are only in words ; it never 
 puts forth in the course of its later evolution a new 
 power ; it never makes for itself a new case, or a new 
 tense, or a new comparative. But the losses are both 
 in words and in powers. In addition to the words 
 which it drops, it leaves behind, as it travels onward, 
 cases which it once possessed ; renounces the employ- 
 
 o 2
 
 196 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 merit of tenses which it once used ; forgets its dual ; 
 is content with one termination both for masculine 
 and feminine, and so on. Nor is this a peculiar 
 feature of one language, but the universal rule in all. 
 ' In all languages,' as has been well said, ' there is a 
 constant tendency to relieve themselves of that pre- 
 cision which chooses a fresh symbol for every shade 
 of meaning, to lessen the amount of nice distinction, 
 and detect as it were a royal road to the interchange 
 of opinion.' For example, a vast number of languages 
 had at an early period of their development, besides 
 the singular and plural, a dual number, some even a 
 trinal, which they have let go at a later. But what I 
 mean by a language renouncing its powers I hope to 
 make clearer in my next lecture. This much I have 
 here said on the matter, to explain and justify a 
 division which I propose to make, considering first 
 the losses of the English language in words, and then 
 in powers, the former constituting my theme in the 
 present lecture, and the latter in one that will suc- 
 ceed it. 
 
 And first, there is going forward a continual ex- 
 tinction of the words in our language — as indeed in 
 every other. We hardly realize to ourselves the im- 
 mense losses which we have suffered, till we take the 
 extinct words of some single formation, and seek to 
 make as complete a list of these as we can. Then in- 
 deed we perceive that they are multitudinous as the 
 autumn leaves in Vallombrosa. Take, for instance, 
 the adjectives with the suffix 'ful.' The list which I 
 offer does not make the remotest claim to complete : 
 ness ; while yet, I am sure, it is longer than any list of
 
 v. Extinct Words with Suffix ' full 197 
 
 the surviving words of the same formation which could 
 be placed together. It is as follows : ' abuseful ' (Sussex 
 dialect), 'aidful,' ' almightful,' 'amendful' (Daniel), 
 'amazeful' (Sidney), 'angerful' (Sylvester), 'annoyfuP 
 (Chaucer), 'availful' (Florio), 'avengeful,' 'aviseful' 
 (both in Spenser), ' barful ' (Shakespeare), ' bateful ' 
 (Sidney), ' batful ' ( = fruitful, Drayton), ' bedeful ' 
 ( = prayerful, Old English), ' behoveful ' (Shake- 
 speare), 'beliefful' (Old English), 'birthful' (Cathoti- 
 con), ' blameful' (Shakespeare), ' blushful' (Thomson), 
 ' bourdful ' (Wiclif), ' breathful ' (Spenser), ' causeful' 
 (Sidney), ' chanceful ' (Spenser), ' chargeful ' (Shake- 
 speare), ' charmful ' (Cowley), ' checkful ' (Udal), 
 ' choiceful ' (Spenser), ' comfortful ' (Levins), ' conceit- 
 ful ' (Spenser), ' contemptful ' (Feltham), ' crimeful ' 
 (Shakespeare), ' cursful ' (Wiclif), ' dainteful ' (Gower), 
 ' dangerful ' (Udal), ' dareful ' (Shakespeare), ' dark- 
 fur (Wiclif), 'deathful' (Shakespeare), ' debateful ' 
 (Spenser), ' deedful ' (but this has been revived by 
 Tennyson), ' delayful ' (Chapman), ' dernful ' (Spen- 
 ser), 'desertful' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'desireful' 
 (Udal), ' despairful,' ' deviceful ' (both in Spenser), 
 ' devoutful ' (Daniel), ' discordful ' (Spenser), ' disease- 
 ful ' (Bacon), ' disgustful ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 
 'dislikeful,' 'dismayful' (both in Spenser), 'dispatch- 
 ful ' (Pope), ' distractful ' (Heywood), ' distressful ' 
 (Shakespeare), ' doomful ' (Spenser), ' doughtful ' 
 ( = doughty, Shakespeare), ' dreamful ' (Mickle), 
 ' drossful ' (Sylvester), ' dueful,' ' dureful ' (both in 
 Spenser), ' earnful ' (P. Fletcher), ' ermeful,' ' ernest- 
 ful ' (both in Chaucer), ' excessful ' (Wiclif), ' expense- 
 ful ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), ' eyeful ' ( = observ- 
 ant, Yorkshire dialect), ' fameful ' (Davies), ' faultful '
 
 198 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 (Shakespeare), ' feastful ' (Milton), ' feckful ' (still in 
 provincial use), ' fenceful ' (West), ' fiendful ' (Mar- 
 lowe), ' fishful ' (Drayton), ' flameful ' (Sylvester), 
 ' foresightful ' (Sidney), ' formful ' (Thomson), ' fraud- 
 ful ' (Shakespeare), ' freakful ' (Keats), ' friendful ' 
 (Wiclif), ' friskful' (Thomson), 'gameful' (Chapman), 
 'gastful,' 'gazeful,' 'gladful,' 'griefful ' (all in Spenser), 
 ' gripful ' ( = avaricious, Whitby dialect), ' grisful ' 
 (Wiclif), 'groanful,' 'grudgeful' (both in Spenser), 
 ' gustful ' (Jeremy Taylor), ' heapful ' (Holland), 
 ' heryful ' (Wiclif), ' hirkful ' (Levins), ' increaseful ' 
 (Shakespeare), 'intreatful' (Spenser), 'jangleful' (Suf- 
 folk dialect), ' lampfuP (Sylvester), 'lateful,' 'leveful,' 
 ' lightful ' (all in Wiclif), ' liveful ' (North), < listful,' 
 ' lothful,' ' loveful ' (all in Spenser), ' maliceful ' 
 (Leighton), 'masterful' (Holland), 'mazefuP (Spenser), 
 'medeful' {Testament of Love), 'menseful' ( = deco- 
 rous, Durham dialect), 'mightful' {Townley Mysteries), 
 ' mischiefful ' (Paynell), ' mistful,' ' mistrustful ' (both 
 in Shakespeare), ' moistful ' (Sylvester), ' molestful ' 
 (Barrow), 'moneful' (Spenser), 'moodful' (Layamon), 
 ' murderful ' (Mid Yorkshire), ' museful ' (Sylvester), 
 'noiful' (Wiclif), ' noiseful' (Dryden), 'offenceful' 
 (Shakespeare), ' pangful ' (Richardson), ' pensiful ' 
 ( = pensive, Sir T. Elyot), ' pithful ' (Sir T. Browne), 
 ' plaintful ' (Shakespeare), ' poisonful ' (Gurnall), 
 'praiseful' (Sidney), 'prayful' (Shakespeare), 'pride- 
 ful ' (Whitehead), ' promiseful ' (Sylvester), ' quarful ' 
 (Lydgate), ' quemful ' (Richard Rolle de Hampole), 
 'rageful' (Sylvester), 'rapeful' (Chapman), 'rebukeful' 
 (Levins), ' recompenseful,' ' recourseful ' (Drayton), 
 'reuful' (Piers Ploivmans Crede), 'redeful' (Layamon), 
 'resentful' (Pope), 'resistful' (C.Brooke), 'rewardful'
 
 v. Extinct Words with Suffix ' ful! 199 
 
 (Spenser), 'ruthful' (Shakespeare), 'scareful'(Golding), 
 ' scathful ' (Shakespeare), ' scentful ' (Browne), ' seed- 
 ful,' ' senseful ' (Sylvester), ' shapeful ' (Chapman), 
 'shenful' (Wiclif), 'sightful' (Chapman), 'smartful' 
 (Florio), ' solaceful ' (Sylvester), ' spacefill ' (Sandys), 
 ' sparkful ' (Camden), ' spearful ' (Shenstone), ' speed- 
 ful ' (Wiclif), ' spelful ' (Hoole), ' spendful ' (Cecil), 
 ' spleenful ' (Chapman), ' spoilful ' (Spenser), ' starful ' 
 (Sylvester), 'stomachful' (Hall), 'streamful' (Dray- 
 ton), ' strengthful ' (Wiclif), ' strideful ' (Spenser), 
 ' supportful ' (Chapman), ' surgeful ' (Drayton), ' sus- 
 pectful' (Howell), ' sweatful' (Sylvester), 'talkful' (the 
 same), ' teenful ' (Destruction of Troy), ' teemful ' (we 
 still speak of the teeming earth), ' tideful ' (Drayton), 
 'tuneful' (Wiclif), 'threatful' (Spenser), 'toothful' 
 (Massinger), ' toyful ' (Donne), ' tradeful,' ' tressful ' 
 (both in Sylvester), 'tristful,' 'unbashful' (both in 
 Shakespeare), ' unbelieveful ' (Wiclif), ' unscathful ' 
 (Ormulum), 'urgeful,' 'vauntful' (Spenser), 'wailful' 
 (Shakespeare), ' weedful ' (Sylvester), ' weepful ' (Wi- 
 clif), 'wordful' (see Bosworth), 'worthful' (Ormu- 
 luni), ' wrackful ' (Chapman), ' wreakful ' (Spenser), 
 ' wreckful ' (Golding), ' wretchful ' (Wiclif), ' yeamful ' 
 (P. Fletcher), ' zealful ' (Sylvester). As against these 
 numerous losses I can only set 'prayerful,' which, long 
 at home in the chapel, has now found its way into 
 the church ; ' nookful,' if this, on Browning's autho- 
 rity ('nookful Normandy'), shall obtain a footing 
 among us; and 'mischanceful,' which is good and 
 which also claims him, so far as I know, for its 
 sponsor. 
 
 We may draw together, as a complement to these, 
 a list of words ending with the privative ' less,' whose
 
 200 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 places in like manner now know them no more. 
 Here is not a complete list, but a contribution to 
 one : 'accessless' (Chapman), 'aidless' (Shake- 
 speare), 'armless' (North Country), 'bandless' (Christ. 
 Brooke), 'bateless' (Shakespeare), 'beginningless ' 
 (Davies), 'blushless' (Marston), 'bookless' (Fuller), 
 'bowelless' (Sir T. Browne), 'bragless' (Shake 
 speare), 'breadless' (Piers Plowman), 'bribeless' 
 (Tourneur), 'brinkless' (Golding), ' busyless,' 'chaff- 
 less,' ' characterless ' (all in Shakespeare), ' cheekless ' 
 (Marston), 'chiefless' (Pope), 'choiceless' (Hammond), 
 'churchless' (Fuller), ' cloyless,' ' conceitless,' 'con- 
 fineless,' ' contentless,' 'crestless,' 'crimeless,' 'cure- 
 less' (all in Shakespeare), 'debtless' (Chaucer), 'deed- 
 less ' (Shakespeare), ' designless ' (Boyle), ' dirtless ' 
 (Swift, which unhappily he was not), ' disputeless,' 
 ' easeless ' (Donne), ' effectless ' (Shakespeare), ' envy- 
 less ' (Lord Brooke), ' exceptless ' (Shakespeare), 
 ' faintless ' (Stirling), ' favourless ' (Spenser), ' fineless ' 
 (Shakespeare), ' finiteless ' (Sir T. Browne), ' flower- 
 less ' (Chaucer), ' footless ' (Phineas Fletcher), ' force- 
 less' (Shakespeare), 'fortuneless' (Spenser), 'front- 
 less' (Dryden), 'gainless' (Hammond), 'gall-less' 
 (Cowley), 'gateless' (Machin), 'grainless' (Fuller), 
 ' graveless ' (Shakespeare), ' griefless ' (Sylvester), 
 ' guardless ' (South), ' guerdonless ' (Sir T. Malory), 
 'guideless' (Cowley), 'hateless' (Sidney), 'healthless' 
 (Sylvester), ' heatless ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 
 'heirless' (Shakespeare), 'herberless' (Wiclif), 'honey- 
 less' (Shakespeare), 'honourless' (Phaer), 'hostless' 
 (Spenser), 'importless,' 'issueless,' 'kindless' (all in 
 Shakespeare), ' jeopardless ' (Udal), ' jointureless ' 
 (Chapman), ' knightless ' (Spenser), 'knotless' (Gold-
 
 v. Extinct Words with Suffix' less! 201 
 
 ing), 'labourless' (Sylvester), 'landless,' 'languageless,' 
 'lightless' (all in Shakespeare), 'leaveless' (Chaucer), 
 'lotless' (Sir T. Malory), 'lustless' (Spenser), 'ma- 
 liceless ' (Leighton), ' manless ' (Bacon), ' markless ' 
 (Whitby dialect), ' mateless ' (Quarles), ' matterless ' 
 (Whitby dialect), ' meanless ' (Cleveland dialect), 
 'mirthless' (Golding), 'modestless' (Shakespeare), 
 'moodless' (Old English), 'napless' (Shakespeare), 
 'natureless' (Sadler), ' neighbourless ' (Lord Brooke), 
 ' noteless ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), ' notionless ' 
 (Davies), ' occasionless ' (Jackson), ' offenceless,' ' op- 
 poseless,' 'orderless' (all in Shakespeare), 'parentless' 
 {Mirror for Magistrates), ' patronless ' (Shaftesbury), 
 'phraseless,' 'pithless' (both in Shakespeare), 'plea- 
 sureless' (Golding), 'prideless' (Chaucer), 'priestless' 
 (Pope), 'ransomless' (Shakespeare), 'reasonless' (Mil- 
 ton), ' recureless ' (Chapman), ' redeless ' (Sidney), 
 'repelless' (Markham), 'reputeless' (Shakespeare), 
 ' requiteless ' (Davies), ' respectless ' (Ben Jonson), 
 ' returnless ' (Chapman), ' rindless ' (Old English), 
 ' reckless ' (Dryden), ' ruleless ' (Spenser), ' sabbath- 
 less ' (Bacon, revived by Charles Lamb), ' sackless ' 
 (North Country), ' sarkless ' (Cleveland dialect), ' sate- 
 less ' (Young), ' seemless ' (Chapman), ' shunless ' 
 (Shakespeare), ' sickless ' (Surrey), ' silverless ' {Poli- 
 tical Songs), ' skilless ' (Shakespeare), ' smartless ' 
 (Sylvester), ' smelless ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 
 ' smockless ' (Chaucer), ' sonless ' (Sylvester), ' sound- 
 less' (Shakespeare), 'spleenless' (Chapman), 'staunch- 
 less' (Shakespeare), 'stayless' (Davies), 'steerless' 
 (Donne), ' strengthless ' (Shakespeare), ' successless ' 
 (Pope), ' suspectless ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 
 'sweatless' (Sylvester), 'swordless' (Sir T. Malory),
 
 202 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 'termless' (Spenser), 'timeless,' 'titleless (both in 
 Shakespeare), 'truceless' (Fuller), 'trustless' (Gas- 
 coigne), 'ventless' (Davies), ' wareless ' (Spenser), 
 ' waterless ' (Udal), ' wayless ' (Golding), ' weightless,' 
 ' wenchless ' (both in Shakespeare), ' wieldless ' (Spen- 
 ser), ' wontless ' (Spenser), ' wordless ' (Shakespeare), 
 ' workless ' (Sir T. More), ' woundless ' (Spenser), 
 ' writless ' (Tuke), ' yieldless ' (Rowe). 
 
 When we ask ourselves what are the causes which 
 have led to this immense mortality, why in that great 
 struggle for existence which is going on here as in 
 every other domain of life, this still makes part of the 
 living army of words, while that has fallen dead, or 
 been dismissed to drag out an obscure provincial ex- 
 istence ; why oftentimes one word has been displaced 
 by another, not, as it seems to us, better but worse ; 
 or, again, why certain families of words, or words 
 formed after certain schemes and patterns, seem ex- 
 posed to more than the ordinary chances of mortality, 
 it is not always easy to give a satisfactory answer to 
 these questions. Why for example in French has 
 'moult' given way before 'beaucoup,' 'cheoir' before 
 'tomber,' 'remembrer' before 'se souvenir,' 'chere' 
 before 'visage,' 'ost' before 'armee,' 'navrer' before 
 ' blesser,' ' faillir ' before ' manquer,' ' clore ' before 
 ' fermer ' ? Causes no doubt in every instance there 
 are. We can ascribe little here, if indeed anything, to 
 mere hazard or caprice. Hazard might cause one 
 man to drop the use of a word, but not a whole people 
 to arrive at a tacit consent to employ it no more ; 
 while without this tacit consent it could not have 
 become obsolete. Caprice, too, is an element which 
 may be eliminated from our calculations when we
 
 v. Extinction of Words. 203 
 
 have to do with multitudes ; for in such case the 
 caprice of one will traverse and defeat the caprice of 
 another, leaving matters very much where they were. 
 But the causes oftentimes are hard to discover ; they 
 lie deep-hidden in the genius of the language and in 
 the tendencies of it at particular periods, these affect- 
 ing speakers and writers who are quite unconscious of 
 the influence thus exercised upon them. 1 Much here 
 must remain unexplained ; but suggestions may be 
 offered, which shall account for some, though by no 
 means all, of the facts which here come under the 
 eye. 
 
 And first, men do not want, or fancy that they do 
 not want, certain words, and so suffer them to drop 
 out of use. A language in the vigorous acquisitive 
 periods of its existence has generated, or has in other 
 ways got together from different quarters, a larger num- 
 ber of words, each with its separate shade of meaning, 
 to connote some single object, than can be taken into 
 actual use ; more at any rate they are than the great 
 body of the speakers of a language, with their lazy 
 mental habits, are prepared to take up. Thus we speak 
 at this day of a ' miser,' and perhaps in popular lan- 
 
 1 Dwight {Modem Phonology, 2nd series, p. 208) : 'Great, 
 silent, yet determinative laws of criticism, and so, of general 
 acceptance or condemnation, are ever at work upon words, de- 
 ciding their position among mankind at large, as if before a 
 court without any appeal. Their action is certain, though un- 
 definable to our vision, like the seemingly blind laws of the 
 weather ; which yet, however multiplied in their sources, or 
 subtle in their action, rule infallibly not only the questions of 
 human labour and of human harvests, but also, to a great extent, 
 those of human health, power, and enjoyment.'
 
 204 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 guage of a 'hunks' and a 'skinflint;' but what has 
 become of a 'chinch,' a ' clutchfist,' a 'gripe,' a 
 'huddle,' a 'kumbix' (/a/*,/?i£), a 'micher,' a 'nip- 
 cheese,' a ' nipfarthing,' a ' nipscreed,' a ' pennifather,' 
 a 'pinchfist,' a 'pinchpenny,'a 'snudge'? They have 
 all or nearly all quite dropped out of the living language 
 of men, and, doubtless, for the reason just suggested, 
 namely, that they were more and more various than 
 men would be at pains to discriminate, and having 
 discriminated, to employ. 1 This same mental indo- 
 lence causes words to fall out of use, which it has been 
 a real loss in clearness and precision to let go. An 
 uncle on the father's side, and an uncle on the 
 mother's, are manifestly not the same relation ; cer- 
 tainly the Romans did not so account them, who for 
 the first had ' patruus,' for the second ' avunculus.' 
 We too had once a distinct word for mother's brother, 
 'eame,' OE. 'earn,' cp. the German 'oheim' (see 
 Kluge). It was employed so late as by Drayton, but 
 would be unintelligible now. 
 
 In like manner the dialect which in that struggle 
 for existence has won the day, and become the classical 
 language of a people, will very rarely admit of more 
 
 1 Diez {Gram. d. Roman. Sprachen, vol. i. p. 53) traces to 
 the same cause the disappearance in the whole group of Romanic 
 languages of so many words which from their wide use in Latin 
 we might have expected to remain : thus ' arx ' was rendered 
 unnecessary by ' castellum,' ' equus ' by ' caballus,' 'gramen ' by 
 ' herba,' ' janua ' by ' ostium ' and ' porta,' ' sidus ' by ' astrum,' 
 ' magnus' by ' grandis,' ' pulcher ' by ' bellus,' ' ssevus ' by 
 ' ferus,' and have thus to a great extent vanished out of the lan- 
 guages descended from the Latin. The whole discussion on 
 this subject is of great interest.
 
 v. Extinction of Words. 205 
 
 than one word for one object ; all the others it ignores ; 
 which thus either fall out of use altogether, or at best 
 maintain an obscure and local existence. Thus there 
 is hardly one of our familiar English birds which has 
 not two, it may be several, names by which in different 
 districts it is known. Our woodpecker, for example, is 
 the 'specht' (Holland), the 'woodspick' (Golding), 
 the ' woodsprite,' the 'woodhack,' the 'awlbird,' the 
 ' pickatree,' the ' treejobber,' the ' thewhole,' the 
 ' rainfowl,' the ' woodwall,' the 'woodhack,' the 'yaf- 
 fingale,' the 'hecco,' the 'green-peak,' the 'eatbee,' 
 the 'rainbird,' the 'yaffle.' These are all the names 
 which I can bring together ; though certainly I have 
 not exhausted the local names by which the wood- 
 pecker is called. But the classical language, which 
 seeks to avoid confusion before everything else, having 
 this more at heart than the preservation of the super- 
 fluous wealth of the language, lets in such cases all 
 names disappear but one ; as in instances innumerable 
 may be seen. 
 
 Let me indicate another cause of the disappearance 
 of words. Arts, trades, amusements, in the course of 
 time are superseded by others. These had each more 
 or less of a nomenclature peculiarly its own. But with 
 the supersession of any one of them a large number 
 of words, which in the first instance were proper and 
 peculiar to it, will have vanished likewise. Ships wear 
 armour now, and not men ; but with men's ceasing to 
 wear it, how many words have for all practical purposes 
 ceased from among us. Words like ' brigandine ' 
 and ' habergeon,' though found in our Bibles, like 
 ' burgonet,' ' vantbrace,' ' morion,' ' gorget,' ' sallet,' 
 'baldric,' 'guisarm,' 'bascinet,' with many more,
 
 206 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 are not merely unemployed, but unintelligible for 
 ninety-nine out of every hundred of English readers. 
 Archery in its more serious aspects is now extinct, 
 and the group of words is not a small one which with 
 it have ceased to belong to our living language any 
 more. How many readers would need a glossary to 
 turn to, if they would know so much as what a 'fletcher' 
 is ? ' Or look at any old treatise on hawking. What a 
 multitude of terms are there assumed as familiar to the 
 reader, which have now quite dropped out of our com- 
 mon knowledge. Nor let it be urged that these can 
 have constituted no serious loss, seeing that they were 
 only used within the narrow circle, and comparatively 
 narrow it must have always been, of those addicted to 
 this sport. This is not the case. Of technical words 
 a large number travel beyond the sphere which is 
 peculiarly their own; are used in secondary senses, 
 and in these secondary senses are everybody's words, 
 however in their primary sense they may remain the 
 possession only of a few. 
 
 When I spoke just now of the extinction of such a 
 multitude of words, I did not, as you will have observed 
 already, refer merely to tentative words, candidates for 
 admission into the language, offered to, but never in 
 any true sense accepted by it, such as those of which 
 I quoted some in an earlier lecture ; I referred rather 
 to such as either belonged to its primitive stock, or, if 
 not this, had yet been domiciled in it so long that they 
 seemed to have found there a lasting home. The de- 
 struction has reached these quite as much as those. 
 
 1 Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, i860, p. 267, 
 sqq.
 
 v. Good Words extinct. 207 
 
 Thus not a few words of the purest Old English stock, 
 some having lived on into the Elizabethan period or 
 beyond it, have finally dropped out of our vocabulary ; 
 sometimes leaving a gap which has never since been 
 filled ; but their places oftener taken by others, some 
 worse, some better, which have come up in their 
 room. That beautiful word for despair, ' wanhope,' 
 long held its ground ; it occurs in Gascoigne ; being 
 the latest survivor of a whole family of words which 
 continued much longer in Scotland than with us ; of 
 which some perhaps continue there still. These are 
 but a few of them : ' wanthrift,' for extravagance ; 
 'wanluck,' 'wanweird' or 'wanhap,' misfortune ; 'wan- 
 lust,' languor ; ' wanwit,' folly ; ' wangrace,' wicked- 
 ness ; ' wantrust ' (Chaucer), diffidence ; ' wantruth ' 
 {Metrical Homilies), falsehood ; 'wanchance,' ill-luck. 1 
 'Skinker,' cupbearer, is used by Shakespeare, and 
 lasted on to Dryden's time and beyond it. Spenser 
 uses the verbs 'welk,' to fade; 'sty,' to mount; 'hery,' 
 to glorify or praise ; ' halse,' to embrace ; also ' teene,' 
 vexation or grief. Shakespeare has ' tarre,' to provoke. 
 Holland has ' reise ' for journey, ' frimm ' for lusty or 
 strong. ' To tind,' surviving in ' tinder,' occurs in 
 Bishop Sanderson ; ' to nimm ' (nehmen) in Fuller. 
 ' Nesh,' soft, which was good literary English once, still 
 lives on in some of our provincial dialects, with not 
 a few of the other words just named. Thus ' leer,' 
 empty, 'heft,' a heaving (in Shakespeare), the verb 
 'fettle' (employed by Swift), 'elenge,' a beautiful 
 word signifying lonely and melancholy at once, are 
 
 [' Cp. the German wahn in wahnwitz, and wahnsinn, see. 
 Kluge.]
 
 2o8 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 common on the lips of our southern peasantry to this 
 day. 
 
 A number of vigorous compounds we have let go 
 and lost, or suffered to retire into remote provincial 
 parts. Except for Shakespeare we might have quite 
 forgotten that young men of hasty fiery valour were 
 once named ' hotspurs ; ' and this even now is for us 
 rather the proper name of one than a designation 
 of all. 1 Austere old men, ' severe ancients ' as Hol- 
 land describes them, such as, in Falstaff 's words, ' hate 
 us youth,' were ' grimsirs,' or ' grimsires ' once (Massin- 
 ger) ; a foe that wore the semblance of a friend was a 
 ' heavy friend ; ' a mischief-maker a ' coal-carrier ; ' an 
 impudent railer a ' saucy jack ' (all these in Golding) ; 
 a cockered favourite was a ' whiteboy ' (Fuller) ; 
 a drunkard an ' aleknight ' or ' maltworm ; ' an old 
 woman an ' old-trot ; ' an ill-behaved girl a ' naughty 
 pack ' (Golding), a ' lightskirts ' (Bishop Hall) ; a de- 
 pendent a ' hangby ; ' a soldier who on the plea of 
 illness shirked his share of duty and danger a ' malin- 
 gerer' — the word has life in it yet ; — a sluggard a 'slow- 
 back;' forest-haunting banditti 'woodkerns;' an ignoble 
 place of refuge a 'creephole' (Henry More); entertain- 
 ments of song or music were ' earsports ' (Holland) ; a 
 hideous concert of all most discordant noises a ' black- 
 sanctus ; ' pleasant drink ' merrygodown ' (Golding). 
 ' Double-diligent ' (the same) was mischievously offi- 
 cious ; ' snoutfair ' an epithet applied to a woman who, 
 having beauty, had no other gifts, mental or moral, 
 to commend her ; ' mother-naked ' (an old Teutonic 
 
 1 See Holland, Livy, p. 922 ; Baxter, Life and Times, 
 39 ; Rogers, Matrimonial Honour, p. 233.
 
 v. Extinction of Words. 209 
 
 combination revived by Carlyle) finds its explanation 
 at Job i. 21 ; 1 Tim. vi. 7. Who too but must acknow- 
 ledge the beauty of such a word as 'weeping-ripe' 
 (Shakespeare), ready, that is, to burst into tears, the 
 'crying-ripe' of Beaumont and Fletcher, the dpn'iWpus 
 of the Greeks ? 
 
 And as words, so also phrases are forgotten. ' From 
 the teeth outward,' to express professions which spring 
 from no root in the heart of him who makes them, has 
 evidently approved itself to Carlyle. How expres- 
 sive too are many other of the proverbial phrases 
 which we have suffered to fall through ; as for instance 
 'to make a coat for the moon,' to attempt something 
 in its nature every way impossible ; ' to tread the shoe 
 awry,' to make a faux pas ; ' to play rex,' to domineer ; 
 ' to weep Irish,' to affect a grief which is not felt within, 
 as do the hired mourners at an Irish wake. But these 
 are legion, and quite impossible to enumerate, so that 
 we must content ourselves with the examples here 
 given. 
 
 An almost unaccountable caprice seems often to 
 preside over the fortunes of words, and to determine 
 which should live and which die. Of them quite as 
 much as of books it may be affirmed, habent sua fata. 
 Thus in instances out of number a word lives on as 
 a verb, but has perished as a noun; we say 'to embar- 
 rass,' but no longer an 'embarrass ;' 'to revile,' but not, 
 with Chapman and Milton, a ' revile ; ' ' to dispose,' 
 but not a ' dispose ; ' ' to retire,' but not a ' retire ' 
 (Milton) ; 'to wed,' but not a 'wed ;' 'to angle,' but 
 not an ' angle ; ' ' to infest,' but we use no longer the 
 adjective ' infest.' Or with a reversed fortune a word 
 lives on as a noun, but has perished as a verb ; thus 
 
 p
 
 210 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 as a noun substantive, a 'slug,' but no longer 'to slug' 
 (Milton, prose); a 'child,' but no longer 'to child' 
 ('childing autumn,' Shakespeare); a 'rape,' but not 
 'to rape' (South); 'knowledge,' but not 'to know- 
 ledge ' (Coverdale) ; a ' rogue,' but not ' to rogue ; ' 
 ' malice,' but not 'to malice;' a 'path,' but not 'to 
 path ' (Shakespeare) ; or as a noun adjective, ' serene,' 
 but not ' to serene,' a beautiful word, by us let go, as 
 'sereiner' by the French; 1 'meek,' but not 'to meek' 
 (Wiclif) ; 'fond,' but not 'to fond' (Dryden) ; 'dead,' 
 but not ' to dead ; ' 'intricate,' but ' to intricate' (Jeremy 
 Taylor) no longer. So too we have still the adjective 
 'plashy,' but a 'plash,' signifying a wet place in a 
 grassy field, no more. 
 
 Or again, the affirmative remains, but the negative 
 is gone. One of our most serious losses is the frequent 
 perishing of this ; thus 'scathful,' but not 'unscath- 
 ful' {Ormulum) ; 'profit,' 'bold,' 'sad,' 'deadly,' but 
 not any more 'unprofit,' 'unbold,' 'unsad,' 'undeadly' 
 (all in Wiclif); 2 'cunning,' but not 'uncunning;' 
 
 1 How many words modern French has lost which are most 
 vigorous and admirable, the absence of which can only now be 
 supplied by a circumlocution or by some less excellent word — 
 'Oseur,' ' affranchisseur ' (Amyot), 'mepriseur,' ' murmurateur,' 
 ' blandisseur ' (Bossuet), 'abuseur' (Rabelais), ' desabusement,' 
 ' rancoeur,' are all obsolete at the present ; and so ' desaimer,' 
 to cease to love (' disamare ' in Italian), ' guirlander,' ' steriliser,' 
 ' blandissant,' ' ordonnement ' (Montaigne), with innumerable 
 others. La Bruyere, in his Caracteres, c. 14, laments the loss, 
 oftentimes inexplicable, of various excellent words in French. 
 [This chapter from La Bruyere is printed with a valuable philo- 
 logical commentary in Darmesteter's La Vie des Mots, 1887, 
 
 p. 187.] 
 
 2 I had added ' unwisdom ' in former editions to these ; but 
 this, I am glad to believe, has come back to us.
 
 v. Survival of the Affirmative. 211 
 
 'manhood,' 'mighty,' 'tall,' but not 'unman- 
 hood,' ' unmighty ' (both in Chaucer), or ' untall ' 
 (in the Ploivmans Tale) ; ' ghostly,' but not ' un- 
 ghostly' (Coverdale); ' dreadful,' but not 'undreadful' 
 (Herrick) ; ' honest,' but not ' unhonest ' (Holland) ; 
 'tame,' but not 'untame' (Jackson); 'buxom,' but 
 not 'unbuxom' (Dryden) ; 'cheerful,' but not 'un- 
 cheerful,' ' faulty,' but not ' unfaulty,' ' harmful,' but 
 not ' unharmful,' ' hasty,' but not ' unhasty ' (all in 
 Spenser) ; ' bashful,' but not ' unbashful ; ' ' contrite,' 
 but not ' uncontrite,' ' lusty,' but not ' unlusty ' (both 
 in Fisher) ; 'rightful,' but not 'unrightful;' 'secret,' 
 but not ' unsecret ; ' ' pregnant,' but not 'unpregnant; ' 
 ' doubtful,' but not ' undoubtful ; ' ' rough,' but not 
 ' unrough ; ' ' tender,' but not ' untender ' (all in 
 Shakespeare) ; ' worthies,' but not ' unworthies ' 
 (Brereton) ; ' blithe,' but not ' unblithe ; ' ' idle,' but 
 not ' unidle ' (Sidney) ; ' base,' but not ' unbase ; ' 
 ' quick,' but not ' unquick ' (both in Daniel) ; ' glad,' 
 but not 'unglad' {Townley Mysteries); 'useful,' but 
 not ' unuseful ' (Massinger) ; ' ease,' but not ' unease ' 
 (Hacket) ; 'lust,' but not 'unlust' (Coverdale); 'pro- 
 bity,' but not 'improbity' (Sanderson) ; 'subject,' but 
 not ' unsubject ' (Daniel) ; ' repentance,' but not 
 ' unrepentance ; ' ' remission,' but not ' irremission ' 
 (Donne); 'science,' but not 'nescience' (Glanvill) ; 
 'facile,' but not 'difficile' (Bacon); 'to know,' but not 
 'tounknow;' 'to worship,' but not 'to unworship' 
 (both in Wiclif ) ; ' to give,' but not ' to ungive ; ' ' to 
 hallow,' but not ' to unhallow ' (Coverdale) ; ' to re- 
 member,' but not ' to disremember ' ( = to forget, and 
 still common in Ireland). Or, with a variation the 
 reverse of this, the negative survives, while the afhrma- 
 
 p 2
 
 2 1 2 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 tive is gone ; thus ' wieldy ' (Chaucer) survives only 
 in ' unwieldy ; ' ' couth ' and ' couthly ' (both in Spen- 
 ser), only in ' uncouth ' and ' uncouthly ; ' ' mannerly ' 
 in 'unmannerly' (Coverdale) ; 'nocent' (Milton, 
 prose), in ' innocent ; ' ' speakable ' (Milton), in ' un- 
 speakable;' 'pregnable' (Holland), in 'impregnable;' 
 'vincible' (Jeremy Taylor), in 'invincible ;' 'advert- 
 ence ' (Barclay), in ' inadvertence ; ' ' flammability ' 
 (Sir T. Browne), in ' inflammability ; ' ' ruly ' (Foxe), in 
 ' unruly ; ' ' gainly' (Henry More), in 'ungainly ; ' these 
 last two were serviceable words, and have been ill lost, 
 ' gainly ' indeed is still common in the West Riding ; 
 ' exorable ' (Holland) and ' evitable ' survive only in 
 ' inexorable ' and ' inevitable ; ' ' faultless ' remains, 
 but hardly ' faultful ' (Shakespeare) ; ' shapeless,' but 
 not ' shapeful ' (Chapman) ; ' semble ' (Foxe), except 
 as a technical law term, has disappeared, while ' dis- 
 semble ' continues ; ' simulation ' (Coverdalej is gone, 
 but 'dissimulation' remains; 'to embogue' (Florio) 
 in like manner has vanished, but not ' to disembogue.' 
 So also of other pairs one has been taken, and one 
 left; 'height,' or 'highth,' as Milton better spelt it, 
 remains, but ' lowth ' (Becon) is gone ; ' underling ' 
 remains, but ' overling ' has perished ; ' beldam ' has 
 kept its ground, but not ' belsire,' 1 ' Exhort ' con- 
 tinues, but ' dehort,' a word whose place 'dissuade' 
 does not exactly supply, has escaped us ; ' exhume ' 
 lives, but not so ' inhume ' (Heylin) ; ' righteous,' or 
 ' rightwise,' as once more accurately written, remains, 
 but ' wrongwise ' is lost ; ' inroad ' continues, but 
 ' outroad ' (Holland) has disappeared ; ' levant ' lives, 
 
 [' The word belsire still exists in surnames, as in Belcher, 
 Bewsher. ]
 
 v. Groups of Words perish. 213 
 
 but ' ponent ' (Holland) has died ; ' to extricate ' con- 
 tinues, but, as we saw just now, ' to intricate ' does 
 not ; so too 'parricide,' but not 'filicide' (Holland); 
 ' womanish,' but not ' mannish ' (Shakespeare) ; ' to 
 winter,' but not ' to summer ' (A. V.). Again, of whole 
 groups of words formed on some particular scheme 
 it may be only a single specimeruwill survive. Thus 
 ' gainsay ' survives ; but ' gaincope,' ' gainstand ' 
 (Golding), ' gainstrive ' (Foxe), and other similarly 
 formed words, exist no longer. 'Blameworthy,' ' note- 
 worthy,' 'praiseworthy,' 'seaworthy,' 'trustworthy,' are 
 perhaps the only survivors of a group that numbered 
 once ' crownworthy ' (Ben Jonson), ' deathworthy,' 
 (Shakespeare), ' japeworthy ' (Chaucer), ' keepworthy ' 
 (Taylor of Norwich), ' kissworthy ' (Sidney), ' pain- 
 worthy ' (Spenser), ' shameworthy ' (Wiclif), 'stal- 
 worthy ' ' (Skelton), ' law-worthy,' ' thankworthy ' (in 
 A. V.), and very probably more ; as ' lean worthy,' 
 which I have seen, although I have lost the reference. 
 In like manner ' foolhardy ' alone remains out of at 
 least five adjectives formed on the same pattern ; thus 
 'foollarge' (=' prodigal ') and 'foolhasty,' both found 
 in Chaucer, lived on to the time of Holland ; while 
 ' foolhappy ' is in Spenser, and ' foolbold ' in Bale. 
 ' Laughing-stock ' we still use ; and ' battering-stock ' 
 survives in some local dialects ; but ' gazing-stock ' 
 (A. V.), 'jesting-stock' (Coverdale), ' mocking-stock ' 
 (Sternhold and Hopkins), 'sporting-stock' (Udal), 
 ' playing-stock ' (North), ' japing-stock ' (Old English 
 
 [' A slightly different form, namely, stalworth, still flourishes 
 in full vigour as stalwart. These words have nothing in the 
 world to do with stealing, as is so often maintained. For the 
 etymology see Sievers' 0. E. Grammar, 1887, p. 106.]
 
 214 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 Sermon), 'pointing-stock,' ' flouting-stock' (both in 
 Shakespeare), ' wondring-stock ' (Coverdale), 'mercy- 
 stock ' (Hutchinson), have all disappeared. ' Stedfast ' 
 and ' shamefast ' (badly spelt ' shamefaced ') remain, 
 but 'bedfast' (=• bedridden), 'handfast' (=betrothed), 
 ' homefast,' ' housefast ' or confined to the house, 
 ' masterfast ' or engaged to a master (Skelton), ' root- 
 fast,' 'trothfast' (Cumbrian), ' weatherfast ' (Cleveland 
 dialect), ' wordfast,' with others, are all gone. We 
 have 'twilight,' but 'twibill' (= bipennis, Chapman), 
 and ' twifight ' (= duel), have escaped us. 
 
 It is a real loss that the comparative 'rather' 
 should now stand alone, having dropped alike the 
 positive ' rathe,' and the superlative ' rathest.' ' Rathe,' 
 or early, though a graceful word, and not fallen quite 
 out of popular remembrance, being embalmed in the 
 Lycidas of Milton, 
 
 ' And the rathe primrose, which forsaken dies,' 
 
 might be suffered to share the common lot of so many 
 other words which have perished, though worthy to 
 live ; but the disuse of ' rathest ' is a real loss to the 
 language, and the more so, that ' liefest ' has gone 
 too. ' Rather ' expresses the Latin ' potius ; ' but 
 ' rathest ' being obsolete, we have no word, unless 
 ' soonest' may be accepted as such, to express ' potis- 
 simum,' or the preference not of one way over another 
 or over certain others, but of one over all ; which we 
 therefore effect by aid of various circumlocutions. 
 Nor has ' rathest ' been so long out of use, that it 
 would be hopeless to attempt to revive it. Sander- 
 son, in his beautiful sermon on the text, ' When my 
 father and my mother forsake me, the Lord taketh
 
 v. Mortality of Words. 215 
 
 me up,' puts the consideration, 'why father and 
 mother are named the rathest, and the rest to be 
 included in them.' 1 
 
 I observed just now that words formed on certain 
 patterns had a tendency to fall into disuse, and seem 
 exposed to more than the ordinary chances of mor- 
 tality. It has perhaps been thus with adjectives end- 
 ing in ' some,' the Old English ' sum,' the German 
   sam ' (' friedsam,' ' seltsam '). It is true that of these 
 many survive, as ' gladsome,' ' handsome,' ' weari- 
 some,' ' buxom ' (in the Ancren Riwk ' buhsum,' 
 bendable, compliant) ; but of these the great majority 
 are nearly or quite extinct. Thus in Wiclifs Bible 
 you may note 'lovesum,' ' hatesum,' ' lustsum,' 'gilsum ' 
 (guilesome), ' wealsum,' ' heavysum,' ' lightsum,' ' de- 
 lightsum ; ' of these ' lightsome ' survived long, and 
 indeed still survives in provincial dialects ; but of the 
 others all save ' delightsome ' are gone ; while that, 
 although used in our Authorized Version (Mai. iii. 12), 
 is now only employed in poetry. So too ' willsome ' 
 (Promptorium), 'hearsome' (= obedient), 'needsome,' 
 ' wantsome,' ' brightsome ' (Marlowe), ' wieldsome,' 
 ' unwieldsome ' (Golding), ' unlightsome ' (Milton), 
 ' thoughtsome,' ' growthsome ' (both in Fairfax), 
 ' healthsome ' {Homilies), ' poisonsome ' (Speght), 
 ' ugsome,' ' ugglesome ' (both in Foxe), ' laboursome ' 
 (Shakespeare), ' friendsome,' ' longsome ' (Bacon), 
 'quietsome,' 'mirksome' (both in Spenser), 'tooth- 
 some' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'dubersome,' (Sussex 
 dialect), 'deepsome' (Chapman), 'gleesome,' 'joysome' 
 
 1 For other passages in which ' rathest ' occurs see the State 
 Papers, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
 
 216 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 (both in Browne's Pastorals), ' gaysome ' {Mirror for 
 Magistrates), ' likesome ' (Holinshed), ' roomsome,' 
 'bigsome,' 'awsome,' ' timersome,' 'viewsome,' 'do- 
 some' (= prosperous), ' flaysome ' (=fearful), ' flow- 
 tersome' (= quarrelsome), 'auntersome' (= ad- 
 venturous), ' drearisome,' ' dulsome,' ' doubtsome,' 
 ' doughtsome,' 'aimsome' (= ambitious), 'gather- 
 some' (= social), 'fremsome' (= unsocial), 'friend- 
 some,' ' hurtsome,' ' growsome,' ' lixom ' (= likesome 
 or amiable), ' flavoursome,' ' wranglesome,' ' hinder- 
 some,' ' clamorsome,' ' thwartsome ' (all these still 
 surviving in the North), 'playsome' (employed by 
 the historian Hume), ' lissome,' ' meltsome,' ' heed- 
 some,' ' laughsome,' ' clogsome,' ' fearsome,' ' limber- 
 some,' ' chatsome ' (= talkative, Kentish), ' ravisome ' 
 (= rapacious), 'fensome' (= adroit), 'gyversome' 
 (=greedy, Durham), 'clumsome,' have nearly or quite 
 disappeared from our common English speech, and 
 are found, if found at all, in our dialects. More ot 
 these have held their place in Scotland than in the 
 south of the Island. 1 
 
 In the same way of a group of words, almost all 
 of them depreciatory and contemptuous, ending in 
 ' ard,' the German ' hart,' 2 more than one half have 
 
 1 Thus see in Jamieson's Dictionary ' bangsome,' ' freak- 
 some,' ' drysome,' ' grousome,' with others out of number. 
 
 " This, though a German form, reached us through the 
 French ; having been early adopted by the Neo-latin languages. 
 In Italian words of this formation are frequent, ' bugiardo,' 
 ' codardo,' ' falsardo,' ' leccardo,' ' linguardo,' ' testardo,' 
 ' vccchiardo ; ' and certainly not less so in French, in which 
 words with this termination are at this day multiplying fast. 
 Darmesteter, in his work Mots Nouveaux, enumerates some
 
 Mortality of Words. 217 
 
 dropped out of use ; I refer to that group of which 
 ' bastard,' ' braggart/ ' buzzard,' ' dotard,' ' laggard,' 
 ' sluggard,' ' wizard,' may be taken as surviving speci- 
 mens ; while ' ballard ' (a bald-headed man, Wiclif ) ; 
 ' blinkard ' {Homilies), ' bosard,' ' dizzard ' (Burton), 
 ' drivelard,' ' dullard ' (Udal), ' haggard ' (an untrained 
 hawk), ' haskard,' ' musard ' (Chaucer), ' palliard,' 
 ' pillard,' ' puggard,' ' shreward ' (Robert of Glouces- 
 ter), ' snivelard ' (Promptorium) ; ' stinkard ' (Ben 
 Jonson), ' trichard ' (Political Sotigs), have no longer 
 any life in them. 1 
 
 There is a curious province of our vocabulary, in 
 which we were once so rich, that extensive losses 
 have failed to make us poor. I refer to those double 
 words which either contain within themselves a strong 
 rhyming modulation, such, for example, as 'willy- 
 nilly," hocus-pocus,' 'helter-skelter,' 'tag-rag,' 'namby- 
 pamby,' pell-mell,' 'hab-nab,' 'hodge-podge,' 'hugger- 
 mugger,' 'hurly-burly,' 2 or, with a slight difference 
 
 eighteen recent creations, including 'bondieuzard,' not a pleas- 
 ing addition to the tongue ; ' capitulard,' one who had any 
 share in the capitulations of Metz and of Paris. Words formed 
 in this fashion, in whatever language they may be found, have 
 almost always, as Diez observes [Gram. d. Rom. Sprachen, vol. 
 ii. p. 350), 'eine ungiinstige Bedeutung.' Compare Matzner, 
 English Grammar, vol. i. p. 439 ; Koch, Gramm. d. Engl. 
 Sprache, vol. iii. p. 106. 
 
