ing.

long-winded-in fact, button-holdOurs is terse, swift, compact, straight to the point, fitted to be said or sung at sea, where a minute in a movement makes all the difference of life or death. So it is the most monosyllabic of the German tongues. We are in a desperate hurry to live, even more so than the French, because we want to do some new business just as they want some new pleasure, and business is greedier even than pleasure. How irreverent both of us are with some ancient names! we call Martius Tullius Cicero Tully, Marcus Antonius Mark Antony, Titus Livius Livy and Tite Live. We English call Aristoteles Aristotle, while our gallant allies dock him down into Aristote.

One observation cannot fail to strike those who compare the ancient classical languages with the modern, and that is the entire absence of what we call vulgarity in the ancients. And this is because wealth-worship was comparatively unknown to them. We serve either God or Mammon, while with them Plutus was a very subordinate sort of divinity. The gentleman of the Greek was the zaλozayados, "the man beautiful and good;" of the Romans, the "vir factus ad unguem," the "perfectly-finished man," homme comme il faut; he was formerly even with us the gentile man, or "man of good family;" he is now, with the mass of the people, "the well-off man, who does not externally disgrace his position." The Greeks and Romans had no name for "snob" or rotûrier," which showed that the thing itself, though it must have existed among them, had not become one of the powers that be. Their great authors were never vulgar, though there are few of them without an element of blackguardism. As for the rich, they disliked them politically as likely to become oligarchs, but spoke of them derisively as oi Taxes,“ the thick," or "the warm." In all the Greek and Latin authors there are no such self-damnatory idioms as "how much

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is he worth?" and "combien épousezvous?" between which it is hard to assign the palm of baseness. We believe it is Grimm who gives the preference to the English among modern languages, because, like the Duke of Wellington's army in Spain, it can go anywhere and do anything. There is no purpose to which it cannot turn its hand. Like the German, it is good for poetry; like the French, it is good for prose; if the words are well picked and chosen, as by Burns and Moore, it is even good for song. Of all modern languages, it is probably the most hardy, because it clips its words close to the root, and can live and thrive in all climates. When mixed with other tonguesas French in Canada, and French and German in the United States

it has a knack of superseding them. And yet it is a language in which the original structural beauty has been sacrificed more than perhaps any other. It is a thoroughly unprincipled language; not in the sense that the French say "perfide Albion," but in having no fixed principles of grammar. It is not a dainty feeder, but derives words and phrases from all sources, and digests them into its own body, only requiring that they should be available for expressing its meanings. Those who look at it all round may find fault, but they cannot deny that it works well and wears well. It is like the English Constitution in this respect, and perhaps also the English Church, full of inconsistencies and anomalies, yet flourishing in defiance of theory. It is like the English nation, the most oddly governed in the world, but withal the most loyal, orderly, and free.

It has this great advantage over its more symmetrical High German sister, that when it wished to vary an idea, or describe the species of a genus, it is not obliged to make a compound from a single source, but can vary a Saxon word with a Latin or French, a Welsh or a Greek. For instance, a dog is the

genus, and hound is the species. The Germans must say "jagt-hund." We have "needle" and "pin"-the Germans, sewing-needle and sticking-needle. For glove the Germans say hand-shoe, when they might as well say foot-glove. We say feather and pen, the Germans writing-feather. In science the German puritanism is most unhandy; we go at once to the Greek spring, and while they say "water-stuff-gas," we quietly reply "hydrogen." When we want picturesque words, we use AngloSaxon or Norse, especially when we wish to describe outward things; when we want words to tell our own impressions or feelings, we generally use Latin ones-our Saxon language being objective, and our Latin subjective. Thus, in good English, our meaning is generally seen from the language from which we draw our words. We speak of swiftness of foot and rapidity of intelligence. The more select form is supposed to be that of Latin origin, and thus it is that, used to denote logical second intentionsfor instance," manuscript" as compared with "handwriting"-it is ridiculous when any pedant tries to curb this versatility of our language, and make its Anglo-Saxon element do all the work, as some author is said to have done, who, wishing to write an essay on the impenetrability of matter," headed it "on the unthoroughfaresomeness of stuff." The English language is the great Scriptural drag-net, which takes up of all kinds, selects and keeps the good, and throws away the useless. Practical application is its constant object. And here the people are as the language. Napoleon was never so illogical as when he called us a nation of shopkeepers, though we are in truth a shopkeeping nation. Our common slang would tell that tale, when we talk of being posted up in a subject, of shutting up, of taking stock, of striking a balance, of being up to the mark (though this may be a term of the ring).