 1 What this ' ard ' or ' hart ' was before it became a mere 
 suffix is fully explained in Max Muller's Chips from a German 
 Workshop, vol. iv. p. 92. 
 
 2 The same pleasure in a swiftly recurring rhyme has helped 
 to form such phrases as these : 'carry and harry,' 'creep and 
 leap,' ' draff and chaff,' 'rape and scrape,' ' scot and lot,' 'art 
 and part,' ' shame and blame,' ' top and lop.' Fairly numerous
 
 2 1 8 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 from this, those whose characteristic feature is not 
 this internal likeness with initial unlikeness, but 
 initial likeness with internal unlikeness ; not rhyming, 
 but strongly alliterative, and in every case with a 
 change of the interior vowel from a strong into a weak, 
 generally from ' a ' or ' o ' into ' i ' ; as ' shilly-shally,' 
 ' mingle-mangle,' 'tittle-tattle,' 'prittle-prattle,"driffel- 
 draffel,' 'riff-raff,' 'see-saw,' 'slip-slop.' No one who 
 is not quite out of love with the homelier portions of 
 the language, but will acknowledge the life and strength 
 which there is often in these and in others still current 
 among us. But of this sort what vast numbers have 
 fallen out of use, some so fallen out of all remembrance 
 that it may be difficult to find credence for them. 
 Thus take of rhyming the following : ' kaury-maury,' 
 ' trolly - lolly ' {Piers Plowman), ' tuzzie - muzzie ' 
 {Promptoriwn), ' hufty-tufty,' ' kicksy-wicksy ' (Shake- 
 speare); ' hibber-gibber,' 'rusty-dusty,' ' horrel-lorrel,' 
 ' slaump-paump ' (all in Gabriel Harvey), 'royster- 
 
 in English, there are far more of them in German ; thus, ' band 
 und rand,' ' dach und fach,' * fleiss und schweiss,' ' freud und 
 leid,' ' gut und blut,' ' handel und wandel,' ' hege und pflege,' 
 ' hehlen und stehlen,' ' hiiben und driiben,' ' hiille und fiille,' 
 ' kern und stern,' ' krieg und sieg,' ' leben und streben,' ' leben 
 und weben,' 'lug und trug,' 'rath und that,' ' sack und pack,' 
 ' sang und klang,' ' saus und braus,' ' schalten und walten,' 
 ' schlecht und recht,' ' schritt und tritt,' ' schutz und trutz,' 
 ' sichten und richten,' ' steg und weg,' ' weit und breit. ' For 
 some earlier and mainly juristic forms of the like kind see 
 Grimm, Deutsche Rechtsalterthiimcr, p. 13. The same are 
 common enough in Greek, as in the proverb, TlaOrifxaTa, 
 fj.a6rifj.aTa : so too pev/xara and Trvev/j.aTa (Plato Rep. iii. 405) ; 
 KTrj<Tis and xpV '^, nrrifxaTa and xP^/ J - aTa > C w ^l an d Trvori (Acts 
 xvii. 25), fipSiois and ir6cris (Col. ii. 16).
 
 Composite Words. 219 
 
 doyster' {Old Play), ' hoddy-doddy ' (Ben Jonson) ; 
 while of alliterative might be instanced these : ' skim- 
 ble-skamble,' ' bibble-babble ' (both in Shakespeare), 
 ' twittle-twattle,' ' kim-kam ' (both in Holland), ' trim- 
 tram,' ' trish-trash,' ' swish-swash ' (all in Gabriel 
 Harvey), ' whim-wham ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 
 • mizz-mazz ' (Locke), ' snip-snap ' (Pope), ' flim-flam ' 
 (Swift), ' tric-trac,' ' hogan-mogan,' ' huddle-duddle,' 
 and others. J 
 
 Again, there is a whole family of words, — many of 
 them are now under ban, — which were at one time 
 formed almost at pleasure, the only condition being 
 that the combination should be a happy one. I refer 
 to those singularly expressive words formed by a com- 
 bination of verb and substantive, the former governing 
 the latter: as 'lickspittle,' 'marplot,' 'scapegrace,' 
 ' spendthrift,' ' telltale.' These, with some others, 
 have held their ground, and are current still : but 
 how many are forgotten ; while yet, though not 
 always elegant, they preserved some of the most 
 genuine and vigorous idioms of the language. 2 
 
 1 A Dictionary of Redttplicated Words in the English Lan- 
 guage, by Henry B. Wheatley, published as an appendix to The 
 
 Transactions of the Philological Society, 1865, contains nearly 
 six hundred of these words, and the collector believes that there 
 are some hundreds more which he has not ingathered. I doubt 
 whether he has left any such gleaning to those who follow him. 
 Words constructed on a similar scheme are to be found in the 
 Romance languages ; but are less numerous there, and not in- 
 digenous ; their existence in these being rather the result of 
 Germanic influences, which the Neo-latin languages did not 
 altogether escape (Diez, Gram. d. Rom. Sprachen, vol. i. 
 p. 71). 
 
 2 Many languages have groups of words formed upon the
 
 220 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 Nor is this strange ; they are almost all words of 
 abuse or contempt, and these, alas ! are invariably 
 among the most picturesque and imaginative which a 
 language possesses. The whole man speaks out in 
 them, and often the man under the influence of 
 passion and excitement, which always lend force and 
 fire to his speech. Not a few of these words occur 
 in Shakespeare. The following catalogue makes no 
 pretence to completeness : ' breakleague,' ' break- 
 promise,' ' breakvow,' ' breedbate,' ' carrytale,' ' change- 
 church' (Fuller), 'choplogic,' 'clunchfist,' 'crackhemp,' 
 ' findfault,' killcourtesy,' ' lackbeard,' ' lackbrain,' 
 'lacklinen,' ' lacklove,' 'makepeace,' 'makesport,' 
 ' martext,' mumblenews,' ' picklock,' ' pickpurse,' 
 ' pickthanks,' ' pleaseman,' ' scarecrow,' ' sneakcup,' 
 ' swingebuckler,' 'tearsheet,' ' telltruth,' 'ticklebrain,' 
 'wantwit.' Among all these there is only one, 
 ' makepeace,' in which reprobation or contempt is not 
 implied. But the catalogue is not more than begun. 
 Thus add the following : ' bitesheep,' a favourite 
 name with Foxe for bishops who rather, it would 
 suggest, as wolves devour the flock than as shepherds 
 
 same scheme, although, singularly enough, they are altogether 
 absent from the Anglo-Saxon (Grimm, Deutsche Gram., vol. ii. 
 p. 976). Thus in Spanish a vaunting braggart is a ' matamoros,' 
 a slaymoors ; he is a ' matasiete,' a slayseven (the ' ammazza- 
 sette ' of the Italians) ; a ' perdonavidas,' a sparelives. Others 
 may be added to these, as ' azotacalles,' ' picapleytos,' 'saltapa- 
 redes,' ' rompeesquinas,' ' ganapan,' ' cascatreguas.' So in 
 French, ' attisefeu,' ' coupegorge,' ' faineant,' ' troublefete,' 
 'vaurien.' In Italian ' accattapane,' ' cercabrighe,' ' ruba- 
 cuori,' and many more (Diez, Gram. d. Rom. Sprachen, vol. ii. 
 p. 410).
 
 v. Composite Words. 221 
 
 feed it; ' blabtale ' (Hacket), ' blurpaper' (= scrib- 
 bler, Florio), ' catchpole ' (Wiclif ), ' cherishthieves,' 
 ' clawback ' (a more picturesque if not more graceful 
 word than sycophant, Hacket), ' clusterfist ' (Cot- 
 grave), ' clutchfist ' (Middleton), ' crackhalter,' ' crack- 
 rope,' 'curryfavour,' ' cumberworld ' (Drayton), 'dare- 
 devil ' (= wagehals), ' dingthrift ' (= prodigal, Her- 
 rick), 'drawlatch' (Awdeley), ' frayboggard ' (= scare- 
 crow, Coverdale), ' getnothing ' (Adams), ' gulchcup,' 
 'haleback' (Telltruttts New Year's Gift), 'hategood' 
 (Bunyan), 'hatepeace' (Sylvester), 'hangdog' ('Herod's 
 hangdogs in the tapestry,' Pope), ' hinderlove ' (Pas- 
 sionate Morris), ' killcow ' (G. Harvey), ' killjoy,' 
 ' killman ' (Chapman), ' kindlecoal,' ' kindlefire ' (both 
 in Gurnall), ' lackland,' ' lacklatin,' ' letgame ' 
 (Chaucer), ' lickdish,' ' lickspit ' (both in Florio), 
 ' makebate,' ' makedebate ' (Richardson), ' makefray ' 
 (Bishop Hall), ' makesport ' (Fuller), ' makeshift ' (used 
 of persons and not things, G. Harvey), ' marprelate,' 
 ' mumblematins,' ' nipcheese,' 'nipfarthing ' (Drant), 
 'nipscreed,' 'pickfault,' 'pickpenny' (H. More), 'pick- 
 quarrel,' ' pinchpenny ' (Holland), ' pinchfist ' (the 
 same), ' quenchcoal ' (Rogers), ' rakekennel,' ' rake- 
 shame ' (Milton), 'reelpot,' 'rinsepitcher' (Becon), 
 ' robaltar,' ' rushbuckler,' ' scapegallows,' ' scape- 
 thrift,' ' shakebuckler,' ' sharkgull ' (Middleton), ' slip- 
 string ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), 'skinflint,' 'slip- 
 gibbet' (a name sometimes given to one who had 
 just escaped what is called ' going upstairs to bed '), 
 ' smellfeast ' (= Tpe^e'8et7r^os and an improvement on 
 ' parasite,' Davies), ' smellsmock ' ( = mulierarius), 
 ' spendall ' (Cotgrave), ' spillbread,' ' spilltime ' {Piers 
 Plowman), ' spintext,' ' spoilsport,' ' spyfault,' ' stroy-
 
 222 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 good ' (Golding), ' spitfire,' ' spitpoison ' (South), ' spit- 
 venom,' ' suckfist,' ' swashbuckler ' (Holinshed), ' swill- 
 bowl ' (Stubbs), ' swillpot ' (Cotgrave), ' tearthroat,' 
 ' telltruth ' (Fuller), ' tosspot ' (the same), ' trouble- 
 town ' (Breton), ' turnback ' (Gayton), ' turnbroach,' 
 ' turncoat,' ' tumtippet ' (Cranmer), ' turntail,' ' wag- 
 feather,' 'waghalter' (hence our modern 'wag'), 
 ' wastegood ' (all in Cotgrave), ' wastethrift ' (Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher), ' wantgrace,' ' wantwit.' ' Rake- 
 hell,' which used to be spelt ' rakel ' (Chaucer), a good 
 English word, would be wrongly included in this list, 
 although Cowper, when he writes ' rakehell ' (' rake- 
 hell baronet'), must plainly have regarded it as be- 
 longing to this family of words. 1 
 
 There is another frequent cause of the disuse of 
 words. In some inexplicable way there comes to be 
 attached something of ludicrous, or coarse, or vulgar 
 to them, from a sense of which they are no longer 
 used in earnest writing, and fall out of the discourse 
 of those who desire to speak elegantly. Not indeed 
 that this degradation which overtakes certain words is 
 in all cases inexplicable. The unheroic character of 
 most men's minds, with their consequent intolerance 
 of that heroic which they cannot understand, is con- 
 stantly at work, often with too much success, in taking 
 down words of nobleness from their high pitch ; and, 
 as the most effectual way of doing this, in casting an 
 air of mock-heroic about them. Thus, 'to dub,' a 
 
 1 The mistake is far earlier ; long before Cowper wrote the 
 sound suggested first this sense, and then this spelling. Thus 
 Stanihurst, Description of Ireland, p. 28 : ' They are taken for 
 no better than rakeheh, or devil's black guard ; ' and often else- 
 where.
 
 v. Words and Phrases become Vulgar. 223 
 
 word resting on one of the noblest usages of chivalry, 
 has now something of ludicrous about it ; ' doughty ' 
 has the same. Words like these so used belong to 
 that serio-comic, mock-heroic diction, the multiplica- 
 tion of which, as of all parodies on greatness, is ever- 
 more a sign of evil augury for a nation that welcomes 
 it with favour, is at present such a sign of evil augury 
 for our own. ' 
 
 ' Pate ' is now comic or ignoble : it was not so 
 once ; else we should not meet it in our version of the 
 Psalms (vii. 17); 2 as little was 'noddle,' which occurs 
 in one of the few poetical passages in Hawes. The 
 same may be affirmed of ' sconce,' of ' nowl ' or ' noil ' 
 (Wiclif); of 'slops' for trousers (Marlowe's Lucaii); 
 of ' cocksure ' (Rogers), of ' smug,' which once meant 
 adorned (' the smug bridegroom,' Shakespeare). ' To 
 nap ' is now a word without dignity ; while in Wiclif's 
 Bible we read, ' Lo He schall not nappe, nether 
 slepe that kepeth Israel ' (Ps. cxxi. 4). ' To punch,' 
 'to thump,' both occurring in Spenser, could not now 
 obtain the same serious use ; as little ' to wag ' (Matt, 
 xxvii. 39, A. V.), or 'to buss' (Shakespeare). Neither 
 would any one now say with Wiclif that at Lystra 
 Barnabas and Paul rent their clothes and skipped out 
 ('skipten out') among the people (Acts xiv. 14); nor 
 
 [' In modern French slang, a glass of brandy poured into a 
 cup of black coffee, is with impious irreverence called a gloria. 
 Larchey says : De meme que le gloria patri se dit a la fin des 
 psaumes, ce gloria d'un autre genre est la fin obligee d'un regal 
 populaire.] 
 
 [* The word pate occurs in the Prayer Book and Author- 
 ized Versions of the Psalms, and has even been retained in 
 the Revised Version (1885).]
 
 224 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 with Coverdale, ' My beloved cometh hopping upon 
 the mountains ' (Cant. ii. 8) ; nor yet that ' the Lord 
 trounsed Sisara and all his charettes,' as it stands in 
 the Bible of 1551; nor with the Geneva characterize 
 some as ' detestable fellows ' (2 Pet. ii. 14). 'A sight 
 of angels ' (as Tyndale has it at Heb. xii. 22) would 
 be felt as a vulgarism now. 1 Even ' a flock of angels ' 
 (ennglefiocc, Ormulum) would be counted somewhat 
 too familiar. ' A blubbered face ' (Spenser) would 
 scarcely appeal to our pity, nor ' a smudged face ' 
 (Golding) excite horror. We should not call now a 
 delusion of Satan a '■flam of the devil ' (Henry More) ; 
 nor our Lord's course through the air to the pinnacle 
 of the temple ' his aery jaunt' (Milton). 'Verdant' 
 is hardly a name which Spenser could now venture 
 to give to a knight of Fairyland. It is the same with 
 phrases. ' Through thick and thin ' (Spenser), ' cheek 
 by jowl ' (Sylvester), ' tag and rag ' (Golding), ' highest 
 by odds,' 'to take snuff,' 'to lay in one's dish,' 'to 
 cast a sheep's eye ' (the four last in Holland), ' to save 
 one's bacon ' (Milton, prose), ' hand over head ' 
 (Bacon), 'tooth and nail' (Golding), 'bag and bag- 
 gage, 2 ' in a brown study,' ' at sixes and sevens,' ' at 
 the fag end,' ' a peck of troubles ' (Florio), do not 
 now belong to serious literature. In the glorious 
 ballad of Chevy Chase, a noble warrior whose legs are 
 hewn off is ' in doleful dumps ; ' just as, in Holland's 
 Livy, the Romans are ' in the dumps ' after their de- 
 feat at Canna?. In Golding's Ovid, one fears that he 
 
 [' For other early instances of sight (number), see 
 Oliphant, and Trench's Select Glossary.] 
 
 ['- For Mr. Gladstone's memorable use of this phrase, see 
 N.E.D.)
 
 v. Advance of Refinement. 225 
 
 will 'go to pot.' John Careless, in one of his beauti- 
 ful letters preserved in Foxe's Martyrs, announces 
 that a persecutor, who expects a recantation from 
 him, is ' in the wrong box.' l And in the sermons of 
 Barrow, who certainly did not affect familiar, still less 
 vulgar, expressions, we constantly meet such terms as 
 ' to rate,' ' to snub,' ' to gull,' ' to pudder ' (that is, to 
 make a pother), ' dumpish,' and the like : words, we 
 may be sure, not vulgar when he used them. 
 
 Then too the advance of refinement causes words 
 to be dismissed from use, which are felt to speak too 
 plainly. It is not here merely that one age has more 
 delicate ears than another ; and that matters are freely 
 spoken of at one period which at another are with- 
 drawn from conversation. There is something of 
 this ; but even if this delicacy were at a standstill, 
 there would still be a continual disallowing of words, 
 which for a certain while had been employed to 
 designate coarse or disagreeable facts or things ; or, 
 where not a total disallowing, a relinquishing of them 
 to the lower classes of society, with the adoption and 
 employment of others in their stead. The former 
 words being felt to have come by long use into too 
 direct and close relation with that which they desig- 
 nate, to summon it up too distinctly before the mind's 
 eye, they are thereupon exchanged for others, which 
 indicate more lightly and allusively the offensive thing, 
 rather hint and suggest than designate and name it ; 
 although by and by these new will in their turn be 
 discarded, and for exactly the same reasons which 
 brought about the dismissal of those which they them- 
 
 [' The phrase occurs in Ridley's works, see N.E.I).] 
 
 Q
 
 226 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 selves superseded. I must of necessity leave this 
 part of my subject, curious as it is, without illustration 
 by aid of examples ; l but no one even moderately 
 acquainted with the early literature of the Reforma- 
 tion can be ignorant of words having free course 
 therein, which now are not merely coarse, and thus 
 
 1 As not, however, turning on a very coarse matter, and 
 illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might 
 refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote 
 and his squire on the dismissal of ' regoldar ' from the language 
 of good society, and the substitution of 'erutar' in its room {Don 
 Quixote, iv. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to Pretus {Fam. ix. 22) 
 there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on the philosophy 
 of these forbidden words. See too Grimm's Worterbuch, s. v. 
 Koth. What has been said above on this matter has been said 
 so much better by Mr. Earle {Philology of the English Tongue, 
 § 547) that I cannot refuse to quote his words : ' It is well 
 known that many words in common use are masked, that they 
 do not express plainly the sense which they are notwithstanding 
 intended to convey. We do not always call a spade a spade. 
 We have recourse in certain well-known cases to forms of ex- 
 pression as distant from the thing meant as is any way consistent 
 with the intention of being understood. In such cases it will 
 have struck every philological observer that it becomes necessary 
 from time to time to replace these makeshifts with others of new 
 device. In fact, words used to convey a veiled meaning are 
 found to wear out very rapidly. The real thought pierces 
 through ; they soon stand declared for what they are, and not 
 for what they half feign to be. Words gradually drop the non- 
 essential, and display the pure essence of their nature. And the 
 real nature of every expression is the thought which is at the 
 root of its motive. As in cases of euphemism we know well 
 how this nature pierces through all disguise, casts off all drapery 
 and pretext and colour, and in the course of time stands forth 
 as the name of that thing which was to be ignored even while 
 it was indicated, even so it is in the case now before us.'
 
 v. Possibility of recalling Words. 227 
 
 under ban, but such as no one would employ who did 
 not mean to speak impurely and vilely. 
 
 I spoke in a former lecture of the many words 
 which have come back to us after a temporary absence, 
 and of the extent to which the language has been 
 reinforced and recruited by these. For there is this 
 difference between words and flexions, that of the last 
 what is once gone is gone for ever ; no human power 
 could ever recall them. A poet indeed may use 
 'picta'i' for ' pictce,' 'olli' for 'illi' (Virgil), or < glit- 
 terand ' for ' glittering ' (Spenser), but all such revivals 
 are purely artificial. It is not in his power to give a 
 new lease of life to these, even if he would ; and 
 when a German writer suggests that to abate the 
 excessive sibilation of our language we should recover 
 the plurals in ' n,' ' eyne,' ' housen,' ' hosen,' and the 
 like, he betrays his unacquaintance with the inexora- 
 ble laws of language, the impossibility by any human 
 effort of controlling or modifying these. But it is not 
 so with words; and I must needs think, in view of 
 this disposition of theirs to return, in view also of the 
 havoc which, as we have seen, various causes are 
 evermore effecting in the ranks of a language, that 
 much might be done by writers of authority and influ- 
 ence in the way of bringing back deserters, where they 
 are capable of yielding good service still, and placing 
 them in the ranks again; still more in that of detain- 
 ing words which, finding no honourable employment 
 among us, seem disposed to be gone, and even now 
 are keeping out of the way, though they have not as 
 yet actually disappeared. This would be the less 
 difficult from the fact that in almost every instance 
 these words, obsolete or obsolescent, which our literary 
 
 Q2
 
 228 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 English knows, or threatens to know, no more, live 
 on, as has already been noted, in one or more of our 
 provincial dialects; they do not therefore require, as 
 dead, that life should be breathed into them anew; 
 but only, as having retired into obscurity for a while, 
 that some one draw them forth from this obscurity 
 again. Of these there are multitudes. If I instance 
 a very few, it is not as specially recommending them 
 for rehabilitation, though some of them are well 
 worthy of it, and capable of doing good service still ; 
 but as showing to what kind of work I invite. 
 
 It is indeed to the poet mainly, although not ex- 
 clusively, that this task of retaining or recovering 
 words more or less archaic must belong. 'That high- 
 flying liberty of conceit ' which is proper to him will 
 justify liberties on his part which would be denied to 
 the less impassioned writer of prose. 1 It is felt by all 
 
 1 Jean Paul {sEsthetik, § 83) : Ueberhaupt bildet und nahrt 
 die Prose ihre Sprachkraft an der Poesie, denn diese muss 
 immer mit neuen Federn steigen, wenn die alten, die ihren 
 Flugeln ausfallen, die Prose zum Schreiben nimmt. Wie diese 
 aus Dichtkunst entstand, so wachst sie auch an ihr. Ewald 
 {Die poet. Biicher des Alien Bundes, p. 53) : Endlich aber ist 
 der Dichter nicht bloss so der freieste Herrscher und Schopfer 
 im Gebiete der Sprache seiner Zeit, er spricht auch am warm- 
 sten und frischesten aus der Zeit und dem Orte, woran seine 
 Empfindungen zunachst gekmipft sind ; seine Sprache ist bei 
 aller Wiirde und Hohe zugleich die heimischste und eigen- 
 thiimlichste, weil sie am reinsten und anspruchslosesten aus dem 
 ganzen menschlichen Sein des Einzelnen fliesst. Der Dichter 
 kann also freier und leichter abweichende Farben und Stoffe der 
 Sprache seiner n'achsten Heiniath und seiner eigenen Zeit ein- 
 fliessen lassen, und wahrend die Prosa eine einmal festgewordene 
 Form sehwer iindert, bereichert und verjiingt sich die Dichter-
 
 v. Poets recall Words. 229 
 
 that with the task which is before him, he has a right 
 to all the assistances which the language, strained to 
 the uttermost, is capable of yielding. This liberty 
 Tennyson in our own day has not been slow to use. 
 Thus 'to burgeon' had well-nigh disappeared from 
 the language since the time of Dryden, but has by 
 Tennyson on more occasions than one been employed. 1 
 1 Holts,' also, for wooded tops of hills, has been re- 
 covered by him. To him we owe the bringing back 
 of the verb ' to sough ' (' the soughing reeds ') ; the 
 noun Wordsworth had brought back already ('the 
 pine-woods' steady sough '). A poet too, though hardly 
 any other, might recall the fine old poetic adjective 
 ' brim,' with much the same variety of meaning as the 
 modern 'brave;' [see N.E.D. (s. v. 'breme').] But 
 not to him only such a privilege is conceded. The 
 verb ' to hearten ' was as good as dead till Mr. Grote, 
 by his frequent employment of it in his History of 
 Greece, gave it life again. Southey and others did 
 the like for ' to worsen,' surely a better word than ' to 
 deteriorate.' 'Overlord,' with which all readers of 
 Mr. Freeman must be familiar, and which is often a 
 vast improvement on ' suzerain,' is in like manner a 
 revival ; it occurs in the Ormidum. 
 
 sprache bestandig durch Aufnahme des Dialectischen, welches 
 in die herrschende Prosa nicht ubergegangen, und durch den 
 Eindrang von Stoffen der Volkssprache, welche doch immer 
 mannigfaltiger ist, weil die unerschop niche Quelle lebendiger 
 Sprache auch unvermerkt sich immer ver'andert und fortbildet. 
 Compare Goethe, Werke, 1836, vol. v. p. 68. 
 
 [' The word burgeon was used by Cary (in his Dante), 
 Scott, Kingsley (1848) before its appearance in In Memoriam 
 (1850), seeN.E.D.]
 
 230 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 But how much more in this line of things might 
 be accomplished than yet has been done. ' To sagg,' 
 a Shakespearian word, too good to lose, is alive almost 
 everywhere in England except in our literary dialect ; 
 thus a tired horse ' saggs ' his head ; an ill-hung gate 
 ' saggs ' on its hinges. ' To gaster ' and ' to flayte,' * —   
 they are synonyms, but the first is rather to terrify, 
 and the second to scare, — are frequent in the Puritan 
 writers of East Anglia ; and still alive on men's lips. 
 Perhaps ' to fleck ' is not gone ; nor yet ' to shimmer ; ' 
 but both are in danger of going. Coleridge sup- 
 posed that he had invented 'aloofness;' it is well 
 worthy of acceptance; but he only revived a word 
 which was in use two hundred years before; [see 
 N.E.D. s. v.] 'Well-wilier,' 'ill-wilier,' both fre- 
 quent in North's Plutarch, are good and unpretending 
 words. ' Litherness,' as indicating an utter worth- 
 lessness of character, has gone, without leaving 
 a substitute behind it. ' Elfish ' 2 and ' einshness,' 
 both of them implying a certain inborn and mis- 
 chievous waywardness, have done the same; [but 
 they are returning into use.] Daniel (1603), among 
 other grand qualities which he ascribes to the English 
 race, describes them as ' attemptive,' or prompt for 
 high attempts. Does any other word say exactly 
 what this says ? ' Damish ' (Rogers), applied in 
 blame to proud imperious women, 'wearish' in the 
 sense of small, weak, shrunken (thus, ' a wearish old 
 
 [' See Halliwell (s. w.Jlaite).] 
 ? Thus Chaucer : 
 
 ' He seemeth elvish by his countenaunce, 
 For unto no wyght doth he daliaunce.' 
 
 Prioresses Tale.
 
 v. Words ill lost. 231 
 
 man,' Burton), ' masterous,' or ' maistrous ' as Milton 
 spells it, in that of overbearing, ' kittle,' an epithet 
 given to persons of a certain delicate organization, 
 and thus touchy and easily offended, ' soggy,' an 
 epithet which in Devonshire would still be given to 
 a field soaked with wet, ' birdwitted,' or incapable of 
 keeping the attention fixed for long on any single 
 point (Bacon), ' afterwitted,' applied by Tyndale to 
 one having what the French call Vesprit de I'escalier, 
 who always remembers what he should have said, when, 
 having left the room, it is too late to say it, with others 
 innumerable, may each of them singly be no serious 
 loss ; but when these losses may be counted by hun- 
 dreds and thousands, they are no slight impoverish- 
 ment of our vocabulary ; and assuredly it would not be 
 impossible to win some of these back again. There 
 are others, such as Baxter's ' word-warriors,' strivers, 
 that is, about words, as ' hopelosts ' (Grimeston's 
 Polybins, and responding to the Greek aawrot), as 
 'bookhunger ' (Lord Brooke), as 'little-ease,' a place, 
 that is, of painful restraint, as ' realmrape ' (= usur- 
 pation, Mirror for Magistrates), as ' housedoves,' 
 effeminate stay-at-home people (North), the same 
 who in Sussex would have the name of ' fire-spaniels,' 
 spaniels, that is, which lie before the fire, as ' to wit- 
 wanton' (Fuller warns men that they do not 'witwanton 
 with God '), to ' cankerfret ' (' sin cankerfrets the soul,' 
 Rogers), which all, though never in popular use, seem 
 to me happier than that they should be allowed to 
 disappear. Great caution and moderation, it is true, 
 should be used in this reviving or detaining of words 
 which it would be only too easy to put to flight. 
 Quintilian has some prudent warnings here. Of new
 
 232 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 words, he says, the oldest are the best; of old the 
 newest ; while Seneca mocks at the ' antiquaries,' as 
 they were called; men, as he describes them, who 
 spoke the Twelve Tables; for whom Gracchus and 
 Curio were too recent. 1 
 
 We have to thank the American branch of the 
 English-speaking race that we have not lost ' freshet ' 
 (an exquisite word, used by Milton), 'snag' (Spen- 
 ser), 'bluff,' 'kedge,' 'slick,' 2 'to whittle,' 'to cave 
 in,' 'to prink,' 'to rile,' 'to snarl' (= to entangle). 
 They are often counted as American neologies, but 
 are indeed nothing of the kind. There is scarcely 
 one of them, of which examples could not be found 
 in our literature, and in provincial dialects they are 
 current every one to this present day. 3 Even 'the 
 fall,' as equivalent to the autumn, is not properly 
 American ; being as old as Dryden, and older. 4 
 
 1 Gerber, Sprache als Kuiist, vol. i. p. 436. 
 
 2 'Slick' is indeed only another form of 'sleek.' Thus 
 Fuller (Pisgah Sight of Palestine, vol. ii. p. 190) : ' Sure I am 
 this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet, was 
 fairer, finer, slicker, smoother, more exact, than any fabric the 
 earth afforded.' 
 
 3 Nail, Dialect and Provincialisms of East Anglia, s. vv. 
 
 4 ' What crowds of patients the town-doctor kills, 
 
 Or how last fall he raised the weekly bills.' 
 
 So in the answer to Marlowe's Passionate Pilgrim, ascribed to 
 Raleigh : 
 
 ' A honey tongue, a heart of gall, 
 Is fancy's spring; but sorrow's fall.' 
 
 On this matter of American-English compare a very interesting 
 paper, with the title, ' Inroads upon English,' in Black-wood's 
 Magazine, Oct. 1867, p. 399, sqq.
 
 v. What our Dialects are. 233 
 
 ' Betterment,' too, as equivalent to improvement, is in 
 The Pilgrim's Progress ; and in the writings of Jackson. 
 
 But besides these deserters, of which some at least 
 might with great advantage be recalled to the ranks, 
 there are other words, which have never found a place 
 in our literary English, that yet might be profitably 
 adopted into it. A time arrives for a language, when, 
 apart from the recoveries I have just been speaking 
 of, its own local and provincial dialects are almost 
 the only sources from which it can obtain acquisitions, 
 such as shall really constitute an increase of its wealth ; 
 while yet such additions from one quarter or another 
 are most needful, if it is to find any compensations 
 for the waste which is evermore going forward of the 
 wealth that in time past it possessed, if, in fact, it is 
 not day by day to grow poorer. We have seen how 
 words wear out, become unserviceable, how the glory 
 that clothed them once disappears, as the light fades 
 from the hills ; how they drop away from the stock 
 and stem of the language, as dead leaves from their 
 parent tree. Others therefore, a newer growth, must 
 supply the place of these, if the foliage is not to grow 
 sparser and thinner every day. 
 
 Before, however, we turn to the dialects with any 
 confident expectation of obtaining effectual help from 
 them, we must form a juster estimate of what they 
 really are than is commonly entertained ; they must 
 be redeemed in our minds from that unmerited con- 
 tempt and neglect with which they are by too many 
 regarded. We are prone to think of a dialect, as of a 
 degraded, distorted, and vulgarized form of the classi- 
 cal language ; all its departures from this being for us 
 violations of grammar, or injuries which in one shape
 
 234 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 or another it has suffered from the uneducated and 
 illiterate by whom mainly it is employed. But all 
 this is very far from the case. A dialect may not have 
 our grammar, but it has its own. 1 If it have here 
 and there a distorted or mutilated word, much oftener 
 what we esteem such embodies some curious fact 
 in the earlier history of the language. A dialect is 
 one of the many forms in which a language once ex- 
 isted ; but one, as an eminent French writer has ex- 
 pressed it, which has had misfortunes ; 2 or which at 
 any rate has not had the good fortune that befell High- 
 German in Germany, Castilian in Spain, Tuscan in 
 
 1 See in proof Barnes' Grammar and Glossary of the Dorset 
 Dialect in the Transactions of the Philological Society, 1864. 
 
 - Sainte-Beuve : Je definis un patois, une ancienne langue 
 qui a eu des malheurs. Littre {Hist, de la Langue Francaise, 
 vol. ii. p. 92) : Les faits de langue abondent dans les patois. 
 Parce qu'ils offrent parfois un mot de la langue litteraire estropie 
 ou quelque perversion manifeste de la syntaxe reguliere, on a 
 ete porte a conclure que le reste est a l'avenant, et qu'ils sont, 
 non pas une formation independante et originale, mais une 
 corruption de l'idionie cultive qui, tombe en des bouches mal 
 apprises, y subit tous les supplices de la distorsion. II n'en est 
 rien ; quand on ote ces taches peu nombreuses et peu piofondes, 
 on trouve un noyau sain et entier. Ce serait se faire une idee 
 erronee que de considerer un patois comme du francais altere ; 
 il n'y a eu aucun moment ou ce que nous appelons aujourd'hui 
 le francais ait ete uniformement parle sur toute la surface de la 
 France; et, par consequent, il n'y a pas eu de moment non plus 
 oil il ait pu s'alterer chez les paysans et le peuple des villes pour 
 devenir un patois. Elsewhere the same writer says (vol. ii. 
 p. 150): Sauf l'usage des bons ecrivains et de la societe polie, 
 sauf l'elaboration grammaticale (double avantage que je suis loin 
 de vouloir attenuer), la langue litteraire n'est, non plus, qu'un 
 patois ou dialecte eleve a la suprematie, et elle a, comme les 
 autres, ses fautes et ses meprises.
 
 v. Freedom and Freshness of a Dialed. 235 
 
 Italy ; — that namely of being elevated, under favour- 
 able circumstances not accorded to others, above its 
 compeers and competitors to the dignity of the classi- 
 cal language of the land. As a consequence it will 
 not have received the development, nor undergone the 
 elaboration, which have been the portion of its more 
 successful rival ; but for this very reason it will often 
 have retained a freedom, a freshness, and a ?iaivete 
 which the other has in large measure foregone and 
 lost. 1 
 
 Of its words, idioms, turns of speech, many which 
 
 1 Littre {Hist, de la Langue Francaise, vol. ii. p. 130) : Un 
 patois n'a pas d'ecrivains qui le fixent, dans le sens oil Ton dit 
 que les bons auteurs fixent une langue ; un patois n'a pas les 
 termes de haute poesie, de haute eloquence, de haul style, vu 
 qu'il est place sur un plan oil les sujets qui component tout cela 
 ne lui appartiennent plus. C'est ce qui lui donne une apparence 
 de familiarite naive, de simplicite narquoise, de rudesse grossiere, 
 de grace rustique. Mais, sous cette apparence, qui provient de 
 sa condition meme, est un fonds solide de bon et vieux francais 
 qu'il faut toujours consulter. Compare Ampere, La Formation 
 de la Langue Francaiie, p. 381 ; and Schleicher {Die Deutsche 
 Sprache, p. no) : Die Mundarten nun sind die natiirlichen, nach 
 den Gesetzen der sprachgeschichtlichen Veranderungen gewor- 
 denen Formen der deutschen Sprache, im Gegensatze zu der 
 mehr oder minder gemachten und schulmeisterisch geregelten 
 und zugestutzten Sprache der Schrift. Schon hieraus folgt der 
 hohe Werth derselben fur die wissenschaftliche Erforschung 
 unserer Sprache ; hier ist eine reiche Fiille von Worten und 
 Formen, die, an sich gut und echt, von der Schriftsprache 
 verschmaht wurden ; hier finden wir manches, was wir zur 
 Erklarung der alteren Sprachdenkmale, ja zur Erkenntniss 
 der jetzigen Schriftsprache verwerthen konnen, abgesehen von 
 dem sprachgeschichtlichen, dem lautphysiologischen Intereese, 
 welches die ubcraus reiche Mannigfaltigkeit unserer Mundarten 
 bietet.
 
 236 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 we are ready, in our half-knowledge, to set down as 
 vulgarisms, solecisms of speech, violations of the pri- 
 mary rules of grammar, do no more than attest that 
 those who employ them have from some cause or 
 another not kept abreast with the progress which the 
 language has made. The usages are only local in 
 the fact that, having once been employed everywhere 
 and by all, they have now receded from the lips of all 
 except those in some certain country districts, who 
 have been more faithful than others to the traditions 
 of the past. Thus there are districts of England 
 where for ' we sing,' ' ye sing,' 'they sing,' they decline 
 their plurals, ' we singen,' ' ye singen,' ' they singen.' 
 This was not indeed the original plural, but was that 
 form of it which, coming up about the time of the 
 Ormulum, was dying out in Spenser's. He indeed 
 constantly employs it, 1 but after him it becomes ever 
 
 1 It must be owned that Spenser does not fairly represent the 
 language of his time, or indeed of anytime, affecting as he does 
 a certain artificial archaism both of words and forms ; and this 
 unfortunately with no sufficient knowledge of the past history 
 of the language to prevent him from falling into various mis- 
 takes. See as bearing out this charge the article <yede' in 
 Skeat. Some call in question the justice of this charge, and 
 will fain have it that he does but write the oldest English of his 
 time. I cannot so regard it. Ben Jonson, born only twenty years 
 later, could not have been mistaken ; and with all its severity 
 there is a truth in his observation, ' Spenser, in affecting the 
 ancients, writ no language.' And Daniel, born some ten years 
 later, implicitly repeats the charge : 
 
 ' Let others sing of knights and paladins 
 
 In aged accents and untimely words. ' 
 
 See too the remarkable Epistle prefixed by the anonymous Editor 
 
 to his Shepherd's Calendar, where the writer glories in the
 
 v. Old English and Bad English. 237 
 
 rarer in our literary English. In the Homilies I have 
 met it once, in Drayton, 1 and even so late as in 
 Fuller : but in his time it quite disappears. 
 
 Now of those who retain such forms you should 
 esteem not that they violate the laws of the language, 
 but that they have taken their permanent stand at that 
 which was only a point or stage of transition for it, 
 and which it has now left behind. A countryman will 
 nowadays say, ' The price of corn ris last market-day,' 
 or ' I will axe him his name ; ' or ' I tell ji'<?,' and you 
 
 archaic character of the author on whom he is annotating. In 
 the matter, however, which is treated above Ben Jonson was at 
 one with him, himself expressing a strong regret that these in- 
 flexions had not been retained. ' The persons plural,' he says 
 (English Grammar, c. xvii. ), 'keep the termination of the first 
 person singular. In former times till about the reign of King 
 Henry the Eighth, they were wont to be formed by adding en ; 
 thus loven, sayen, complainen. But now (whatsoever is the cause) 
 it hath quite grown out of use, and that other so generally pre- 
 vailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again ; albeit (to 
 tell you my opinion) I am persuaded that the lack hereof, well 
 considered, will be found a great blemish to our tongue. For 
 seeing time and person be as it were the right and left hand of a 
 verb, what can the maiming bring else, but a lameness to the 
 whole body ? ' This statement, let me observe by the way, 
 needs to be a little modified. Until about Chaucer this termi- 
 nation in ' en ' was common in perfects ; thus ' they makeden ' 
 = they made ; but not in presents ; thus not ' they maken,' but 
 the older ' they maketh.' Neither Chaucer, however, nor Gower 
 observes this distinction ; but, as usual, analogy carries the day ; 
 what was good for one tense is assumed to be good also for 
 another ; and by both these poets ' they maken ' is as freely used 
 as ' they makeden ' — this also in due time, as Jonson remarks, to 
 give place to our present use. 
 
 1 ' The happy shepherds minsen on the plain.
 
 2 38 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 will be tempted to set these phrases down as barba- 
 rous English. They are not such at all. ' Ris ' or 
 ' risse ' is a form of the preterite plural (' rison ' ) of the 
 OE. ' rlsan,' 'to rise;' 'to axe ' is not a mispronun- 
 ciation of 'to ask,' but the constant form which in 
 southern English this word assumed ; while ' ye ' is 
 treated as an accusative by the dramatists of the Eliza- 
 bethan period ; [Prof. Skeat suggests that the ' ye ' 
 here is merely an unemphatic 'you']. 1 ' Waps,' 
 which we hear constantly, is not a malformation of 
 ' wasp,' but only the earlier form of the word, 
 'wasps' or 'wasfs' in Old English. ' Ouren,' or 
 ' ourn,' as our rustics in the south of England so 
 freely use it (cf. Gen. xxvi. 20, Wiclif, and often), 
 
 1 Genin {Recreations Philologiques, vol. i. p. 71) says to the 
 same effect : II n'y a gueres de faute de francais, je dis faute 
 generale, accreditee, qui n'ait sa raison d'etre, et ne put au besoin 
 produire ses lettres de noblesse ; et souvent mieux en regie que 
 celles des locutions qui ont usurpe leur place au soleil. The 
 French Academy, in the Preface to the last edition of the Die- 
 tionnaire Historique de la Langue Francaise, p. xv, warns 
 against similar acts of injustice, into which, trying the past by 
 the rules of the present, we are in clanger of falling : Ces 
 ecrivains y seront quelquefois defendus contre d'indiscretes cri- 
 tiques, qui leur ont reproche comme des fautes de langage ce qui 
 n'etait que 1'emploi legitime de la langue de leur temps. A 
 chaque epoque s'etablissent des habitudes, des conventions, des 
 regies meme, auxquelles n'ont pu assurement se conformer par 
 avance les ecrivains des epoques anterieures, et qu'il n'est ni 
 juste ni raisonnable de leur opposer, comme s'il s'agissait de 
 ces premiers principes dont l'autorite est absolue et universelle. 
 C'est pourtant en vertu de cette jurisprudence retroactive qu'ont 
 ete condamnees, chez d'excellents auteurs, des manieres de 
 parler alors admises, et auxquelles un long abandon n'a pas 
 toujours enleve ce qu'elles avaient de grace et de vivacite\
 
 v. Old English and Bad English. 239 
 
 has been disallowed by those classes with which 
 rests the final decision as to what shall stand in 
 a language and what shall not ; but it is in itself as 
 correct as ' ours.' ' Hern ' too for ' hers ' is frequent 
 in Wiclif. When you hear a country lad speaking 
 dissyllabically of ' nestes,' where you would say ' nests,' 
 he is only clinging to a form which you have let go, 
 but which will meet you in every page of Chaucer, 
 and in almost every one of Spenser. The upper 
 classes do not say now, ' It is all " along " (" gelang ") 
 of you that this happened ; ' but it is good English, 
 see N.E.D., p. 250; so too is 'tell on us' (1 Sam. 
 xxvii. 11). You are not indeed to conclude from all 
 this that such forms are open to you to employ, or 
 that they would be good English now. They would 
 not ; being departures from that present use and cus- 
 tom, which must constitute our standard in what we 
 speak and write ; just as in our buying and selling 
 we must use the current coin of the realm, not attempt 
 to pass money which long since has been called in, 
 whatever intrinsic value it may possess. 
 
 The same may be said of certain ways of pronounc- 
 ing words, not now in use except among the lower 
 classes; thus, 'contrary,' 'mischievous,' 'blasphe- 
 mous,' instead of 'contrary,' 'mischievous,' 'blasphe- 
 mous.' It would be easy to show by quotations from 
 our poets that these are no mispronunciations, but 
 only the retention of an earlier pronunciation by the 
 people, after the higher classes have abandoned it. 1 
 
 1 A single proof may in each case suffice : 
 1 Our wills and fates do so contrary run.' — Shakespeare. 
 ' Ne let mischievous witches with their charms.' — Spenser. 
 ' O argument blasphemous, false and proud. ' — Milton.
 
 240 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 And let me here observe how well worth your while 
 it will prove to watch for provincial words and inflex- 
 ions, local idioms and modes of pronunciation ; and 
 where you meet to take notice of them. Count no- 
 thing in this kind beneath your attention. Do not at 
 once ascribe any departure from what you have been 
 used to, either in grammar, or pronunciation, or mean- 
 ing ascribed to words, to the ignorance or stupidity of 
 the speaker or writer. Thus refrain from counting 
 ' em ' a mutilation of ' them.' It is a word which had 
 its own place in the language, though it has not been 
 able to keep this. If you hear ' nuncheon,' as indeed 
 you always will hear on the lips of our Hampshire 
 ' homespuns ' (Shakespeare), do not at once set this 
 down for a malformation of ' luncheon,' 1 (they are 
 really independent words), nor ' yeel ' 2 as an ignorant 
 mispronunciation of ' eel.' If a ' boil ' in the language 
 of your poorer neighbours becomes a 'bile,' count 
 that they have done no more than retain the older 
 and indeed the regular pronunciation which you have 
 left behind ; [see N.E.D.] Indeed you will find the 
 
 1 In Cotgrave's French and English Dictionary, both words 
 occur : ' ressie, an afternoon's nunc h ion or drinking' (cf. Hicdi- 
 bras, i. I, 346 : 'They took their breakfasts or their nuncheons'), 
 and ' caribot, 2.lunchion, a big piece of bread ' ; compare Gay : 
 ' When hungry thou stood'st staring like an oaf, 
 I sliced the hmcheon from the barley loaf.' 
 Miss Baker {Northamptonshire Glossary) explains ' lunch ' as 
 'a large lump of bread, or other edible ; "he helped himself 
 to a good lunch of cake."' Compare Florio's Montaigne, p. 
 162 : 'They used to nonchion between meals.' [For the history 
 of the word ' nunchion ' see Skeat.] 
 
 - Holland {Pliny, vol. ii. p. 428, and often) writes it so ; and 
 see on this initial 'y,' Barnes, Dorsetshire Poems, passim.
 
 v. Richness of Dialects. 241 
 
 word so spelt by Sir John Cheke, s also in the first 
 edition of the Authorized Version of Scripture (161 1). 
 Our best bred ancestors not many generations back, 
 would all have spoken of a 'jinte' of meat, while 
 rhymes such as ' join ' and ' wine ' (they are of con- 
 stant occurrence in the poets of the seventeenth cen- 
 tury) were by no means once those imperfect rhymes 
 which we regard them now. Lists and collections of 
 provincial usage, such as I have suggested, always 
 have their value. If you cannot turn them to profit 
 yourselves, and they may not stand in close enough 
 connexion with your own studies for this, there are 
 always those who will thank you for them ; and to 
 whom the humblest of these collections, carefully and 
 conscientiously made, will be in one way or other of 
 real assistance. 1 Philological experts, it is probable, 
 will not thank you much for your etymologies, which, 
 indeed, may generally be omitted with advantage ; 
 but they will for your facts and for your words. There 
 is the more need to urge this at the present, because, 
 notwithstanding the tenacity with which our country 
 folk cling to their old forms and uses, still these must 
 now be rapidly growing fewer ; and there are forces, 
 moral and material, at work in England, which will 
 probably cause that of those now surviving, the greater 
 number will within the next fifty years have disap- 
 peared. Many even now are only to be gathered up 
 
 1 An article On English Pronouns Personal in the Trans- 
 actions of the Philological Society, vol. i. p. 277, attests the 
 excellent service which an accurate acquaintance with provin- 
 cial usages may render in the investigation of perplexing pheno- 
 mena in English grammar. Compare Guest, History of English 
 Rhythms, vol. ii. p. 207 [p. 494 of the second edition]. 
 
 R
 
 242 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 by patient gleaners like Miss Baker and Miss Jackson ; 
 and by them only from such scattered and remote 
 villages as have not yet been exposed to the ravages 
 of the schoolmaster, or the inroads of the railway. 
 
 What has been just now said of our provincial 
 English, namely, that it is often old English rather 
 than bad English, is not less true of many so-called 
 Americanisms. 1 There are parts of America where 
 ' het ' is still the participle of ' to heat ' (if our Autho- 
 rized Version had not undergone some very un- 
 authorized revision, we should so read it at Dan. iii. 
 19 to this day); where 'holp' still survives as the 
 perfect of ' to help ; ' ' pled ' (as in Spenser) of ' to 
 plead.' But bad English is sometimes found in 
 American authors. Longfellow uses ' dove ' incor- 
 rectly as the perfect of ' dive ; ' nor is this a poetical 
 license alone, I lately met the same in a well-written 
 American book of prose. 
 
 The dialects then are worthy of respectful study — 
 and if in their grammar, so in their vocabulary no less. 
 If the sage or the scholar were required to invent a 
 word which should designate the slight meal claimed 
 in some of our southern counties by the labourer 
 before he begins his mowing in the early dawn, he 
 might be sorely perplexed to do it. The Dorsetshire 
 labourer, who demands his ' dewbit,' has solved the 
 difficulty. In the same dialect they express in a 
 single word that a house has a northern aspect ; it is 
 'back-sunned.' You have marked the lighting of 
 the sky between the horizon and the clouds when 
 the latter are about to break up and disappear. 
 
 1 See Barllett, Dictionary of Americanisms, passim.
 
 v. Richness of Dialects. 243 
 
 Whatever name you gave it you would hardly improve 
 on that of the ' weather-gleam,' which in some of our 
 dialects it bears. Then, too, there is a certain humour 
 in calling frogs ' fen-nightingales ; ' a good scolding ' a 
 dish of tongues ' (Sussex dialect) ; tea ' chattering 
 broth ' (the same). I had long supposed that ' chair- 
 days,' the beautiful name for those days of old age 
 when strong outward activity has ceased, was of 
 Shakespeare's own invention ; occurring as it does in 
 young Clifford's pathetic lament for his slain father. 1 
 But this is a mistake; in Lancashire, as I learn, 
 the phrase is current still. And this is what we 
 find continually, namely, that the true art of word- 
 making, which is hidden from the wise and learned 
 of this world, is revealed to the husbandman, the 
 mechanic, the child. Spoken as the dialects are by 
 the actual tillers of the soil, they will often be in- 
 conceivably rich in words having to do with the pro- 
 cesses of husbandry ; thus ripe corn blown about by 
 strong winds, or beaten down by rain or hail, may in 
 East Anglia be said either to be 'baffled,' or 'nickled,' 
 or ' snaffled,' or ' shuckled,' or ' wilted,' 2 each of 
 these terms having its own shade of meaning ; when 
 thoroughly soaked and spoiled by wet, it is ' water- 
 slain.' Spoken by those who are in constant and 
 close contact with external nature, the dialects will 
 often possess a far richer and more varied nomencla- 
 ture to set forth the various and changing features of 
 
 1 2 Henry VI. , act v. sc. 2. 
 
 2 See Nail, Dialect of East Anglia, s. vv. 'To wilt,' pro- 
 vincial with us, is not so in America (Marsh, Lectures, i860, 
 p. 668). 
 
 R 2
 
 244 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 this than the literary language itself. Professor Max 
 Miiller, in a passage of singular eloquence on the 
 subject of ' dialectical regeneration,' 1 claims the 
 dialects as the true feeders of a language : ' We can 
 hardly form an idea of the unbounded resources of 
 dialects. When literary languages have stereotyped 
 one general term, their dialects will supply fifty, each 
 with its own special shade of meaning. If new com- 
 binations of thought are evolved in the progress of 
 society, dialects will readily supply the required names 
 from the store of their so-called superfluous words.' 2 
 
 1 Lectures on the Science of Langtiage, vol. i. p. 68. 
 
 2 Compare Heyse, System der Sprachwissenschaft, p. 299 ; 
 and Geruzez, who in his admirable Hist, de la Li 1 1 e rat lire Fran- 
 caise, vol. i. p. 19, has said on this matter : Ce recrutement 
 necessaire doit s'operer non par voie d'invasion tumultueuse ou 
 de capricieuse creation. II y a plusieurs moyens d'y pourvoir 
 regulierement : c'est d'abord la reprise des mots et des tournures 
 qui ont ete delaisses par inadvertence ou juste declaim En 
 effet chez nos vieux auteurs qui ont ete des maitres et qui ne 
 sont plus des modeles, il y a bien des richesses enfouies qui ne 
 demandent qu'a reparaitre. Les langues anciennes, meres de la 
 notre, peuvent encore lui fournir quelques aliments. Nous 
 pouvons aussi, avec de grandes precautions toutefois, faire 
 d'heureux emprunts a nos voisins. Mais la source la plus saine 
 et la plus abondante, la vraie fontaine de Jouvence pourlalangue 
 litteraire, c'est la langue populaire, qui fermente toujours; ce 
 sont les dialectes speciaux des arts, des metiers, des jeux meme, 
 oil les mots naissent spontanement des mouvements et des 
 besoins de la pensee et recoivent une empreinte vivante de la 
 vie meme de l'intelligence. Ceux-la seuls sont de bonne venue 
 et destines a vivre. Les mots qu'on forge dans le cabinet 
 manquent de grace et durent peu. Nisard (Curiosiie's de VEty- 
 mol. Fratic. p. 90) : Les patois sont a la fois l'asile oil s'est 
 refugiee en partie l'ancienne langue francaise, et le depot oil 
 se gardent les elements de la nouvelle.
 
 v. Fads, Boulders. 245 
 
 Thus a brook, a streamlet, a rivulet are all very well, 
 but what discriminating power do they possess as 
 compared with a ' burn,' a ' beck,' l a ' gill,' a ' force,' 
 North-country words, each with a special signification 
 of its own ? 
 
 Words from the local dialects are continually 
 slipping into the literary or standard language, and 
 making a home for themselves there. Thus ' fads,' 
 as equivalent to silly whims, is no invention of the 
 present day, but a North-country word which not 
 long ago reached us from the provinces. ' Boulder,' 
 which is of quite recent introduction into standard 
 English, has reached us from the same quarter. ' Frac- 
 tious,' in like manner, which is not found in our early 
 literature, seems to have travelled by the same paths ; 
 [see Skeat.] ' Donkey,' which is neither in Todd's 
 Johnson, nor in Richardson, and ' pony,' not quite so 
 new, have to all appearance done the same. ' Grue- 
 some' (cp. the German 'grausam'), which has always 
 lived in Scotland, is creeping back into English (it is 
 used by Browning) ; with words not a few from the 
 same higher latitudes, as ' blink,' ' bonnie,' ' braw,' 
 'caller,' 'canny,' 'canty,' 'daft,' 'douce,' 'dour,' 
 ' drumly,' ' eerie,' ' fash,' ' feckless,' ' fey,' ' foregather,' 
 ' glamour,' ' glint,' ' gloaming,' 'glower,' ' ingle,' ' lilt,' 
 'raid,' 'skirl,' 'uncanny,' 'winsome,' all excellent 
 in their kind. Wordsworth has given allowance to 
 'force,' the Scandinavian word for a waterfall; and 
 
 1 A 'hum' and 'beck' may be distinguished thus: 'A burn 
 winds slowly along meadows and originates from small springs, 
 whereas a beck is formed by water collected on the side of moun- 
 tains, and proceeds with a rapid stream ' (Willan).
 
 246 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 for the dialect words 'beck' and 'burn' as well. 1 
 ' Clever' is an excellent example of a low-born word 
 which almost without observation has found its way 
 into good society ; though meaning one thing in our 
 dialects, another in America (see Webster), and an- 
 other in our standard English. Sir Thomas Browne 
 noted it two centuries ago as an East Anglian pro- 
 vincialism, and Ray as a dialect word. Barlow in his 
 Dictionary, 1772, warns us that 'it should never 
 make its way into books,' while Johnson protests 
 against it as 'a low word, scarcely ever used but in 
 burlesque or conversation.' The facts of the case did 
 not, even when he wrote, quite bear this statement 
 out; still there can be little doubt that it is zparvejiu, 
 which has been gradually struggling up to the posi- 
 tion which it has now obtained. ' Stingy' was in Sir 
 
 ; What use Luther made of the popular language in his 
 translation of the Bible he has himself told us, and in this is one 
 secret of its epoch-marking character. These are his words : 
 Man muss nicht die Buchstaben in der lateinischen Sprache 
 fragen, wie man soil deutsche reden ; sondern man muss die 
 Mutter im Hause, die Kinder auf den Gassen, den gemeinen 
 Mann auf dem Markte darum fragen, und denselben auf das 
 Maul sehen, wie sie reden. What a real acquisition the verb 
 ' klirren ' is in German. It is a provincial word which first 
 found its way into a written book in 1738, and not into the 
 German Dictionaries till a good deal later (see Grimm, Worter- 
 buch, s. v. ). The French ' gamin ' dates no farther back than 
 1835, see my Study of Words, 20th ed. p. 226. Montaigne, who 
 owes not a little of his reputation to his wonderful style, pleads 
 guilty to the charge brought in his lifetime against him, that 
 he employed not a few words and idioms which, till he gave 
 them a wider circulation, belonged to his native Gascony alone. 
 Goethe too has obtained general allowance for words not a few, 
 which were only provincial before him.
 
 v. Tiny, Fun, Sulky. 247 
 
 Thomas Browne's time and in his estimation 'a new 
 coined word.' It was in all likelihood, to speak more 
 exactly, a provincial word making its way in his time 
 into more general circulation. ' Tiny ' was ' a bur- 
 lesque word,' whatever this may mean, for Johnson, 
 and ' touchy ' a ' low ' one. ' Fun ' too, of which our 
 earlier Dictionaries know nothing, was 'a low cant 
 word' in his day and in his estimation. 'Sulky' 
 first puts in an appearance in Todd's Johnson, and 
 ' sombre ' about the same time. 
 
 So much has been done in this matter, the lan- 
 guage has been so largely reinforced, so manifestly 
 enriched by words which either it has received back 
 after a longer or shorter absence, or which in later 
 days it has drawn from the dialects and enlisted for 
 general service, as to afford abundant encouragement 
 for attempting much more in the same direction. 
 But these suggestions must for the present suffice. 
 I reserve for my next lecture the other half of 
 my treatment of a subject very far from being half 
 exhausted. 
 
 I would not willingly leave this part of my subject 
 without something said on the main dialects of the 
 land, as they have made their several contributions to 
 that which is now recognized here and wherever 
 English is spoken as the rule and standard by which 
 all other English must be tried, and, in the measure 
 of its departure from this, condemned. The clear 
 recognition of the fact that there is not one Old 
 English, but several, that Modern English, though 
 indebted most largely to one of these, is largely in- 
 debted to them all, being the result of a tacit com- 
 promise between them, is perhaps the most important
 
 248 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 step in advance which the study of English in recent 
 times has made. The recognition of this belongs to the 
 last forty years, and one hardly exaggerates who has 
 said that ' it has brought order, where there was only 
 chaos and confusion before.' Mr. Garnett has the 
 honour of being the first, not indeed to call attention 
 to the varying dialects, but the first to classify them, 
 to register their several peculiarities, to define the 
 areas over which they severally prevailed, and to esti- 
 mate the contributions which they severally made to 
 our standard English. This he did in an article in 
 the Quarterly Review, 1836, reprinted in his Philo- 
 logical Essays, 1859, pp. 41-77. The fact that there 
 was a Northern, a Southern, and a Midland English, 
 each with its own characteristics, and that the English 
 which we speak and write is the result of the triumph, 
 a partial not a complete triumph, of one among them, 
 was known long before. I quote in proof a remark- 
 able passage from Puttenham's Art of Poesy, of date 
 1589 (I need hardly observe that by a 'maker' he 
 means a poet) : 'Our maker therefore at these days 
 shall not follow Piers Plowman, nor Gower, nor Lyd- 
 gate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out 
 of use with us : neither shall he take the terms of 
 Northern-men, such as they use in daily talk, whether 
 they be noblemen, or gentlemen, or their best clerks, 
 all is a matter ; nor in effect any speech used beyond 
 the river of Trent. Though no man can deny but that 
 theirs is the purer English Saxon at this day, yet it is 
 not so courtly nor so current as our Southern English 
 is ; no more is the far Western man's speech. Ye 
 shall therefore take the usual speech of the Court, and 
 that of London and the shires lying about London
 
 V. 
 
 Three Dialects. 249 
 
 within sixty miles, and not much above.' We have 
 since improved upon Puttenham's nomenclature, his 
 ' Southern ' being what we now call Midland, even 
 as we are wont more accurately to define the exact 
 area over which this, destined to be the ruling dialect 
 of the land, was spoken. In explanation of the steps 
 by which this English obtained its pre-eminence, I 
 quote, but with great reluctance immensely abridging, 
 some words of Mr. Freeman in his Norman Conquest, 
 vol. v. p. 541 : 'The fourteenth century had to fix 
 what kind of English should become the acknowledged 
 language of England ; which of the many dialects of 
 English should come to the front and become the 
 standard English tongue. The Northern dialect, the 
 Anglian of Northumberland, modified under Scandi- 
 navian influences, had no chance. The tongue of 
 York was not likely to become the standard of lan- 
 guage at the Court either of Winchester or of Westmin- 
 ster. It might perhaps have been thought among the 
 various dialects the one which would come to the 
 front would be the true Saxon speech of the South, 
 the tongue both of the elder and the younger capital. 
 But in cases of this kind, when dialects are left to them- 
 selves, that which wins in the long run is likely to be 
 a dialect which holds a middle place between extremes 
 at both ends. It was neither the Northern nor the 
 Southern, neither the broadly Anglian nor the broadly 
 Saxon variety of our language which was to set the 
 standard of the English tongue. Without pretending 
 to fix the geographical limit very exactly, there can 
 be no doubt that the English language, in the form 
 which has been classical ever since the fourteenth 
 century, is the language of the shires bordering on
 
 250 Diminutions of English. Lect - 
 
 the great monastic region of the Fenland, the tongue 
 of Northamptonshire, Huntingdonshire, Rutland, and 
 Holland. Classical English is neither Northern nor 
 Southern, but Midland.' 
 
 Other excellent words from another pen on the 
 same matter are as follows : ' In the thirteenth and 
 fourteenth centuries the three English dialects — the 
 Southern, Midland, and Northern— had held equal 
 rank as practically distinct languages, each sovereign 
 in its own territory, and each boasting its own litera- 
 ture. When a work which had been produced in one 
 dialect had to be reproduced for the speakers of 
 another, it was not a simple transcription, but a trans- 
 lation which had to be made. The man who lived 
 north of the Humber was only partially intelligible 
 when he wrote, probably altogether unintelligible 
 when he spoke, to the man who lived south of the 
 Thames. But as the country became more consoli- 
 dated into a national unity, and its extremities more 
 closely drawn together, the Midland dialect, which 
 united the characteristics of the other two, and was 
 moreover the form of speech used at the great seats 
 of learning, where Northern and Southern thought 
 were blended in one, began to stand forth as the 
 medium of a common literature, the language of 
 education and culture. In proportion as the Midland 
 dialect acquired this preeminence, the dialects of 
 the North and South, understood only in their own 
 localities, ceased to be employed for literary pur- 
 poses, and sank gradually into the position of local 
 and rustic patois. By the close of the fifteenth cen- 
 tury there was thus but one standard language ac- 
 knowledged, namely, that founded upon the old
 
 v. Three Dialects. 251 
 
 Midland tongue ' (Murray, Dialect of the Southern 
 Cowities of Scotland, p. 45). 
 
 At the same time it must be borne in mind that 
 our present standard English is indebted to almost all 
 the other dialects for certain grammatical and lexico- 
 graphical forms whose special provincial origin is now 
 forgotten or lost sight of. No one dialect of our old 
 English is competent to account for all our present 
 grammar and vocabulary. The history of our pro- 
 nouns, for instance, must be gathered from a study 
 of the old Northern literature ; while our verb neces- 
 sitates a knowledge of Northern and Midland pecu- 
 liarities. The Midland wins the day, but not without 
 many concessions to its less successful rivals, above 
 all to the Northern, and these alike in flexions and 
 single words, in the Grammar and in the Dictionary. 
 And first in the Grammar. The Anglian 'are' 
 (earlier ' aron ') as the plural of ' am,' gets the better 
 of 'beoth' ( = 'be'); which indeed still survives, 
 as when we say ' to whom all hearts be open,' but 
 is, and is felt to be, more or less of an archaism. 
 The dropping in past participles of the prefix 'ge,' 
 already often worn down to 'i ' or 'y,' a prefix which 
 modern German has been so careful to retain, is 
 another triumph of Anglian over Southern speech. It 
 is still frequent, but as a survival, in Spenser, 'yblent,' 
 'ytake,' ' ytorn,' 'ygot,' 'yborne,' and the like. Milton 
 too has used it a few times, 'yclept,' ' ychained,' 'star- 
 i-pointing ;' in the last two cases being prefixed before 
 Romanic verbs. Then too the Southern plural ' en ' 
 gives place to the Anglian ' es ' or ' s,' ' en ' only sur- 
 viving in about half a dozen words, such as ' oxen,' 
 ' brethren,' and provincially in a few more, such as
 
 252 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 ' housen,' 'cheesen.' So too, though the language of 
 the Danelagh could not in the end displace our Saxon 
 English any more than the Sweyns and the Canutes 
 could found an enduring Danish dynasty, a large 
 number of Danish words did in the struggle for exis- 
 tence get the better of words more properly English, 
 put these out of use, and push their own way into 
 every corner of the land, finally taking their place in 
 its recognized speech. Thus ' to plough ' has been 
 too strong for ' to ear,' though this last was not 
 without support from our English Bible. In like 
 manner the Northern 'to ask ' has triumphed over the 
 Southern 'to axe' (acsian), a vulgarism now. 'Cross,' 
 — the Old Norse ' kross ' [learnt from the Irish mis- 
 sionaries, cp. O. Irish : c.jss'], not the French ' croix,' 
 — has put ' rood ' out of use ; this last only surviving in 
 'rood-screen' and 'rood-loft.' The Northern 'with' 
 has been too much for the Southern 'mid,' identical 
 with the High German 'mit; ' 'their' too and 'them,' 
 both Northern, have put out of written use ' her ' and 
 ' hem ' of Middle English. But this subject, despite 
 of all the interest which it possesses, I can dwell on 
 no further. For a good conspectus of the chief Old 
 English Dialects, and their relation to one another, 
 see Morris, English Accidence, pp. 41-47.
 
 vi. Grammatical Simplicity. 253 
 
 LECTURE VI. 
 
 DIMINUTIONS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. 
 
 (CONTINUED.) 
 
 WHAT in my last preceding lecture has been 
 said must suffice in respect of the words, and 
 the character of the words, which we have lost or let 
 go. Of these, indeed, if a language, as it travels on- 
 wards, loses some, it also acquires others, and pro- 
 bably many more than it loses ; they are leaves on 
 the tree of language, of which, if some wither and 
 drop, a new succession takes their place. But it is 
 not so, as I already observed, with the forms or powers 
 of a language, that is, with the various inflexions, 
 moods, duplicate or triplicate formation of tenses, and 
 the like. Not a few of these the speakers of a lan- 
 guage come gradually to perceive that they can do 
 without; which therefore they cease to employ; seek- 
 ing to suppress grammatical intricacies, and to obtain 
 grammatical simplicity and, so far as possible, a per- 
 vading uniformity, sometimes even at the cost of 
 letting go what had real worth, and contributed to 
 the livelier, if not the clearer, setting forth of the 
 inner thought or feeling of the mind. 1 Here there 
 
 1 It has been well said, ' There is nothing more certain than 
 this, that the earlier we can trace back any one language, the
 
 254 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 is only loss, with no compensating gain ; or, at all 
 events, diminution only, and never acquisition. In 
 this region no productive energy is at work during 
 the later periods of a language, or indeed during any 
 save quite the earliest, and such as are withdrawn from 
 our observation altogether. These are not as the leaves, 
 of which a new succession takes the place of the old ; 
 but may be likened to the leading branches of a tree, 
 whose shape, mould, and direction are determined for 
 it at a very early stage of its growth ; and which age, 
 or accident, or violence may make fewer, but which 
 never can become more numerous than they are. I 
 have already noticed a familiar example of this, namely, 
 the dropping within historic times of the dual in 
 Greek. Already in Homer's time it was losing its 
 hold ; he writes 8v' Atav-res as freely as Svw Mavre. 
 
 more full, complete, and consistent are its forms ; that the later 
 we find it existing, the more compressed, colloquial, and business- 
 like it has become. Like the trees of our forests, it grows at 
 first wild, luxuriant, rich in foliage, full of light and shadow, 
 and flings abroad in its vast branches the fruits of a youthful 
 and vigorous nature ; transplanted to the garden of civilization 
 and trained for the purposes of commerce, it becomes regulated, 
 trimmed, pruned— nature indeed still gives it life, but art pre- 
 scribes the direction and extent of its vegetation. Always we 
 perceive a compression, a gradual loss of fine distinctions, a 
 perishing of forms, terminations, and conjugations in the younger 
 state of the language. The truth is, that in a language up to a 
 certain period, there is a real indwelling vitality, a principle 
 acting unconsciously, but pervasively in every part : men wield 
 their forms of speech as they do their limbs— spontaneously, 
 knowing nothing of their construction or the means by which 
 these instruments possess their power. It may be even said that 
 the commencement of the age of self-consciousness is identical 
 with the close of that of vitality in language.'
 
 vi. Loss of the Dual. 255 
 
 And not in Greek only; elsewhere too it has been felt 
 that this dual was not worth preserving, or at all events 
 that no serious inconvenience would follow from its 
 dismissal. There is no such number in the modern 
 German, Danish, Swedish, or English ; in the old 
 German and Norse there was, and a few traces of a 
 dual lingered on in Old English. In other words, the 
 stronger logic of a later day has ' found no reason for 
 splitting the idea of moreness into twoness and much- 
 ness] as Mommsen has quaintly put it. 
 
 How many niceties, delicacies, subtleties of ex- 
 pression, we, speakers of the English tongue, in the 
 course of centuries have got rid of; how bare (whether 
 too bare is another question) we have stripped our- 
 selves ; what simplicity, for better or for worse, reigns 
 in the present English, as compared with the same in 
 earlier stages of its existence. Once it owned six 
 declensions, it owns at present but one ; it had three 
 genders, while English as it now is, if we except one 
 or two words, has none ; and the same fact meets us, 
 at what point soever we compare the grammar of the 
 past with that of the present. Let me here repeat that 
 in an estimate of the gain or loss, we must not put 
 certainly to loss everything which a language has dis- 
 missed, any more than everything to gain which it has 
 acquired. Unnecessary and superfluous forms are no 
 real wealth. They are often an embarrassment and 
 an encumbrance rather than a help. The Esthonian 
 language, which is said to have twenty cases, 1 need 
 not excite the envy of those which may have only five. 
 The half, or less than the half, will often here prove 
 
 [' See Hovelacque, Science of Language, p. 93.]
 
 256 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 more than the whole. Dr. Bleek, than whom there 
 can be on this subject no higher authority, informs 
 us that ' in Bushman from fifty to sixty different ways 
 of forming the plural occur ' — surely no very enviable 
 wealth. It therefore seems to me that some words of 
 Otfried Miiller, in many ways admirable, exaggerate 
 the disadvantages consequent on a reduction of the 
 forms of a language. ' It may be observed,' he says, 
 ' that in the lapse of ages, from the time that the pro- 
 gress of language can be observed, grammatical forms, 
 such as the signs of cases, moods, and tenses, have 
 never been increased in number, but have been con- 
 stantly diminishing. The history of the Romance, 
 as well as of the Germanic, languages shows in the 
 clearest manner how a grammar, once powerful and 
 copious, has been gradually weakened and impover- 
 ished, until at last it preserves only a few fragments 
 of its ancient inflexions. Now there is no doubt 
 that this luxuriance of grammatical forms is not an 
 essential part of a language considered merely as a 
 vehicle of thought. It is well known that the Chinese 
 language, which is merely a collection of radical words 
 destitute of grammatical forms, can express even 
 philosophical ideas with tolerable precision ; and the 
 English, which, from the mode of its formation by a 
 mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its 
 grammatical inflexions more completely than any 
 other European language, seems, nevertheless, even 
 to a foreigner, to be distinguished by its energetic 
 eloquence. All this must be admitted by every un- 
 prejudiced inquirer ; but yet it cannot be overlooked, 
 that this copiousness of grammatical forms, and the 
 fine shades of meaning which they express, evince a
 
 VI. Impoverishment of Languages. 257 
 
 nicety of observation, and a faculty of distinguishing, 
 which unquestionably prove that the race of mankind 
 among whom these languages arose was characterized 
 by a remarkable correctness and subtlety of thought. 
 Nor can any modern European, who forms in his mind 
 a lively image of the classical languages in their ancient 
 grammatical luxuriance, and compares them with his 
 mother tongue, conceal from himself that in the 
 ancient languages the words, with their inflexions, 
 clothed as it were with muscles and sinews, come 
 forward like living bodies, full of expression and cha- 
 racter, while in the modern tongues the words seem 
 shrunk up into mere skeletons.' l 
 
 Whether languages are as much impoverished by 
 this process as is here assumed, may be fairly ques- 
 tioned. Let me offer some materials which shall assist 
 you in judging for yourselves on the matter ; 2 not 
 
 1 Literature of Greece, p. 5. 
 
 2 I will also append the judgment of another scholar (Renan, 
 Les Langnes Semitiques, p. 422) : ' Bien loin de se representer 
 l'etat actuel comme le developpement d'un germe primitif moins 
 complet et plus simple que l'etat qui a suivi, les plus profonds 
 linguistes sont unanimes pour placer a l'enfance de l'esprit 
 humain des langues synthetiques, obscures, compliquees, si com- 
 pliquees meme que c'est le besoin d'un langage plus facile qui 
 a porte les generations posterieures a abandonner la langue 
 savante des ancetres. II serait possible, en prenant l'une apres 
 l'autre les langues de presque tous les pays oil l'humanite a une 
 histoire, d'y verifier cette marche constante de la synthase a 
 l'analyse. Partout une langue ancienne a fait place a une 
 langue vulgaire, qui ne constitue pas, a vrai dire, un idiome 
 nouveau, mais plutut une transformation de celle qui l'a pre- 
 ceded : ccllc-ci, phis savante, charged de flexions pour exprimer 
 les rapports infinimenl delicats de la pi usee, plus riche meme 
 
 s
 
 258 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 adducing forms which the language has relinquished 
 long ago, but mainly such as it is relinquishing at this 
 present. Such a process, as it affects these last, and 
 as we ourselves are at this instant helping to set it for- 
 ward, will have more than a merely archaic interest for 
 us. Thus the words which retain the Romance female 
 termination in 'ess,' ' as 'heir,' which makes 'heiress,' 
 and ' prophet ' ' prophetess ' (or ' prophetisse,' as it is 
 in Coverdale), ' emperor,' which makes ' empress,' or 
 ' emperice,' as it was once, are every day becoming 
 fewer. This termination has already fallen away in 
 so many instances, and is evidently becoming of un- 
 frequent use in so many more, that, if we may augur 
 of the future from the analogy of the past, it will 
 one day wholly vanish from our tongue. Thus all 
 these occur in Wiclif 's Bible : ' techeress ' (2 Chron. 
 xxxv. 25); 'friendess' (Prov. vii. 4); 'servantess' 
 (Gen. xvi. 2) ; ' leperess ' (= saltatrix, Ecclus. ix. 4) ; 
 ' daunceress ' (Ecclus. ix. 4) ; ' neighbouress ' (Exod. 
 iii. 22); 'sinneress' (Luke vii. 37); 'purpuress' (Acts 
 xvi. 14); 'cousiness' (Luke i. 36); ' slayeress ' (Tob. 
 iii. 9); 'devouress' (Ezek. xxxvi. 13); 'spousess' 
 (Prov. v. 19); 'thralless' (Jer. xxxiv. 16); ' dwel- 
 
 dans son ordre d'idees, bien que cet ordre fut comparativement 
 moins etendu, image en un mot de la spontaneite primitive, ou 
 l'esprit accumulait les elements dans une confuse unite, et perdait 
 dans le tout la vue analytique des parties ; le dialecte moderne, 
 au contraire, correspondant a. un progres d'analyse, plus clair, 
 plus explicite, separant ce que les anciens assemblaient, brisant 
 les mecanismes de l'ancienne langue pour donner a. chaque idee 
 et a. chaque relation son expression isolee.' 
 
 1 Diez, Rom. Gram. vol. iii. pp. 277, 326, 344; compare 
 Ronsch, Itala und Vulgata, p. 62.
 
 vi. Feminities in ' ess.' 259 
 
 leress' (Jer. xxi. 13); 'waileress' (Jer. xix. 17); 
 'cheseress' (= electrix, Wisd. viii. 4); 'singeress' 
 (2 Chron. xxxv. 25) ; ' breakeress, ' waiteress,' this last, 
 indeed, having recently come up again. Add to these 
 ' souteress,' ' dyssheress ' (both in Piers Plotvman), 
 'chideress,' 'constabless,' 'moveress,' ' jangleress,' 
 ' vengeress,' ' soudaness ' (= sultana), 'guideress,' 
 ' charmeress ' (all in Chaucer); ' forgeress,' 'graveress,' 
 'goldsmithess ;' 'cellaress,' 'chamberess,' 'treasuress' 
 (all three in the Mirrour of our Lady). Others reached 
 to far later periods of the language, as some of these 
 do; thus 'vanqueress' (Fabyan), 'Ethiopess' (Ra- 
 leigh), 'exactress' (Isai. xiv. 4, margin), ' inhabitress ' 
 (Jer. x. 17); ' poisoneress ' (Greneway) ; ' knightess ' 
 (Udal) ; ' oratress ' (Warner), ' pedleress,' ' cham- 
 pioness,' ' vassaless,' ' avengeress,' ' warriouress,' ' vic- 
 toress,' 'conqueress,' 'creatress,' 'tyranness/'Titaness,' 
 'Britoness' (all in Spenser); 'offendress,' 'fornica- 
 tress,' 'cloistress,' 'jointress' (all in Shakespeare); 
 ' ministress,' ' paintress,' ' flatteress,' ' directress ' (all 
 in Holland) ; ' captainess ' (Sidney) ; ' saintess ' (Sir 
 T. Urquhart); 'leadress' (F. Thynne) ; ' heroess,' 
 1 dragoness,' ' butleress,' ' contendress,' ' waggoness,' 
 'rectress ' (all in Chapman) ; ' Turkess ' (Marlowe) ; 
 ' shootress ' (Fairfax); ' admiraless ' (Cotgrave); ' mil- 
 leress' (Aubrey); ' archeress ' (Fanshawe) ; 'archi- 
 tectress ' (Sandys) ; ' clientess,' ' pandress ' (both in 
 Middleton) ; ' papess,' ' Jesuitess ' (both in Bishop 
 Hall); ' incitress ' (Gayton) ; ' mediatress ' (H. More); 
 ' fautress,' ' herdess ' (both in Browne); ' neatress ' (cp. 
 neat-herdess, see Uavies), ' soldieress,' ' guardianess,' 
 'votaress' (all in Beaumont and Fletcher); 'com 
 fortress,' ' fosteress ' (both in Ben Jonson) ; ' factress' 
 
 s 2
 
 260 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 (Ford); 'fellowess' (Richardson); 'squiress' (Lytton); 
 ' bankeress ' (Thackeray) ; ' doggess ' (Richardson) ; 
 'nabobess' (Walpole) • ' speakeress ' (Carlyle); 'sove- 
 raintess ' (Sylvester) ; ' preserveress ' (Daniel) ; ' her- 
 mitress' (Drummond); ' emulatress ' (Skelton); ' soli- 
 citress,' ' impostress,' ' buildress,' ' intrudress,' ' mode- 
 ratress,' ' patriarchess,' ' presidentess ' (all in Fuller; 
 who otherwhere has ' impostrix ' and ' creditrix ; ' 
 Florio ' moderatrix '). Add ' favouress ' (Hakewell) ; 
 ' commandress ' (Burton) ; ' defenderess ' (Fisher) ; 
 'sultaness' (Lee); 'varletess' (Richardson); 'monarch- 
 ess,' 'discipless' (Speed); 'auditress,' 'cateress,' 'chant- 
 ress,' 'prelatess' (all in Milton); 'saviouress' (Jeremy 
 Taylor) ; ' citess,' ' divineress ' (both in Dryden) ; 
 ' competitress ' (Corah's Doom, 1672); 'deaness' 
 (Sterne) ; ' detractress ' (Addison) ; ' hucksteress ' 
 (Howell); 'tutoress,' ' legislatress ' (both in Shaftes- 
 bury); ' farmeress ' (Lord Peterborough, Letter to 
 Pope); 'suitress' (Rowe) ; ' nomenclatress ' (Guar- 
 dian) ; ' rivaless,' ' gaoleress,' ' keeperess ' (Richard- 
 son) ; ' pilgrimess,' ' laddcss,' 'censoress ' (D'Arblay); 
 with others which a catalogue that made any claims 
 to completeness would contain. 1 Tennyson's 'ost- 
 leress ' is a proof that the power of forming words on 
 this scheme has not wholly gone from us, unless 
 indeed this should be only a revival ; for ' ostleress ' 
 is in Fuller. ' Tailoress,' too, and ' manageress,' both, 
 if we may judge by the newspapers, are coming into 
 
 1 In Cotgrave I note ' commendress,' ' fluteress,' 'loveress,' 
 ' possessoress,' ' praiseress,' 'regentess,' but have never met 
 them in any text ; ' chieftainess ' only in Sir Walter Scott {Rob 
 Roy), who seems to suppose that he has invented it, which can 
 scarcely he the case.
 
 vi. New Words in ' ster! 261 
 
 use, but hardly ' promenadress,' nor ' patriotess,' nor 
 ' speakeress,' for all of which Carlyle is godfather. 
 
 What happened to one has happened also to 
 another feminine suffix, the Saxon ' ster,' which takes 
 the place of 'er,' where a female doer is intended. 1 
 ' Spinner ' and ' spinster ' are the only pair of such 
 words which still survive. There were formerly many 
 such ; thus ' baker ' had ' bakester,' being the female 
 who baked; 'brewer' had 'brewster' {Piers Plow mail); 
 'sewer' 'sewster' (Ben Jonson) ; 'reader' 'readster;' 
 ' seamer ' ' seamster ; ' ' weaver ' ' webster ' (Golding) ; 
 ' fruiterer ' ' fruitester ; ' ' tumbler ' ' tombestere ' (both 
 in Chaucer); 'hanger' or hangman 'hangster;' 'hotere' 
 (see Matzner) 'hotestre' (Ayenbite); 'knitter' 'knitster' 
 (the word still lives in Devon), ' shaper,' a cutter out 
 of clothes or dressmaker, had ' shapster ' (both of these 
 still found in the Whitby Glossary). Add to these 
 'whitster' (the female bleacher, Shakespeare), 'band- 
 ster,' the woman binding up the sheaves (Cleveland 
 dialect), ' wafrester,' the woman making wafers for the 
 priest {Piers Plowman); 'kempster' (pectrix), 'dryster' 
 (siccatrix), 'brawdster' (embroideress,seeN.E.D), and 
 ' salster' (salinaria). 2 ' Harpster ' I have never met 
 in use, but have met it in glossaries. It is a singular 
 evidence of the richness of a language in forms at the 
 earlier stages of its existence, that not a few of the 
 words which had, as we have just seen, a feminine ter- 
 mination in ' ess,' had also a second in ' ster.' Thus 
 'daunser,' beside 'daunseress,' had also 'daunster' 
 (Ecclus. ix. 4) ; ' wailer,' beside ' waileress,' had 
 
 1 On this termination see J. Grimm, Deutsche Gram., vol. ii. 
 p. 134; vol. iii. p. 339; [Kluge, N. S. § 48.] 
 [- For the last four see Wright-Wiilcker.]
 
 262 diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 'wailster' (Jer. ix. 17); ' dweller' had ' dwelster' (Jer. 
 xxi. 13); and 'singer' ' singster ' (2 Kin. xix. 35); 
 'slayer' had ' slayster ' (Tob. iii. 9), as well as 
 'slayeress;' 'chooser' 'chesister' (Wisd. viii. 4), as 
 well as ' cheseress ; ' so too ' chider ' had ' chidester ' 
 (Chaucer), as well as ' chideress ; ' with others that 
 might be named. 
 
 It is impossible then to subscribe to Marsh's state- 
 ment, high as his authority on a matter of English 
 scholarship must be, when he affirms, 'I find no 
 positive evidence to show that the termination " ster " 
 was ever regarded as a feminine termination in Eng- 
 lish.' l It has indeed been urged that the existence 
 of such words as 'seamstr^i-,' 'songstrm,' is decisive 
 proof that the ending ' ster ' or ' estre,' of itself was 
 not counted sufficient to designate persons as female ; 
 since if 'seam^r' and 'songster' had been felt to 
 be already feminine, no one would have thought of 
 doubling on these, and adding a second female ter- 
 mination, ' seamstress,' ' songstress.' But all which 
 this proves is, that when the final ' ess ' was super- 
 added to these already feminine forms, and all exam- 
 ples of it belong to a comparatively late period of the 
 language, the true significance of this ending had been 
 
 1 If indeed he had said that there are certain perplexing 
 exceptions to this rule, words with this termination, although 
 very few, applied at an early date to men and not to women, 
 as 'dempster' (= judge), ' thakster ' ( = thatcher), ' shepster ' 
 ( = sheep shearer), this, but not more than this, would be true. 
 [In .-Elfric's Old English version of Genesis, circa a.d. iooo, 
 Pharaoh's baker is written ' cynges bacistre.'] See Morris, 
 English Accidence, p. 89 ; Matzner, Engl. Gram. , vol. i. p. 
 434 ; [Oliphant (index, s. v. ster), and Skeat, Principles of 
 English Etymology, § 238.]
 
 vi. Meaning of Forms forgotten. 263 
 
 lost sight of and forgotten. 1 The same may be 
 affirmed of such other of these feminine forms as are 
 now, or have been recently, applied to men, such as 
 'gamester,' 'youngster,' 'oldster,' 'dragster' (South), 
 'huckster,' 'hackster' (=swordsman, Milton's prose), 
 'wooster,' 'seedster'(=sower), 'teamster,' 'throwster,' 
 'rhymester,' 'punster' {Spectator), 'tapster,' 'maltster,' 
 'whipster,' 'lewdster' (Shakespeare), 'trickster,' 
 'smockster,' 'tonguester' (Tennyson). Either like 
 'teamster' and 'punster,' the words did not come 
 into being till the force of this termination was alto 
 gether forgotten ; 2 or like ' tapster,' which was still 
 female in Skelton's time ('a tapster like a lady bright '), 
 as it is now in Dutch and Frisian, being distinguished 
 from ' tapper,' the man who has charge of the tap ; 
 
 1 Richardson's earliest example of ' seamstress ' is from Gay, 
 of 'songstress' from Thomson. I find however 'sempstress' 
 in Olearius' Voyages and Travels, 1669, p. 43. As late as Ben 
 Jonson, 'seamster' and 'songster' expressed severally the female 
 seamer and singer ; in his Masque of Christinas, one of the 
 children of Christmas is ' Wassel, like a neat sempster and song- 
 ster ; her page bearing a brown bowl. ' Compare a passage from 
 Hollands Leaguer, 1632 : 'A tyre-woman of phantastical orna- 
 ments, a sempster for ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats.' [The 
 Old English masculine form ofseamstress, namely, scamere, occurs 
 in Wright- Wiilcker's Glossaries as a gloss of the Latin ' sartor.' 
 The word lingered on in the surname Seamer, a name which 
 perhaps still survives, see Bardsley (index.)] 
 
 - This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the 
 confusion which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare's time, 
 see his use of 'spinster' as =' spinner,' the man spinning, 
 Henry VIII., act i. sc. 2; and doubtless too in Othello, act i. 
 sc. 1. And somewhat later, in Howell's Vocabulary, 1659, 
 ' spinner ' and ' spinster ' are both referred to the male sex, and 
 the barbarous ' spinstress ' invented for the female.
 
 264 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 or as 'bakester,' at this day used in Scotland for 
 ' baker,' as ' dyester,' for ' dyer,' the word did originally 
 belong of right and exclusively to women ; ' but with 
 the gradual transfer of the occupation to men, and an 
 increasing forgetfulness of what this termination im- 
 plied, there went also a transfer of the name, 2 just as 
 in other words, and out of the same causes, the con- 
 verse finds place ; and ' baker ' or ' brewer,' not 
 'bakester' or 'brewster,' would be now applied to 
 the woman baking or brewing. So entirely has this 
 power of the language died out, that it survives 
 more apparently than really even in 'spinner' and 
 ' spinster ; ' seeing that ' spinster ' has now quite an- 
 other meaning than that of a woman spinning ; whom, 
 
 1 The Latin equivalent for ' maltster ' in the Promptorium is 
 'brasia^/7'.r.' 
 
 2 In Wright-Wiilcker the words ' hsec auxiatrix, a hnksterj 
 occur. That the huckster is properly the female pedlar is suffi- 
 ciently plain. ' To sell small wares ' was formerly ' to huck ' — 
 it is so used by Bishop Andrewes, and ' hucker ' (the German 
 'hoker') is the mm who ' hucks,' or peddles, 'huckster' the 
 woman who does the same. Howell then and others employing 
 'huckstered' fall into the same unnecessary excess of expression, 
 whereof we are all guilty in ' seamstress ' and ' songstress.' I 
 take the opportunity of noting another curious excess of ex- 
 pression that has succeeded in establishing itself in the language. 
 [I mean the unnecessary addition of the suffix -er denoting 
 the agent. For instance, in poultei-er (for older poulter) this 
 suffix occurs twice over ; in upholsterer the suffix -er is need- 
 lessly added to -ster ; in adulterer the English suffix is 
 barbarously added to the Latin word adulter; in caterer, 
 chorister, roisterer, scrivener, we find the English suffix added 
 superfluously to French words already denoting the agent or 
 person. For the origin of this very common Teutonic suffix see 
 Kluge, N. S. § 9.]
 
 vi. Violations of Analogy. 265 
 
 as well as the man, we should call, not a ' spinster,' 
 but a 'spinner.' 1 It would be hard to believe, but 
 for the constant experience we have of the fact, how 
 soon and how easily the true law and significance of 
 some form, which has never ceased to be in every- 
 body's mouth, may yet be lost sight of by all. No 
 more curious chapter in the history of language could 
 be written than one which should trace the transgres- 
 sions of its most primary laws, the violations of analogy 
 and the like, which follow hereupon ; the plurals, as ' in- 
 voice' (=' envoys'), 'welkin,' 'baize,' which are dealt 
 with as singulars ; the singulars, like 'riches' (richesse), 2 
 ' pease ' (pisum, pois), 3 ' alms ' (' almesse ' in Cover- 
 dale), ' summons '(OF. 'semonse '),' eaves ' (OE. 'efes'), 
 ' Cyclops,' ' Chinese ' (Milton has rightly ' Chineses ' 
 
 1 Notes and Queries, No. 157. 
 
 2 See Romaunt of the Rose, 1032, where Richesse, 'an 
 high lady of great noblesse,' is one of the persons of the 
 allegory. In Tyndale's Bible we read (Jam. v. 2), ' Your riches 
 is corrupte ; ' in the Geneva ' is ' has given place to ' are,' 
 which stands in our Version ; so too ' riches ' is twice used as a 
 singular in Othello, act ii. sc. 1 ; iii. 3. This has so entirely 
 escaped Ben Jonson, English scholar as he was, that in his 
 Grammar he cites ' riches ' as an example of an English word 
 wanting a singular ; and at a later day Wemyss {Biblical Glean- 
 ings, p. 212) complains of a false concord at Rev. xviii. 17: 
 ' For in one hour so great riches is come to nought.' Compare 
 Wisdom of Solomon, v. 8. 
 
 3 ' Set shallow brooks to surging seas, 
 
 An orient pearl to a white pease. ' — Puttenham. 
 
 On ' pea ' and ' pease ' see the Transactions of the Philological 
 Society, 1873, I ^74, P- 256; on 'baize,' an unrecognized plural 
 ( = bayis), and on 'bodice,' see Skeat [and N. E. D. ; and on 
 cherris {cherry), sherris {sherry), see Skeat.]
 
 266 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 for the plural), which on the score of the final ' s ' 
 are assumed to be plurals ; ' thus Macaulay writes 
 ' Cyclop,' and Tennyson ' cottage eave,' this last 
 appearing also in Kingsley's Andromeda. It does 
 not fare otherwise with ' skates,' which is properly 
 a singular, with 'skateses' for its plural; [for an 
 account of this Dutch word, see Skeat.] 
 
 One example of the kind is familiar to us all ; to 
 which yet it may be worth adverting as a notable 
 example of this forgetfulness which may overtake a 
 whole people, of the true meaning of a grammatical 
 form which they have never ceased to employ. I 
 refer to the mistaken assumption that the ' s ' of the 
 genitive, as 'the king's countenance,' was merely a 
 more rapid way of pronouncing ' the king his coun- 
 tenance,' and that the final ' s ' in ' king's ' was in fact 
 an elided ' his.' This explanation for a long time 
 prevailed almost universally; I believe there are 
 many who accept it still. It was in vain that here 
 and there one more accurately acquainted with the 
 past history of our tongue protested against this 
 ' monstrous syntax,' as Ben Jonson justly calls it ; 
 
 1 It has been well said that of the many influences which 
 are evermore at work for the injury of a language, there is none 
 which works so effectually for the barbarizing of it as the dying 
 out of what may be called the ' speech-feeling ' among the mass 
 of those who use it. By this 'speech -feeling' is meant a 
 knowledge, or if not an explicit knowledge yet an instinctive 
 sense, of the significance of its forms. Philologically trained 
 the great majority of the speakers of a language can never be ; 
 but there is a time when they have an innate instinctive con- 
 sciousness of the meaning of its forms, which at a later period 
 inevitably dies out. It can hardly be denied that with us this 
 period has arrived.
 
 vi. The Inflected Genitive. 267 
 
 though curiously enough, despite this protest, one of 
 his plays has for its name, Sejunus his Fall, and 
 another, Catiline his Conspiracy. It was in vain that 
 Wallis, another English scholar of the seventeenth 
 century, pointed out that the slightest examination of 
 the facts revealed the untenable character of this ex- 
 planation, seeing that we do not merely say ' the king's 
 countenance,' but ' the queen's countenance ; ' where 
 ' the queen his countenance ' cannot be intended ; ' 
 we do not say merely ' the child's bread,' but ' the 
 children's bread,' where it is no less impossible to 
 resolve the phrase into ' the children his bread.' 2 Not- 
 withstanding these protests, the error held its ground. 
 This much indeed of a plea it could make for itself, 
 that such an actual employment of ' his ' had found 
 its way into the language, as early as the fourteenth 
 
 1 Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any mis- 
 giving ; on the contrary he boldly asserts {Spectator, No. 135), 
 ' The same single letter " s " on many occasions does the office 
 of a whole word, and represents the "his" or " her" of our 
 forefathers.' 
 
 2 Wallis excellently well disposes of this scheme, although 
 less successful in showing what this ' s ' does mean than in 
 showing what it cannot mean {Gramm. Ling. Anglic, c. v.): 
 Qui autem arbitrantur illud s loco his adjunctum esse (priori 
 scilicet parte per aphseresim abscissa), ideoque apostrophi notam 
 semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltern subintelligendam, omnino 
 errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin apostrophi nota commode 
 nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius littene s usus distinctus, ubi 
 opus est, percipiatur ; ita tamen semper fieri debere, aut etiam 
 ideo fieri quia vocem his innuat, omnino nego. Adjungitur enim 
 et foeminarum nominibus propriis, et substantivis pluralibus, ubi 
 vox his sine soloecismo locum habere non potest : atqueetiam in 
 possessivis ours, yours, theirs, hers, ubi vocem his innui nemo 
 somniaret.
 
 268 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 century, and had been in occasional, though rare, use 
 from that time downward. 1 Yet this, which has only 
 been elicited by the researches of recent scholars, does 
 not in the least justify those who assumed that in the 
 ordinary ' s ' of the genitive were to be found the re- 
 mains of ' his ' — an error from which the books of 
 scholars in the seventeenth, and in the early decades 
 of the eighteenth, century are not a whit clearer trjan 
 the books of any others. Spenser, Donne, Fuller, 
 Jeremy Taylor, all fall into it; Dryden more than 
 once helps out his verse with an additional syllable in 
 this way gained. It has forced itself into our Prayer 
 Book, where the 'Prayer for all conditions of men,' 
 added at the last revision of the Book in 1662, ends 
 with these words, ' and this we beg for Jesus Christ 
 his sake.' 2 I need hardly tell you that this ' s ' is in 
 fact the one remnant of flexion surviving in the singular 
 number of our English noun substantives ; it is in all 
 the Indo-European languages an original sign of the 
 genitive ; and just as in Latin ' lapis ' makes ' lapidis ' 
 in the genitive, so 'king,' 'child,' make in English, 
 'kings,' 'childs,' the apostrophe, an apparent note of 
 
 1 See the proofs in Marsh, Manual of the English Language, 
 English edit., pp. 280, 293. 
 
 - Surely our University Presses might remove this deformity 
 from the Prayer Book. Such a liberty they have already as- 
 sumed with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized 
 Version it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 14 : ' Nevertheless Asa his heart 
 was perfect with the Lord ; ' it is ' Asa?s heart ' now ; as it was 
 in Tyndale. In the same way ' Mordecai his matters' (Esth. 
 iii. 4) has been silently changed into ' Mordecai 's matters ; ' 
 while ' by Naomi her instruction Ruth lieth at Boaz his feet,' 
 in the heading of Ruth iii., has been as little allowed to stand.
 
 vi. Adjectives in ' en ' disappear. 269 
 
 elision, being a mere modern expedient, ' a late re- 
 finement,' as Ash calls it, 1 to distinguish the genitive 
 singular from the plural cases. 
 
 I will call to your notice another example of this 
 willingness to dispense with inflexion, of this en- 
 deavour to reduce the forms of a language to the 
 fewest possible, consistent with the accurate commu- 
 nication of thought. Of our adjectives in ' en,' formed 
 on substantives, and expressing the material or sub- 
 stance of a thing, the Greek tvo?, 2 a vast number have 
 gone, many more are going, out of use; we having 
 learned to content ourselves with the bare juxtaposi- 
 tion of the substantive itself, as sufficiently expressing 
 our meaning. Thus instead of ' golden pin ' we say 
 ' gold^m.;' instead of '■earthen works' we say ' earth- 
 works.' ' Golden ' and ' earthen,' it is true, still belong 
 to our living speech, though mainly as part of our 
 poetic diction, or of the solemn and stereotyped lan- 
 guage of Scripture; but a whole company of such 
 words have nearly or quite disappeared; some re- 
 cently, some long ago. ' Clouden,' ' fellen ' or made of 
 
 1 In a note on p. 6 of the Comprehensive Grammar prefixed 
 to his Dictionary, London, 1775- [The form king's stands 
 for an older hinges, the ending is originally belonging to the 
 genitive singular of some masculine and neuter substan- 
 tives. The ending es was not the genitive sign of feminine 
 nouns until the thirteenth century, and then for the most 
 part only in the Northern dialect. See Morris, Accidence, 
 tj 98. In thi^ connexion contrast the form Friday with Tues- 
 day, Wednesday, Thursday, as well as Lady Day with Lord's 
 Day.] See Grimm, Deutsche Gram., vol. ii. pp. 609, 944; 
 and on the remarkable employment of s not merely as the sign 
 of the genitive singular, but also <>f the genitive plural, Loth, 
 Angelsachsisch-Etiglische Gramtnalik, p. 203. 
 
 [* Sec Kluge, N. S., § 198.]
 
 270 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 skins, ' firen,' 'flowren,' 'rocken,' ' steelen,' 'thornen,' 
 belong only to a very early period of the language ; 
 ' thornen,' it is true, being still alive in some of our 
 country dialects. ' Rosen ' also went early ; Chaucer 
 is my latest authority for it (' rosen chapelet'); as also 
 for ' iven,' or made of ivy ; ' stonen ' is in Wiclif (John 
 ii. 6) ; x ' hairen ' in him and in Chaucer ; ' silvern ' 
 stood at first in Wiclif 's Bible (' silverne housis to 
 Diane,' Acts xix. 24) ; but already in the second re- 
 cension this was exchanged for 'silver;' 'hornen,' 
 still in our dialects, he also employs, with ' clayen ' 
 (Job iv. 19), and 'iverene' or of ivory (Cant. vi. 4). 
 ' Bonen ' occurs in the Townley Mysteries ; ' birchen ' 
 in Tyndale ; 'tinnen ' in Sylvester; while in Bacon it 
 is never 'the Milky Way,' but always the 'Milken.' 
 In the coarse polemics of the Reformation the phrase, 
 1 breaden god,' provoked by the Roman doctrine of 
 transubstantiation, is of frequent recurrence, and is 
 found as late as in Oldham. ' Mothen parchments ' 
 is in Fulke ; ' twiggen bottle ' and ' threaden sail ' in 
 Shakespeare; l yewen' or ' ewghen bow,' in Spenser; 
 ' cedarn alley ' and ' azurn sheen ' in Milton ; ' boxen 
 leaves ' in Dryden ; ' a corden ladder ' in Arthur 
 Brooke ; ' a tree7i cup ' in Jeremy Taylor ; ' eldern 
 popguns ' in Sir Thomas Overbury ; ' a glassen breast ' 
 in Whitlock ; ' a reeden hat ' in Coryat ; ' a wispen 
 
 1 The existence of ' stony ' ( = lapidosus, steinig) does not 
 make ' stonen ' ( = lapideus, steinern) superfluous any more than 
 'earthy' makes 'earthen' and 'earthly.' That part of the field 
 in which the good seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was 
 ' stony ; ' the vessels which played their part at the Marriage in 
 Cana of Galilee (John ii. 6) were ' stonen.' [This distinction is 
 maintained in the Wiclif version (Purvey's revision).]
 
 vi. Adjectives in ' en ' disappear. 271 
 
 garland ' in Gabriel Harvey ; ' yarnen ' occurs in 
 Turberville ; ' fursen ' in Holland ; while ' bricken,' 
 ' papern,' 'elmen,' 'harden,' made, that is, of scraps 
 of refuse linen, of hards, as they are called, appear 
 from our provincial glossaries to be still in local use. 1 
 
 It is true that some of these adjectives still hold 
 their ground ; but the roots which sustain even these 
 are being gradually cut away from beneath them. 
 Thus ' brazen ' might at first sight seem as strongly 
 established in the language as ever ; but such is very 
 far from the case. Even now it only lives in a 
 metaphorical sense, as ' a brazen face ; ' or, if in a 
 literal, in poetic diction or in the consecrated language 
 of Scripture, as ' the brazen serpent ; ' otherwise we 
 say 'a brass farthing,' 'a brass candlestick.' It is 
 the same with 'oaten,' 'oaken,' 'birchen,' 'beechen,' 
 ' strawen,' and many more, whereof some are obsoles- 
 cent, some obsolete, the language manifestly tending 
 now, as it has tended for centuries past, to the getting 
 quit of them all, and to the satisfying itself with an 
 adjectival apposition of the substantive instead. 
 
 There are other examples of the manner in which 
 a language, as it travels onward, simplifies itself, ap- 
 proaches more and more to a grammatical and logical 
 uniformity, seeks to do the same thing always in the 
 same manner ; where there are for it two or more 
 ways of conducting a single operation, declines to use, 
 and so in the end loses, all save one. Thus, no 
 doubt, it becomes easier to be mastered, more handy 
 and manageable ; for its very riches prove an embar- 
 
 1 For a long list of words of this formation which never 
 passed from Old into Middle English, see Loth, Angelsachsisch- 
 I-.ii Jisdie Grammatik, p. 332.
 
 272 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 rassment and a perplexity to many ; but at the same 
 time it limits and restrains its own freedom of action, 
 and is in danger of forfeiting elements of strength, 
 variety, and beauty, which it once possessed. Take 
 for instance the tendency of our verbs to let go their 
 strong preterites, and to substitute weak ones in their 
 room ; or, where they have two or three preterites, to 
 retain only one of these, and that almost invariably 
 the weak. 1 
 
 The weak have been too much for the strong, so 
 that multitudes among the strong have already dis- 
 appeared, many more are in process of disappearing. 
 For example, 'shape' has now a weak preterite, 
 ' shaped,' it had once a strong one, ' shope ' (Cover- 
 dale) ; ' bake ' has now a weak preterite, ' baked,' it 
 had once a strong one, ' boke ; ' the preterite of ' glide ' 
 is now ' glided,' it was once ' glode ' or ' glid ; ' ' help ' 
 makes now ' helped,' it made once ' halp ' and ' holp.' 
 ' Creep ' made ' crope,' still current in the North of 
 England, and ' crep ' (Story of Genesis) ; 'weep ' ' wope ' 
 and ' wep ; ' ' yell ' ' yoll ; ' ' starve ' ' storve ; ' ' washe ' 
 ' wesh ' (all in Chaucer) ; ' seethe ' ' soth ' or ' sod ' 
 (Gen. xxv. 29) ; 'shear' once made 'shore;' as 'leap' 
 made ' lep ' and ' lope ' (Spenser) ; ' gnaw ' ' gnew ; ' 
 ' sow ' ' sew ; ' ' delve ' ' dalf ' and ' dolve ; ' ' yield ' 
 ' yold ' and ' yald ; ' ' melt ' ' molt ; ' ' wax ' ' wex ' and 
 ' wox ; ' ' laugh ' ' leugh • ' ' knead ' ' kned ; ' ' beat ' 
 ' bet ' (Coverdale) ; with others more than can be 
 enumerated here. 2 A very large number of these 
 
 [' For a full and clear account of the Indo-European system 
 of vowel-gradation (ablaut) and its relation to the Teutonic 
 strong or ablaut verbs, see Douse, Gothic of Ulfdas, § 24.] 
 
 I'll' entire ignorance as t<> the past historic evolution of t lie
 
 vi. Strong and Weak Preterites. 273 
 
 £> 
 
 strong forms, which have disappeared from our lite- 
 rary English, still hold their ground in our provincial 
 dialects. 
 
 [Observe further that where verbs have not actually 
 renounced their strong preterites, contenting them- 
 selves with weak in their room, yet possessing once 
 two forms for the preterite, one for the singular (third 
 person) and one for the plural, they now retain only 
 one form— in some cases the singular, in some the 
 plural form. For instance, the verb 'sling' had even 
 in the seventeenth century the preterites 'slang' (as in 
 1 Sam. xvii. 49, A.V.) and 'slung,' representing the 
 singular and plural form respectively' ; at the present 
 day 'slung,' the plural form, only remains. Up to 
 comparatively recent times the verbs 'write' and 
 'ride' had respectively the two preterite forms 'wrote' 
 and 'writ,' 'rode' and 'rid ;' they now retain only the 
 singular forms ' wrote ' and ' rode.' The following are 
 some instances of strong preterites in modern English 
 which represent the singular form in each case : 
 'abode,' 'arose,' 'drove,' 'shone;' 'began,' 'drank,' 
 'ran,' 'sang;' 'flew.' The following are representa- 
 tives of plural forms : ' bit,' ' slit ; ' ' found,' ' wound ; ' 
 
 language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is 
 astonishing. Thus the author of Observations upon the English 
 Language, without date, but published about 1730, treats all 
 these strong preterites as of recent introduction, counting ' knew ' 
 to have lately expelled ' knowed,' ' rose ' to have acted the same 
 part towards ' rised,' and of course esteeming them so many 
 barbarous violations of the laws of the language ; and concluding 
 with the warning that ' great care must be taken to prevent 
 their increase.' ! ! — p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this ab- 
 surdity, yet proposes in his English Grammar, that they should 
 all be abolished as inconvenient. 
 
 T
 
 274 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 'flung,' 'stung.' The preference for the plural form 
 in these cases is no doubt due to the influence of the 
 past participle.] 
 
 Observe too that wherever a struggle is now going 
 forward between weak and strong forms, which shall 
 continue, the weak are carrying the day : ' climbed ' 
 is gaining the upper hand of ' clomb,' ' swelled ' of 
 'swoll,' 'hanged' of 'hung,' 'chid' of 'chode' (as in 
 Gen. xxxi. 36, A.V.) There are, it is true, exceptions 
 to this ; and these not quite so few as at first one 
 might suppose. Thus ' they have digged a pit ' stands 
 in our Bible; we should now say 'dug.' 'Shaked,' 
 'shined,' 'wringed,'and 'shrinked' in like manner are 
 there ; while we now only admit the regularly developed 
 strong forms 'shook,' 'shone,' 'wrung,' and 'shrunk' 
 or 'shrank.' 'To blow' had sometimes 'blowed' 
 (see N.E.D.) ; ' to strive ' had 'strived' (Spenser and 
 Shakespeare) ; ' to stick ' makes ' sticked ' irregularly in 
 Coverdale's Bible, but has only ' stuck ' for a preterite 
 now ; in the same ' to swim ' had the incorrect weak 
 form ' swimmed ; ' it has now only ' swum ' or ' swam,' 
 properly only this last. ' Growed ' and not the proper 
 strong form ' grew ' is in Piers Ploivman the preterite 
 of ' to grow ; ' ' becomed ' and ' misbecomed ' are in 
 Shakespeare. But these are the exceptions ; the exact 
 reverse of this is the prevailing tendency of the lan- 
 guage, and we may anticipate a time when perhaps 
 all English verbs will form their preterites weakly ; 
 not without serious injury to the fulness, variety, 
 and force, which in this respect the language even 
 now displays, and once far more signally displayed. 1 
 
 1 J. Grimm {Deutsche Gram., vol. i. p. 839) : Die starke
 
 vi. Participial Formations. 275 
 
 The ravages which analogy is making in a lan- 
 guage are incessant, — that which is sometimes or 
 which is often, claiming to be always. Not seldom 
 the analogy is false and deceptive ; x but, even where 
 this fault cannot be urged, analogy will often substitute 
 a poor uniformity for a rich variety. We have just 
 seen what it has done with our preterites ; let us see 
 what it has not less effectually done with our past par- 
 ticiples. All our strong verbs formed originally their 
 past participles in 'en.' But with the multiplication 
 of weak verbs, whose participles ended in ' ed,' there 
 has followed a constant effort, and one too often suc- 
 cessful, to reduce the older to the same scheme. Many, 
 it is true, have resisted, and will now probably resist to 
 the end. But others not a few, as ' bounden,' ' graven,' 
 ' holden,' ' holpen,' and ' stricken,' have already an ar- 
 chaic air about them ; or, like the incorrect ' foughten ' 
 and 'paven,' would scarcely be used except in poetry. 
 For very many more analogy has effectually done its 
 work in driving them out of use. Thus we have 
 ceased to use the following past participle forms in 
 ' en ' (many of which, to be sure, were not genuine 
 strong forms): 'baken,' 'folden,' 'loaden,' 'shapen,' 
 'unwashen,' 'wreathen,' abiden ' (all in our English 
 Bible), 'founden/ 'hoven,' 'reapen' (all in Wiclif's 
 Bible), 'dolven' {Piers Plowman), 'corven,' 'kneden' 
 (Chaucer), 'betrayne' {Sir Scudamore), 'achieven,' 
 ' blotten,' 'overcomen/'gilden' (all in Spenser), 'fretten,' 
   sain ' (both in Shakespeare), ' casten,' ' fiayn ' (both 
 
 Flexion stufenweise versinkt unci ausstirbt, die schwache aber 
 urn sich greift. Cf. i. 994, 1040 ; ii. 5 ; iv. 509. 
 
 [' See Archdeacon Hare, Words corrupted by False Analogy, 
 or False Derivation.] 
 
 T 2
 
 276 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 in Coverdale), 'cliven' (Golding), 'usen' (Rogers), 
 'unwroken' (=unrevenged, Surrey), 'gnawn' (Hacket), 
 'sitten' (Holland), 'snown' (North), 'lopen' (Surrey), 
 'starven,' 'slidden,' 'contriven' (Beaumont). Some 
 curious instances of past participles in '-en' are still 
 to be found in our local dialects ; as, for example, 
 in Cumbrian we meet 'cutten,' 'knodden,' 'putten,' 
 ' setten,' ' strucken,' and others. 
 
 It is found in practice that men care very little for 
 grammatical right, when by the ignoring of this they 
 can obtain a handier implement for use. The con- 
 sideration of convenience will for most men override 
 every other. Our English verbs formed on the past 
 participle of the Latin verb, as for instance 'to devote,' 
 ' to corrupt,' ' to circumcise,' have in a large number 
 of instances been preceded by verbs which formed 
 themselves more correctly from the present tense 
 active ; thus ' to devove ' (Holland) preceded ' to 
 devote;' 'to corrump' (Wiclif, Mai. iii. 11) or 'to 
 corruppe ' (Coverdale) ' to corrupt ; ' ' to circumcide ' 
 (Coverdale) 'to circumcise;' though these with others 
 like them, as 'to compromit' (Capgrave), 'to suspeck,' 
 ' to correck,' ' to instruck ' (all in Coverdale), ' to in- 
 culk' (Tyndale), have been unable to make good their 
 footing in the language, having one and all given place 
 to those which we now employ. We need not look 
 far for the motive which led to the taking of the par- 
 ticiple past of the Latin verb as that on which to form 
 the English. In many cases it was difficult, in some 
 apparently impossible, to form this on the Latin pre- 
 sent. 'To devove,' 'to corrump,' 'to circumcide,' 
 might pass ; but 'to suspeck,' 'to correck,' 'to instruck,' 
 did not commend themselves much, while yet nothing
 
 VI. Participial Formations. 277 
 
 better could be done with ' suspicio,' ' corrigo,' ' in- 
 struo ; ' not to say that other verbs out of number, as 
 'accipio,' 'exhaurio,' 'addico,' 'macero,' 'polluo,' lent 
 themselves hardly or not at all to the forming in the 
 same way of an English verb upon them. But all 
 was easy if the participle past were recognized as the 
 starting-point ; and thus we have the verbs ' to accept,' 
 'to exhaust,' 'to addict,' 'to macerate,' 'to pollute,' 
 with a multitude of others. It is true that these words 
 could not all at once forget that they were already 
 participles past ; and thus side by side with that other 
 usage they continued for a long while to be employed 
 as such ; and instead of ' instructed,' ' dejected,' ' ac- 
 cepted,' ' exhausted,' and the rest, as now in use, we 
 find 'instruct' (' elephants instruct for war,' Milton), 
 1 deject ' (Shakespeare), ' accept ' (Coverdale), ' ex- 
 haust' (Bacon), 'distract' ('the fellow is distract] 
 Shakespeare), ' attaint ' (Holland), ' addict ' (Frith), 
 'convict' (Habington), 'infect' ('many are infect] 
 Shakespeare), ' pollute,' ' disjoint,' ' elevate ' ( ' in 
 thoughts more elevate] Milton), ' dilute ' (John Smith), 
 ' extort,' ' distort,' ' extract ' (all in Spenser), ' deduct,' 
 'mutilate' (both in Frith), 'contract' (Shakespeare), 
 ' abrogate ' (Tyndale), ' premeditate ' (Holland), ' con- 
 solidate' (Sir T. Elyot), with many more. Little by 
 little, however, it passed out of the linguistic con- 
 sciousness of men that these were past participles 
 already ; and, this once forgotten, no scruple was then 
 made of adding to them a second participial sign, and 
 we thus have them in their present shape and use ; 
 ' instructed, ' 'exhausted,' and the like. 
 
 Take another illustration from a tendency which 
 for centuries has been making itself felt more and
 
 278 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 more, of that ever-recurring law of language, namely, 
 that wherever two or more methods of attaining the 
 same result exist, there is always a disposition to drop 
 and dismiss all of these save one ; so that the alter- 
 native, or choice of ways, which once existed shall 
 exist within limits which are ever growing narrower, 
 and, in the end, shall not exist any more. If only a 
 language can arrive at a greater simplicity, it seems to 
 grudge no self-impoverishment by which this result 
 may be attained. We have two ways of forming our 
 comparatives and superlatives, one inherent in the 
 word itself, and derived from our old Teutonic stock, 
 thus 'bright,' 'brighter,' 'brighter*;' the other supple- 
 mentary to this, by aid of the auxiliaries ' more ' and 
 ' most ; ' this latter making its appearance toward the 
 end of the thirteenth century, and being probably due 
 to Norman -French analogy. The first, organic we 
 might call it, the indwelling power of the word to 
 mark its own degrees, must needs be esteemed the 
 more excellent way ; which yet, already disallowed in 
 almost all adjectives of more than two syllables in 
 length, is daily becoming of a yet more restricted em- 
 ployment. Compare in this matter our present posi- 
 tion with our past. Wiclif forms without scruple such 
 comparatives as ' grievouser,' ' gloriouser,' ' patienter,' 
 ' profitabler,' such superlatives as ' greviousest,' 'fa- 
 mousest,' ' preciousest.'' Two centuries later we meet 
 in Tyndale, 'excellenter,' ' miserablest ; ' in Roger 
 Ascham, ' inventivest ; ' in Shakespeare, ' ancientest,' 
 ' violentest ; ' in Gabriel Harvey, ' vendiblest,' ' sub- 
 stantialest,' ' insolentest ; ' in Fuller, ' eloquenter ; ' in 
 Butler, ' ingeniouser,' ' dangerouser ; ' in Rogers, ' in- 
 sufficienter,' ' goldenest ; ' in Beaumont and Fletcher,
 
 vi. Comparatives and Superlatives. 27 9 
 
 ' valiantest ; ' in Bacon, ' excellentest,' ' honorablest ; ' 
 in Sylvester, ' infamousest ; ' in North, ' warlikest,' 
 'unfortunatest.' Milton uses 'sensualest,' 'resolutest,' 
 1 exquisites:,' ' virtuosest,' and in prose ' vitiosest,' 
 ' elegantest,' ' artificialest,' ' servilest,' ' sheepishest,' 
 ' moralest ; ' Fuller has ' fertilest ; ' Drayton ' impos- 
 siblest ; ' Baxter ' tediousest ; ' Butler ' preciousest,' 
 ' intolerablest, 5 ' preposterousest ; ' Burnet ' copious- 
 est ; ' Gray ' impudentest.' Of these forms, and it 
 would be easy to adduce almost any number, we 
 should hardly now employ one. In participles and 
 adverbs in ' ly ' these organic comparatives and super- 
 latives hardly survive at all. We do not say 'wil- 
 linger,' or ' lovinger,' and still less ' repiningest ' (Sid- 
 ney), ' flourishingest,' ' shiningest,' ' surmountingest,' 
 all which Gabriel Harvey, a prime master of the 
 English of his time, employs ; ' plenteouslyer,' 
 ' charitablier ' (Barnes), ' amplier ' (Milton), ' easiliest ' 
 (Fuller), 'plainliest' (Dryden), 'fulliest,' ' highliest ' 
 (both in Baxter), would be all inadmissible at present. 
 In the evident disposition of English at the pre- 
 sent moment to reduce the number of words in which 
 this more vigorous scheme of expressing degrees is 
 allowed, we must recognize an evidence that the 
 energies of youth and early manhood in the language 
 are abating, and the stiffness of advancing age making 
 itself felt. Still it fares with us here only as it fares 
 with all languages, in which at a certain stage of their 
 development auxiliary words, leaving the main word 
 unaltered, are preferred to inflexions of this last. 
 Such preference makes itself ever more strongly felt ; 
 and, judging from analogy, I cannot doubt that a day, 
 however distant now, will arrive, when the only way
 
 2 So Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 of forming comparatives and superlatives in the 
 English language will be by prefixing ' more ' and 
 ' most ; ' or, if the other survive, it will be in poetry 
 alone. Doubtless such a consummation is to be re- 
 gretted ; for our language is too monosyllabic already ; 
 but it is one which no regrets will avert. 
 
 It will not fare otherwise, as we may be bold to 
 predict, with the flexional genitive, formed in ' s ' or 
 ' es.' This too will finally disappear, or will survive 
 only in the diction of poetry. A time will arrive, 
 when we shall no longer be free to say as now, either 
 ' the king's sons,' or ' the sons of the king,' but when the 
 latter will be the only admissible form. Tokens that 
 we are travelling to this consummation are already 
 evident. The region in which the alternative forms 
 are equally good is daily narrowing. We should not 
 now any more write, ' when man's Son shall come ' 
 (Wiclif), but ' when the Son of man shall come ; ' nor 
 yet ' the hypocrite's hope shall perish' (Job viii. 13, A.V.), 
 but ' the hope of the hypocrite shall perish ; ' nor ' the 
 Philistines' land ' (Gen. xxi. 34), but ' the land of the 
 Philistines ; ' not with Barrow, ' No man can be ig- 
 norant of humati life's brevity and uncertainty] but 
 ' No man can be ignorant of the brevity and uncertainty 
 of human life.' Already in our Authorized Version 
 the analytic form has displaced in passages out of 
 number the inflected. Thus at John xviii. 15, it is 
 ' the palace of the High Priest ; ' but in Coverdale, 
 ' the High Priest's palace ; ' at Heb. ii. 17, 'the sins 
 of the people,' but in earlier Versions 'the people's 
 sins ; ' at 1 Pet. iv. 23, 'partakers of the sufferings of 
 Christ,' but in earlier Versions ' partakers of Christ's 
 passions ;' at Zech. i. n, 'the angel of the Lord,' but
 
 vi. Augmentatives and Diminutives. 281 
 
 in Coverdale, ' the Lord's angel' This change at the 
 revision of 161 1 found place in cases innumerable, 
 but never, so far as I have observed, the converse. 
 Here too the consummation anticipated may be 
 centuries off, but with other of a like character will 
 assuredly arrive. 1 
 
 Of augmentatives, in which Spanish and Italian 
 so much abound, we have never had many ; of depre- 
 ciatives, in which Italian is so ignobly rich, still fewer. 2 
 But with diminutives we were fairly furnished once, 
 though not as the Romance languages are ; 3 nor in- 
 deed as some of our own dialects. Thus in that of 
 Banffshire ' horse ' may be made small in the follow- 
 ing fashion: 'horse,' 'horsie,' 'horsik,' 'horsikie;' 
 and when the word cannot be c belittled ' any further, 
 the aid of auxiliaries may be called in, ' wee horsikie,' 
 ' wee wee horsikie,' ' little wee horsikie.' Diminutives, 
 however, are leaving us fast. We prefer to express 
 smallness by an auxiliary word ; thus, a little fist, and 
 
 1 Schleicher in his masterly treatise, Die deutsche Sprache, 
 i860, p. 69, notes the same as going forward in German : Das 
 Schwinden der Casus und ihren Ersatz durch Priipositionen 
 konnen wir in unsrer jetzigen deutschen Sprache recht deutlich 
 beobachten. Anstatt 'siissen Weines voir u. dgl. pflegen wir im 
 gewbhnlichen Leben schon zu sagen, ' voll von siissem Weine ; 
 ja manche deutsche Volksmundarten haben den Genitiv fast 
 spurlos verloren, und sagen z. B. anstatt ' meines Bruders Sohn ' 
 entweder 'der Sohn von meinem Bruder,' oder 'meineni Bruder 
 sein Sohn.' Compare Sayce, Principles of Comparative Philo- 
 logy, p. 3 6 9- 
 
 - Thus, besides ' sonetto ' there are names of contempt fur 
 every variety of bad sonnet, 'sonettaccio,' 'sonettuccio,' 'sonet- 
 torello,' 'sonettino,' 'sonettuzzo,' ' sonettuciaccio.' 
 
 3 Diez, Graiiuu. Pom. vol. ii. p. 274.
 
 282 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 not a ' fistock ' (Golding), a little lad, and not a ' lad- 
 kin,' a little drop, and not a 'droplet' (in Shaks.), a 
 little worm, and not a ' wormling ' (Sylvester). It is 
 true that of diminutives many still survive, in all our 
 four main terminations of such, as ' hilled,' ' stream/*?/,' 
 ' lamb&'#,' ' gosli/ig ; ' but they are few as compared 
 with those which have perished, and are every day 
 becoming fewer. Where now is ' kingling ' (Holland), 
 ' friarling ' (Foxe), ' twinling' (=gemellus, Old Voca- 
 bulary), ' beamling' (Vaughan), ' whimling ' (Beaumont 
 and Fletcher), ' popeling ' (Hacket), 'tenderling' 
 (Harrison), ' streamling,' ' godling,' ' loveling,' dwarf- 
 ling,' ' shepherdling ' (all in Sylvester), ' chasteling ' 
 (Becon), ' niceling ' (Stubbs), ' poetling,' ' fosterling ' 
 (both in Ben Jonson), and ' masterling ' ? Where 
 now 'porelet' (= paupercula, Isai. x. 30), ' bundelet ' 
 (both in Wiclif) ; 'chastilet,' or little castle {Piers 
 Plowman), ' cushionet ' (Henry More), ' riveret,' 
 ' orphanet ' (both in Drayton), ' closulet,' ' lionet ' 
 (both in Phineas Fletcher), ' herblet,' ' batlet ' (both 
 in Shaks.), 'modulet' (Sylvester), 'thronelet' (Her- 
 rick), ' pouncelet ' (Davies), ' dragonet,' ' arboret ' 
 (both in Spenser), ' havener,' ' pistolet,' ' queenlet ' ? 
 Where, again, is ' bulkin ' (Holland), ' canakin,' ' bodi- 
 kin ' (both in Shaks.), ' thumbkin,' ' maidkin,' ' lady- 
 kin,' 'slamkin' (a slovenly girl); or where 'pillock' 
 (Levins), 'laddock,' 'hummock,' 'ruddock,' 'pad- 
 dock,' ' wifock ' (Golding), and a hundred more ? 
 Even of those remaining to us still many are putting 
 off, or have long since put off, any diminutive sug- 
 gestion ; a ' pocket ' being no longer a small poke, 
 nor a ' latchet ' a small lace, nor a ' trumpet ' a small 
 trump, as formerly they were ; just as our Greek Testa-
 
 vi. Adjectives do dtity as Substantives. 283 
 
 ment attests that many words in the ' common dialect ' 
 of Greek wherein it is written have done the same. 
 The attempt to form new diminutives on any of these 
 patterns, as when Carlyle of prince forms ' princekin,' 
 of Fritz makes ' Fritzkin,' of coach forms ' coachlet,' 
 of vein ' veinlet ; ' Thackeray, ' lordkin ' of lord ; 
 Tennyson, ' cageling ' of cage, is attended with very 
 moderate success. Few of them outlive the time of 
 their birth. 
 
 We have at this present day a large number of 
 nouns adjective, which we make do the work of nouns 
 substantive, as a ' white,' a ' black,' an ' antient,' a 
 ' modern,' 'operatives,' 'simples,' 'valuables.' Butthere 
 was a far greater freedom in this turning of adjectives 
 into substantives two or three centuries ago ; such ad- 
 jectives generally, but by no means always, designating 
 persons and not things ; and being most often used in 
 the plural number. Thus we had once in use, though 
 we hardly have now, ' abjects ' (English Bible), 'audi- 
 bles ' (Bacon), ' concurrents ' (=rivals, Holland), 
 ' dainties,' ' delicates ' (used both of persons by the 
 same), ' desirables ' (Cowper), ' despicables,' ' deplor- 
 ables' (both in Carlyle), 'hopelosts' (=ao-wroi), 'de- 
 sperates ' (Brereton), ' frantics ' (Adams), ' gentles ' 
 (Shaks.), 'humans' (Chapman), ' fantastics ' (Milton), 
 ' freshes,' ' homespuns,' ' resolutes ' (Shaks.), ' igno- 
 rants ' (Jeremy Taylor), 'memorables,' ' observables ' 
 (both in Fuller), ' unworthies ' (Brereton), ' valiants ' 
 (English Bible, margin), ' visibles ' (Bacon), ' vulgars ' 
 (Shaks.), ' transitories' (Jackson), 'predestinates' 
 (J. Taylor). I have quoted these in the plural as I 
 do not know them in the singular ; but we may add 
 to these a 'droll' (—a farce, Kirkman), an ' eloquent '
 
 284 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 (Jeremy Taylor), a 'forlorn' (Shaks.), a 'headstrong' 
 (the same), a 'pleasant ' (=a buffoon, Holland). No 
 one of these which I have just enumerated has estab- 
 lished itself in the language ; nor can I call to mind 
 for the filling up of the places which they have left 
 empty any considerable growth of other words of the 
 same kind. At the same time the coming up in the 
 last few years of words like the following, 'anaesthe- 
 tics,' an 'expert,' an 'irreconcilable,' a 'rough,' a 
 ' silly,' a ' suspect,' a ' stupid,' an ' empty,' attests the 
 fact that this power of compelling adjectives to do the 
 work of substantives is not wholly extinct. 
 
 There was a time when nouns substantive in ' er ' l 
 sprung out of verbs almost as spontaneously as par- 
 ticiples do now. This free generation of such cannot 
 be said to exist any more ; and of the nouns in this 
 way generated, a vast number have been subsequently 
 in practice disallowed. Let me instance a few from 
 verbs and nouns, in proof how freely these once were 
 formed ; thus, ' constrainer,' ' feigner ' (both in Wiclif), 
 'appearer,' 'banisher,' ' bridger,' ' budger,' 'causer,' 
 ' chaser,' ' correctioner,' ' depender,' ' forfeiter,' ' giber,' 
 ' needer,' ' pauser,' ' rumourer,' ' seemer,' ' squarer,' 
 'succeeder,' 'truster,' 'torcher,' 'wronger' (all in 
 Shaks.), ' cofferer ' (North), ' doomer ' (Greene), ' ex- 
 tirper ' (from the obsolete verb ' to extirp,' Bacon), 
 ' craver,' ' escaper ' (A. V., margin), ' forsaker,' ' liker,' 
 ' puler,' ' saver ' (all in North), ' turmoiler ' (Frith), 
 'decider' (Beaumont and Fletcher), ' commotioner ' 
 (Crowley), ' possessionem' 'judger' (both in Cover- 
 
 1 [For this suffix denoting the agent or person, see Kluge, 
 
 N.S., § 9-]
 
 vi. Substantives hirned into Verbs. 285 
 
 dale), ' eluder,' ' obeyer ' (both in Rogers), ' exhaus- 
 ter,' 'praiser,' ' prizer,' 'verser' (all in Ben Jonson), 
 ' haranguer,' ' proscriber ' (both in Dryden), ' fabler,' 
 'fabricker' (both in Holyday), 'gracer' (Chapman), 
 ' motioner ' (A. V., Preface), ' representer ' (Cranmer), 
 ' miner,' ' advancer ' (both in Fuller), ' practiser ' 
 (Jeremy Taylor), ' treatiser ' (Field), ' homager ' 
 (Quarles), ' rigger ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), ' ima- 
 ger,' ' roper ' (both in Holland), ' distracter,' ' neg- 
 lecter,' ' slighter ' (all in Baxter), ' shamer,' ' whetter ' 
 (both in Beaumont and Fletcher), with many more 
 which it would not be hard to bring together. 
 
 There are other ways in which our present English 
 is not what our past English was, has abdicated powers 
 which it once possessed, or has so long intermitted to 
 claim them that it could hardly venture to do so now. 
 Think for example of the freedom with which Shake- 
 speare, and he is very far from being alone in this, made 
 almost any noun substantive into a verb at his pleasure ; 
 thus, ' to ambition,' ' to antic,' ' to ballad,' ' to balm,' 
 'to barn,' 'to bench,' 'to blanket,' 'to bombast,' 'to 
 boy,' ' to bride,' ' to buckler,' ' to casket,' ' to cham- 
 pion,' ' to child,' ' to climate,' ' to compeer,' ' to condi- 
 tion,' ' to coward,' ' to craven,' ' to cupboard,' 'to dis- 
 aster,' 'to decalogue,' 'to dialogue,' 'to duke,' 'to 
 dumb,' ' to faith,' ' to fortress,' ' to furnace,' ' to ghost,' 
 ' to god,' ' to gospel,' ' to history,' ' to host,' ' to hovel,' 
 1 to hull,' ' to king,' ' to kingdom,' ' to knee,' ' to lesson,' 
 'to life,' 'to lip,' 'to livery,' ' to lover,' 'to malice,' ' to 
 mart,' ' to miracle,' ' to mist,' ' to monster,' ' to mounte- 
 bank,' ' to necessity,' ' to niggard,' ' to nose,' ' to office/ 
 'to page,' 'to palate,' 'to pang,' 'to path,' 'to 
 pattern,' ' to pellet,' ' to period,' ' to prince,' ' to
 
 286 Diminutions of English. Lect. 
 
 property,' 'to renown,' 'to repast,' 'to ruffian,' 'to 
 safeguard,' ' to scythe,' ' to sermon,' ' to sepulchre,' ' to 
 servant,' ' to sinew,' 'to sire,' ' to sister,' 'to spectacle,' 
 ' to stage,' ' to stranger,' ' to timber,' ' to tongue,' ' to 
 truncheon,' ' to uproar,' ' to verse,' ' to virgin,' ' to 
 window,' 'to woman,' 'to womb.' He asserts the 
 same liberty with nouns adjective ; thus, ' to bold,' 
 ' to coy,' ' to dear,' ' to demure,' ' to dumb,' ' to false,' 
 'to feeble,' 'to fond,' 'to gentle,' 'to happy,' 'to 
 mad,' ' to pensive,' ' to safe,' ' to tardy,' ' to unhappy, 
 ' to violent,' 'to worthy.' Other writers of the Eliza- 
 bethan, of the preceding, and of the next succeeding 
 age, use the same liberty, though scarcely to the same 
 extent. Thus we meet 'to author' (Chapman), 'to 
 bane ' (Fuller), ' to blank ' (North), ' to chest ' (A. V., 
 margin), ' to cinder ' (Gascoigne), ' to contrary ' 
 (North), 'to cranny' (Golding), 'to dark' (Spenser), 
 ' to ditty ' (P. Fletcher), ' to goal,' ' to guilt ' (Wiclif), 
 •to halter' (Golding), 'to ignoble ' (Bacon), ' to imbe- 
 cile ; (Jeremy Taylor), ' to mire ' (Holland), ' to pas- 
 sion ' (Beaumont and Fletcher), ' to prelate ' (Latimer), 
 ' to proverb,' ' to sycophant ' (both in Milton), ' to 
 tinsel ' (Herrick), ' to title,' ' to truant ' (both in 
 Milton), ' to wrath ' (Chapman), with others. ' To 
 interview,' a very recent birth, is still alive. 
 
 Once more — in the entire dropping among the 
 higher classes, and in some parts of England among 
 all classes, of ' thou,' except in poetry or in addresses 
 to the Deity, and, consequent on this, in the dropping 
 of the second singular of the verb with its strongly 
 marked flexion, as ' lovest,' ' lovedst,' we have another 
 example of a power which has been allowed to expire, 
 a distinction to disappear. In the seventeenth century
 
 vi. Thou and You. 287 
 
 ' thou ' in English, as at the present ' du ' in German, 
 ' tu ' in French, was the sign of familiarity, whether 
 that familiarity was of love or of contempt. 1 It was 
 not unfrequently the latter. Thus at Sir Walter 
 Raleigh's trial (1603), Coke, when argument and evi- 
 dence failed him, insulted, and meant to insult, the 
 illustrious prisoner by applying to him the term 
 'thou ': — 'All that Lord Cobham did was at thy in- 
 stigation, thou viper ! for I thou thee, thou traitor ! ' 
 And when Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night is urging 
 the foolish knight to send a sufficiently provoca- 
 tive challenge to Viola, he suggests ' that he taunt him 
 with the licence of ink; if thou thou'st him some thrice, 
 it shall not be amiss.' To keep this in mind will throw 
 much light on one peculiarity of the Quakers, and 
 give a certain dignity to it as once maintained, which 
 at present it is very far from possessing. However 
 needless and unwise their determination to ' thou ' 
 and ' thee ' the whole world, this was not then, as it 
 seems now to us, and as indeed through the silent 
 changes which language has undergone, it now is, a 
 gratuitous departure from the ordinary usage of society. 
 Right or wrong, it meant something, and had an 
 ethical motive : being indeed a testimony upon their 
 parts, however misplaced, that they would not have 
 high or great or rich men's persons in admiration ; 
 nor render the observance to some which they with- 
 held from others. It was a testimony too which 
 cost them something. At present we can very little 
 
 1 Thus Wallis {Gramm. Ling. Anglic, 1654) : Singulari 
 numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, 
 vel familiariter hlandientis.
 
 288 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 understand the amount of courage which this ' thou- 
 ing' and 'thee-ing' of all the world demanded on 
 their parts, the amount of indignation and offence 
 which it stirred up where men were not aware of, 
 or would not allow for, the scruples which, as the 
 Quakers considered, obliged them to this course. 1 It 
 is, however, in its other aspect that we must chiefly 
 regret the dying out of the use of ' thou ' — that is, as 
 the token of peculiar intimacy and special affection, as 
 between husband and wife, parents and children, and 
 others who might be knit together by bands of more 
 than a common love. 
 
 Let me add before quitting the subject that this 
 plural used in the addressing of single persons was 
 not, I am sure, at the first any ' plural of majesty; ' but 
 had its origin in a reluctance to come face to face 
 with the single personality of another. There is often 
 in men's speech a similar shrinking from looking their 
 
 1 What the actual position of the compellation ' thou ' was 
 at that time, we learn from Fuller {Church History, Dedication 
 of Book vii. ) : 'In opposition whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker 
 usage] we maintain that thou from superiors to inferiors is 
 proper, as a sign of command ; from equals to equals is passable, 
 as a note of familiarity ; but from inferiors to superiors, if pro- 
 ceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness ; if from 
 affectation, a tone of contempt.' See a brief but instructive 
 disquisition in Skeat's edition of The Romance of William of 
 Palerne, p. xli, in proof that in Early English literature the 
 distinction between 'thou' and 'ye,' as here laid down, was 
 accurately observed. There is a most interesting and exhaustive 
 treatment of the past relation between ' thou ' and ' you ' in 
 Guesses at Truth, 1867, pp. 120-133; see also Abbott, A 
 Shakespearean Grammar, 1870, pp. 153-159 ; and Grimm's 
 Worterbuch , s. v. Du.
 
 vi. Loss of Plural in ' en! 289 
 
 own personality in the face, though it may show itself 
 in a somewhat different way. When Purvey in the 
 Preface to his revision of WicliPs Bible, where he 
 should naturally say ' I ' in the first person, prefers to 
 substitute ' a simple creature ' in the third ; or Wiclif 
 himself, in the same way, for ' I ' substitutes ' a poor 
 caitiff ; ' when a grand Canadian lumberer, as I read 
 in a recent book of American travel, would always 
 designate himself as ' this horse; ' or when the Chinese 
 scholar speaks of ' ts'ie ' or ' the thief,' meaning there- 
 by himself, 1 we may trace in all these the same feeling 
 uttering itself in slightly different ways. 
 
 I have already remarked more than once that no- 
 thing can be imagined more stealthy, more calculated 
 to elude observation, than the disappearance of an old 
 form, and the usurpation of its place by a new. Take 
 for instance the getting rid of the plural in ' en.' This, 
 originally the Old Teutonic plural of the weak declen- 
 sion, had, during the early Middle period of the lan- 
 guage, spread over a much larger group of words ; but, 
 as we all know, has long since given place to ' s,' 
 which, once the sign in two of the strong declensions, 
 is now the almost universal sign of the plural. By 
 steps so slow as to be almost imperceptible, diffused 
 as they have been over vast spaces of time, this dis- 
 missal of one and adoption of another has been 
 effected. Long before Chaucer, already in the Rhymed 
 Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, written before 1 300, 
 it is evident that the termination in 'en' is giving 
 way, and that that in ' s ' has virtually won the day ; 
 
 1 We may compare the ' Ilunc hominem ' of Horace, Sat. i, 
 9. 47. 
 
 U
 
 290 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 but we do not the less meet in this ' arwen ' (arrows), 
 ' steden,' 'sterren,' 'ameten' (emmets), 'chyrchen,' 
 'massen,' 'been,' 'heveden' (heads), 'applen,' 'can- 
 dlen,' 'honden,' 'soulen,' 'unclen,' ' lancen,' and 
 others; as in The Romatice of King Alexander, of the 
 same date, we have 'crabben,' ' hawen,' 'slon' (sloes), 
 ' noten ' (nuts). In Chaucer's time they are very much 
 fewer, while yet he has ' ashen,' ' been,' ' dougteren,' 
 'eyne,' 'fone,' 'shoon,' ' sistren ; ' but all these side 
 by side with our present 'ashes,' 'bees,' 'daughters,' 
 'foes,' and the rest ; employing now one and now the 
 other. Thus the region which the plural in ' en ' occu- 
 pied once has greatly narrowed, and it is not in 
 exclusive occupation even of this ; although still re- 
 taining a certain ground of its own. Two centuries 
 later ' sistern ' is still alive ; it is frequent in Tyndale, 
 Coverdale, and other of our early Reformers ; and in 
 discourses from the pulpit in America it still goes 
 hand in hand with ' brethren.' ' Peasen,' too, is still 
 the plural of ' pease,' which is itself a singular, the 
 Low Latin ' pisum,' ' pea ' not having yet been heard 
 of ; ' hosen ' too appears in our Authorized Version 
 (Dan. iii. 21), and this though Wiclif already had 
 'hosis.' ' Fone,' too, and 'shoon,' ' eyne ' also, and 
 ' skyen,' are all found in the diction of poetry, but 
 chiefly in that of poets who, like Spenser, affect the 
 archaic. At the present day, setting aside four or five 
 words which have preserved, and will now probably 
 preserve to the end, the termination in 'en,' as 'oxen,' 
 ' kine ' (kyen, a cumulate plural ; for ' kye,' still current 
 in Scotland, was a plural already), and ' brethren ' 
 (another cumulate plural), perhaps ' eyne ' is the only 
 one of these plurals which even a poet would feel at
 
 vi. Displacement of Suffix ' and.' 291 
 
 liberty to employ; while others, as 'shoon' (shoes), 
 ' housen,' 'fuzzen ' (furzes), 'cheesen,' maintain a pro- 
 vincial existence. 
 
 A history very nearly similar might be traced of the 
 process by which the modern standard termination 
 of the participle present, namely the suffix ' ing,' has 
 superseded and displaced the northern ' and ' [the re- 
 presentative of the OE. ' -ende '], so that we say now 
 'doing,' 'sitting,' 'leaping,' not ' doand,' 'sittand,' 
 ' leapand.' Spenser's archaic ' glitterand ' (F. Q. i. 
 7. 29) is about the last surviving specimen in literary 
 English of the northern form ; in Scotland it main- 
 tained its ground to a far later day, in the popular 
 language maintains it still, as every reader of Burns 
 must be aware. 1 
 
 It is thus, and by steps such as these, that a 
 change is brought about. That which ultimately is 
 to win all comes in, it may be, at first as an exception ; 
 it then just obtains a footing and allowance ; it next 
 exists side by side and on equal term?; with the old ; 
 then overbears it ; and finally, it may be, so claims 
 the whole domain of the language as its own, that a 
 single isolated word, like the ' paterfamili<w ' of the 
 Latins, is all which survives of what was once the law 
 for all words of a certain class in a language. 
 
 [' The termination -ing of the modern form of the present 
 participle is not a phonetic representative of the OE. termina- 
 tion -aide, but is the direct representative of the OE. suffix 
 -ungvrith which verbal substantives were formed in the Teutonic 
 languages, which suffix came into participial use from phrases 
 like ' I am a fighting,' ' I go a fishing ; ' for examples of this 
 use see N.E. D. (s. v. A, p. 3, cols. 2, 3) ; and for a further 
 discussion of the subject see Skeat, Principles of English Ety- 
 mology, % 241.I 
 
 U 2
 
 292 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 I will not conclude this lecture without one further 
 illustration of the same law, which, as I have sought 
 to show, is evermore working, and causing this and 
 that to be dismissed from a language, as soon as ever 
 the speakers feel that it is not absolutely indispens- 
 able, that they can attain their end, which is, to con 
 vey their meaning, without it ; though, having dwelt 
 on the subject so fully, I shall do little more than 
 indicate this. I refer not here to any change in 
 English now going forward, but to one which com- 
 pleted its course several centuries ago ; namely, to 
 the renouncing upon its part, of any distribution of 
 nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter, as in 
 German, or even into masculine and feminine, as in 
 French ; and with this, and as a necessary conse- 
 quence of this, the dropping of any flexional modifi- 
 cation of the adjectives in regimen with them. It was 
 the boldest step in the way of simplification which 
 the language has at any time taken ; and one which 
 it took centuries fully to accomplish. Natural sex, of 
 course, remains, being inherent in all language ; but 
 grammatical gender, with the exception of 'he,' 'she,' 
 and 'it,' and perhaps one or two other fragmentary 
 instances, our language has altogether foregone. An 
 example will make clear the distinction between 
 these. Thus it is not the word ' poetess ' which is 
 feminine, but the person indicated who is female. So 
 too ' daughter,' ' queen,' are in English not femi- 
 nine nouns, but nouns designating female persons. 
 Take, on the contrary, 'filia' or ' regina,' 'fille' or 
 'reine,' you have there feminine nouns as well as 
 female persons. We did not inherit this simplicity 
 from others, but, like the Danes, in so far as they have
 
 vi. Sex and Gender. 293 
 
 done the like, have made it for ourselves. Whether 
 we turn to the Latin, or, which is for us more im- 
 portant, to the old Teutonic, we find gender ; and 
 in all the daughter languages which were born of the 
 Latin, in most of those which have descended from 
 the ancient Teutonic stock, it is fully established to 
 this day. We are sometimes disposed to think of 
 German and English, if we think of them at all, as 
 languages very much abreast of one another in their 
 development ; nay, if I do not mistake, to regard 
 German in some way or other as the older language 
 of the two. But indeed such a fact as that to which 
 I am now calling your attention, namely that English 
 has rid itself of these distinctions of gender, which 
 burden the memory, but serve no good purpose 
 whatever, while German is hampered with them 
 still, is itself proof sufficient, though other proof 
 there is in abundance, that English has in one way 
 or another got the start of German and kept it, has 
 found means to disembarrass itself of much which 
 still encumbers German. Of this no doubt German 
 too will rid itself in time, according to the course 
 which all languages, some faster and some slower, 
 run ; although centuries may elapse before such a 
 consummation will arrive. 1 The practical business- 
 like character of the English mind asserted itself 
 in the rejection of a distinction, which in a vast pro- 
 portion of words, that is, in all which are the signs 
 of inanimate objects, and as such incapable of sex, 
 
 1 Why English should have travelled at a more rapid rate 
 than German, Koch in his excellent Grammar, p. 6, has well 
 explained.
 
 294 Diminutions of English. lect. 
 
 rested upon a fiction, and had no ground in the real 
 nature of things. It is only by an act and effort of 
 the imagination that sex, and thus gender, can be 
 attributed to a table, a ship, or a tree ; l and there are 
 aspects, this being one, in which the English is among 
 the least imaginative of all languages, even while it 
 has been employed in some of the mightiest works of 
 imagination which the world has ever seen. 2 
 
 What, it may be asked, is the meaning and expla- 
 
 1 Compare Pott, Etym. Forsch., part ii. p. 404 ; Heyse, Syst. 
 d. SprachivissenscJiaft, p. 418. The entirely arbitrary character 
 of the attribution of gender to sexless things is illustrated well 
 by the way in which different genders are ascribed in the same 
 book to one and the same thing ; thus in our Authorized Version, 
 'the tree his fruit ' (Dan. iv. 14), 'the tree her fruit' (Rev. 
 xxii. 1) ; and the different Versions vary, thus ' the vine her roots ' 
 (Ezek. xvii. 7, A.V. ), 'the vine his roots' (ibid. Coverdale) ; 
 'the salt his savour' (Matt. v. 13, A.. V.), 'the salt her salt- 
 ness ' (ibid. Tyndale). But at a much earlier date it had become 
 to a great extent a matter of subjective individual feeling 
 whether his (masculine and neuter) or her (feminine) should be 
 employed. The two recensions of Wiclif frequently differ from 
 one another ; thus at Job xxxix. 14, the first, ' the ostridge her 
 eggs,' the second, ' the ostridge his eggs ; ' so too at Gen. viii. 9, 
 the first, ' the culver his foot,' the second, ' the culver her 
 foot ; ' Wisdom is ' it ' in the first version ; but ' she ' in Pur- 
 vey's revision. Marsh's judgment on the whole matter is a just 
 one. In his Lectures on the English Language, p. 400, he 
 says : — The indiscriminate attribution of the three genders, as 
 in Anglo-Saxon and German, or of the masculine and fem- 
 inine, as in French and Italian, to inanimate objects, is philo- 
 sophically a blemish, and practically a serious inconvenience in 
 those languages ; and it is a great improvement in English that 
 it has simplified its grammar, by rejecting so superfluous, un- 
 meaning, and embarrassing a subtlety. 
 
 2 Compare Chasles, Etudes sur I'Alle/uagne, p. 25.
 
 vi. Synthetic and Analytic. 295 
 
 nation of all this ? It is that at certain earlier periods 
 of a nation's life its genius is synthetic, and at later 
 becomes analytic. At earlier periods the imagination 
 is more than the understanding ; men love to con- 
 template the thing and the mode of the thing together, 
 as a single idea, bound up in one. But a time arrives 
 when the intellectual obtains the upper hand of the 
 imaginative, when the inclination of those that speak 
 a language is to analyse, to distinguish between these 
 two, and not only to distinguish, but to divide, to 
 have one word for the thing itself, and another for 
 the quality or manner of the thing ; and this, as it 
 would appear, is true, not of some languages only, 
 but of all.
 
 296 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 LECTURE VII. 
 
 CHANGES IN THE MEANING OF ENGLISH 
 WORDS. 
 
 I PROPOSE in ray present lecture to consider a 
 little those changes which have found, or are 
 now finding, place in the meaning of English words ; 
 so that, whether we are aware of it or not, we employ 
 them at this day in senses very different from those in 
 which our forefathers employed them of old. 1 You 
 will observe that it is not obsolete words, such as have 
 quite fallen out of present use, which I propose to 
 consider ; but such, rather, as are still on the lips of 
 men, although with meanings more or less removed 
 from those which once they possessed. My subject 
 is far more practical, has far more to do with your 
 actual life, than if I were to treat of words at the 
 present day altogether out of use. These last have 
 an interest indeed ; but so long as they remain what 
 they are, and can be found only in our glossaries, it is 
 an interest of an antiquarian character. They con- 
 
 1 There is a very interesting and instructive essay, extend- 
 ing over some seventy pages, in Littre's Etudes et Glanures, 
 Paris, 1880, entitled Pathologie Verbale, which travels over 
 much of the same ground as this lecture, and to which I would 
 invite your attention ; although, as the name which he has given 
 to it sufficiently indicates, it is words which have, if I may so 
 express myself, suffered in one shape or another to which he 
 restricts his studies.
 
 vii. Changed Meaning of Words. 297 
 
 stitute a part of the intellectual money with which 
 our ancestors carried on the business of their lives ; 
 but now they are rather medals for the cabinets and 
 collections of the curious than current money for the 
 service of all. Their wings are clipped; they are 
 ' winged words ' no more ; the spark of thought or 
 feeling, kindling from mind to mind, no longer runs 
 along them, as along the electric wires of the soul. 
 And then, besides this, there is little danger that any 
 should be misled by them. They are as rocks which, 
 standing out from the sea, declare their presence, and 
 are therefore easily avoided ; while those other are as 
 hidden rocks, which are the more dangerous, that 
 their very existence is unsuspected. A reader lights 
 for the first time on some word which has now passed 
 out of use, as ' frampold,' or ' garboil,' or ' brangle ; ' 
 he is at once conscious of his ignorance ; he has re- 
 course to a glossary, or, if he guesses from the context 
 at the signification, still his guess is a guess to him, 
 and no more. 
 
 But words that have changed their meaning have 
 often a deceivableness about them. A reader not once 
 doubts but that he knows their intention ; he is visited 
 with no misgiving about this. There is nothing to 
 tell him that they possess for him another force than 
 that which they possessed for the author in whose 
 writings he finds them, and which they conveyed to 
 his contemporaries. He little dreams how far the old 
 life may have gone out of them, and a new life entered 
 in. Let us suppose a student to light on a passage 
 like the following (it is from the Preface to Howell's 
 Lexicon, 1660): 'Though the root of the English 
 language be Dutch, yet it may be said to have been
 
 298 Changed Meaning of Words, lect. 
 
 inoculated afterwards on a French stock.' He may 
 know that the Dutch is a dialect of the great Teutonic 
 family of languages, and one very nearly related to 
 our own ; but that it is the root of English will cer- 
 tainly perplex him, and he will hardly know what 
 to make of the assertion ; perhaps he ascribes it to 
 ignorance in his author, who is thereby unduly lowered 
 in his esteem. But presently in the progress of his 
 reading he meets with the following statement, this 
 time in Fuller's Holy War, being a history of the 
 Crusades : ' The French, Dutch, Italian, and English 
 were the four elemental nations, whereof this army [of 
 the Crusaders] was compounded.' If the student has 
 sufficient historical knowledge to know that in the 
 time of the Crusades there were no Dutch in our 
 use of the word, this statement would merely startle 
 him ; and probably before he had finished the chapter, 
 having his attention once roused, he would perceive 
 that Fuller with the writers of his time used ' Dutch ' 
 for German ; even as it was constantly so used to 
 the end of the seventeenth century, — what we call 
 now a Dutchman being then a Hollander,— and as 
 the Americans use it to this present day. But a raw 
 student might very possibly want that amount of pre- 
 vious training which should cause him to receive this 
 announcement with surprise and misgiving ; and he 
 might rise from a perusal of the book, persuaded that 
 the Dutch, as we call them, played an important part 
 in the Crusades, while the Germans took little or no 
 part in them at all. 1 
 
 [' But the ' raw student ' should be warned that Howell in 
 using the word Dutch does not intend us to understand thai
 
 vii. Changed Meaning of Words. 299 
 
 And as it is here with an historic fact, so still more 
 often will it fare with the subtler moral and ethical 
 modifications which words have undergone. Out of 
 these it will continually happen that words convey 
 now much more reprobation, or convey now much 
 less, than once th^y did ; or, it may be, convey re- 
 probation of a different kind ; and a reader, unaware 
 of their altered value, may seriously misread his 
 author, never doubting all the while that he perfectly 
 takes in his meaning. Thus when Shakespeare makes 
 the gallant York address Joan of Arc as a ' mis- 
 creant,' how coarse a piece of invective this sounds ; 
 how unlike what the chivalrous soldier would have 
 uttered ; or what Shakespeare, even with his unworthy 
 estimate of the holy warrior-maid, would have been 
 likely to put into his mouth. But the ' miscreant ' of 
 Shakespeare's time was not the ' miscreant ' of ours. 
 He was simply, in agreement with the etymology of 
 the word, a misbeliever, one who did not believe 
 rightly the articles of the Catholic Faith. This I need 
 not remind you was the constant charge which the 
 English brought against the Pucelle, — namely, that 
 she was a dealer in hidden magical arts, a witch, and 
 as such had fallen from the faith. On this plea they 
 burnt her, and it is this which York intends when he 
 calls her a ' miscreant,' not what we should intend by 
 the name. 
 
 In poetry above all what beauties are often missed, 
 what forces lost, through this taking for granted that 
 
 the root of English is German, the language we now strictly call 
 Modern High German ; if he had been writing now he would 
 have written 'Germanic' or 'Teutonic.']
 
 300 Changed Meaning of Words, lect. 
 
 the present meaning of a word accurately represents 
 the past. How often the poet is wronged in our esti- 
 mation ; that seeming to us now flat and pointless, 
 which would assume quite another aspect did we know 
 how to read into some word the emphasis which it 
 once had, but which now has departed from it. For 
 example, Milton ascribes in Comus the ' tinsel-slippered 
 feet ' to Thetis, the goddess of the sea. How com- 
 paratively poor an epithet this 'tinsel-slippered' 
 sounds to as many as know of ' tinsel ' only in its 
 modern acceptation of mean and cheap finery, affect- 
 ing a splendour which it does not really possess. But 
 learn its earlier use by learning its derivation, bring it 
 back to the French 'etincelle,' and the Latin 'scin- 
 tella : ' see in it, as Milton and the writers of his 
 time saw, ' the sparkling,' and how exquisitely beauti- 
 ful a title does this become applied to a sea-goddess ; 
 how vividly does it call up before our mind's eye the 
 quick glitter and sparkle of the waves under the light 
 of sun or moon. 1 It is the ' silver-footed ' (apyvpoir^a) 
 of Homer ; but this not servilely transferred, rather 
 reproduced and made his own by the English poet, 
 dealing as one great poet will do with another ; not 
 disdaining to borrow, but ever adding to what he bor- 
 rows a further grace of his own. 
 
 Or, again, do we always keep in mind, or are we 
 even aware, that whenever the word ' influence ' occurs 
 in our English poetry, down to comparatively a mo- 
 dern date, there is always more or less remote allusion 
 
 1 So in Herrick's Electro. : 
 
 ' More white than are the whitest creams, 
 Or moonlight tinselling the streams. '
 
 vii. Influence. 301 
 
 to invisible illapses of power, skyey, planetary effects, 
 supposed to be exercised by the heavenly luminaries 
 upon the dispositions and the lives of men ? The ten 
 occasions on which the word occurs in Shakespeare 
 do not offer a single exception. How many a passage 
 starts into new life and beauty and fulness of allusion, 
 when this is present with us ; even Milton's 
 
 ' store of ladies, whose bright eyes 
 Rain influence? 
 
 as spectators of the tournament, gain something, when 
 we regard them — and using this language, he intended 
 we should — as the luminaries of this lower sphere, 
 shedding by their propitious presence strength and 
 valour into the hearts of their champions. 
 
 A word will sometimes even in its present accep- 
 tation yield a convenient and even a correct sense ; 
 the last I have cited would do so ; we may fall 
 into no positive misapprehension about it ; and still, 
 through ignorance of its past history and of the force 
 which it once possessed, we may miss much of its 
 significance. We are not beside the meaning of our 
 author, but we are short of it. Thus in Beaumont 
 and Fletcher's King and no King, ' a cowardly braggart 
 of a soldier describes the treatment he experienced, 
 when, like Parolles, he was at length found out, and 
 stripped of his lion's skin: — 'They hung me up by 
 the heels and beat me with hazel sticks, . . . that the 
 whole kingdom took notice of me for a baffled whipped 
 fellow.' Were you reading this passage, there is pro- 
 bably nothing which would make you pause; you 
 would attach to ' baffled ' a sense which sorts very well 
 
 1 Act iii. sc. 2.
 
 302 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 with the context — ' hung up by the heels and beaten, 
 all his schemes of being thought much of were baffled 
 and defeated.' But ' baffled ' implies far more than 
 this ; it contains allusion to a custom in the days of 
 chivalry, according to which a perjured or recreant 
 knight was either in person, or more commonly in 
 effigy, hung up by the heels, his scutcheon blotted, 
 his spear snapt asunder, and he himself or his effigy 
 made the subject of all kinds of indignities ; such an 
 one being said to be ' baffled.' ' Twice in Spenser's 
 Fairy Queen recreant knights are so treated. I can 
 only quote a portion of the shorter passage, in which 
 this infamous punishment is described : 
 
 ' And after all, for greater infamy 
 He by the heels him hung upon a tree, 
 And baffled so, that all which that passed by 
 The picture of his punishment might see.'- 
 
 Probably when Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, men 
 were not so remote from the days of chivalry, or at 
 any rate from the literature of chivalry, but that this 
 custom was still fresh in their minds. How much 
 more to them than to us, so long as we are ignorant 
 of the same, must their words just quoted have con- 
 veyed ? 
 
 There are several places in the Authorized Version 
 of Scripture, where those unaware of the changes we 
 are speaking of, can hardly fail of being to a certain 
 extent misled as to the intention of our Translators ; 
 or, if they are better acquainted with Greek than with 
 
 1 See Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. iii. pp. 827, 1218 ; Ann. 
 1513, 1570 [and the passages cited in N.E. L).]. 
 - Fairy Queen, vi. 7, 27 ; cf. v. 3, 37.
 
 VII. Meaning of Religion. 303 
 
 early English, will be tempted to ascribe to them, 
 though unjustly, an inexact rendering of the original 
 Thus the altered meaning of ' religion ' may very easily 
 draw after it a serious misunderstanding in that well- 
 known statement of St. James, ' Pure religion and un- 
 defined before God and the Father is this, to visit the 
 fatherless and widows in their affliction.' 'There!' 
 exclaims one who wishes to set up St. James against 
 St. Paul, that so he may escape the necessity of obey- 
 ing either, ' listen to what St. James says ; there is 
 nothing mystical in what he requires ; instead of harp- 
 ing on faith as a condition necessary to salvation, he 
 makes all religion to consist in deeds of active well- 
 doing and kindness one to another.' But let us pause 
 for a moment. Did ' religion,' when our Version was 
 made, mean godliness ? did it mean the sum total of 
 our duties towards God ? for, of course, no one would 
 deny that deeds of charity are a necessary part of our 
 Christian duty, an evidence of the faith which is in 
 us. There is abundant evidence to show that ' reli- 
 gion ' did not mean this ; that, like the Greek $prjo-K€ia, 
 for which it here stands, like the Latin 'religio,' it 
 meant the outward forms and embodiments in which 
 the inward principle of piety clothed itself, the external 
 service of God : and St. James is urging upon those 
 to whom he is writing something of this kind : ' In- 
 stead of the ceremonial services of the Jews, which 
 consisted in divers washings and in other elements 
 of this world, let our service, our Op-qaKua, take a 
 nobler shape, let it consist in deeds of pity and of 
 love ' — and it was this which our Translators intended, 
 when they used ' religion ' here and ' religious ' in the 
 verse preceding. How little 'religion' was formerly
 
 304 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 in meaning co-extensive with godliness, how predo- 
 minantly it was used for the outward service of God, 
 is plain from many passages in our Homilies, and from 
 other contemporary literature. 
 
 Or, again, consider some words in the Sermon on 
 the Mount, ' Take no thought for your life, what ye 
 shall eat, or what ye shall drink ' (Matt. vi. 25). They 
 have been often found fault with ; and, to quote one 
 of the fault-finders, 'most English critics have lamented 
 the inadvertence of our Authorized Version, which in 
 bidding us take no thought for the necessaries of life 
 prescribed to us what is impracticable in itself, and 
 would be a breach of Christian duty even if possible.' 
 But there is no ' inadvertence ' here. When our 
 Translation was made, ' Take no thought ' was a per- 
 fectly correct rendering of the words of the original. 
 ' Thought ' was then constantly used for painful soli- 
 citude and care. 1 Thus Bacon writes: 'Harris an 
 alderman was put in trouble and died of thought and 
 anxiety before his business came to an end ; ' and in 
 one of the Somers Tracts (its date is of the reign of 
 Elizabeth) these words occur : ' In five hundred years 
 only two queens have died in childbirth. Queen 
 Catherine Parr died rather of thought? A still better 
 example occurs in Shakespeare's Julius Caisar — 
 ' Take thought, and die for Caesar ' — where ' to take 
 thought ' is to take a matter so seriously to heart that 
 death ensues. 
 
 Again, there are words in our Prayer Book which 
 are frequently misunderstood. Thus we ask of God 
 
 [' The Revised Version (1881) renders, 'Be not anxious,' 
 &c.j
 
 vii. Kindly. 305 
 
 that it would please Him ' to give and preserve to our 
 use the kindly fruits of the earth.' What is commonly 
 understood by these 'kindly fruits of the earth'? The 
 fruits, if I mistake not, in which the kindness of God 
 or of nature towards us finds its expression. This is 
 no unworthy meaning, but it is not the right one. The 
 ' kindly fruits ' are the ' natural fruits,' those which the 
 earth according to its kind should naturally bring forth, 
 which it is appointed to produce. To show you how 
 little ' kindly ' meant once benignant, as it means now, 
 I will instance an employment of it from Sir Thomas 
 More's Life of Richard the Third. He tells us that 
 Richard calculated by murdering his two nephews in 
 the Tower to make himself accounted a ' kindly king ' 
 — not certainly a ' kindly ' one in our present usage 
 of the word ; but, having put them out of the way, 
 that he should then be lineal heir of the Crown, and 
 should thus be reckoned as king by kind or natural 
 descent ; and such was of old the constant use of the 
 word. Thus Bishop Andrewes, preaching on the Con- 
 spiracy of the Gowries, asks concerning the conspira- 
 tors, — if indeed conspirators they were, and not rather 
 foully murdered men, — 'Where are they? Gone to 
 their own place, to Judas their brother; as is most 
 kindly, the sons to the father of wickedness, there to 
 be plagued with him for ever.' 
 
 A phrase in one of our occasional Services, ' with 
 my body I thee worship,' has perplexed and some- 
 times offended those who were unacquainted with 
 the early uses of the word, and thus with the in- 
 tention of the framers of that Service. Clearly in 
 our modern sense of ' worship,' this language would 
 be inadmissible. But 'worship' or 'worthship ' meant 
 
 x
 
 -> 
 
 06 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 'honour' in our early English, and 'to worship' to 
 honour, this meaning of 'worship' still very harmlessly 
 surviving in 'worshipful,' and in the title of 'your 
 worship,' addressed to the magistrate on the bench. 
 So little was it restrained of old to the honour which 
 man is bound to pay to God, that it is employed by 
 Wiclif to express the honour which God will render 
 to his faithful servants and friends. Thus our Lord's 
 declaration, ' If any man serve Me, him will my 
 Father honour 7 (John xii. 26), in Wiclif's translation 
 reads thus, ' If ony man serve me, my fadir schal 
 ivorschipe hym.' 
 
 Take another example of a misapprehension which 
 may not be a very serious one ; but which it is just 
 as well to avoid. Fuller, our Church historian, prais- 
 ing some famous divine lately dead, exclaims, ' Oh 
 the painfulness of his preaching ! ' How easily we 
 might take this for an exclamation wrung out at the 
 recollection of the tediousness which he inflicted on 
 his hearers. Nothing of the kind ; the words are a 
 record not of the pain which he inflicted on others, 
 but of the pains which he bestowed himself: nor can 
 I doubt, if we had more ' painful ' preachers in the 
 old sense of the word, that is, who took pains them- 
 selves, we should have fewer 'painful' ones in the 
 modern sense, who cause pain to their hearers. So 
 too Grostete, the famous Bishop of Lincoln, is re- 
 corded as ' the painful writer of two hundred books ' 
 — not meaning hereby that these books were 'painful' 
 in the reading, but that he was laborious and 'painful' 
 in their composing. 
 
 Here is another easy misapprehension. Swift wrote 
 a pamphlet, or Letter to the Lord Treasurer^ with this
 
 vii. Treacle. 307 
 
 title, 'A proposal for correcting, improving, and ascer- 
 taining the English Tongue.' Who that brought a 
 knowledge of present English, and no more, to this 
 passage, would doubt that ' ascertaining the English 
 Tongue ' meant arriving at a certain knowledge of 
 what it was ? Swift, however, means something quite 
 different to this. ' To ascertain the English tongue ' 
 was not with him to arrive at a subjective certainty in 
 our own minds of what that tongue is, but to give an 
 objective certainty to that tongue itself, so that hence- 
 forth it should not be subject to change any more. 
 For even Swift himself, with all his masculine sense, 
 entertained a dream of this kind, fancied that the 
 growth of a language might be arrested, nothing from 
 henceforth being added to it, nothing taken away, as 
 is more fully declared in the work itself. 1 
 
 In other places unacquaintance with the changes 
 in a word's usage may leave you sorely perplexed and 
 puzzled as to your author's meaning. It is evident 
 that he has a meaning, but what it is you are unable 
 to divine, even though all the words he employs are 
 familiarly employed to the present day. Thus 'courtly 
 Waller,' congratulating Charles the Second on his 
 return from exile, and describing how men, once his 
 bitterest enemies, were now the most earnest to offer 
 themselves to his service, writes thus : 
 
 ' Offenders now, the chiefest, do begin 
 To strive for grace, and expiate their sin ; 
 All winds blow fair that did the world embroil, 
 Your vipers treacle yield, and scorpions oil. ' 
 
 Readers not a few before now will have been per- 
 
 1 Works (Sir W. Scott's edition), vol. ix. p. 139. 
 
 x 2
 
 308 Changed Meaning of Words, lect. 
 
 plexed at the poet's statement that '■vipers treacle yield' 
 — who yet have been too indolent, or who have wanted 
 the helps at hand enabling them to search out what 
 his meaning was. There is in fact allusion here to a 
 curious piece of legendary lore. 'Treacle,' or 'triacle,' 
 as Chaucer wrote it, a word ultimately of Greek origin, 
 wrapped up in itself the once popular belief (a partial 
 anticipation, by the way, of homoeopathy), that a con- 
 fection of the viper's flesh was the most potent antidote 
 against the viper's bite. 1 Waller serves himself of this 
 old legend, familiar enough in his time, for Milton 
 speaks of 'the sovran treacle of sound doctrine,' 2 while 
 'Venice treacle,' or 'viper-wine,' was a common name 
 for a supposed antidote against all poisons ; and he 
 would say that regicides themselves began to be loyal, 
 vipers not now yielding hurt any more, but rather a 
 healing medicine for the old hurts which they them- 
 selves had inflicted. ' Treacle,' it may be observed, 
 designating first this antidote, came next to designate 
 any antidote, then any medicinal confection or sweet 
 
 1 &rjptaK-f], from 6r]piov, sl designation given to the viper 
 (Acts xxviii. 4). ' Theriac ' is only the more rigid form of the 
 same word, the scholarly, as distinguished from the popular, 
 adoption of it. Augustine (Con. duas Epp. Pelag. iii. 7): Sicut 
 fieri consuevit antidotum etiam de serpentibus contra venena 
 serpentum. See Promptorium, and Concise Dictionary of 
 Middle English (s. v. triacle). 
 
 2 And Chaucer, more solemnly still : 
 
 ' Crist, which that is to every harm triacle.' 
 
 The antidotal character of treacle comes out yet more in these 
 lines of Lydgate : 
 
 ' There is no venom so parlious in sharpnes, 
 As whan it hath of treacle a likenes. '
 
 vii. Black guard. 309 
 
 syrup, and lastly that particular syrup, namely, the 
 sweet syrup of molasses, to which alone we now restrict 
 the word. 
 
 I will draw on Fuller for one more illustration of 
 the matter in hand. In his Holy War, having enu- 
 merated the rabble rout of fugitive debtors, runaway 
 slaves, thieves, adulterers, murderers, of men laden for 
 one reason or another with heaviest censures of the 
 Church, who swelled the ranks, and helped to make 
 up the army, of the Crusaders, he exclaims, 'A lament- 
 able case, that the devil's black guard should be God's 
 soldiers ! ' What does he mean, we may ask, by ' the 
 devil's black guard' ? The phrase does not stand here 
 alone; it is, on the contrary, of frequent recurrence in 
 the early dramatists and others down to the time of 
 Dryden ; in whose Don Sebastian, ' Enter the captain 
 of the rabble, with the Black guard,' is a stage direc- 
 tion. What is this ' black guard ' ? Has it any con- 
 nexion with a word of our homeliest vernacular? 
 None which is very apparent, and yet such as may 
 very clearly be traced. In old times the palaces of 
 our kings and seats of our nobles were more rudely 
 and more scantily furnished than at the present day : 
 and thus it was customary, when a royal progress was 
 making, or when the great nobility exchanged one resi- 
 dence for another, that at such a removal all kitchen 
 utensils, pots and pans, and even coals, should be also 
 carried with them where they went. The scullions 
 and other meaner retainers, who rode amongst these 
 and were smutted by them, were contemptuously 
 styled 'the black guard i' 1 then any troop or company 
 
 1 ' A slave, that within these twenty years rode with the 
 black guard in the Duke's carriage, 'mongst spits and dripping
 
 310 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 of ragamuffins ; and lastly, when the word's history 
 was obscured and men forgot that it properly belonged 
 to a company, to a rabble rout, and not to a single 
 person, one would compliment another, not as belong- 
 ing to, but as himself being, 'a black guard.' 
 
 These examples are sufficient to prove that this 
 study of the changed meaning of words to which I 
 invite you, is not a useless and unprofitable study, nor 
 yet one altogether without entertainment. It is a 
 study so far from unprofitable, that no one who desires 
 to read with accuracy, and thus with advantage and 
 pleasure, our earlier classics, who would not often fall 
 short of, and often go astray from, their meaning, can 
 omit it altogether. This being so, we could not more 
 usefully employ such time as to-day remains, than 
 in seeking to indicate those changes to which words 
 are most frequently subject ; and to trace as far as we 
 can the forces, moral and material, which bring 
 these changes about, with the good or the evil out 
 of which they have sprung, and to which they bear 
 witness. For indeed they are seldom or never 
 changes at random, being obedient to certain laws, 
 the outward transcripts and attestations of mental and 
 moral processes which have gone forward inwardly in 
 those who bring them about. Much, it is true, will 
 escape any classification of ours : will appear to us as 
 the result of mere caprice, and not to be explained by 
 any principle to which we can appeal. But all this 
 admitted freely, in far the greater number of instances 
 
 pans' (Webster, White Devil, act i. sc. i). [For further 
 passages illustrating the various uses of this term, see N.E.D.]
 
 vii. Words restrict their Meaning. 311 
 
 the change will be reducible to some law or other, and 
 will be explicable by it. With these instances we will 
 occupy ourselves now. 1 
 
 And first, the extent of meaning which a word 
 covers is oftentimes gradually narrowed. It was once 
 as a generic name, embracing many as yet unnamed 
 species within itself, which all went by its common 
 designation. By and by it is found convenient that 
 each of these should have its own more special sign 
 allotted to it. 2 It fares here very much as it fares in 
 some newly enclosed country, where a single house- 
 hold will at first loosely occupy a whole district ; which 
 same district is in the course of time parcelled out 
 among twenty proprietors, and under more accurate 
 culture employs and sustains them all. Thus all food 
 was once called ' meat ; ' it is so in our Bible, and 
 ' horse-meat ' for fodder is still no unusual phrase ; yet 
 ' meat ' uncompounded is now a name given usually 
 to flesh alone. Any little book or writing was a 
 ' libel ' once ; now only such an one as is scurrilous 
 and injurious. Every leader was a 'duke' (dux) • 
 thus ' duke Hannibal ' (Sir Thomas Elyot), ' duke 
 Brennus ' (Holland), ' duke Theseus ' (Shakespeare), 
 1 duke Amalek,' with other 'dukes' in Scripture (Gen. 
 xxxvi). Every journey, by land as much as by sea, 
 was a 'voyage.' 'Fairy' was not a word restricted, 
 
 1 See upon this subject Sayce, Principles of Comparative 
 rhilology, 1875, p. 56; and, going more fully into it, Pott, 
 Etym. Forschung. vol. v. p. xxx. sqq. 
 
 2 Genin {Lexique de la Langue de Moliere, p. 367) says well : 
 En auginentant le nombre des mots, il a fallu restreindre leur 
 signification, et faire aux nouveaux un apanage aux depens des 
 anciens.
 
 3 1 2 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 as now, to the mythology of romance, but Sir J. 
 Harington could speak of 'the fairy Egeria.' A 
 ' corpse ' might quite as well be a body living as one 
 dead. In each of these cases we find the same con- 
 traction of the meaning retained, with the assigning 
 to other words large portions of the meaning separated 
 off. ' To starve ' (most often spelt ' sterve ' up to the 
 middle of the seventeenth century) meant formerly, 
 as does ' sterben ' in German, to die any manner 
 of death ; thus Chaucer says, ' Crist that star/ for 
 our sauacioun ; ' it now is restricted to the dying 
 by cold or by hunger. Words not a few were 
 once applied to both sexes alike, which are now re- 
 stricted to the female. It is so even with 'girl,' which 
 was once applied, as in Piers Plowman and Chaucer, 
 to young persons of either sex ; l while other words, 
 such as ' hoyden ' (Milton, prose), ' shrew,' ' harlot,' 
 ' leman ' (all in Chaucer), ' coquet ' (Phillips, New 
 World of Words), 'witch ' (Wiclif) ; ' wench,' ' slut ' 
 (Gower), 'termagant' (Bale), 'scold,' 'jade,' 'hag' 
 (Golding), must, in their present exclusive appropria- 
 tion to the female sex, be regarded as evidences of 
 men's rudeness, and not of women's deserts. 
 
 The necessities of an advancing civilization demand 
 more precision and accuracy than was necessary at the 
 first, in the use of words having to do with weight, 
 measure, number, size. Almost all such words as 
 'acre,' 'furlong,' 'yard,' 'gallon,' 'peck,' were once of 
 a vague and unsettled use, and only at a later day, and 
 
 1 And no less so in French with ' dame,' by which form not 
 'domina' only, but 'dominus,' was represented. Thus in early 
 French poetry, ' Dame Dieu ' for ' Dominus Deus ' continually 
 occurs.
 
 VII. Words bear a more Precise Meaning. 313 
 
 in obedience to the necessities of commerce and social 
 life, exact measures and designations. Thus any field 
 was once an 'acre;' and this remains so still with the 
 German 'acker,' and with us when we give the name 
 of ' God's acre ' (suggested by the German ' Gottes 
 Acker ') to the consecrated ground in which we lay 
 our dead ; it was not till the reign of Edward the 
 First that 'acre' was limited by statute to a deter- 
 mined measure and portion of land. Here and there 
 even now a glebe-land will be called ' the acre ; ' and 
 this, though it should contain not one but many of 
 our measured acres. A ' furlong ' meant a ' furrow- 
 long,' or length of a furrow. 1 Any pole was a 'yard,' 
 and this vaguer use survives in ' sailyard,' ' halyard,' 
 and in other sea-terms. A large pitcher was a 'galon' 
 (Mark xiv. 13, Wiclif), while a 'peck' was once quite 
 an indefinite quantity. In other languages the same 
 takes place. The Greek 'drachm' was at first a 
 handful. 2 The word which stood at a later day for 
 ten thousand (jxvpioi), implied in Homer's time any 
 great multitude ; and, differently accented, retained 
 this vaguer meaning in the later periods of the lan- 
 guage. 'Arsenic,' 'bark,' 'opium,' 'vervain,' 'vitriol,' 
 are all in like manner words which have narrowed 
 their sense, and mean now much less than once they 
 meant, or than, according to their etymology, they 
 would seem to mean. 3 
 
 1 ' A furlong, quasi furrowlong, being so much as a team in 
 England plougheth going forward, before they return back again ' 
 (Fuller, Pisgah Sight of Palestine, p. 42). 
 
 - Apaxnv = ' manipulus,' from Spda<To/u.ai, to grasp as much as 
 one can hold in the fingers. 
 
 3 See John Mill, Logic, b. iv. ch. v. § 4. Any living crea-
 
 314 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 Over against this is a counter-process by which 
 words of narrower intention gradually enlarge their 
 domain of meaning, become capable of much wider 
 application than any which once they admitted. In- 
 stances in this kind are fewer than in the last. The 
 main stream and course of human thoughts and 
 human discourse tends the other way, to discerning, 
 distinguishing, dividing ; and then to the permanent 
 fixing of the distinctions gained, by the aid of desig- 
 nations which shall keep apart for ever in word that 
 which has been once severed and sundered in thought. 
 Nor is it hard to perceive why this process should be 
 the more frequent. Men are first struck with the 
 likeness between those things which are presented to 
 them ; on the strength of which likeness they mentally 
 bracket them under a common term. Further ac- 
 quaintance reveals their points of unlikeness, the real 
 dissimilarities which lurk under superficial resem- 
 blances, the need therefore of a different notation for 
 objects which are essentially different. It is compa- 
 ratively much rarer to discover real likeness under 
 what at first appeared as unlikeness ; and usually 
 when a word moves forward, and from a special ac- 
 quires a general significance, it is not in obedience to 
 any such discovery of the true inner likeness of things 
 — the steps of successful generalizations being marked 
 and secured in other ways — but this widening of a 
 word's meaning is too often a result of quite other 
 causes. Men forget a word's history and etymology ; 
 its distinctive features are obliterated for them, with 
 
 ture which wanted discourse of reason might once be termed 
 &\oyov : in modern Greek the word is restricted to, and is the 
 name of, the horse.
 
 vii. Words enlarge their Meaning. 315 
 
 all that attached it to some thought or fact which by 
 right was its own. All words in some sort are faded 
 metaphors, but this is one in which the fading has 
 become absolute and complete. Appropriated and 
 restricted once to some striking speciality which it 
 vividly set out, it can now be used in a wider, vaguer, 
 more indefinite way ; can be employed twenty times 
 for once when it would have been possible formerly 
 to employ it. Yet this is not gain but pure loss. 
 It has lost its place in the disciplined army of 
 words, and become one of a loose and disorderly 
 mob. ' 
 
 Let me instance 'preposterous.' It is no longer 
 of any practical service at all in the language, being 
 merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for 
 absurd. But restore and confine it to its proper use ; 
 let it designate that one peculiar branch of absurdity 
 which it indicated once, namely, the reversing of the 
 true order of things, the putting of the last first, and, 
 by consequence, of the first last, and what excellent 
 service it would yield. Thus it is ' preposterous ' to 
 put the cart before the horse, to expect the wages be- 
 fore the work is done, to hang a man first and try him 
 afterwards ; and in this stricter sense ' preposterous ' 
 was always used by our elder writers. 
 
 In like manner 'to prevaricate' was never em- 
 ployed by good writers of the seventeenth century 
 
 1 The exact opposite of this will sometimes take place. 
 Beaucoup de mots, qui du temps de Corneille se pliaient a 
 plusieurs significations, se sont, de la facon la plus bizarre, im- 
 mobilises et petrifies, si Ton ose le dire, dans des sens etroits et 
 restreints {Lexique de la Langne de Corneille, p. xxii).
 
 o 
 
 1 6 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 without nearer or more remote allusion to the uses of 
 the word in the Roman law-courts, where a 'prevari- 
 cator' (properly a straddler with distorted legs) did 
 not mean generally and loosely, as now with us, one 
 who shuffles, quibbles, and evades ; but one who played 
 false in a particular manner ; who, undertaking, or 
 being by his office bound, to prosecute a charge, is 
 in secret collusion with the opposite party ; and, be- 
 traying the cause which he affected to sustain, so 
 managed the accusation as to obtain not the condem- 
 nation, but the acquittal, of the accused ; a ' feint 
 pleader,' as in our old law-language he would have 
 been termed. How much force would the keeping 
 of this in mind add to many passages in our elder 
 divines. 
 
 Or take ' equivocal,' ' equivocate,' ' equivocation.' 
 These terms, which belonged at ' first to logic, have 
 slipped into common use ; but in so doing have lost 
 all the precision which marked their first employ- 
 ment. ' Equivocation ' is now almost any such ques- 
 tionable dealing in words, with the intention of de- 
 ceiving, as falls short of an actual lie ; but according 
 to etymology and in primary use 'equivocation,' this 
 fruitful mother of so much error, is the calling by the 
 same name, of things essentially diverse, hiding inten- 
 tionally or otherwise a real difference under a verbal 
 resemblance. 1 Nor let it be urged in defence of the 
 present looser use, that the word could not otherwise 
 have served the needs of our ordinary conversation. 
 So far from this, had it retained its proper use, how 
 
 1 Thus Barrow : ' Which [courage and constancy] he that 
 wanteth is no other than equivocally a gentleman, as an image 
 or a carcass is a man. '
 
 vii. Idea. 3 1 7 
 
 serviceable an implement of thought might it have 
 proved for the detecting our own fallacies, or the 
 fallacies of others. All this it can now be no longer. 
 What now is ' idea ' for us ? How infinite the fall 
 of this word from the time when Milton sang of the 
 Creator contemplating his newly-created world, 
 
 ' how it showed, 
 Answering his great idea,'' 
 
 to the present use, when this person ' has an idea that 
 the train has started,' and the other ' had no idea that 
 the dinner would be so bad.' Matters have not 
 mended since the times of Dr. Johnson ; who, as 
 Boswell tells us, ' was particularly indignant against the 
 almost universal use of the word idea in the sense of 
 notion or opinion, when it is clear that idea can only 
 signify something of which an image can be formed 
 in the mind.' There is perhaps no word in the 
 whole compass of the language so ill treated, so rarely 
 employed with any tolerable correctness ; in none is 
 the distance so immense between what properly it 
 means, and the slovenly uses which popularly it is 
 made to serve. 
 
 This tendency in words to lose the sharp, rigidly 
 defined outline of meaning which they once possessed, 
 to become of wide, vague, loose application instead of 
 fixed, definite, and precise, to mean almost anything, 
 and so really to mean nothing, is one of the most 
 active and effectual tendencies evermore at work for 
 the final ruin of a language, and I do not fear to add, 
 for the moral injury of those that speak it. It is a 
 tendency against which we shall all do well to watch ; 
 for there is none of us who cannot do something in
 
 318 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 the way of keeping words close to their own proper 
 meaning, and in resisting their encroachment on the 
 domain of others. 
 
 The causes which bring this mischief about are not 
 hard to trace. We all know that when a piece of our 
 silver money has for a long time been fulfilling its 
 part as 'pale and common drudge 'tween man and 
 man,' whatever it had at first of sharper outline and 
 livelier impress is in the end nearly or altogether worn 
 away. So it is with words, above all with words of 
 theology and science. These, getting into general 
 use, and passing often from mouth to mouth, lose the 
 ' image and superscription ' which they had, before 
 they descended from the school to the market-place, 
 from the pulpit to the street. Being now caught up 
 by those who understand imperfectly and thus incor- 
 rectly their true value, who will not be at the pains of 
 learning what that is, or who are incapable of so 
 doing, they are obliged to accommodate themselves 
 to the lower sphere in which they circulate, by laying 
 aside much of the precision and accuracy and fulness 
 which once they had ; they become feebler, shallower, 
 more indistinct ; till in the end, as true or adequate 
 exponents of thought and feeling, they cease to be of 
 any service at all. 
 
 Sometimes a word does not merely narrow or ex- 
 tend its meaning, but altogether changes it ; and this 
 it does in more ways than one. Thus a secondary 
 figurative sense will quite put out of use and ex- 
 tinguish the literal, until in the entire predominance 
 of that it is altogether forgotten that it ever possessed 
 any other. In ' bombast ' this forgetfulness is nearly 
 complete. What ' bombast ' now means is familiar to
 
 vii. Bombast. 319 
 
 us all, namely, inflated words, 'full of sound and fury,' 
 but ' signifying nothing.' This, at present the sole 
 meaning, was once only the secondary and superin- 
 duced ; ' bombast ' being properly the soft down of 
 the cotton plant, and then the cotton wadding with 
 which garments were stuffed out and lined. You re- 
 member perhaps how Prince Hal addresses Falstaff, 
 ' How now, my sweet creature of bombast ; ' using 
 the word in its literal sense ; and another early poet 
 [namely Gascoigne] has this line : 
 
 ' Thy bodies bolstred out with bumbast and with bagges.' 
 
 ' Bombast ' was then transferred in a vigorous image 
 to the big words without substance or solidity where- 
 with the discourses of some were stuffed out, and 
 knows at present no other meaning but this. ' To 
 garble ' was once ' to cleanse from dross and dirt, as 
 grocers do their spices, to pick or cull out.' 1 It is 
 never used now in this its primary sense, and has 
 indeed undergone this further change, that while once 
 ' to garble ' was to sift for the purpose of selecting the 
 best, it is now to sift with a view of picking out the 
 worst. 2 ' Polite ; is another word which in the figurative 
 sense has quite extinguished the literal. We still speak 
 of ' polished ' surfaces ; but not any more, with Cud- 
 worth, of '■polite bodies, as looking-glasses.' Neither 
 do we now ' exonerate ' a ship (Burton) ; nor ' stigma- 
 tize,' otherwise than figuratively, a malefactor (the 
 
 1 Phillips, New World of Words, 1706. 
 
 2 'But his [Gideon's] army must he garbled, as too great for 
 God to give victory thereby ; all the fearful return home by 
 proclamation' (Fuller, Pisgah Sight of Palestine, b. ii. c. 8).
 
 320 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 same) ; nor ' corroborate ' our health (Sir Thomas 
 Elyot) any more. 
 
 Again, a word will travel on by slow and regularly 
 progressive courses of change, itself a faithful index 
 of changes going on in society and in the minds of 
 men, till at length everything is changed about it. 
 The process of this it is often very curious to observe ; 
 being one which it is possible to watch as step by step 
 it advances to the final consummation. There may 
 be said to be three leading phases which the word 
 successively presents, three stages in its history. At 
 first it grows naturally out of its own root, is filled with 
 its own natural meaning. Presently it allows another 
 meaning, very often one foreign to its etymology, and 
 superinduced on the earlier, to share possession with 
 this, on the ground that where one exists, the other 
 commonly exists with it. At the third step, the newly 
 introduced meaning, not satisfied with a moiety, with 
 dividing the possession of the word, has thrust out 
 the original and rightful possessor altogether, and 
 reigns henceforward alone. The three successive 
 stages may be represented by a, ab, b ; in which series 
 b, which was wanting altogether at the first stage, and 
 was only admitted as secondary at the second, does at 
 the third become primary, and indeed remains in sole 
 and exclusive possession. 1 
 
 We must not suppose that in actual fact the trans- 
 itions from one signification to another are so strongly 
 and distinctly marked, as I have found it convenient 
 to mark them here. Indeed it is hard to imagine any- 
 
 [' On this subject of the progressive steps of change of 
 meaning, see Darmesteter, La Vie des Mots, especially chapter 
 ii.]
 
 vii. Progressive Steps of Change. 321 
 
 thing more gradual, more subtle and imperceptible, 
 than the process of change. The manner in which 
 the new meaning first insinuates itself into the old, 
 and then drives out the old, can only be compared to 
 the process of petrifaction, as rightly understood — the 
 water not gradually turning what has fallen into it to 
 stone, as we generally assume the operation to be ; 
 but successively displacing each several particle of 
 that which is brought within its power, and depositing 
 a stony particle in its stead, till in the end, while all 
 appears to continue the same, all has in fact been 
 thoroughly changed. It is precisely thus, by such 
 slow, gradual, and subtle advances, that the new mean- 
 ing filters through and pervades the word, little by little 
 displacing entirely that which it formerly possessed. 
 
 No word would illustrate this process better than 
 that old example, familiar probably to us all, of 
 ' villain.' The ' villain ' is, first, the serf or peasant, 
 ' villanus,' because attached to the ' villa ' or farm. He 
 is, secondly, the peasant who, it is further taken for 
 granted, will be churlish, selfish, dishonest, and gene- 
 rally of untoward moral conditions, these having come 
 to be assumed as always belonging to him, and to 
 be permanently associated with his name, by those 
 higher classes of society, 'the ra\ot tcayadoi,' who in 
 the main commanded the springs of language. At the 
 third step, nothing of the meaning which the etymo- 
 logy suggests, nothing of 'villa,' survives any longer ; 
 the peasant is wholly dismissed, and the untoward moral 
 conditions of him who is called by this name alone 
 remain ; l so that the name would now in this its final 
 
 1 Epigrams and proverbs like the following, and they 
 are innumerable in the Middle Ayes, sufficiently explain the 
 
 Y
 
 322 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 stage be applied as freely to peer, if he deserved it, 
 as to peasant. ' Boor ' has had exactly the same 
 history ; being first the cultivator of the soil ; then 
 secondly the cultivator of the soil who, it is assumed, 
 will be coarse, rude, and unmannerly ; and then 
 thirdly, any one who is coarse, rude, and unmannerly. 
 So too ' pagan ; ' which is first villager, then heathen 
 villager, and lastly heathen. 1 You may trace the 
 same progress in ' churl,' ' antic,' and in numerous 
 other words. The intrusive meaning might be likened 
 in all these cases to the egg which the cuckoo lays in 
 the sparrow's nest ; the young cuckoo first sharing the 
 nest with its rightful occupants, but not resting till it 
 has dislodged and ousted them altogether. 2 
 
 I will illustrate by the aid of one word more this 
 part of my subject. I called your attention in my 
 last lecture to the true character of several words and 
 forms in use among our country people, and claimed 
 for them to be in many instances genuine English, 
 although English now more or less antiquated and 
 overlived. ' Gossip ' is a word in point. This name 
 is given by our Hampshire peasantry to the sponsors 
 in baptism, the godfathers and godmothers. We have 
 here a perfectly correct employment of 'gossip,' in 
 fact its proper and original use, involving moreover 
 
 successive phases of meaning through which ' villain ' has 
 
 passed : 
 
 Quando mulcetur villanus, pejor habetur : 
 Ungentem pungit, pungentem rusticus ungit. 
 
 1 See my Study of Words, 20th edit. p. 136. 
 [- On this point the student is referred for further illustra- 
 tion to Darmesteter's The Life of Words as the Symbols of Ideas. ,]
 
 vii. Proper Meaning of Gossip. 32 
 
 j 
 
 a very curious record of past beliefs. ' Gossip ' or 
 'gossib,' as Chaucer spelt it, is a compound word, 
 made up of the name of ' God,' and of an old English 
 word, 'sib,' still alive in Scotland, as all readers of 
 Walter Scott will remember, and in northern parts of 
 England, and which means, akin ; they being ' sib ' 
 who are related to one another. But why, you may 
 ask, was the name given to sponsors ? Out of this 
 reason ; — in the Middle Ages it was the prevailing 
 belief (and the Roman Catholic Church affirms it 
 still), that those who stood as sponsors to the same 
 child, besides contracting spiritual obligations on 
 behalf of that child, also contracted spiritual affinity 
 one with another ; they became sib, or akin, in God, 
 and thus ' gossips ; ' hence ' gossipred,' an old word, 
 exactly analogous to 'kindred.' Upon these grounds 
 the Roman Catholic Church will not allow (unless by 
 dispensation) those who have stood as sponsors to the 
 same child, afterwards to contract marriage with one 
 another, affirming them too nearly related for this to 
 be lawful. 
 
 Take 'gossip,' however, in its ordinary present use, 
 as idle tittle-tattle, and it seems to bear no relation 
 whatever to its etymology and first meaning. The 
 same three steps, however, which we have traced 
 before will bring us to its present use. ' Gossips ' are, 
 first, the sponsors, brought by the act of a common 
 sponsorship into affinity and near familiarity with 
 one another ; secondly, the word was applied to all 
 familiars and intimates ; thirdly, it came to signify 
 such idle talk, the ' commerage ' (which word has 
 exactly the same history) that often would be heard 
 in the intercourse of such. 
 
 y 2
 
 324 Changed Meaning of Words, lect. 
 
 It is plain that words which designate not things 
 and persons only, but these as they are contemplated 
 more or less in an ethical light, words tinged with a 
 moral sentiment, are peculiarly exposed to change ; 
 are constantly liable to take a new colouring, or to 
 lose an old. The gauge and measure of praise or 
 blame, honour or dishonour, admiration or abhor- 
 rence, which they imply, is so purely a mental and 
 subjective one, that it is most difficult to take accu- 
 rate note of its rise or of its fall, while yet there are 
 causes continually at work to bring about the one or 
 the other. There are words not a few, ethical words 
 above all, which have so imperceptibly drifted away 
 from their former moorings, that although their posi- 
 tion is now very different from that which they once 
 occupied, scarcely one in a hundred of casual readers, 
 whose attention has not been specially called to the 
 subject, will have observed that they have moved at 
 all. Here too we observe some words conveying less 
 of praise or blame than once, and some more ; while 
 some have wholly shifted from the one to the other. 
 Some were at one time words of slight, almost of 
 offence, which have altogether ceased to be so now. 
 Still these are rare by comparison with those which 
 once were harmless, but now are harmless no more ; 
 which once, it may be, were terms of honour, but 
 which now imply a slight, or even a scorn. It is only 
 too easy to explain why the latter should prove in 
 number to exceed. 
 
 Let us take an example. To speak now of royal 
 children as 'royal imps,'' would sound, and according 
 to our present usage would be, impertinent ; and yet 
 ' imp ' was once a name of dignity and honour, and
 
 vii. Imp. 325 
 
 not of slight or of undue familiarity. Thus Spenser 
 addresses the Muses, 
 
 ' Ye sacred imps that on Tavnasso dwell ; ' 
 
 and ' imp ' was especially used of the scions of royal 
 or illustrious houses. 1 More than one epitaph, still 
 existing, of our ancient nobility might be quoted, 
 beginning in such language as this, ' Here lies that 
 noble imp.' Call a person 'pragmatical,' and you now 
 imply not merely that he is busy, but over-busy, offi- 
 cious, self-important and pompous to boot. But it 
 once meant nothing of the kind, and a man ' pragma- 
 tical ' (like -rrpayfiariKoc) was one engaged in affairs, 
 and the title an honourable one, given to a man 
 simply and industriously accomplishing the business 
 which properly concerned him. 2 So too to say that 
 a person ' meddles ' or is a ' meddler ' implies now that 
 he interferes unduly in other men's matters. But ' to 
 meddle' and 'meddler' did not always suggest or in- 
 sinuate anything of the kind. On the contrary, three 
 of our earlier translations of the Bible have, ' Meddle 
 with your own business' (1 Thess. iv. 11); and Barrow 
 in one of his sermons draws at some length the dis- 
 tinction between ' meddling ' and ' being meddlesome,' 1 
 and only condemns the latter. 3 Or take the words, ' to 
 
 [' Becon speaks of ' those most goodly and virtuous young 
 imps, the Duke of Suffolk and his brother.' See Select Glossary. ,] 
 
 "• ' We cannot always be contemplative, or pragmatical 
 abroad : but have need of some delightful intermissions, wherein 
 the enlarged soul may leave off awhile her severe schooling' 
 (Milton, Tetrachordon). 
 
 [ 3 The word meddle means properly ' to mix ; ' so in Wiclifs 
 translation of Rev. xviii. 6, ' In the drynke that she meddlid to 
 you ' {iv t$ TTOTTip'iw £ iKipaae). It is a French word, the French
 
 326 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 prose ' or a ' proser.' It cannot indeed be affirmed 
 that they involve any moral condemnation, yet they 
 certainly convey no compliment at the present, being 
 almost among the last epithets which any one would 
 desire to be applied to his talking or his writing. ' To 
 prose,' as we all now know too well, is to talk or write 
 heavily and tediously, without spirit or animation ; 
 but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and 
 a ' proser ' the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It 
 will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer 
 who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would 
 have ' prosed ' and been a ' proser,' in the language 
 of our ancestors. Thus Drayton writes of his con- 
 temporary Nashe : 
 
 'And surely Nashe, though he a proser were, 
 A branch of laurel yet deserves to bear,' 
 
 that is, the ornament not of a 'proser ' but of a poet. 
 The tacit assumption that vigour, animation, rapid 
 movement, with all the precipitation of the spirit, 
 belong to verse rather than to prose, are to be found 
 exclusively in it, must explain the changed uses of the 
 word. 
 
 Still it is according to a word's present signification 
 that we must employ it now. It would be no excuse, 
 having applied an insulting epithet to any, if we 
 should afterwards plead that, tried by its etymology 
 and primary usage, it had nothing offensive or insult- 
 ing about it ; although indeed Swift assures us that 
 in his time such a plea was made and was allowed. 
 ' I remember,' he says, ' at a trial in Kent, where Sir 
 
 forms being medler, mesler, equivalent to the Late Lat. misculare, 
 from Lat. miscere, to mix.]
 
 vii. Sycophant. 327 
 
 George Rooke was indicted for calling a gentleman 
 "knave" and " villain," the lawyer for the defendant 
 brought off his client by alleging that the words were 
 not injurious ; for " knave " in the old and true signi- 
 fication imported only a servant ; and " villain " in 
 Latin is villicus, which is no more than a man em- 
 ployed in country labour, or rather a baily.' The 
 lawyer may have deserved his success for the ingenuity 
 and boldness of his plea ; though, if Swift reports 
 him aright, scarcely on the ground of the strict accu- 
 racy either of his Early English or his Latin. 
 
 The moral sense and conviction of men is often 
 at work upon their words, giving them new turns in 
 obedience to these convictions, of which their changed 
 use will remain a permanent record. The history of 
 ' sycophant ' will illustrate this. You probably are 
 acquainted with the story which the Greek scholiasts 
 invented by way of explaining a word of whose his- 
 tory they knew nothing, — namely, that the ' sycophant ' 
 was a ' manifester of figs,' one who detected and 
 denounced others in the act of exporting figs from 
 Attica, an act forbidden, they asserted, by the Athe- 
 nian law ; and accused such to the people. Be this 
 explanation worth what it may, the word obtained 
 in Greek a more general sense ; any accuser, and then 
 any false accuser, was a 'sycophant ;' and when the 
 word was first adopted into English, it was in this 
 meaning: thus an old poet speaks of 'the railing 
 route of sycophants ; ' and Holland : ' the poor man 
 that hath nought to lose, is not afraid of the sycophant.'' 
 But it has not kept this meaning: a ' sycophant ' is 
 now a fawning flatterer ; not one who speaks ill of you 
 behind your back ; but rather one who speaks good
 
 328 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 of you before your face, but good which he does not 
 in his heart believe. Yet how true a moral instinct 
 has presided over this changed signification. The 
 calumniator and the flatterer, although they seem so 
 opposed to one another, how closely united they 
 really are. They grow out of the same root. The 
 same baseness of spirit which shall lead one to speak 
 evil of you behind your back, will lead him to fawn 
 on you and flatter you before your face. There is a 
 profound sense in that Italian proverb, ' Who flatters 
 me before, spatters me behind.' 
 
 But it is not the moral sense only of men which is 
 thus at work, modifying their words ; the immoral 
 does the same. If the good which men have and 
 feel, penetrates into their speech, and leaves its deposit 
 there, so does also the evil. Thus we may trace a 
 constant tendency — in too many cases it has been a 
 successful one — to empty words employed in the con- 
 demnation of evil, of the depth and earnestness of 
 the moral reprobation which they once conveyed. 
 Men's easy toleration of sin, the feebleness of their 
 moral indignation against it, brings this about, namely, 
 that the blame which words expressed once, has in 
 some of them become much weaker now than once, 
 from others has vanished altogether. ' To do a shreivd 
 turn,' was once to do a wicked turn ; Chaucer em- 
 ploys ' shrewdness ' to render the Latin ' improbitas ; ' 
 nay, two murderers he calls two ' shrews,' — for there 
 were, as has been already noticed, male ' shrews ' once 
 as well as female. But ' a shreivd turn ' now, while it 
 implies a certain amount of sharp practice, yet implies 
 nothing more; and 'shrewdness' is applied to men 
 rather in their praise than in their dispraise. And
 
 vii. Investigation of Words. 329 
 
 not these only, but a multitude of other words, — I 
 will only instance ' flirt,' ' loiterer,' ' luxury,' ' luxurious,' 
 'peevish,' ' prank,' ' uncivil,' 'wayward,' — involved once 
 a much more earnest moral disapprobation than they 
 do at this present. 
 
 But I must bring this lecture to a close. I have 
 but opened to you paths, which you, if you are so 
 minded, can follow up for yourselves. We have 
 learned lately to speak of men's ' antecedents ; ' the 
 phrase is newly come up ; and it is common to say 
 that if we would know what a man really now is, we 
 must know his ' antecedents,' that is, what he has 
 been and what he has done in time past. This is 
 quite as true about words. If we would know what 
 they now are, we must know what they have been ; 
 we must know, if possible, the date and place of their 
 birth, the successive stages of their subsequent history, 
 the company which they have kept, all the road which 
 they have travelled, and what has brought them to the 
 point at which now we find them ; we must know, in 
 short, their antecedents. 
 
 And let me say, without attempting to bring back 
 school into these lectures which are out of school, 
 that, seeking to do this, we might add an interest to 
 our researches in the lexicon and the dictionary which 
 otherwise they could never have ; that taking such 
 words, for example, as itcKXrjrria, or irakiyyeveffia, or 
 ivrpcnreXia, 1 or rrocpitrrijc, OX rr^oX^orj/aJr, in Greek ; 
 
 as ' religio,' or ' sacramentum,' or ' imperator,' 2 or 
 
 1 For these three words see Synonyms of the New Testa- 
 ment, s. vv. 
 
 2 See Merivale, History of the Romans, vol. iii. p. 440 sqq.
 
 330 Changed Meaning of Words. Lect. 
 
 ' urbanitas,' or ' superstitio,' in Latin ; as 'casuistry,' or 
 'good-nature,' or 'humorous,' or 'danger,' or 'roman- 
 tic,' in English, and endeavouring to trace the manner 
 in which one meaning grew out of and superseded 
 another, and how they arrived at that use in which 
 they have finally rested (if indeed before some of these 
 words there be not a future of movement still), we 
 shall derive, I believe, amusement, I am sure, instruc- 
 tion ; we shall feel that we are really getting something, 
 increasing the moral and intellectual stores of our 
 minds ; furnishing ourselves with that which here- 
 after may be of service to ourselves, may be of service 
 to others — than which there can be no feeling more 
 delightful. 1 
 
 1 For a fuller treatment of the subject of this lecture, see my 
 Select Glossary, 5th edit., 1S79.
 
 viii. Imperfection of Alphabets. 331 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 CHANGES IN THE SPELLING OF ENGLISH 
 WORDS. 
 
 -p 
 
 ^HE subject of my lecture to-day will be English 
 spelling, and it will be mainly taken up with 
 notices of some changes which this has undergone. 
 You may think perhaps that a weightier, or at all events 
 a more interesting, subject might have claimed our 
 attention. But it is indeed a subject wanting neither 
 in importance nor in interest. Unimportant it is not, 
 having often engaged the attention of the foremost 
 scholars among us. Uninteresting it may be, through 
 faults in the manner of its treatment ; but would never 
 prove so in competent hands. 1 Let me hope that even 
 in mine it may yield some pleasure and profit. 
 
 It was Hobbes who said, ' the invention of print- 
 ing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of 
 letters, is no great matter.' Use and familiarity had 
 not obliterated for him the wonder of that at which 
 we probably long ago have ceased to wonder, if in- 
 deed the marvel of it ever presented itself to our minds 
 at all— the power, namely, of representing sounds by 
 
 1 Let me refer, in proof, to a paper, On Orthographical 
 Expedients, by Edwin Guest, in the Transactions of the Philo- 
 logical Society, vol. iii. p. 1.
 
 332 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 written signs, of reproducing for the eye what before 
 existed only for the ear. Nor was the estimate 
 which he formed of the relative value of these two 
 inventions other than a just one. Writing stands 
 more nearly on a level with speaking, and deserves 
 better to be compared with it, than with printing ; 
 which last, with all its utility, is yet of quite another 
 and inferior scale of greatness. Or, if this be too 
 much to claim for writing, it may at all events be 
 affirmed to stand midway between the other two, and 
 to be as much superior to the one as it is inferior to 
 the other. 
 
 The intention of the written word, the end whereto 
 it is a mean, is by aid of signs agreed on beforehand, 
 to represent to the eye with as much accuracy as 
 possible the spoken word. This intention, however, 
 it never fulfils completely. There is always a chasm 
 between these two, and much continually going for- 
 ward in a language to render this chasm ever wider 
 and wider. Short as man's spoken word often falls 
 of his unspoken, that is, of his thought, his written 
 word falls often as short of his spoken. Several 
 causes contribute to this. In the first place, the 
 marks of imperfection and infirmity cleave to writing, 
 as to every other invention of man. It fares with 
 most alphabets as with our own. They have super- 
 fluous letters, — letters, that is, which they do not want, 
 because others already represent their sound ; thus 
 ' q ' in English is perfectly useless ; ' c ' ' k ' and ' s ' 
 have only two sounds among them. They have 
 dubious letters, such, that is, as say nothing certain 
 about the sounds they stand for, because more than 
 one sound is represented by them, our own * c ' for
 
 viii. Spoken and Written Words. 3 3 3 
 
 example. They are deficient in letters, that is, the 
 language has elementary sounds such as our own ' th ' 
 which have no corresponding symbols appropriated to 
 them, and can only be represented by combinations 
 of letters. This then, being, as one called it long ago, 
 'an appendix to the curse of Babel,' is one reason of 
 the imperfect reproduction of the spoken word by 
 the written. But another is, that the human voice is 
 so wonderfully fine and flexible an organ, is able to 
 mark such subtle and delicate distinctions of sound, so 
 infinitely to modify and vary these sounds, that were 
 an alphabet complete as human art could make it, did 
 it possess twice as many letters as our own possesses 
 — the Sanscrit, which has fifty, very nearly does so, — 
 there would still remain a multitude of sounds which 
 it could only approximately give back. 
 
 But there is a further cause for the divergence which 
 little by little becomes apparent between men's spoken 
 word and their written. What men do often, they 
 will seek to do with the least possible exertion. There 
 is nothing which they do oftener than utter words. 
 They will endeavour then here to save themselves 
 trouble ; they will contract two or more syllables into 
 one; as in Spanish 'vuestra merced ' will become 
 ' usted ; ' or draw two or three syllables together, as in 
 English 'hafoc' will become 'hawk,' 'cyning' 'king,' 
 and ' almesse ' ' alms ; ' they will assimilate consonants, 
 'subfero' will become 'suffero,' 'submonere' will be- 
 come 'summon ;' they will slur over, and thus after 
 a while cease to pronounce, certain letters, especially 
 at the close of words, where the speaking effort has in 
 a manner exhausted itself ; for hard letters they will 
 substitute soft ; for those which require a certain effort
 
 334 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 to pronounce, they will substitute others which require 
 little or almost none. 1 Under the operation of these 
 causes a chasm between the written and spoken word 
 will not only exist, but will have the tendency to 
 grow ever of a wider reach. This tendency indeed 
 will be partially traversed by approximations which 
 from time to time will by silent consent be made 
 of the written word to the spoken ; absolutely 
 superfluous letters will be got rid of ; as the final 
 ' k ' in ' civic,' ' politic,' and such like words ; here and 
 there a letter dropped in speech will be dropped also 
 in writing, as the ' s ' in so many French words, where 
 its absence is marked by a circumflex ; a new shape, 
 contracted or briefer, which a word has taken on the 
 lips of men, will find its representation in their writ- 
 ing ; as ' chirurgeon ' will not merely be pronounced, 
 but also spelt, ' surgeon ; ' ' squinancy ' ' quinsey ; ' 
 
 1 Schleicher {Die Deutsche Sprache, p. 49): Alle Veranderung 
 der Laute, die im Verlaufe des sprachlichen Lebens eintritt, ist 
 zunachst und unmittelbar Folge des Strebens, unseren Sprach- 
 organen die Sache leicht zu machen. Bequemlichkeit der Aus- 
 sprache, Ersparung an Muskelthatigkeit ist das hier wirkende 
 Agens. Ampere {Formation de la Langtte Francaise) describes 
 well the forces, and this among the rest, which are ever at 
 work for the final destruction of a language: Les mots, en 
 vieillissant, tendent a remplacer les consonnes fortes et dures 
 par des consonnes faibles et douces, les voyelles sonores, 
 d'abord par des voyelles sourdes, puis par des voyelles muettes. 
 Les sons pleins s'eteignent peu a. peu et se perdent. Les 
 finales disparaissent et les mots se contractent. Par suite, les 
 langues deviennent moins melodieuses ; les mots qui charmaient 
 et remplissaient l'oreille n'offrent plus qu'un signe mnemonique, 
 et comme un chiffre. Les langues en general commencent par 
 etre une musique, et finissent par etre une algebre.
 
 viii. Phonetic Writing. 335 
 
 'Ecgbrihtes-Stan' will be 'Brixton;' 'Eoforwic,' or 
 ' Euerwic,' ' York ; ' while ' St. .Ethelthryth,' 
 patroness of Ely, will be written, as well as pro- 
 nounced, in Anglo-French, ' St. Audre ' [whence our 
 English ' St. Audry ' and the adjective ' tawdry,' see 
 Select Glossary] ; ' ' Ligoraceaster ' will be ' Leicester,' 
 pronounced now ' Lester.' Still, notwithstanding these 
 partial readjustments of the relations between the 
 two, the anomalies will be infinite ; there will be a 
 multitude of written letters which have ceased to be 
 sounded letters ; words not a few will exist in one 
 shape upon our lips, and in quite another in our 
 books. Sometimes, as in such proper names as 
 'Beauchamp,' ' Belvoir,' 'Cholmondeley,' 'Cockburn,' 
 'Harwich,' ' Marjoribanks,' even the pretence of an 
 agreement between the written word and the spoken 
 will have been abandoned. 
 
 It is inevitable that the question should arise — 
 Shall these anomalies be meddled with ; shall the 
 attempt be made to remove them, and to bring writing 
 and speech into harmony and consent — a harmony 
 and consent which never indeed in actual fact at any 
 period of the language existed, but which yet may be 
 regarded as the object of written speech, as the idea 
 which, however imperfectly realized, has in the re- 
 duction of spoken sounds to written, floated before 
 the minds of men ? If the attempt is to be made, it 
 is clear that it can only be made in one way. There 
 is not the alternative here, that either Mahomet shall 
 go to the mountain, or the mountain to Mahomet. 
 The spoken word is the mountain ; it will not stir ; 
 it will resist all attempts to move it. Conscious of 
 superior rights, that it existed the first, that it is, so to
 
 $36 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 say, the elder brother, it will never consent to become 
 different from what it has been, that so it may more 
 closely conform and comply with the written word. 
 Men will not be persuaded to pronounce ' wou/d ' and 
 ' shou/d,' because they write these words with an ' 1 ' : 
 but what if they could be induced to write ' woud ' and 
 ' shoud,' because they so pronounce ; and to adopt the 
 same course wherever a discrepancy exists between the 
 word as spoken, and as written ? Might not the gulf 
 between the two be in this way made to disappear ? 
 
 In what has been just said we have the explanation 
 of that which in the history of almost all literatures has 
 repeated itself more than once, namely, the endeavour 
 to introduce phonetic spelling. It has certain plausi- 
 bilities to rest on ; it appeals to the unquestionable fact 
 that the written word was intended to picture to the 
 eye what the spoken word sounded in the ear. For all 
 this I believe that it would be impossible to introduce 
 it ; and, even if possible, that it would be most unde- 
 sirable, and this for two reasons : the first being that 
 the losses consequent upon its introduction would 
 far exceed the gains, even supposing those gains as 
 large as the advocates of the scheme promise ; the 
 second, that these promised gains would themselves 
 be only very partially realized, if at all. 
 
 I believe it to be impossible. It is clear that such 
 a scheme must begin with the reconstruction of the 
 alphabet. The first thing that the phonographers 
 have perceived is the necessity for the creation of a 
 vast number of new signs, the poverty of all existing 
 alphabets, at any rate of our own, not yielding a 
 several sign for all the several sounds in the language. 
 Hereupon our phonographers of thirty years back
 
 viii. Phonetic Writing. 2>Z7 
 
 invented ten of these new signs or letters, which were 
 henceforth to take their place with our ' a, b, c,' and 
 to enjoy equal rights with them. Rejecting two 
 (' q,' ' x '), and adding ten, they raised their alphabet 
 from twenty- six letters to thirty-four. But to procure 
 the reception of such a reconstructed alphabet is 
 simply an impossibility, as much an impossibility as 
 would be the reconstruction of the language in any 
 points where it was manifestly deficient or illogical. 
 Sciolists or scholars may sit down in their studies, and 
 devise these new letters, and prove that we need 
 them, and that the introduction of them would be a 
 manifest gain ; and this may be all very true : but if 
 they imagine that they can persuade a people to adopt 
 them, they know little of the extent to which its alpha- 
 bet is entwined with the whole innermost life of a 
 people. 1 One may freely own that most present 
 alphabets are redundant here, are deficient there ; 
 our English is as greatly at fault as any, perhaps is 
 the most faulty of all, 2 and with that we have chiefly 
 to do. Unquestionably it has more letters than one 
 
 1 Of course it is quite a different thing when philologers, for 
 their own special purposes, endeavour to construct an alphabet 
 which shall cover all sounds of human speech, and shall enable 
 them to communicate to one another in all parts of the world 
 what is the true pronunciation, or what they believe to be true 
 pronunciation, of the words with which they are dealing. But 
 alphabets like these are purely scientific, and must remain such. 
 A single fact will sufficiently prove this. The Standard Alphabet 
 of the German scholar Lepsius, intended, it is true, to furnish 
 written equivalents for sounds, not of one human speech, but of 
 all, has two hundred and eighty-six signs, every one of them 
 having a distinct phonetic value. 
 
 '-' See Latham, Defence of Phonetic Spelling, passim. 
 
 2
 
 338 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 to express one and the same sound ; while it has only 
 one letter to express two or three sounds; it has sounds 
 which are only capable of being expressed at all by 
 awkward and roundabout expedients. Yet at the 
 same time we must accept the fact, as we accept any 
 other which it is out of our power to change — with 
 regret indeed, but with a perfect acquiescence ; as one 
 accepts the fact that Ireland is not some thirty or 
 forty miles nearer to England — that it is so difficult to 
 get round Cape Horn — that the climate of Africa is 
 so fatal to European life. A people will no more 
 quit their alphabet than they will quit their language, 
 they will no more consent to modify the one at a 
 command from without than the other. Caesar avowed 
 that with all his power he could not introduce a new 
 word, and certainly Claudius could not introduce a new 
 letter. Centuries may bring about and sanction the 
 introduction of a new one, or the dropping of an old. 1 
 But to imagine that it is possible suddenly to introduce 
 a group of ten new letters, as these reformers suggested 2 
 — they might just as feasibly propose that the English 
 language should form its comparatives and superlatives 
 on some entirely new scheme, say in Greek fashion, 
 by the terminations ' oteros ' and ' otatos ; ' or that we 
 should agree to set up a dual ; or that our substan- 
 tives should return to their Anglo-Saxon declensions. 
 Languages are not made, they grow ; and alphabets 
 are something more than mere mechanical devices, 
 
 1 See on this matter Isaac Taylor's History of the Alphabet, 
 passim. 
 
 2 These must, in some sense, be not ten, but forty; for in each 
 case there must be a capital letter and a smaller, a letter for 
 printing and a cursive letter for writing.
 
 viii. Changed Spelling of Words. 339 
 
 the conscious work of men's art. A very moderate 
 acquaintance with the eternal laws which regulate 
 human speech, and of the limits within which delibe- 
 rate action upon it is possible, should bring home to 
 us the hopelessness of the attempt to add to our 
 alphabet ten entirely novel signs. 1 
 
 But grant it possible, grant our six and twenty 
 letters to have so little sacredness in them that Eng- 
 lishmen would endure a crowd of upstart interlopers 
 to mix themselves on an equal footing with them, still 
 this could only come to pass from a sense of the 
 greatness of the advantage to be derived from this 
 introduction. Now the vast advantage claimed by the 
 advocates of the system is, that it would facilitate the 
 learning to read, and wholly save the labour of learn- 
 ing to spell, which ' on the present plan occupies,' as 
 they assure us, ' at the very lowest calculation from 
 three to five years.' 'Count,' says Professor Marsh, 
 ' the hours spent through life in keeping up and per- 
 fecting this knowledge of spelling, in consulting dic- 
 tionaries, a work that never ends, the hours which 
 each man spends in writing silent letters, and multiply 
 
 1 This is indeed a very moderate statement of the facts of 
 the case. At a Conference of Spelling Reformers held in Lon- 
 don in May, 1877, a communication from Lord Sherbrooke, 
 approving the work in which they were engaged, was read. 
 'There are,' he says, ' thirty-nine sounds in the English language. 
 There are twenty-four letters. I think that each letter should 
 represent one sound, that fifteen new letters should be added, so 
 that there should be a letter for every sound.' The Bishop of 
 Exeter, with a truer estimate, as it seems to me, of what can be 
 done and what cannot, writes to the same Conference, ' It is 
 essential to have no new letters, and only a few critical marks.' 
 
 z 2
 
 34-0 Changed Spelling of Words. lect. 
 
 this time by the number of persons who speak English; 
 and we shall have a total of millions of years wasted 
 by each generation.' l Spelling, it is urged, would no 
 longer need to be learned at all ; since whoever knew 
 the sound would necessarily know also the spelling, 
 these being in all cases in perfect conformity with 
 one another. The anticipation of this gain rests 
 upon two assumptions which are tacitly regarded as 
 lifted above all doubt, but both of them erroneous. 
 The first of these assumptions is, that all men pro- 
 nounce all words alike, and thus that, whenever they 
 come to spell a word, they will exactly agree as to 
 what the sound, in letters to be expressed, is. But 
 this is not so, as is clear from the fact that, before there 
 was any fixed and settled orthography in our language, 
 when, therefore, everybody was more or less a phono- 
 grapher, a writer down of words as they sounded 
 to him (for he had no other law to guide him), the 
 variations of spelling were infinite. Take, for instance, 
 the word ' sudden,' which does not seem to promise 
 any great scope for variety. I have myself met with 
 this word spelt in the following sixteen ways among 
 our early writers: ' sodain,' ' sodaine,' 'sodan,' ' so- 
 dane,' ' sodayne," sodden,' 'sodein,' ' sodeine,' ' soden,' 
 'sodeyn,' suddain,' 'suddaine,' 'suddein,' 'suddeine,' 
 'sudden,' 'sudeyn.' There have been collected 
 twenty-eight ways of spelling Wiclifs name. 2 Shake- 
 speare's too is spelt in ways I know not how many ; 
 and Raleigh's in hardly fewer. The same fact is evi- 
 dent from the spelling of uneducated persons in our 
 
 1 Address before the American Philological Association, p. 6. 
 
 2 Lechler, Wiclif und die Reformation, vol. i. p. 268.
 
 viii. Spelling by the Ear. 341 
 
 own day. They have no other rule but the sound to 
 guide them. How is it that they do not all spell alike ; 
 erroneously, it may be, as having only the sound for 
 their guide, but still falling all into exactly the same 
 errors ? What is the actual fact ? They not merely 
 spell wrongly, which might be laid to the charge ot 
 our perverse system of spelling, but with an inex- 
 haustible diversity of error, and that too in the case 
 of simplest words. Thus the town of Woburn would 
 seem to offer small room for caprice in spelling, while 
 yet the postmaster there has made, from the super- 
 scriptions of letters that have passed through his hands, 
 a collection of two hundred and forty-four various 
 ways in which the place has been spelt. ' It may be 
 replied that these were all or nearly all collected from 
 the letters of the ignorant and uneducated. Exactly 
 so ; — but it is for their sakes, and to place them on a 
 level with the educated, or rather to accelerate the 
 process of their education by the omission of a disci- 
 pline as troublesome as it is useless, that the change 
 is proposed. I wish to show you that after the change 
 they would be just as much, or almost as much, at a 
 loss in their spelling as now. 
 
 For another reason it would be quite as necessary 
 then to learn orthography as now. Pronunciation, as 
 I have already noticed, is oftentimes far too subtle a 
 thing to be more than approximated to and indicated 
 by the written letter. Different persons would attempt 
 
 1 Notes and Queries, No. 147. Compared with this, the 
 notice of the German Consul at Ipswich (1876), that he has made 
 a list of fifty-seven ways in which ' Ipswich ' has been spelt in 
 letters addressed to him, is hardly worth adducing.
 
 342 Changed Spelling of Words. lect. 
 
 by different methods to overcome the difficulties which 
 the reproduction of it for the eye presented, and thus 
 different spellings would arise ; or, if not so, one must 
 be arbitrarily selected, and would have need to be 
 learned, just as much as spelling at present has need 
 to be learned. In what is probably the latest Pro- 
 nouncing Dictionary of the English Language, the 
 student is invited to pronounce embonpoint, ang- 
 bong-pwong ; combat, kong-bar, and the like. I will 
 only ask you, in proof of this which I affirm, to turn 
 to any Pronouncing Dictionary. When you mark 
 the elaborate and yet ineffectual artifices by which it 
 toils after the finer distinctions of sound, seeks to 
 reproduce in letters what exists, and can only exist, 
 as the spoken traditions of pronunciation, acquired 
 from lip to lip by the organ of the ear, capable of 
 being learned, but incapable of being taught ; or when 
 you compare two of these Dictionaries with one 
 another, and note the entirely different schemes and 
 combinations of letters which they employ for repre- 
 senting the same sound to the eye ; you will then 
 perceive how futile the attempt to make the written 
 in language commensurate with the sounded ; you will 
 own that not merely out of human caprice, ignorance, 
 or indolence, the former falls short of and differs 
 from the latter ; but that this lies in the necessity of 
 things, in the fact that man's voice can effect so much 
 more than ever his letter can. 1 You will then perceive 
 that there would be as much, or nearly as much, of 
 
 1 See Boswell, Life offohnson, Croker's edit. 1848, p. 233. 
 Adelung tells us that the word or letters ' ardzhyz ' represent 
 our manner of pronouncing 'orgies.'
 
 viii. Spelling by the Ear. 343 
 
 arbitrary in spelling which calls itself phonetic as 
 there is in our present. We should be as little able 
 to dismiss the spelling card then as now. But to 
 what extent English writing would be transformed — 
 whether for the better or the worse each may judge for 
 himself — a single specimen will prove. Take as the 
 first sample which comes to my hand these four lines 
 of Pope, which hitherto we have thus spelt and read, 
 
 ' But errs not nature from this gracious end, 
 From burning suns when livid deaths descend, 
 When earthquakes swallow, or when tempests sweep 
 Towns to one grave, whole nations to the deep ? ' 
 
 Phonetically written, they present themselves to us in 
 
 the following fashion : 
 
 ' But 1 erz not netiur from dis grecus end, 
 from burniij sunz when livid debs d.isend, 
 when erbkweks swoler, or when tempests swap 
 tounz trj wun grsv, he'l necons ti] de dip.' 
 
 This however is but a mild specimen of the trans- 
 formation which our written language will undergo. 
 I take the following from one of the ablest defences of 
 phonetic spelling which has appeared : 
 
 Ser Bidwer Lilon sez : — 'A mar ljir), pszel-heded delu3on dan 
 dat bj whig \v.i konfiiz de kl.ir instirjkts ov trui in our aksrsed 
 sistem ov spelirj woz never konkokted bj de fader of folshud. 
 Hou kan a sistem ov edidcejon flsrij dat beginz bj so- monstrss 
 a folshud, whig de sens ov h.iriij syl^sez tu kontradikt?' 
 
 The scheme then would not fulfil its promises. The 
 gains which it vaunts, when we come to look closely at 
 them, disappear. And now for the losses. There are 
 in every language a vast number of words, which the 
 ear does not distinguish from one another, but which 
 are at once distinguishable to the eye by the spelling.
 
 ?44 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 o 
 
 I will only instance a few which are the same parts of 
 speech ; thus ' sun ' and ' son ; ' ' virge ' (' virga,' now 
 obsolete) and 'verge;' 'reign,' 'rain,' and 'rein;' 
 ' hair ' and ' hare ; ' ' plate ' and ' plait ; ' ' moat ' and 
 ' mote ; ' ' pear ' and ' pair ; ' ' pain ' and ' pane ; ' 
 ' raise ' and ' raze ; ' ' air ' and ' heir ; ' ' ark ' and 
 ' arc ; ' ' mite ' and ' might ; ' ' pour ' and ' pore ; ' ' tail ' 
 and ' tale ; ' ' veil ' and ' vale ; ' ' knight ' and ' night ; ' 
 ' knave ' and ' nave ; ' ' pier ' and ' peer ; ' ' rite ' and 
 ' right ; ' ' site ' and ' sight ; ' ' aisle ' and ' isle ; ' ' con- 
 cent ' and ' consent ; ' ' signet ' and ' cygnet.' Now, 
 of course, it is a real disadvantage, and may be the 
 cause of serious confusion, that there should be words 
 in our spoken language of entirely different origin and 
 meaning, which yet cannot in sound be differenced 
 from one another. The phonographers simply pro- 
 pose to extend this disadvantage already cleaving to 
 our spoken, to the written language as well. It is 
 fault enough in the French language that ' mere ' 
 a mother, ' mer ' the sea, ' maire ' a mayor of a town, 
 should have no perceptible difference between them 
 in the spoken tongue ; or again that there should be 
 nothing to distinguish 'sans,' 'sang,' 'sent,' 'sens,' 
 's'en,' 'cent;' and as little 'ver,' 'vert,' 'verre,' and 
 ' vers.' Surely it is not very wise to propose gratui- 
 tously to extend the same imperfection to the written 
 language as well. 
 
 This loss in so many instances of the power to 
 discriminate between words which, however liable to 
 confusion now in our spoken language, are liable to 
 none in our written, would be serious enough ; but 
 more serious still would be the loss which would 
 constantly ensue, of all which visibly connects a word
 
 viii. Losses of Phonetic Spelling. 345 
 
 with the past, which tells its history, and indicates the 
 quarter from which it has been derived. In how 
 many English words a letter silent to the ear is yet 
 most eloquent to the eye — the 'g' for instance in 
 ' deign,' ' reign,' ' impugn,' telling as it does of ' dignor,' 
 'regno,' 'impugno ;' even as the 'b' in 'debt,' 'doubt,' 
 is not idle, but tells of ' debitum ' and ' dubitare.' 
 
 It is urged, indeed, as an answer to this, that the 
 scholar does not need these indications to help him 
 to the pedigree of the words with which he deals, that 
 the ignorant is not helped by them ; that the one 
 knows without, and that the other does not know with 
 them ; so that in either case they are profitable for 
 nothing ; the one standing above, and the other below, 
 the possibility of learning anything from the spelling, 
 but do these two classes make up the whole of man- 
 kind ? Are there not a multitude of persons, neither 
 accomplished and highly trained scholars on the one 
 side, nor yet wholly without acquaintance with other 
 languages beside their own on the other? For myself, 
 I cannot doubt that there is much which these can 
 gain, and do gain, by the aid of the very modest philo- 
 logical acquirements which are all that they can boast ; 
 of a large part whereof they would thus be deprived. 
 It does not require more than fourth form Greek to 
 know that by ' syntax ' is meant the orderly marshal- 
 ling of words in their relation to one another. But is 
 not the word more for many when they know this than 
 it would otherwise have been ; while yet is it likely 
 they would have known it, if 'sintacs,' and not 'syn- 
 tax,' had been the form in which the word had always 
 presented itself to their eye? 
 
 At present it is the written word which in all Ian-
 
 346 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 guages constitutes their conservative element. In it 
 is the abiding witness against the mutilations or other 
 capricious changes in shape which affectation, folly, 
 laziness, ignorance, and half-knowledge would intro- 
 duce. Not seldom it proves unable to hinder the 
 final adoption of these corrupter forms ; but it does not 
 fail to oppose to them a constant, and often a success- 
 ful, resistance. In this way, for example, the ' coco- 
 drill ' of our Middle English has given place to the 
 ' crocodile ' of our later. With the adoption of pho- 
 netic spelling, this witness would exist no longer. 
 Whatever was spoken would have also to be written, 
 were it never so barbarous, never so wide a departure 
 from the true form of the word ; the jargon of the 
 lowest of the people would be stereotyped as the 
 model and pattern of speech. 1 Nor is it merely pro- 
 bable that such a barbarizing process, such an adopt- 
 ing and sanctioning of a vulgarism, might take place, 
 but among phonographers it has taken place already. 
 There is a vulgar pronunciation of the word ' Europe,' 
 as though it were ' Eurup.' Now it is quite possible 
 that a larger number of persons in England may pro- 
 nounce the word in this manner than in the right ; 
 and therefore the phonographers are only true to their 
 principles when they spell ' Europe ' ' Juarap,' the life 
 of the first syllable being assailed no less than that of 
 the second. What are the consequences ? First, all 
 connexion with the Greek word Evpio-n-ri is lost to the 
 
 1 See Notes on some English Heterographers, by H. B. 
 Wheatley, in the Philological Society's Transactions, 1865, pp. 
 13-59; an exhaustive account of the efforts of English phono- 
 graphers up to the date of his writing
 
 viii. Losses of Phonetic Spelling. 347 
 
 eye, and secondly, all connexion with the old mytho- 
 logy and the story of Europa is entirely broken off. 1 
 But so far from the spelling servilely following the 
 pronunciation, I should be bold to affirm that if 
 ninety-nine out of every hundred persons in England 
 chose to pronounce the vowel of the second syllable 
 of 'Europe' as the 'u' in 'up,' this would be a vul- 
 garism still, against which the written word ought to 
 maintain its protest, not lowering itself to their level, 
 but rather seeking to elevate them to its own. 2 
 
 Then, too, if there is much in orthography which 
 is unsettled now, how much more would be unsettled 
 then ! Inasmuch as the pronunciation of words is 
 continually altering, their spelling would of course 
 have continually to alter too. It would be abundantly 
 easy to prove that pronunciation is undergoing con- 
 stant changes, although changes for the most part 
 
 1 Ampere has well said, ' Effacer les signes etymologiques 
 d'une langue, c'est effacer ses titres genealogiques et gratter son 
 ecusson. ' 
 
 - Quinctilian has expressed himself with the true dignity of a 
 scholar on this matter [Inst. I. 6. 45): Consuetudinem sermonis 
 vocabo consensu »i eruditorum', sicut vivendi consensum bonorum. 
 — How different from innovations like this the changes in 
 German spelling which J. Grimm, so far as his own example 
 may reach, has introduced ; and the still bolder which in the 
 Preface to his Dentsches Wdrterbiich, pp. liv-lxii, he avows his 
 desire to see introduced: — as the employment of f, not merely 
 where at present used, but wherever v is now employed ; the 
 substituting of the v, which would be thus disengaged, for w, 
 and the entire dismissal of w. These may be advisable, or they 
 may not ; it is not for strangers to offer an opinion ; hut at any 
 rate they all rest on a deep historic study of the language, and 
 of its true genius ; and are not a seeking to give permanent 
 authority to the fleeting accidents of the present hour.
 
 348 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 unmarked, or marked only by a few. 1 Take a 
 Pronouncing Dictionary of fifty or a hundred years 
 ago ; in almost every page you will meet schemes of 
 pronunciation recommended which are now merely 
 vulgarisms, or which have been dropped altogether. 
 We gather from a discussion in Boswell's Life of 
 Johnson, 2 that in his time ' great ' was by some of the 
 best speakers of the language pronounced ' gr^t,' not 
 ' grate : ' Pope usually rhymes it with ' cheat,' ' com- 
 plete,' and the like ; thus in the Dunciad : 
 
 ' Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great, 
 There, stamped with arms, Newcastle stands complete;' 
 
 while Spenser's constant use, a century and a half 
 earlier, leaves no doubt that such was the established 
 pronunciation of his time. Again, Pope rhymes 
 'obliged ' with 'besieged ; ' and it has only ceased to 
 be ' obliged ' almost in our own time. ' Key ' in our 
 Elizabethan literature always rhymes with such words 
 as ' survey ' (Shakespeare, Sonnets). Who now that 
 speaks the ordinary standard English drinks a cup of 
 ' tay ' ? yet it is certain that this was the fashionable 
 pronunciation in the earlier half of the last century. 
 This couplet of Pope's is one proof out of many : 
 
 ' Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey, 
 Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.' 
 
 Rhyme is a great assistance to the detecting of changes 
 like these, which but for the help that it affords we 
 should fail to detect ; which indeed we should often 
 have no means of detecting ; which not seldom we 
 
 1 Consuetudo loquendi in motu est, as Varro said long ago. 
 s Croker's edit., 184S, pp. 57, 61, 233.
 
 VIII. Pronunciation alters. 349 
 
 should not suspect in the least. Thus, if it were not 
 for these lines of Dryden, 
 
 ' Better to hunt the fields for health unbought, 
 Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught,' 
 
 we should not at all suspect 'draught' to have been 
 pronounced as thus we learn that it was. So too 
 when ' should ' rhymes with ' cooled ' (Shakespeare), 
 with ' hold ' (Daniel), with ' cold ' (Ben Jonson), 
 and 'would' with 'bold' (Ford), with 'mould' 
 (Chapman), with ' old ' (Fletcher), it is plain that our 
 'shou'd,' 'wou'd,' had not yet established themselves 
 in the language. And how little our words ending in 
 ' ough ' are pronounced now as they were once we 
 gather from the fact that Golding in his translation of 
 Ovid's Metamorphoses rhymes 'tough ' and ' through,' 
 ' trough ' and ' through,' ' rough ' and ' plough.' 1 Or 
 a play on words may inform us how the case once 
 stood. Thus there would be no point in the com- 
 plaint of Cassius, 2 that in all Home there was room 
 but for a single man, 
 
 ' Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough,' 
 
 if Rome had not been pronounced in Shakespeare's 
 time, as some few pronounce it still, as I believe John 
 Kemble pronounced it to the last, but as the educated 
 classes of society have now consented not to pro- 
 
 1 In Levins' Manipulus Vocabulorum 'bough,' 'chough,' 
 'cough,' 'plough,' 'slough,' 'trough,' 'through,' 'rough,' 
 'tough,' are all arranged together, the book grouping words, 
 though it must be owned rather carelessly, according to similar 
 terminations. 
 
 -Julius Casar, act i. sc. 2; and compare King John, act 
 iii. sc. I.
 
 350 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 nounce it any more. Samuel Rogers assures us that 
 in his youth ' everybody said " Lonnon," not "Lon- 
 don ; " that Fox said " Lonnon " to the last.' 
 
 Swift long ago urged the same objection against 
 the phonographers of his time : ' Another cause which 
 has contributed not a little to the maiming of our 
 language, is a foolish opinion advanced of late years 
 that we ought to spell exactly as we speak : which, 
 besides the obvious inconvenience of utterly destroy- 
 ing our etymology, would be a thing we should never 
 see an end of. Not only the several towns and coun- 
 ties of England have a different way of pronouncing, 
 but even here in London they clip their words after 
 one manner about the court, another in the city, 
 and a third in the suburbs ; and in a few years, it is 
 probable, will all differ from themselves, as fancy or 
 fashion shall direct ; all which, reduced to writing, 
 would entirely confound orthography.' l 
 
 1 A Proposal for correcting, improving, and ascertaining the 
 English Tongue, 1711, Works, vol. ix. pp. 1 39- 1 59. That the 
 Spelling Reformers should have recently obtained some words 
 of encouragement from Professor Max Miiller is an immense 
 piece of good fortune, which they had little right to expect. It 
 is true that he is not sanguine as to the speedy triumph of the 
 cause, and sees and faces the difficulties which its ordinary 
 advocates for the most part overlook. Thankful as I am for 
 all that I have learned from his article On Spelling in The 
 Fortnightly Review, April, 1876, I still remain unconvinced 
 that this spelling reform is desirable, or that it would be possible, 
 if desirable. [In this vigorous philippic against the Spelling 
 Reformers, it is quite possible that the Archbishop's views would 
 still enjoy the enthusiastic support of many literary men. I 
 doubt much, however, whether they would command the assent 
 of a single living philologist, or student of the English language.
 
 viii. Alterations in Spelling. 351 
 
 Let this much suffice by way of answer to those 
 who would fain revolutionize our English orthography 
 altogether. Dismissing them and their innovations, 
 which only do not fill with alarm because one has so 
 fixed a conviction that they will never force their way 
 into our written English, let me call your attention 
 now to those changes in spelling which are constantly 
 going forward, at some periods more rapidly than at 
 others, but which never wholly cease ; while at the 
 same time I endeavour to trace, where this is possible, 
 the motives and inducements which bring these 
 changes about. It is a subject which none can 
 neglect, who desire to obtain an accurate acquaintance 
 with their native tongue. Some principles have been 
 laid down in the course of what has been said already 
 that may help us to judge whether these changes are 
 for better or for worse. We shall find, if I mistake 
 not, of both kinds. 
 
 There are alterations in spelling which are for the 
 worse. Thus an altered spelling will sometimes ob- 
 scure the origin of a word, concealing this from those 
 who would else at once have known whence and what 
 it was, and would have found both pleasure and 
 profit in this knowledge. In all those cases where the 
 earlier spelling revealed the secret of the word, told 
 its history, which the latter defaces or obscures, the 
 change has been injurious, and is to be regretted. 
 Thus, when ' grower ' was spelt ' grower,' it was com- 
 paratively easy to see that he first had his name, be- 
 
 For well -reasoned arguments in defence of Phonetic Spelling 
 the student is referred to Max Midler's Lectures on the Science 
 of Language, ii. 108 ; Sweet's Handbook of Phonetics (Ap- 
 pendix); Skeat's Principles of English Etymology, p. 294.]
 
 352 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 cause he sold his wares not by retail, but in the gross. 
 ' Coxcomb ' tells us nothing now ; but it did when 
 spelt ' coxcomb,' the comb of a cock being an ensign 
 or token which the fool was accustomed to wear. In 
 ' grograw ' we are entirely to seek for the derivation ; 
 but in ' grogra« ' or ' grogra/>/,' as earlier it was spelt, 
 one could scarcely miss 'grosgrain,' the stuff of a 
 coarse grain or woof. ' Mosaic ' work was once, at 
 least on the part of some, spelt ' musaic,' and better 
 so. The word as we now spell it might easily lead 
 astray, while ' musaic ' does something to set the in- 
 quirer on the track of the Muses, if indeed the right 
 explanation after all. [On this point the student may 
 consult Ducange, s.v. ' musivum opus.'] 
 
 ' P/gmy ' used once to be spelt ' p>gmy,' and no 
 Greek scholar could then fail to perceive that by 
 ' pygmies ' were indicated manikins of no greater 
 height than that of a man's arm from the elbow to the 
 closed fist. 1 Now he may know this in other ways ; 
 but the word itself as written tells him nothing. Or 
 again, the old spelling, 'diama^/,' was preferable to 
 the modern 'dianwz^.' It was so, because it spoke 
 to the eye of the past history of the word. ' Diamant ' 
 and 'adamant' are in fact no more than different 
 adoptions by the English tongue of one and the same 
 Greek, which afterwards became a Latin, word. The 
 primary meaning of ' adamant ' is, as you know, the 
 indomitable ; it was a name given at first to steel as 
 the hardest of metals ; but afterwards transferred 2 to 
 
 1 Pygmrei, quasi cubitales (Augustine). 
 
 - First so used by Theophrastus in Greek, and by Pliny in 
 Latin. The real identity of the two words explains Milton's use
 
 viii. Alterations in Spelling. 353 
 
 the most precious among all the precious stones, as 
 that which in power of resistance surpassed everything 
 
 besides. 
 
 Neither are new spellings to be commended, which 
 obliterate or obscure the relationship of a word with 
 others to which it is really allied ; separating from 
 one another for those not thoroughly acquainted with 
 the subject, words of the same family. Take, for 
 instance, the word 'cousin' (consobrinus), and 'to 
 cozen ; ' a permanent distinction has established itself 
 between them, keeping out of sight that ' to cozen ' 
 is in all likelihood to deceive under show of affinity ; 
 if which be so, Shakespeare's words, 
 
 « Cousins indeed, and by their uncle cozened 
 Of comfort," 
 
 will contain not a pun, but an etymology. 
 
 The omission of a letter, or the addition of a letter, 
 may work, one as effectually as the other, to keep out 
 of sight the true character and origin of a word. Thus 
 the omission of a letter. When for ' bran-new,' it was 
 ' bran^-new ' with a final ' d,' how vigorous was the 
 image here. The ' brand ' is the fire, and ' brand- 
 new,' equivalent to ' fire-new ' (Shakespeare), is that 
 which is fresh and bright, as being newly come from 
 
 of ' diamond ' in Paradise Lost, b. vi. ; and also in that sublime 
 passage in his Apology for Smectymnuus : 'Then Zeal, whose 
 substance is ethereal, arming in complete diamond, ascends his 
 fiery chariot.' — Diez [Worterbuch d. Roman. Sprachcn, p. 123) 
 supposes, not very probably, that it was under a certain influ- 
 ence of '(//'rtfano,' the translucent, that ' adamante ' was in the 
 Italian, from whence we have derived the word, changed into 
 '^/amante.' 
 
 1 Richard III., act iv. sc. 4. 
 
 A A
 
 354 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 the forge and fire. As now spelt, it conveys to us no 
 image at all. Again, you have the word ' scrip' — as a 
 ' scrip ' of paper, railway ' scrip.' Is this the Teutonic 
 ' scrip,' a wallet, which has in some strange manner 
 obtained these meanings so different and so remote ? 
 Have we here only two different applications of one 
 and the same word, or two homonyms, wholly different 
 words, though spelt alike ? It is sufficient to note 
 how the first of these ' scrips ' used to be written, 
 namely with a final ' t,' not ' scrip ' but ' scrip/,' and 
 the question is answered. This 'scrip' is a Latin, 
 as the other is a Teutonic, word, and meant at first 
 simply a written (scripta) piece of paper — a circum- 
 stance which since the omission of the final ' t ' may 
 easily escape our knowledge. 
 
 In these cases it has been the omission of a letter 
 which has clouded and concealed the etymology. 
 The intrusion of a letter sometimes does the same. 
 Thus in the early editions of Paradise Lost, and in the 
 writings of that age, you will find 'scent,' an odour, 
 spelt ' sent' It was better so ; there is no other noun 
 substantive 'sent,' with which it is in danger of being 
 confounded ; while its relation with 'sentio,' with 
 'resent,' 1 'dissent,' ' consent,' and the like, is put out 
 of sight by its novel spelling ; the intrusive 'c' serving 
 only to mislead. The same thing was attempted with 
 
 1 How close this relationship was once, not merely in respect 
 of etymology, but also of significance, a passage like this will 
 prove : * Perchance, as vultures are said to smell the earthiness 
 of a dying corpse ; so this bird of prey [the evil spirit which, 
 according to Fuller, personated Samuel, I Sam. xxviii. 14] re- 
 sented a worse than earthly savor in the soul of Saul, as evidence 
 of his death at hand' (Fuller, The Profane State, b. v. c. 4).
 
 viii. Alterations in Spelling. 355 
 
 'site,' 'situate,' 'situation,' spelt for a time by many, 
 'snte,' 'srituate,' 'situation ;' but it did not continue 
 with these. Again, 'whole,' in Wiclif's Bible, and 
 indeed much later, sometimes as far down as Spenser, 
 is spelt 'hole' without the 'w' at the beginning. The 
 present orthography may have the advantage of at 
 once distinguishing the word to the eye from any 
 other ; but at the same time the initial ' w ' hides its 
 relation to the verb 'to heal.' To ' heal ' a man is to 
 make him 'whole' or 'hale,' 'whole' being precisely the 
 same word as the northern ' hale ' (integer). We owe 
 to Tyndale the form of the word with the initial ' w.' 1 
 ' Wholesome ' has naturally followed the fortunes of 
 ' whole ; ' it was spelt ' holsome ' in Middle English. 
 
 Of ' island ' too our present spelling is inferior to 
 the old, inasmuch as it suggests a hybrid formation, as 
 though the word were made up of the Old French 
 'isle' and the English 'land.' It is quite true that 'isle' 
 is the representative of the old French 'isle' (in modern 
 French 'ile'), which is the Latin 'insula ; ' and hence 
 probably the misspelling of 'island.' This last how- 
 ever has nothing to do with 'insula,' being really 
 identical with the Old English 'Igland,' and signifying 
 'watery land.' And it is worthy of note that this 's' 
 is quite of modern introduction. In the earlier Ver- 
 sions of the Scriptures, and in the Authorized Version 
 as first set forth, it is 'iland;' which is not accidental, 
 seeing that ' isle ' has the ' s ' which ' iland ' has not 
 (see Rev. i. 9) ; and the correct spelling obtained far 
 down into the seventeenth century. 
 
 1 Oliphant, vol. i. p. 41 1 ; compare Earle, Philology of the 
 English Tongue % 165. 
 
 A A 2
 
 "56 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 o 
 
 One of the most frequent causes of alteration in 
 the spelling of a word is a wrongly assumed deriva- 
 tion ; as has been the case with the word just 
 dealt with. It is then sought to bring the word into 
 harmony with, and to make it by its spelling suggest 
 this derivation, which has been erroneously thrust 
 upon it. Here is a subject which, followed out as it 
 deserves, would form an interesting and instructive 
 chapter in the history of language. Very remarkable 
 is the evidence which we have here to the way in 
 which learned and unlearned alike crave to have a 
 meaning in the words which they employ, to have 
 these not body only, but body and soul. Where for 
 the popular sense the life has died out from a word, 
 men will put into it a life of their own devising, rather 
 than that it should henceforth be for them a mere 
 dead and inert sign. Much more will they be tempted 
 to this in the case of foreign words, which have been 
 adopted into the language, but which have not brought 
 with them, at least for the popular mind, the secret of 
 their origin. These shall tell something about them- 
 selves ; and when they cannot tell what is true, or 
 when that true is not intelligible any more, then, rather 
 than that they should suggest nothing, men compel 
 them to suggest what is false, moulding and shaping 
 them into some new form, until at least they shall ap- 
 pear to have something to report about themselves. 1 
 
 1 Diez looks with much favour on this process, and calls it 
 ein sinnreiches Mittel Fremdlinge ganz heimisch zu machen. 
 Compare Schleicher, Die Deutsche Sprache, pp. 114-117; 
 Matzner, Engl. Grammatik, vol. i. p. 483 ; and an article, 
 Die Umdeutschung fremder Wdrter, in Wackernagel's Kleinere 
 Scliriflen, vol. iii.
 
 viii. Spelling for the Worse. 357 
 
 There is probably no language in which such a 
 process has not been going forward ; in which it is 
 not the explanation in a vast number of instances, of 
 changes in spelling and even in form, which words 
 have undergone. I will offer a few examples of it 
 from foreign tongues, before adducing any from our 
 own. ' Pyramid ' is a word whose spelling was 
 affected for the Greeks by an erroneous assumption of 
 its derivation ; the consequences of this error sur- 
 viving to the present day. It is spelt by us with a 
 ' y ' in the first syllable, as it was spelt with the corre- 
 sponding letter in the Greek. But why was this ? It 
 was because the Greeks assumed that the pyramids 
 were so named from their having the appearance of 
 flame going up into a point, ' and so they spelt ' pyra- 
 mid,' that they might find -n-vp or 'pyre' in it ; while 
 in fact ' pyramid ' may possibly have nothing to do 
 with flame or fire at all ; being, perhaps, an Egyptian 
 word of quite a different signification. 
 
 The form ' Hierosolyma,' the Greek reproduction 
 of the Hebrew ' Jerusalem,' was intended in all pro- 
 bability to express that the city so called was the sacred- 
 city of the Solymir At all events the intention not 
 merely of reproducing the Hebrew word, but also of 
 making it significant in Greek, of finding lepov in it, is 
 plainly discernible. For indeed the Greeks were 
 exceedingly intolerant of foreign words, till these had 
 laid aside their foreign appearance, — intolerant of all 
 words which they could not quicken with a Greek soul ; 
 and with a very characteristic vanity and an ignoring 
 of all other tongues but their own, assumed with no 
 
 1 Ammianus Marcellinus, xxii. 15, 28. 
 
 2 Tacitus, Hist. v. 2.
 
 358 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 apparent misgivings that all words, from whatever 
 quarter derived, were to be explained by Greek ety- 
 mologies. 1 
 
 1 Let me illustrate this by further instances in a note. Thus 
 f}jvrvpoi>, from which, through the Latin, our ' butter ' has 
 reached us, is borrowed (Pliny, H. N. xxviii. 9) from a Scythian 
 word, now to us unknown : yet it is highly probable that the 
 Greeks so shaped and spelt it as to contain apparent allusion to 
 cozv and cheese ; there is in (iovrvpov an evident searching after (iovs 
 and rvpdv. Bozra, meaning citadel in Hebrew and Phoenician, 
 and 'the name, no doubt, which the citadel of Carthage bore, 
 becomes Bvp<ra on Greek lips; and then the well-known legend 
 of the ox-hide was invented ; not having suggested the name, 
 but being itself suggested by it. Herodian (v. 6) reproduces the 
 name of the Syrian goddess Astarte in a shape significant for 
 Greek ears — : A(tt podpxy, The Star-ruler or Star-queen. When 
 the apostate hellenizing Jews assumed Greek names, ' Eliakim ' 
 or 'God will raise up,' became 'Alcimus' (&\Kifj.os) or The 
 Strong ( 1 Mace. vii. 5). Latin examples in like kind are ' com/s- 
 satio,' spelt continually ' com^ssatio ' and ' com^ssation ' by those 
 who sought to naturalize it in England, as though connected 
 with ' comedo,' to eat, being indeed the substantive from the 
 verb 'comissari' (= k^/llix^li/), to revel; as Plutarch, whose 
 Latin is often weak, long ago correctly observed ; and ' ori- 
 chalcum,' spelt often ' amichalcum,' as though it were a com- 
 posite metal of mingled gold and brass ; being indeed the 
 mountain brass (opei'xaAKos). The miracle play, which is 
 ' mystere ' in French, whence our English ' mystery,' was ori- 
 ginally written 'mistere,' being derived from the Latin ' minis- 
 terium,' a service, employment, business. This was forgotten, 
 and it then became 'mystery,' as though so called because the 
 mysteries of the faith were in it set out. The mole in German 
 was 'moltwurf once, our English ' moldwarp,' one, that is, 
 that cast up the mould ; but ' molte ' faded out of the language, 
 and the word became, as it now is, 'maulwurf,' one that 
 casts up with the 'maul' or mouth; — which the creature does 
 not do.
 
 viii. Etymologies affect Spelling. 359 
 
 ' Tartar ' is another word, of which it is at least 
 possible that a wrongly assumed derivation has modi- 
 fied the spelling, and not the spelling only, but the 
 very shape in which we now possess it. To many 
 among us it may be known that the people designated 
 by this appellation are not properly ' Tartars,' but 
 ' Tatars ; ' and you may sometimes have noted the 
 omission of the 'r' on the part of some who are 
 exact in their spelling. How then, it may be asked, 
 did the form 'Tartar' arise ? When the terrible hordes 
 of middle Asia burst in upon civilized Europe in the 
 thirteenth century, many beheld in the ravages of their 
 innumerable cavalry a fulfilment of that prophetic word 
 in the book of the Revelation (chap, ix.) concerning 
 the opening of the bottomless pit ; and from this 
 belief ensued the change of their name from ' Tatars ' 
 to ' Tartars,' which was thus put into closer relation 
 with ' Tartarus,' or hell, whence their multitudes were 
 supposed to have proceeded. 1 
 
 Another good example in the same kind is the 
 German word 'sundflut,' the Deluge, which is now 
 so spelt as to signify a ' sinflood,' the plague or flood 
 of waters brought on the world by the sins of man- 
 kind ; and some of us may before this have admired 
 the pregnant significance of the word. Yet the old 
 High German word had originally no such intention ; 
 it was spelt 'sinfluot,' that is, the universal flood ; and 
 as late as Luther, indeed, in Luther's own translation 
 
 1 We have in this popular association of these two distinct 
 words with one another the explanation of the fact that. Spen- 
 ser {Fairy Queen, i. 7. 44}, Middleton {Works, vol. v. pp. 524, 
 528, 538), and others employ ' Tartary ' as equivalent to ' Tar- 
 tarus,' or hell.
 
 360 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 of the Bible, is so spelt as to make plain that the 
 notion of a '^///-flood ' had not yet found its way into, 
 as it had not affected the spelling of, the word. 1 
 
 But to look nearer home for our examples : the 
 little raisins brought from Greece, which play so im- 
 portant a part in our Christmas plum-pudding, used 
 to be called ' corinths ; ' and this name they bear in 
 mercantile lists of a hundred years ago : either that 
 for the most part they were shipped from Corinth, 
 the principal commercial city in Greece, or because 
 they grew in large abundance in. the immediate dis- 
 trict round about it. Their likeness in shape and size 
 and general appearance to our own currants, working 
 together with the ignorance of the great majority of 
 English people about natural history, caused the name 
 of the Corinth raisin — the ' corinth ' — to be applied 
 to our own sour fruit (Ribes) ; the result is that the 
 name of our English garden fruit, ' currant,' is a cor- 
 ruption of the Greek name Koptvfloc. 
 
 ' Cottrt-cards, 7 that is, the king, queen, and knave in 
 each suit, were once ' coat-cards ; ' 2 having their name 
 from the long splendid 'coat' with which they were 
 arrayed. Probably ' coat ' after a while did not per- 
 fectly convey its original meaning and intention ; being 
 no more in common use for the long garment (the 
 vestis talaris) reaching down to the heels ; and then 
 ' coat ' was easily exchanged for ' court,' as the word 
 
 1 For a full discussion of this matter and fixing of the period 
 at which ' sinfluot ' became ' siindflut,' see an article by Jacob 
 Grimm, in the Theol. Stud. u. Krit., vol. ii. p. 613 ; reprinted 
 in his Klein. Schriften, vol. iii. p. 288 ; and Delitzsch, Genesis, 
 2nd ed. vol. ii. p. 210. 
 
 2 Ben Jonson, The New Inn, act i. sc. 1 .
 
 viii. Etymologies affect Spelling. 361 
 
 is now both spelt and pronounced, seeing that no- 
 where so fitly as in a Court should such splendidly 
 arrayed personages be found. A public-house in the 
 neighbourhood of London having a few years since 
 for its sign ' The George Canning,' is already ' The 
 George and Cannon,'— so rapidly do these transforma- 
 tions proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we sup- 
 pose would never be forgotten. ' Farced,' or stuffed 
 ' meat,' becomes '■forced meat.' ' Andirons ' must have 
 assumed its present shape from the notion that it had 
 something to do with ' hand ' or ' end,' and ' iron,' 
 which is altogether a mistake. The mere determina- 
 tion to make a word look English, to put it into an 
 English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to 
 attain any result in the way of etymology, is often suf- 
 ficient to modify its spelling, and even its form. 1 It is 
 thus that ' sipahi ' has become ' sepoy ; ' and only so 
 could Dutch 'huyzenblas' (Sewel) become 'isinglass ;' 2 
 or ' wermode,' as in Wiclif (compare the German ' wer- 
 muth '), become ' wormwood.' Another word which 
 
 1 ' Leghorn ' is sometimes quoted as an example of this ; but 
 erroneously ; for, as Admiral Smyth has shown ( The Mediter- 
 ranean, p. 409), ' Livorno ' is itself rather the modern pronun- 
 ciation and ' Ligorno ' the name found on the earlier charts. 
 
 - Exactly the same happens in other languages ; thus, ' arm- 
 brust,' a crossbow, looks German enough, and yet has nothing 
 to do with 'arm' or ' brust,' being a malformation of the Low 
 Latin • arbalista,' a contraction of ' arcubalista,' but formed under 
 the influence of these German words. As little has 'abenteuer' 
 anything to do with ' abend ' or ' theuer,' however it may seem 
 to be connected with them, being indeed the Old French ' aven- 
 ture.' So too 'weissagen' as shown by its earlier forms had 
 nothing in common with 'sagen.' On this subject see 
 Schleicher, Die Deutsche Spache, p. 166.
 
 362 Changed Spelling of Words. lect. 
 
 in the spelling simulates an English form, is 'rose- 
 mary ' (Old French, ' ros marin '). ' Gillifiower ' and 
 ' demijohn ' have been submitted to the same popular 
 influences. 1 
 
 There are words which, derived from one word, 
 will receive a certain impulse and modification from 
 another. This extends sometimes beyond the spell- 
 ing, and where it does so, would hardly belong to our 
 present theme. Still I may notice an instance or two. 
 Thus our word ' obsequies ' translates the Latin 
 ' exequias,' but was formed under a certain impulse of 
 'obsequium,' and seeking to express and include the 
 observant honour which in ' obsequium ' is implied. 
 So too the French has adopted the German ' sauer- 
 kraut,' but in the form of ' c/iou-croute,' of which the 
 explanation is obvious. The Italian word for 'drago- 
 man' is 'turcimanno,'a term of Aramaic origin mean- 
 ing an interpreter ; the Italian form shows sense- 
 association with ' Turk.' ' Orange ' is a word of 
 Persian origin, which has reached us through the 
 Arabic, and which the Spanish ' naranja ' more nearly 
 represents than the form existing in other languages of 
 Europe. But what so natural as to contemplate this 
 as the golden fruit, especially when the ' aurea mala ' 
 of the Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity ? In 
 this way ' aurum,' ' oro,' 'or,' made itself felt in the 
 various shapes which the word assumed in languages 
 of the West, and we have here the explanation of the 
 change in the first syllable, as in the Low Latin 
 ' aurantium,' in ' orangia,' in the French ' orange,' and 
 in our own. 2 A ' belfry ' is now only used of a tower 
 
 1 See Skeat, Etym. Diet., s. vv. 
 
 - See Mahn, Etym. Untersuch. p. 157.
 
 viii. Transformation of Words. 363 
 
 for bells ; while the word has indeed nothing to do 
 with bells, and the first syllable only through a cor- 
 ruption could so much as seem to have this. 
 
 It is foreign words, or words adopted from foreign 
 languages, as already has been said, which are es- 
 pecially subjected to such transformations as these. 
 The soul which they once had in their own language, 
 having, for as many as are not familiar with that lan- 
 guage, departed from them, men will not rest till they 
 have put another soul into them again. Thus— to 
 take first one or two popular and familiar instances, 
 than which none serve better to illustrate the laws 
 which preside over human speech,— the Bellerophon 
 becomes for our sailors the ' Billy Ruffian,' for what 
 do they know of the Greek mythology or of the slayer 
 of Chimsera ? An iron steamer, the Hirondelle, which 
 plied on the Tyne for a while, was the ' Iron Devil' 
 Langalibalele, an African chief who gave us some 
 trouble (1883), became 'Longbelly' in the mouth of 
 our soldiers. A well-known rose, 'the rose of the 
 four seasons,' or 'rose des quatre saisons,' becomes on 
 the lips of our gardeners, the ' rose of the quarter 
 sessions,' though here the eye must have misled rather 
 than the ear. The cherry of Medoc becomes presently 
 a ' mayduke.' ' Dent de lion' (it is spelt 'dentdelyon ' 
 in our early writers) becomes 'dandelion,' '• chaude 
 melee,' or an affray in hot blood, ' chancemedley,' 
 ' causey ' (chaussee or via calceata) becomes ' cause- 
 way,' ' rachitis ' ' rickets ; ' ' mandragora ' reappears in 
 French as 'main de gloire,' and 'hammock ' (a native 
 Indian word) appears in Dutch as ' hangmat.' ' 
 
 1 On such words De Quincey {Life and Manners, p. 70, 
 American ed.) says well : ' It is in fact by such corruptions, by
 
 64 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 ' Necromancy ' for a long time was erroneously 
 spelt, under the influence of a faulty derivation ; 
 which, perhaps even now, has left traces behind it in 
 our popular phrase, ' the Black Art.' Prophecy by 
 aid of the dead, as I need not tell you, is the proper 
 meaning of the word ; assuming as it does that these 
 may be raised by potent spells, and compelled to give 
 answers about things to come. Of such ' necromancy ' 
 we have an example in the story of the witch of Endor 
 (i Sam. xxviii. 11-20), and a very horrid one in 
 Lucan. 1 But the Latin medieval writers, whose Greek 
 was either little or none, spelt the word ' nigromantia,' 
 while at the same time getting round to the original 
 meaning, though by a wrong process, they understood 
 the dead by these ' nigri ' or blacks, whom they had 
 brought into the word. 2 Down to a late day we find 
 'negromancer' and ' negromsmcy ' frequent in our 
 English speech. 
 
 ' Pleurisy ' used often to be spelt without an ' e ' in 
 the first syllable, evidently on the tacit assumption 
 
 off-sets upon an old stock, arising through ignorance or mispro- 
 nunciation originally, that every language is frequently enriched ; 
 and new modifications of thought, unfolding themselves in the 
 progress of society, generate for themselves concurrently appro- 
 priate expressions. ... It must not be allowed to weigh against 
 a word once fairly naturalized by all, that originally it crept in 
 upon an abuse or a corruption. Prescription is as strong a 
 ground of legitimation in a case of this nature, as it is in law ; 
 and the old axiom is applicable— Fieri non debuit, factum valet. 
 Were it otherwise, languages would be robbed of much of their 
 wealth.' 
 
 1 Phars. vi. 720-830. 
 
 - Thus in a Vocabulary, 1475: Nigromansia dicitur divinatio 
 facta per nigros.
 
 viii. Transformation of Words. 365 
 
 that it was from plus pluris. When Shakespeare falls 
 into an error, he 'makes the offence gracious;' yet, I 
 think, he would scarcely have written, 
 
 ' For goodness growing to a phirisy 
 Dies of his own too much,' 
 
 but that he too derived ' plurisy ' from pluris. This, 
 even with the ' small Latin and less Greek ' which 
 Ben Jonson allows him, he scarcely would have done, 
 had the word presented itself in that form, which by 
 right of its descent from TrXevpd (being a pain, stitch, 
 or sickness in the side) it ought to have possessed. 
 Those who for ' crucible ' wrote ' chrysoble ' (Jeremy 
 Taylor does so) must evidently have assumed that the 
 Greek for gold lay at the foundation of the word. 
 ' Anthymn ' (in Barrow) instead of ' anthem ' rests 
 plainly on a wrong etymology, even as this spelling 
 clearly betrays what that wrong etymology is ; ' an- 
 tiphona' is its proper ancestor, or more properly is 
 itself in an earlier stage of existence. ' Windore ' for 
 'window,' not unfrequent in old texts, rests on the 
 assumption that the word was originally ' wind-door,' 
 and not, as it is indeed, 'wind-eye,' 'vindauga' in 
 the Icelandic. In like manner ' lant-horn ' (Fuller) for 
 ' lantern ' sufficiently explains itself. ' Rhyme ' is a 
 modern misspelling ; and would never have been 
 but for the undue influence which the Greek 'rhythm' 
 has exercised upon it. Spenser and his contempo- 
 raries spelt it 'rime.' 'Abominable ' was not unfre- 
 quently in the seventeenth century spelt ' abomin- 
 able,' as though it were that which departed from 
 the human [ab homine) into the bestial or devilish. 
 ' Posthumous ' owes the ' h ' which has found its way 
 into the heart of the word to the notion that, instead
 
 366 Changed Spelling of Words. lect. 
 
 of being a superlative of ' posterus,' it has something 
 to do with 'post humum,' or after death and burial. 
 Other foreign words which have in whole or in part 
 simulated an English form, and have endeavoured to 
 look like English, though without having always made 
 up their mind what English they should suggest, 
 are the following, 'arblast,' 'furbelow,' 'somerset,' 
 'windlass.' 
 
 In most of the instances just cited the correct spell- 
 ing has in the end resumed its sway. Not so however 
 ' frontispzVce,' which ought to be spelt ' frontisp/ce ' (it 
 was so by Milton and others), being the Low Latin 
 ' frontispicium,' from ' frons ' and ' aspicio,' the fore- 
 front of the building, that side which presents itself to 
 the view. The entirely ungrounded notion that ' piece ' 
 constitutes the last syllable, has given rise to our pre- 
 sent orthography. 1 
 
 1 As ' orthography ' itself means ' right spelling,' it might 
 be a curious question whether it is permissible to speak of an 
 incorrect orthography, that is, of a wrong- ^///-spelling. The 
 question thus started is one of frequent recurrence, and it is 
 worthy of note how often this contrcuiictio in adjecto is found to 
 occur. Thus the Greeks having no convenient word for rider, 
 apart from rider on a horse, did not scruple to speak of the 
 horseman ('nnrevs) upon an elephant. They are often as inaccu- 
 rate and with no necessity ; as in using kvlpids of the statue of a 
 woman ; where €ikc!>i> or aya\fj.a would have served as well. So 
 too their table (rpdire^a = TtTpaire^a) involved probably the four 
 feet which commonly support one ; yet they did not shrink from 
 speaking of a three-footed table (rp'nrovs rpdirefr), in other words, 
 a ' three-footed four-footed ; ' much as though we should speak 
 of a ' three -footed quadruped.' Homer's 'hecatomb' (//. vi. 
 93) is not of a hundred, but of twelve, oxen; and elsewhere of 
 Hebe he says, in words not producible in English, v 4 /crap 
 ecpvoxtei. His i/criSer; Kwerj, a helmet of weasel-skin, but
 
 viii. Siren or Syren. 367 
 
 You may, perhaps, wonder that I have dwelt so 
 long on these details of spelling ; but indeed of how 
 much beyond itself is accurate or inaccurate spelling 
 the certain indication. Thus, when we meet 'syren,' 
 for ' s/ren,' as so strangely often we do, almost always 
 in newspapers, and frequently where we should hardly 
 have expected, how difficult it is not to be 'judges of 
 evil thoughts,' and to take this slovenly misspelling 
 as the specimen and evidence of an inaccuracy and 
 ignorance which reaches very far wider than the single 
 
 more strictly a weaselskin dogskin, contains a like contradiction. 
 "AKpaTos, the unmingled, had so come to stand for wine, that St. 
 John speaks of &Kparos KeKepaa/j.4vos (Rev. xiv. io), or the mingled 
 unmingled. Boxes to hold precious ointments were so commonly 
 of alabaster, that they bore this name whether they were so or 
 not; and Theocritus celebrates ' golden alabaster;' as one might 
 now speak of a ' silver pyx,' that is a silver Norwood, or of an 
 'iron box.' Cicero has no choice but to call a water-clock a 
 water sundial (solarium ex aqua.) ; Columella speaks of a ' vintage 
 of honey' (vindemia mellis), and Horace invites his friend to 
 impede, not his foot, but his head, with myrtle {caput impedue 
 myrto). A German who should desire to tell of the golden 
 shoes with which the folly of Caligula adorned his horse, could 
 scarcely avoid speaking of golden hoof-irons. Ink in some 
 German dialects is ' blak,' it was so in Early English ; but red 
 ink is ' rood blak,' or red black. The same inner contradiction 
 is involved in ' dienstfrau,' or serving mistress; and again in 
 such phrases as these, a 'false verdict,' a ' steel pen'' (penna), 
 a silver 'tureen' or 'terrene,' a ' steel cuirass' ('coriacea,' from 
 corium, leather), ' antics new 11 (Harington's Ariosto), 'looking- 
 glasses of brass' (Exod. xxxviii. 8), a ' sweet sauce' (salsa), an 
 ' erroneous etymology,' 'the nominative case,' the very idea of 
 ' case ' being that of falling away from the nominative, which 
 itself is assumed to stand erect, being thus no case at all ; 
 '■rather late,' 'rather' being the comparative of 'rathe;' and 
 in others. See Gerber, Sprache ah A'unst, vol. i. pp. 387-391.
 
 368 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 word which is before us. But why is it that so much 
 significance is ascribed to a wrong spelling? Because 
 ignorance of a word's spelling at once argues ignor- 
 ance of its origin and derivation. I do not mean that 
 one who spells rightly may not be ignorant of it too ; 
 but he who spells wrongly is certainly so. We are 
 quite sure that he who for ' sz'ren ' writes ' syren,' 
 knows nothing of the Greek word creip-qv [for an in- 
 genious etymology of which the reader is referred to 
 Prof. Postgate's article in the Journal of Philology, 
 vol. ix.]. 
 
 Correct or incorrect orthography being, then, this 
 note of accurate or inaccurate knowledge, we may 
 confidently conclude where two spellings of a word 
 exist, and are both employed by persons who gene- 
 rally write with precision, that there must be some- 
 thing to account for this. It will be worth your while 
 to inquire into the causes which enable both spellings 
 to hold their ground, and to have their supporters, not 
 ascribing either one or the other to mere carelessness 
 or error. You will commonly find that two spellings 
 exist, because two views of the word's origin exist, 
 which those two spellings severally express. The 
 question therefore which way of spelling should con- 
 tinue, and wholly supersede the other, and which we 
 should ourselves employ, can only be settled by de- 
 termining which of these etymologies deserves the 
 preference. It is thus with ' chymist ' and ' chemist,' 
 neither of which has obtained in our common use a 
 complete ascendency over the other. It is not here, 
 that one mode is certainly right, the other as certainly 
 wrong ; but they severally represent two different ety- 
 mologies of the word, and each is correct according to
 
 Vin. Chymist and Chemist. 369 
 
 its own. When we spell ' chymist ' and ' chemistry,' 
 we implicitly affirm the words to be derived from the 
 Greek x^o?, sa P j an d the chymic art will then have 
 occupied itself first with distilling the juice and sap of 
 plants, and will from this have drawn its name. But 
 this is not accepted by all. Many object, that it was 
 not the distillation of herbs, but the amalgamation of 
 metals with which chemistry occupied itself at the first ; 
 and find in the word a reference to an old name of 
 Egypt, 1 in which this art was first practised with 
 success. If these are right, 'chemist,' and not 'chjmist,' 
 is the better spelling. 
 
 Of how much confusion the spelling which used 
 to be so common, ' satyr ' for ' satire,' is at once the 
 consequence, the expression, and the cause. Not 
 indeed that this confusion first began with us ; 2 
 already in the Latin ' satyricus ' was continually written 
 for ' sat/ricus ; ' and this out of an assumed identity 
 of the Roman satire and the Greek satyric drama ; 
 while in fact satire was the only form of poetry which 
 
 1 X-0/j.ia, the name of Egypt ; see Plutarch, De Is. et Os. c. 33. 
 For reasons against this, the favourite etymology at present, 
 see Mahn, Etymol. Untersuch. 69. See also N.E.D. (s. v. 
 alchemy). 
 
 - We have a notable evidence how deeply rooted this error 
 was, of the way in which it was shared by the learned as well 
 as the unlearned, in Milton's Apology for Smectym/nms, sect. 7, 
 which everywhere presumes the identity of he ' satyr ' and the 
 'satirist.' It was Isaac Casaubon who first effectually dissipated 
 it even fur the learned world. The results of his investigations 
 were made popular by Dryden, in the very instructive Discourse 
 on Satirical Poetry, prefixed to his translations from Juvenal; 
 but the confusion still survives, and ' satyrs ' and ' satires,' the 
 Greek 'satyric' drama, the Latin 'satirical' poetry, are still 
 assumed by many to stand in some near relation to one another 
 
 B B
 
 370 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 the Romans did not borrow from the Greeks. The 
 Roman ' satira ' is properly a full dish (' lanx ' being 
 understood) — a dish heaped up with various kinds of 
 food, a ' farce,' or hodge-podge ; the name being trans- 
 ferred from this to a form of poetry which at first 
 admitted the utmost variety in the materials of which 
 it was composed, and the shapes into which these 
 materials were wrought up. Wholly different from this, 
 having no one point of contact with it in form, history, 
 or intention, is the ' satyric ' drama of Greece, so called 
 because Silenus and the satyrs supplied the chorus ; 
 and in their naive selfishness, and mere animal 
 instincts, held up before men a mirror of what they 
 would be, if only the divine, which is also the truly 
 human, element of humanity were withdrawn ; what 
 man, all that properly constituted him such being 
 withdrawn, would prove. 
 
 And then what light, as we have already seen, does 
 the older spelling often cast upon a word's origin, how 
 often compels it to give up a secret which otherwise 
 it would have kept to the end. The importance indeed 
 is now fully recognized of getting at the first recorded 
 spelling of any word about whose derivation and his- 
 tory there may be obscurity and dispute. Even where 
 no positive gain is made, much will be done by a clear- 
 ing in this way of the ground, and a putting beyond a 
 doubt that such or such cannot be the right explanation. 
 None has made a more constant rule, in his philological 
 investigations, of recurring to the earliest form in which 
 a word may be found, or done this to more profit, 
 than Mr. Skeat in his Etymological Dictionary. Thus 
 'dirge' is usually spelt 'dirige' in Middle English. 
 Now this 'dirige ' is the first word of an anthem taken 
 from Psalm v. 8 in the Latin Bible, much used in the
 
 viii. Changed Spelling of Words. 371 
 
 office for the dead ; hence the word ' dirige' or ' dirge ' 
 came to mean a lament for the dead. In cases too 
 where there is no mystery about a word, how often 
 does the early spelling make clear to all that which 
 was before only known to those who had made the 
 language their special study. Thus if an early edition 
 of Spenser should come into your hands, or a modern 
 one in which the early spelling is retained, what con- 
 tinual lessons in English might you derive from it. 
 ' Nostril,' for example, is always spelt by Spenser and 
 his contemporaries, ' nosethrill ; ' a little earlier it was 
 'nosethirle.' Now to 'thrill 'is the same as to drill 
 or pierce ; it is plain then here at once that the word 
 signifies the orifice or opening with which the nose is 
 thrilled, drilled, or pierced. We might have read the 
 word for ever in our modern spelling without being 
 taught this. ' Ell ' gives us no clue to its original 
 meaning; but in 'eln,' used in Holland's translation 
 of Camden's Britannia, we recognize Old English 
 'eln,' a cognate of Old High German 'elina,' a cubit, 
 of Latin 'ulna,' and Greek wXeij/, the forearm. 
 Again, the 'morris' or ' morrice-dance,' of which in 
 our early poets we hear so much, as it is now spelt 
 tells us nothing about itself; but read 'moriske dance,' 
 as Holland and his contemporaries spell it, and you 
 will scarcely fail to perceive that t was so called either 
 because it was really, or was supposed to be, a dance 
 in use among the Moriscoes of Spain, and from Spain 
 introduced into England. 1 Once more, we are told 
 
 ' I have seen him 
 Caper upright, like a wild Morisco 
 Shaking the bloody darts, as he his bells.' 
 
 Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI. act iii. sc. I* 
 
 B B 2
 
 372 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 that our ' cray-fish,' or 'craw-fish/ is the French 
 ' ecrevisse.' This is quite true, but it is not self- 
 evident. Trace it however through these successive 
 spellings, ' krevys ' (Lydgate), ' crevish ' (Gascoigne), 
 'craifish' (Holland), and the gulf between 'cray fish' 
 or ' craw-fish ' and ' ecrevisse ' is by aid of these three 
 intermediate spellings completely bridged over ; and 
 in the fact of our Teutonic ' fish ' finding its way into 
 this French word we see one example more of a law 
 which has been already abundantly illustrated in this 
 lecture. 1 
 
 1 In the reprinting of old books it is often hard to determine 
 how far the earlier spelling of words should be retained, how far 
 it should be conformed to present usage. It is comparatively 
 easy to lay down as a rule that in books intended for popular 
 use, wherever the form of the word is not affected by the 
 modernizing of the spelling, there this modernizing shall take 
 place ; (who, for example, would wish our Bibles to be now 
 printed letter for letter after the edition of 1611, or Shakespeare 
 with the orthography of the first folio ?) but wherever the shape, 
 outline, and character of the word have been affected by the 
 changes which it has undergone, there the earlier form shall be 
 held fast. The rule is a judicious one ; but in practice it is not 
 always easy to determine what affects the form and essence of a 
 word and what does not. About some words there can be no 
 doubt ; and therefore when a modern editor of Fuller's Chtirch 
 History complacently announces that he has changed ' dirige ' 
 into 'dirge,' ' barreter ' into 'barrister,' ' synonymas ' into 'syn- 
 onymous' (!), ' extempory ' into 'extemporary,' ' scited ' into 
 'situated,' 'van-currier' into ' avant-courier,' and the like, he 
 at the same time informs us that for all purposes of the study of 
 English (and few writers are for this more important than Fuller), 
 his edition is worthless. Or again, when modern editors of 
 Shakespeare print, giving at the same time no intimation of the 
 
 fact, 
 
 ' Like quills upon the fretful porcupine, '
 
 viii. Changed Spelling of Words. 37^ 
 
 o 
 
 In other ways also an accurate taking note of the 
 successive changes which words have undergone, will 
 often throw light upon them. Thus we may have been 
 told that ' emmet ' and ' ant ' were originally only two 
 different spellings of the same word ; but we may be 
 perplexed to understand how two forms, now so dif- 
 ferent, could ever have diverged from a single original 
 form. When however we find the different spellings, 
 ' emmet,' ' emet,' ' amet,' ' amt,' ' ant,' the chasm which 
 seemed to separate 'emmet' from 'ant' has dis- 
 appeared, and we not merely accept on the assurance 
 of others that these two are identical, but we perceive 
 clearly their identity ourselves. [The old Germanic 
 form went two different ways in English : (1) O.E. 
 cemete, amete, M.E. atnte, ante, ant; and (2) emete, 
 M.E. emet, emmet. See N.E.D.] 
 
 Apart from any close examination of the matter, it 
 would be hard not to suspect that 'runagate' is another 
 form of 'renegade,' having been slightly transformed, 
 like so many other words, to put an English signifi- 
 cation into its first syllable ; and then the meaning 
 gradually modified under the influence of the new 
 derivation, which was assumed to be its original and 
 true one. Our suspicion of this is strengthened (for 
 we see how very closely the words approach one 
 another), by the fact that ' renegade ' is constantly 
 
 the word in his first folio and quarto standing, 
 
 ' Like quills upon the fretful porpentme,'' 
 
 and this being in Shakespeare's time the current form of the 
 word, they have taken an unwarrantable liberty with his text ; 
 and no less, when they substitute ' Kenilworth ' for ' Killing- 
 worth,' which was for him, for Marlowe, and generally the 
 earlier form of the name.
 
 374 Changed Spelling of Words. Lect. 
 
 spelt ' renega/e ' in our old authors, while at the same 
 time the denial of faith, which is now a necessary 
 element in ' renegade,' and one differencing it in- 
 wardly from 'runagate,' is altogether wanting in early 
 use — the denial of country and of the duties thereto 
 owing being all that is implied in it. Thus it is 
 constantly employed in Holland's Livy as a render- 
 ing of ' perfuga ; ' l while in the one passage where 
 ' runagate ' occurs in the Prayer Book Version of the 
 Psalms (Ps. lxviii. 6), a reference to the original will 
 show that the Translators could only have employed 
 it there on the ground that it also expressed rebel, 
 revolter, and not runaway merely. 
 
 I might easily occupy your attention much longer, 
 so litttle barren or unfruitful does this subject of 
 spelling appear likely to prove ; but all things must 
 have an end ; and as I concluded my first lecture with 
 a remarkable testimony borne by an illustrious Ger- 
 man scholar to the merits of our English tongue, I 
 will conclude my last with the words of another, not 
 indeed a German, but still of our own Teutonic stock ; 
 words resuming in themselves much of which we have 
 been speaking upon this and upon former occasions. 
 'As our bodies,' he says, 'have hidden resources and 
 expedients, to remove the obstacles which the very 
 art of the physician puts in its way, so language, ruled 
 by an indomitable inward principle, triumphs in some 
 degree over the folly of grammarians. Look at the 
 English, polluted by Danish and Norman conquests, 
 
 1 ' The Carthaginians shall restore and deliver back all the 
 renegales [perfugas] and fugitives that have fled to their side 
 from us.' — P. 751.
 
 viii. Living Poiuer of our Tongue. 375 
 
 distorted in its genuine and noble features by old and 
 recent endeavours to mould it after the French fashion, 
 invaded by a hostile entrance of Greek and Latin 
 words, threatening by increasing hosts to overwhelm 
 the indigenous terms. In these long contests against 
 the combined power of so many forcible enemies, the 
 language, it is true, has lost some of its power of inver- 
 sion in the structure of sentences, the means of 
 denoting the difference of gender, and the nice dis- 
 tinctions by inflexion and termination — almost every 
 word is attacked by the spasm of the accent and the 
 drawing of consonants to wrong positions ; yet the 
 old English principle is not overpowered. Trampled 
 down by the ignoble feet of strangers, its springs still 
 retain force enough to restore itself. It lives and plays 
 through all the veins of the language ; it impregnates 
 the innumerable strangers entering its dominions with 
 its temper, and stains them with its colour, not unlike 
 the Greek, which in taking up Oriental words, stripped 
 them of their foreign costume, and bid them to appear 
 as native Greeks. 1 
 
 1 Halbertsma, quoted by Bosworth, Origin of the English 
 and Germanic Languages, p. 39.
 
 INDEX of SUBJECTS. 
 
 Accent, shifting of, 134, 239 
 Addison, on Chaucer, 161 
 
 on Spenser, 161 
 Adoption, double, of words, 24 
 African words in English, 22 
 Alphabet, faults of the English, 336 
 American- English, 66, 232 
 American, North, words in English, 21 
 Ampere, on the French language, 35 
 
 on the decay of languages, 334 
 
 on phonetic spelling, 347 
 Arabic words in English, 18 
 ' Ard,' words ending in, 216 
 Authorized Version of Scripture, its merits, 39 
 ' Ayenbite of Inwyt,' 80 
 
 Bacon, Lord, familiar with Spanish, 128 
 
 Campbell, Thomas, quoted, 104 
 
 Celtic words in English, 13 
 
 Chaucer, his diction, 96 
 
 Chinese words in English, 21 
 
 Comparatives, two ways of forming, in English, 278 
 
 Compound epithets in English, 144 
 
 Daniel, on the future of English, 46 
 
 on Spenser, 236 
 Danish words in English, 252 
 Depreciatives, 281 
 De QuincL-y quoted, 37, 363 
 Derivation, assumed, affects spelling, 356
 
 37 8 Index of Subjects. 
 
 Diminutives, disappearance of, 279 
 Double adoption of Greek words, 24 
 Dryden, on new words in English, 112 
 on the diction of Shakespeare, 161 
 Dual, disappearance of, 254 
 Dutch words in English, 14 
 
 Earle, on some results of the Norman Conquest, 70 
 
 on forbidden words, 226 
 English language, number of words in, 30 
 'Er,' substantives terminating in, 284 
 ' Ess,' a feminine suffix, 258 
 Ewald quoted, 228 
 
 Faber, on the Authorized Version of Scripture, 40 
 Fairfax, his ' Bulk and Selvedge of the World,' 84 
 Fowler, on the English language, 44 
 Freeman, on English dialects, 249 
 French words in ' Piers Plowman,' 98 
 
 in Chaucer, 100 
 
 process of their adoption, 132 
 ' Ful,' adjectives with this suffix now obsolete, 196 
 Fuller, on compounded words, 144 
 
 on Chaucer's English, 160 
 
 Garnett, our debt to him, 248 
 
 Gender, in great part lost in English, 292 
 
 Genin, on supposed faults in language, 238 
 
 Germans rid their language of French words, 188 
 
 German words recently adopted into English, 138 
 
 Geruzez, on dialectic regeneration, 244 
 
 Gil, on Chaucer, 96 
 
 Greek words adopted into English, 130 
 
 Grimm, on the merits of English, 45 
 
 Guest, on French and Latin words in English, 89 
 
 Halbertsma, on the merits of English, 375 
 Hare, Archdeacon, on the study of English, 1
 
 Index of Stcbjects. 379 
 
 Hebrew words in English, 18 
 
 Holland, Philemon, his translations, 109 
 
 Indian words in English, 20 
 'It,' singular use of, 149 
 Italian words in English, 16 
 
 well known in England, 124 
 ' Its,' history of the rise of, 148-154 
 
 Jean Paul quoted, 228 
 Jonson, Ben, on Spenser's English, 236 
 on some points of grammar, 237 
 
 Koch, on the sources of our vocabulary, 36 
 
 Languages, dead and living, 92 
 
 should be studied historically, 6 
 
 changes in, unnoticed by us, 8 
 
 how they separate, 51 
 Latin words, their double adoption into English, 23 
 
 their double admission into French, 28 
 
 proportion of, in English, 29 
 
 time of their incoming, 102 
 
 rejected by English, 113 
 Leibnitz, on improvement of German, 189 
 Lepsius, his ' Standard Alphabet,' 337 
 ' Less,' adjectives with this suffix now obsolete, 199 
 Lessing, what German owes him, 189 
 Littre, on the historic study of languages, 7 
 
 on dialects and their value, 234 
 Luther, his use of the popular language, 246 
 Lyell, on changes which languages are undergoing, 63 
 
 Malay words in English, 21 
 
 Max Muller, on dialectic regeneration, 244 
 
 on grammar of languages unmixed, 33 
 
 on names and naming, 56
 
 3 So Index of Sttbjects. 
 
 Milton, his affection for Italian, 126 
 
 his compound epithets, 145 
 Montaigne, his use of provincial words, 246 
 Miiller, Otfried, quoted, 256 
 Murray, on Standard English, 250 
 
 Naturalization of foreign words, 114-122, 130-133 
 
 Nisard, on dialects and their value, 244 
 
 Norman Conquest, its influence on English, 68 71 
 
 Orthography, 366 
 
 Palgrave, on Teutonic and Latin elements in English, 39 
 
 Persian words in English, 20 
 
 Phonetic decay, 64 
 
 Phonetic spelling, why attempted, 335 
 
 reasons against, 336 
 ' Piers Plowman,' character of its diction, 97 
 Plurals in ' n ' or ' en,' 289 
 Plurals reveal imperfect naturalization, 119 
 Poets recall words, 228 
 Polish words in English, 18 
 Portuguese words in English, 17 
 Pott quoted, 59 
 Prefixes, 81, 170 
 
 Preterites, strong and weak, 272-276 
 Purver, on the diction of the Bible, 157 
 Puttenham, on words in his time novel, 108 
 
 on standard English, 248 
 
 Quinctilian quoted, 145, 347 
 
 Reformation, its influence on the English language, 106 
 
 Refugee French, 63 
 
 Renan, on languages simplifying themselves, 257 
 
 Revival of Learning, 106 
 
 Rhemish Bible, its Latin character, 40
 
 Index of Subjects. 381 
 
 Rhyme detects changes in pronunciation, 347 
 Russian words in English, 18 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, on dialects, 234 
 
 ' Satire ' and ' Satyr,' long confounded, 369 
 
 Scandinavian words in English, 13 
 
 Schlegel, Frederic, quoted, 4 
 
 Schlegel, William, quoted, 33 
 
 Schleicher quoted, 281 
 
 on phonetic decay, 334 
 Selden, on English, 32 
 
 ' Some,' adjectives with this suffix now obsolete, 215 
 Spanish words in English, 16 
 
 well known in England once, 127 
 Spelling, changes in, for the worse, 351 
 
 a test of accuracy of knowledge, 367 
 Spenser, his knowledge of Italian, 125 
 
 his archaisms, 236 
 ' Ster,' a feminine suffix, 261 
 Strong preterites, 272 
 
 Superlatives, two ways of forming in English, 278 
 Swift, on phonetic spelling, 350 
 
 Taylor, Jeremy, his knowledge of Italian, 126 
 
 Thomson, his archaisms, 157 
 
 ' Thou ' as a form of address, 2S6 
 
 Turkish words in English, 20 
 
 Waller, on the future of English, 107 
 Wallis, on the genitive in 's,' 267 
 
 on ' thou ' and ' you,' 287 
 Weak preterites, 272 
 
 Wemyss, on the Authorized Version of Scripture, 157 
 West, his archaisms, 157 
 Wheatley, his list of reduplicated words, 219 
 Whewell, on English, 32 
 Wiclif, character of his diction, 100 
 Wieland, what German owes him, 1S9
 
 382 Index of Subjects. 
 
 3 
 
 Woodpecker, its various names, 205 
 Words, Scandinavian in English, 13 
 
 Celtic in English, 13 
 
 Dutch in English, 14 
 
 Italian in English, 15, 16 
 
 Spanish in English, 16, 17 
 
 Portuguese in English, 17 
 
 Arabic in English, 18 
 
 Hebrew in English, 18 
 
 Polish in English, 18 
 
 Russian in English, 18 
 
 Hungarian in English, 20 
 
 Indian in English, 20 
 
 Persian in English, 20 
 
 Turkish in English, 20 
 
 American, North, in English, 21 
 
 Chinese in English, 21 
 
 Malay in English, 21 
 
 African in English, 22 
 
 Greek in English, 130 
 
 Danish in English, 252 
 
 naturalization of foreign, 114-122 
 
 resume their classical shapes, 1 1.9 
 
 born in this century, 141 
 
 obsolete, may be recovered, 155 
 
 of one, become two, 163-169 
 
 strive to become homogeneous, 170 
 
 first appearance of, should be noted, 178 
 
 become ignoble, 223 
 
 come under ban, 225 
 
 gradual changes in their meaning, 296
 
 II. 
 
 INDEX of WORDS and PHRASES. 
 
 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Abenteuer . . .361 
 
 Abnormal 
 
 
 
 . 141 
 
 Abominable 
 
 
 
 • 365 
 
 Accaparer 
 
 
 
 . no 
 
 Accommodate 
 
 
 
 • 179 
 
 Accredit . 
 
 
 
 . 185 
 
 Acre 
 
 
 
 312 
 
 Adamant 
 
 
 
 • 352 
 
 Admiral . 
 
 
 
 126 
 
 Admiralty 
 
 
 
 • 179 
 
 Adorn 
 
 
 
 . 126 
 
 Advocate 
 
 
 
 . 159 
 
 Adyta 
 
 
 
 • 133 
 
 eEon 
 
 
 
 141 
 
 .-Esthetics 
 
 
 
 141 
 
 Affrap . 
 
 
 
 I2 5 
 
 Affret . 
 
 
 
 125 
 
 Afterborn 
 
 
 
 84 
 
 Aftercomers 
 
 
 
 84 
 
 Afterthink 
 
 
 
 79 
 
 Afterwitted 
 
 
 
 231 
 
 Againbuyin: 
 
 
 
 90 
 
 Alcimus . 
 
 
 
 358 
 
 Aleknight 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Almighty 
 
 
 
 88 
 
 Along 
 
 
 
 239 
 
 Aloofness 
 
 
 
 230 
 
 Amaranth 
 
 
 
 117 
 
 Amoret . 
 
 
 
   125 
 
 Amphibious 
 
 
 
   1S3 
 
 Analogie 
 
 
 
 . no 
 
 Andirons 
 
 
 
   3°i 
 
 Ant 
 
 
 
 • 373 
 
 Antecedents 
 
 
 
   329 
 
 Anthem . 
 
 
 
 365 
 
 Antipodes 
 
 
 
 133 
 
 Apotheosis 
 
 
 
 130 
 
 Archon . 
 
 
 
 119 
 
 apyvpOTre fa 
 
 
 
 300 
 
 Armbrust 
 
 
 
 361 
 
 Army 
 
 
 
 57 
 
 Arride . 
 
 
 
 114 
 
 Ascertain 
 
 
 
 307 
 
 Ask 
 
 
 
 237 
 
 Assassinate 
 
 
 
 126 
 
 Astarte . 
 
 
 
 35S 
 
 Asylum . 
 
 
 
 120 
 
 Atheist . 
 
 
 
 184 
 
 Attemptive 
 
 
 
 230 
 
 Attercop 
 
 
 
 62 
 
 Aurantium 
 
 
 
 362 
 
 Aurichalcum 
 Axe 
 
 
 
 358 
 237 
 
 Backjaw. 
 
 84
 
 384 Index of 
 
 / / ords and Phrases 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Back-sunned . 
 
 242 
 
 Bread en . . . .270 
 
 Baffle . . .21 
 
 3, 301 
 
 Brigandine 
 
 
 
 205 
 
 Bairn 
 
 53 
 
 Brim 
 
 
 
 229 
 
 Baize 
 
 265 
 
 Brixton . 
 
 
 
 335 
 
 Baker, bakester 
 
 261 
 
 Bruit 
 
 
 
 IOI 
 
 Balcony . 
 
 135 
 
 Bruma . 
 
 
 
 57 
 
 Banality . 
 
 136 
 
 Burgeon . 
 
 
 
 229 
 
 Banter . 
 
 179 
 
 Burn 
 
 
 
 245 
 
 Barrier . 
 
 135 
 
 Butter . 
 
 
 
 358 
 
 Bavvn 
 
 63 
 
 Buxom . 
 
 
 
 215 
 
 Beauchamp 
 
 335 
 
 
 Beck 
 
 245 
 
 
 Belfry . 
 
 362 
 
 Cabriolet . . .180 
 
 Belsire . 
 
 212 
 
 Cajole 
 
 
 179 
 
 Belvoir . 
 
 335 
 
 Cankerfret 
 
 
 231 
 
 Betterment 
 
 233 
 
 Caricature 
 
 
 179 
 
 Bieder . 
 
 189 
 
 Casuistry 
 
 
 330 
 
 Birdvvitted 
 
 231 
 
 Causey . 
 
 
 363 
 
 Bison 
 
 119 
 
 Chagrin . 
 
 
 166 
 
 Bishop . 
 
 26 
 
 Chair-days 
 
 
 243 
 
 Black Art 
 
 364 
 
 Chaperon 
 
 
 181 
 
 Blackberry 
 
 56 
 
 Chance-medley 
 
 
 363 
 
 Blackguard 
 
 309 
 
 Character 
 
 
 184 
 
 Black-sanctu.* . 
 
 208 
 
 Cheek by jowl 
 
 
 224 
 
 Blasphemous . 
 
 239 
 
 Chemist 
 
 
 369 
 
 Blubbered 
 
 224 
 
 Chieftainess . 
 
 
 260 
 
 Boil 
 
 240 
 
 Chinese . 
 
 
 265 
 
 Bombast 
 
 3i8 
 
 Chorus . 
 
 
 119 
 
 Bookhouse 
 
 81 
 
 Chou-croute . 
 
 
 362 
 
 Boor 
 
 322 
 
 Churl . 
 
 
 322 
 
 Bore 
 
 181 
 
 Chymist, chymistry 
 
 
 368 
 
 Bovrvpov 
 
 358 
 
 Cimici . 
 
 
 183 
 
 Boulder . 
 
 245 
 
 Cipher . 
 
 
 27 
 
 Bozra 
 
 358 
 
 Circle-learning 
 
 
 131 
 
 Brainsick 
 
 184 
 
 Clawback 
 
 
 221 
 
 Brandshat 
 
 138 
 
 Clever . 
 
 
 246 
 
 Bran-new 
 
 1 r -*> 
 
 j5j 
 
 Clinquant 
 
 
 102 
 
 Brazen . 
 
 271 
 
 Coal-carrier 
 
 
 
 208
 
 Index of Words and Phrases 
 
 385 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Cocodrill . . . 346 
 
 Demagogue 
 
 . no 
 
 Codatremola 
 
 
 
 • 58 
 
 Demy-isle 
 
 . 182 
 
 Comissatio 
 
 
 
 • 358 
 
 Demijohn 
 
 362 
 
 Commerage 
 
 
 
 ' 323 
 
 Denominationalism . 
 
 • 147 
 
 Congregation a 
 
 1 
 
 
 • 147 
 
 Depot 
 
 • 133 
 
 Contrary 
 
 
 
   239 
 
 Desenvoltura . 
 
 128 
 
 Corn 
 
 
 
 • 56 
 
 Deteriorate 
 
 . 229 
 
 Corpse . 
 
 
 
 . 312 
 
 Dewbit . 
 
 . 242 
 
 Corroborate 
 
 
 
 • 32 
 
 Diamond 
 
   352 
 
 Court-card 
 
 
 
 • 360 
 
 Dipsomania . 
 
 131 
 
 Cousin . 
 
 
 
 353 
 
 Dirge 
 
 37o 
 
 Coxcomb 
 
 
 
 352 
 
 Dive, dove 
 
 242 
 
 Cozen 
 
 
 
 353 
 
 Dogma . 
 
 119 
 
 Crants . 
 
 
 
 138 
 
 Dollar . 
 
 138 
 
 Crass 
 
 
 
 181 
 
 Donkey . 
 
 • 245 
 
 Crawfish 
 
 
 
 372 
 
 Dorter . 
 
 25 
 
 Creaunsour 
 
 
 
 100 
 
 Dosis 
 
 115 
 
 Creephole 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Double-diligent 
 
 208 
 
 Crikesman 
 
 
 
 138 
 
 Doughty 
 
 223 
 
 Criterion 
 
 
 
 130 
 
 Drachm . 
 
 3i3 
 
 Cross 
 
 
 
 252 
 
 Draught . 
 
 349 
 
 Crucible . 
 
 
 
 365 
 
 Dub . 
 
 222 
 
 Crusade . 
 
 
 
 121 
 
 Duke . 
 
 3" 
 
 Cuirass . 
 
 
 
 367 
 
 Dumps . 
 
 224 
 
 Currant . 
 
 
 
 360 
 
 Dutch . 
 
 298 
 
 Cusp 
 
 
 
 117 
 
 
 
 Cyclops . 
 
 
 
 265 
 
 
 
 Cypher . 
 
 
 
 27 
 
 Eame 
 
 204 
 
 
 Ear . 
 
 252 
 
 
 Earshrift 
 
 80 
 
 Daffodil 25 
 
 Earsport. 
 
 208 
 
 Dame 
 
 
 
 312 
 
 Easel . 
 
 139 
 
 Damish . 
 
 
 
 230 
 
 Eaves . 
 
 265 
 
 Dandelion 
 
 
 
 363 
 
 Eclectics 
 
 183 
 
 Dearworth 
 
 
 
 79 
 
 Edify, edification 
 
 186 
 
 Deacon . 
 
 
 
 26 
 
 Educational . 
 
 147 
 
 Dehort . 
 
 
 
 212 
 
 Effervescence . 
 
 no 
 
 Delectable 
 
 
 
 123 
 
 Einscitig . . _ . 
 
 c r 
 
 140
 
 386 Index of Words and Phrases. 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Elders .... 
 
 56 
 
 Flayte . 
 
 . 230 
 
 Elfish, elfishness 
 
 230 
 
 Fleck . 
 
 . 230 
 
 Eliakim . 
 
 358 
 
 Fletcher . 
 
 . 206 
 
 Ell 
 
 
 371 
 
 Flota . 
 
 17 
 
 Eltern . 
 
 
 56 
 
 Folk lore 
 
 146, 147 
 
 Em 
 
 
 240 
 
 Foolbold 
 
 . 213 
 
 Emmet . 
 
 
 373 
 
 Foolhappy 
 
 . 213 
 
 Emotional 
 
 
 147 
 
 Foolhardy . . 
 
 . 213 
 
 Empfindsam 
 
 
 189 
 
 Foolhasty 
 
 • 213 
 
 Encyclopaedia 
 
 
 130 
 
 Foollarge 
 
 • 213 
 
 Enfant illage 
 
 
 no 
 
 Force 
 
 • 245 
 
 Engastrimythi 
 
 
 183 
 
 Forced meat . 
 
 • 3 6r 
 
 Enigma . 
 
 
 119 
 
 Fore-elder 
 
 81 
 
 Equivocation 
 
 
 316 
 
 Forespeech . • 
 
 . 81 
 
 Erutar . 
 
 
 226 
 
 Foretalk 
 
 • 83 
 
 Ethics . 
 
 
 183 
 
 Foreword .   
 
 . 140 
 
 i]9iK-f) 
 
 
 183 
 
 Fougue . . 1 
 
 . 129 
 
 Europe . 
 
 
 346 
 
 Fraischeur . , 
 
 . 129 
 
 Eyebite . 
 
 
 80 
 
 Fractions 
 
 • 245 
 
 Eyeproof 
 
 
 80 
 
 Freshet . 
 
 . 232 
 
 
 
 Frimm . 
 
 . 207 
 
 
 
 Frivolite 
 
 . no 
 
 Facsimile 
 
 . 180 
 
 Frontispice 
 
 . 366 
 
 Fads 
 
 • 245 
 
 Fun 
 
 . 247 
 
 Fairy 
 
   3" 
 
 Fungus . 
 
 . 120 
 
 Fall 
 
 • 232 
 
 Furlong . 
 
 • 3i3 
 
 Fallaciloquentia 
 
 • 145 
 
 
 
 Falsify . 
 
 . 184 
 
 
 
 Fanatic . 
 
 • i79 
 
 Gainly . 
 
 . 212 
 
 Farfalla . 
 
 127 
 
 Gallon . 
 
 • 3 12 
 
 Faro 
 
 . 168 
 
 Gamester 
 
 • 263 
 
 Fascine . 
 
 , 180 
 
 Gamin . 
 
 . 246 
 
 Fatherland 
 
 140 
 
 Gang-days 
 
 . 80 
 
 Feint pleader . 
 
   3 l6 
 
 Garble . 
 
 • 319 
 
 Fellow -feel 
 
 • 89 
 
 Gaster . 
 
 • 230 
 
 Fen-nightingale 
 
 • 243 
 
 Gebilde . 
 
 . 160 
 
 Fire-spaniel . 
 
 • 231 
 
 Gilliflower 
 
 . 3 6 2 
 
 Flam 
 
 . 
 
 . 224 
 
 Girl . t 
 
 - 3 12
 
 Index of Words and Phrases. 387 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Gladiator . . .180 
 
 Housedove 
 
 . 231 
 
 Glassen . . . 
 
 
 270 
 
 Huckster 
 
 . 263 
 
 Goldhoard 
 
 
 79 
 
 
 
 Gonfalon 
 
 
 126 
 
 Iceberg . 
 
 . 138 
 
 Gossip . 
 
 
 322 
 
 Ichsucht . 
 
 . 177 
 
 Grain . ... 
 
 
 56 
 
 Idea 
 
 . 119, 317 
 
 Grave . ... 
 
 
 56 
 
 Idolum . 
 
 • 133 
 
 Great . 
 Grimsire 
 
 
 348 
 208 
 
 Ignis fatuus 
 Imager . 
 
 . 182 
 . • 183 
 
 Grocer . 
 
 
 3Si 
 
 Imp 
 
 • 324 
 
 Grogram , .   . 
 
 
 352 
 
 Imparadise 
 
 . 126 
 
 Gruesome 
 
 
 245 
 
 Incurabili 
 
 . 127 
 
 Gull 
 
 . • 185 
 
 Industry . 
 
 . 179 
 
 » . 
 
 Inerrancy 
 
 • 173 
 
 
 Influence 
 
 • 300 
 
 Habergeon 
 
 
 . 205 
 
 Influential 
 
 . 181 
 
 Halfgod . 
 
 
 80 
 
 International . 
 
 . 146, 180 
 
 Hallow . 
 
 
 159 
 
 Ipswich . 
 
 • 341 
 
 Hammock 
 
 
 • 363 
 
 Irremeable 
 
 • "3 
 
 Hand over head 
 
 
 224 
 
 Island 
 
 • 355 
 
 Hand-book 
 
 
 140 
 
 Isle 
 
 • 355 
 
 Hangdog 
 
 
 221 
 
 Isolated . 
 
 . 182 
 
 Harden . . 
 
 
 271 
 
 Isthmus . 
 
 . 119 
 
 Heady . 
 
 
 184 
 
 It . 
 
 . 150, 151 
 
 Heal . . ' . 
 
 
 - 355 
 
 Its . . 148, 
 
 149, 152, 154 
 
 Hearten . 
 
 
 . 229 
 
 
 
 Heat,het 
 
 
 . 242 
 
 
 
 Heavy friend . 
 
 
 208 
 
 Jeopardy 
 
 • 159 
 
 Heft 
 
 
 . 207 
 
 Jinte . , . 
 
 . 241 
 
 Hern 
 
 
 • 239 
 
 Join . , . 
 
 . 241 
 
 Heroes . 
 
 
 
 . 120 
 
 
 
 Hery . 
 
 
 
 . 207 
 
 Kenilworth 
 
 • 373 
 
 Hierosolyma 
 
 
 
 357 
 
 Kindly . 
 
 • 305 
 
 Hippodame 
 
 
 
 122 
 
 Kittle . 
 
 . 231 
 
 His 
 
 
 
 267 
 
 Klei 
 
 • 54 
 
 Holt . 
 
 
 
 229 
 
 Klirren . 
 
 . 246 
 
 Hopelost 
 
 
 
 231 
 
 Knave . 
 
 . .327 
 
 Hotspur . 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Knitster . 
 
 .261
 
 388 Index of 
 
 Words and Phrases. 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Lantern . 
 
 365 
 
 Moltwurf . . . . . . 358 
 
 Leech . ... 
 
 63 
 
 Monograph . 
 
 
 
 
 181 
 
 Leghorn . 
 
 36I 
 
 Monomania 
 
 
 
 
 131 
 
 Leicester 
 
 335 
 
 Morass . 
 
 
 
 
 180 
 
 Liable . 
 
 185 
 
 Morris-dance 
 
 
 
 
 371 
 
 Libel 
 
 3" 
 
 Mosaic . 
 
 
 
 
 352 
 
 Lickstone 
 
 80 
 
 Motacilla 
 
 
 
 
 58 
 
 Lightskirts 
 
 208 
 
 Mother-naked 
 
 
 
 
 , 208 
 
 Litherness 
 
 230 
 
 Museum'. 
 
 
 
 
 • "9 
 
 Little-ease 
 
 231 
 
 Mystery, mystere 
 
 
 
   358 
 
 Loaf, loafer . 
 
 • 139 
 
 Myth . 
 
 
 
 142 
 
 London . 
 
 • 35° 
 
 
 
 Lunch, luncheon . 
 
 240 
 
 
 . 
 
 
 
 Nap . . . .223 
 
 Malingerer 
 
 Maltster . 
 
 208 
 263 
 
 Naughty pack 
 Necromancy 
 Neednot . 
 
 
 
 . 208 
 
 364 
 
 81 
 
 Maltworm . 
 
 208 
 
 
 
 
 
 Mandragora . 
 Matamoros . . 
 
 363 
 220 
 
 Nemorivagus 
 
 Neophyte 
 
 Nesh 
 
 
 
 145 
 179 
 207 
 
 Maturity 
 Maulwurf 
 
 179 
 
 358 
 
 Niggot . 
 Nimm . 
 
 
 
 163 
 207 
 
 Mayduke 
 
 363 
 
 Noctambulo 
 
 
 
 183 
 
 Meat 
 
 Meddle, meddlesome 
 
 3" 
 
 3 2 S 
 
 Noddle . 
 Nookful . 
 
 
 
 223 
 199 
 
 Mel 
 
 IOI 
 
 Nostril . 
 
 
 
   37i 
 
 Mellay . 
 Merchant . . 
 
 135 
 56 
 
 Nugget . ' i 
 
 
 
 163 
 
 Merrygodown   
 
 208 
 
 
 Middler . 
 
 90 
 
 
 Militate . 
 
 180 
 
 Oblige . , . . .133 
 
 Milken . 
 
 270 
 
 Obsequies 
 
 
 
 362 
 
 Millennial 
 
 181 
 
 Old-trot . 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Miscall . . • 
 
 83 
 
 Omnipotent 
 
 
 
 88 
 
 Mischievous . . 
 
 239 
 
 Opera . 
 
 
 • , 
 
 179 
 
 Miscreant 
 
 299 
 
 Orange . 
 
 
 , 
 
 362 
 
 Mixen ... 
 
 63 
 
 Orichalcum 
 
 
 
 358 
 
 Moldwarp .... 
 
 358 
 
 Originate 
 
 
 
 
 1 So
 
 Index of 
 
 Words and Phrases. 389 
 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Ornithology ... 
 
 . I84 
 
 Pragmatical . . . 325 
 
 Orthography . . . 
 
 • 366 
 
 Prayerful 
 
 
 
 • 199 
 
 Ostleress 
 
 . 260 
 
 Preliber . 
 
 
 
 no 
 
 Ourn . . . 
 
 238 
 
 Preposterous 
 
 
 
 • 315 
 
 Out .   . 
 
 . 84 
 
 Prestige . 
 
 
 
 • 133 
 
 Outganger . 
 
 . 8l 
 
 Prevaricate 
 
 
 
 • 3i5 
 
 Outwanderer . . . 
 
 8l 
 
 Prose, proser 
 
 
 
 . 326 
 
 Overlord . . . 
 
 . 229 
 
 Pull back 
 Prudery . 
 Puntillo . 
 
 
 
 . 81 
 . 180 
 • 17 
 
 Pagan . • . 
 
 • 3 2 2 
 
 Pyramid . 
 
 
 • "5.357 
 
 Painful, painfulness. 
 
 . 306 
 
 
 Panic . . 
 
 . 182 
 
 
 Panorama .... 
 
 179 
 
 Quellio . . . .17 
 
 Pate ...... 
 
 223 
 
 Quinsey . . . .122 
 
 Pease . . . 
 
 266 
 
 Quirry . . . .122 
 
 Peasen .   . 
 
 290 
 
 
 Peck ... 
 
 312 
 
 
 Peck of troubles 
 
 224 
 
 Rakehell . . . 222 
 
 Pester . 
 
 l6l 
 
 Rathe, rathest 
 
 
 214 
 
 Phalanx . ... 
 
 119 
 
 Realm rape 
 
 
 231 
 
 Phenomenon . . 
 
 I20 
 
 Reconnoitre 
 
 
 
 180 
 
 Philauty. 
 
 177 
 
 Redemption 
 
 
 . 
 
 90 
 
 Picqueer 
 
 127 
 
 Regoldar 
 
 
 
 226 
 
 Pigmy . 
 
 352 
 
 Reise 
 
 
 
 207 
 
 Pigritia . 
 
 186 
 
 Reliable . 
 
 
 
 142 
 
 Pinchpenny . . . . 
 
 221 
 
 Religion . 
 
 
 
 303 
 
 Plead, pled . 
 
 242 
 
 Renegade 
 
 
 
 373 
 
 Plough 
 
 252 
 
 Replete . 
 
 
 
 185 
 
 Pleurisy . . .   . 
 
 364 
 
 Resent . 
 
 
 
 354 
 
 ^Plunder . . . . 13 
 
 8, 179 
 
 Revenue 
 
 
 
 135 
 
 Polite . . . . 
 
 319 
 
 Revolt . . 
 
 
 
 125 
 
 Polytheism 
 
 184 
 
 Rhinoceros. 
 
 
 
 119 
 
 Pontoon . . . . . 
 
 180 
 
 Rhyme . . 
 
 
 
 365 
 
 Porcupine . . . . 
 
 372 
 
 Riches . 
 
 
 
 265 
 
 Posthumous . 
 
 365 
 
 Righteous 
 
 
 
 212 
 
 Potecary 
 
 123 
 
 Rome 
 
 
 
 349 
 
 Praevaricator . 
 
 3i6 
 
 Rood . 
 
 
 
 252
 
 390 Index 
 
 of Words and Phrases. 
 
 
 PAGE 1 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Rosen . . 
 
 . 270 
 
 Slops .... 223 
 
 Roy 
 
 . IOI 
 
 Sloth . 
 
 
 
 186 
 
 Ruly 
 
 . 212 
 
 Slowback 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Runagate 
 
 • 373 
 
 Smellfeast 
 Smoulder 
 Smug 
 
 
 
 221 
 160 
 223 
 
 Sagg . 
 
 . 230 
 
 Snoutfair 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Sash 
 
 . 122 
 
 Soggy . 
 
 
 
 231 
 
 Satellites 
 
 . 120 
 
 Soldan . 
 
 
 
 126 
 
 Satire, satirical 
 
 • 369 
 
 Solidarity 
 
 
 
 135 
 
 Satyr, satyric . 
 
 • 369 
 
 Sombre . 
 
 
 
 247 
 
 Saucy jack 
 
 . 208 
 
 Somnambulist 
 
 
 183 
 
 Skates . 
 
 . 266 
 
 Songster, songstress 
 
 
 262 
 
 Scent 
 
 • 354 
 
 Sough 
 
 
 229 
 
 Scrip 
 
 • 354 
 
 Southern 
 
 
 249 
 
 Sculptor . 
 
 - • 183 
 
 Specht . 
 
 
 205 
 
 'Sdeign . 
 
 . 126 
 
 Sphinx . 
 
 
 119 
 
 Seamster, seamstres 
 
 3 . 262 
 
 Spinner, spinster 
 
 26 
 
 1, 263 
 
 Sea-shouldering 
 
 146 
 
 Squint . 
 
 
 80 
 
 Selfish, selfishness 
 
 • 177 
 
 Standpoint 
 
 
 140 
 
 Sentiment 
 
 179, 184 
 
 Stalwart . 
 
 
 213 
 
 Sepoy 
 
 . 361 
 
 Starconner 
 
 
 80 
 
 Serene . 
 
 . 210 
 
 Starvation 
 
 
 . 180 
 
 Shewtoken 
 
 • 79 
 
 Starve . 
 
 
 312 
 
 Shimmer 
 
 . 230 
 
 Star-i-pointing 
 
 
 251 
 
 Shrew) shrewdness 
 
 • 328 
 
 Stereotype 
 
 1 
 
 0, 143 
 
 Shrub 
 
 • 179 
 
 Stingy . 
 
 
 246 
 
 Shunt 
 
 . 163 
 
 Stonen, stony. 
 
 
 270 
 
 Sight . 
 
 < . 224 
 
 Succumb 
 
 
 160 
 
 Silvern . 
 
 . 270 
 
 Suckstone 
 
 
 . 80 
 
 Silvicultrix 
 
 • 145 
 
 Sudden . . . 
 
 
 • 340 
 
 Sinflood . 
 
 • • • 359 
 
 Suicide, suicidium 
 
 
 . 178 
 
 Siren 
 
 • 367 
 
 Suicism, suist . 
 
 
 • 177 
 
 Sistern . 
 
 . 290 
 
 Sulky . 
 
 
 . 247 
 
 Skinker . 
 
 . 207 
 
 Sum 
 
 
 • 65 
 
 Skip   . 
 
 . 223 
 
 Svindflut 
 
 
 . 3 6 ° 
 
 Slick 
 
 • 232 
 
 Sunstead 
 
 
 • 79 
 
 Sling 
 
 • 273 
 
 Superannuation 
 
 
 . 180
 
 Index of Words and Phrases. 391 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Swindler . . .139 
 
 Undsethshildignesse . 79 
 
 Sycophant . . . 327 
 
 Unlusthead ... 81 
 
 Syntax .... 345 
 
 Unthoroughfaresomeness . 86 
 
 
 Utilize . . . 143, 181 
 
 Tapster . . . .263 
 
 
 Tarre 
 
 
 
 207 
 
 Vamose . 
 
 
 • 52 
 
 Tartar . 
 
 
 
 359 
 
 Vancurrier 
 
 
 122, 372 
 
 Tartarus .   . 
 
 
 
 359 
 
 Verdant . 
 
 
 . 224 
 
 Tartary . 
 
 
 
 359 
 
 Vicinage 
 
 
 . 122 
 
 Tea 
 
 
 13 
 
 6,348 
 
 Villain . 
 
 
 322, 327 
 
 Terminus 
 
 
 
 120 
 
 Voyage . 
 
 
 • 3" 
 
 Theocracy 
 
 
 
 184 
 
 
 Theriac . 
 
 
 
 308 
 
 
 Thou 
 
 
 
 2S6 
 
 Wanhope . . . 207 
 
 Thought . 
 
 
 
 3°4 
 
 Wasp . 
 
 
 
 238 
 
 Ticket . 
 
 
 
 186 
 
 Watertight 
 
 
 
 80 
 
 Tind 
 
 
 
 207 
 
 Watershed 
 
 
 
 143 
 
 Tinnen . 
 
 
 
 270 
 
 Watersick 
 
 
 
 80 
 
 Tinsel 
 
 
 
 300 
 
 Waterslain 
 
 
 
 243 
 
 Tinsel-slippere 
 
 d 
 
 
 300 
 
 Weaponshew 
 
 
 
 80 
 
 Tiny 
 
 
 
 247 
 
 Wearish . 
 
 
 
 23O 
 
 Touchy . 
 
 
 
 247 
 
 Weather-glean 
 
 1 
 
 
 243 
 
 Tosspot . 
 
 
 
 222 
 
 Weeping-ripe 
 
 
 
 209 
 
 Tradesman 
 
 
 
   56 
 
 Welk . 
 
 
 
 207 
 
 Treacle . 
 
 
 
 . 308 
 
 Whiteboy 
 
 
 
 208 
 
 Trekker . 
 
 
 
 . 138 
 
 Whole . 
 
 
 
 355 
 
 Trigger . 
 
 
 
 • 138 
 
 Wholesome 
 
 
 
 355 
 
 Triumph, trun 
 
 »P 
 
 
 . 167 
 
 Wiclif . 
 
 
 
 • 340 
 
 Trounse . 
 
 
 
 . 224 
 
 Wilt 
 
 
 
 • 243 
 
 Turban . 
 
 
 
 20 
 
 Windbag 
 
 
 
 . 140 
 
 Turngiddy 
 
 
 
   79 
 
 Windflower 
 
 
 
 . 80 
 
 
 Window. 
 
 
 
 • 365 
 
 
 Winter . 
 
 
 
 • 57 
 
 Umbrella . . .180 
 
 Witwanton 
 
 
 
 • 231 
 
 Umgripe ... 82 
 
 Witticism 
 
 
 
 • 179 
 
 Umstroke ... 82 
 
 Woburn . 
 
 
 
 • 34i 
 
 Uncouth 
 
 . 
 
 . 
 
 • 63 
 
 Womanhood 
 
 
 
 160
 
 392 Index 
 
 of Words and Phrases. 
 
 
 i 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Woodpecker . 
 
 '. 205 
 
 Yard 
 
 • 313 
 
 Wordbook 
 
 . I40 
 
 Ye. . . . . 
 
 • 237 
 
 Word-warrior . 
 
 • 231 
 
 Yeel 
 
 . 240 
 
 Wormwood 
 
 . 36I 
 
 York . 
 
 • 33? 
 
 Worsen . 
 
 . 229 
 
 Youngster 
 
 . 263 
 
 Worship . 
 
 • 30S 
 
 
 
 Worterbuch . 
 
 . I90 
 
 
 
 
 
 Zero 
 
 • 27 
 
 
 
 Zoology . 
 
 . 183 
 
 Yacht 
 
 . I80 
 
 Zoophyte 
 
 . 183 
 
 
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