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war -

In every department we have produced what Emerson calls Representative Men. We have men of -Wellingtons and Nelsons; men of peace-Messrs Pease, Sturge, and Co., and John Bright (though he seems to be forgetting himself in the matter of America); poetsShakespeare, Milton, Byron, Scott, Tennyson, &c.; painters-Reynolds, Hogarth, Turner; men of science and philosophers-Newton, Bacon, and a hundred others; historians, orators, politicians, cotton - lords, and railway kings. The list is endless. But all these men used the words of the English language for their purposes, and the English language to a great extent engendered them, and made them what they have been. The crop of general intellect has reached quite as high an average in France; but France cannot point to such a race of Titans as these, and this is perhaps owing to the trammels imposed on her by her stereotyped and intractable language. The same may be said with even more truth of Germany. Germany is the great European φροντισ rigov, or thought-factory. She makes thoughts and theories for the world as Manchester does printed calicoes, and other nations wear them.

There is no European language so perfect in itself as the German. Although it borrows foreign words, it marks them in such a manner that they ever remain distinct; it relies on its own resources to express every idea, and in this its success is marvellous. It resembles Greek especially in its power of composition and variety of inflexion. It has the double advantage of inflexion and construction by particles, and as it keeps the meaning of its roots clear throughout, it hugs the idea more closely, and is more logical and distinctive than any other modern language. It is thus able to dive into speculative depths where no translation can follow it, and is thus emphatically the language of philosophy. Unlike the

French, which glides over the surface, it turns the soul of thought inside out. It possesses an infinite within it, where the mind is free to lose itself in its own labyrinths and obscurities, as the language never departs from the side of the thought. It is the language of sentiment and romance, as its quaint old-fashioned characters denote, and thus adapts itself as well to songs of sentiment and melancholy longing as the Italian does to songs of passion and present enjoyment. But it has, withal, the disadvantage of being unpractical, like the people that speak it. Theorising more upon government than any other in the world, they have not yet learnt the art of governing themselves, or even of coalescing into a State. They remain still a nation of splendid dreamers, and have not yet become a people of doers. German, as might be expected, is more suitable to poetry than to ordinary prose. The words, with their double endings and rhythmic cadences, fall as naturally into metres as the ancient Greek, though from the greater number of consonants they are not quite sufficiently agile to dance in the identical measures of the Greeks. While the most natural measure to the Greeks appears to have been the dactylic, anapæstic, or the iambic of six feet, the German seems to run more easily in the iambic of five feet, or Miltonian metre; while English appears to be most itself in the octosyllabic, iambic, or trochaic. The more delicate metres, indeed, like the dactylic, do not seem to suit languages which have substituted accent in a great measure for quantity. It is hard to translate German into English poetry without inserting more words, as the poetical word in English is generally a shorter one-that is, if the metres are to be strictly observed; and the poverty of English in double-ending rhymes adds to this difficulty. And, vice versa, a corresponding difficulty exists in translating English

poetry into German. It would be hard to say whether English or German in itself is the more fit for poetry; but no doubt the kind of poetry that has been written in each has been affected by the nature of the vehicle. Shakespeare, had he written in German, would probably have written more like Goethe and Schiller; and they, had they written in English, would have written more like Shakespeare, allowing for the differences of dates. Had Tennyson written in German, being, as he is, the most German of our poets, he might not have possessed the objective element in his writings which assimilates him to Wordsworth, keeping his eye always open to external nature.

In some respects, that of ability to portray the inner man, and the shades or rather nuances (for we want the French word) of thoughts and feelings, English may be pronounced inferior to German for purposes of poetry; but, on the other hand, we are enriched with a store of words pregnant with meaning and beauty, and chiefly applicable to description, which we derive from the non-German sources of our language, and a variety of words to express the same thing, by which we get rid of unpleasant reiterations. For instance, how many words we have for colour! Our painters have a fund of materials in colours, tints, hues, dyes, and pigments. Byron thus avoids reiteration :

"Where the tints of the earth, and the

hues of the sky,

In colour though varied in beauty may vie, And the purple of ocean is deepest in dye.' The Germans have only "farbe " for all this. And indeed their language seems to want eyes for natural objects, else why have they no word for pink? They call it blass-roth, pale-red, which it is not, or nelkenfärbig; but nelke is as much a carnation as a pink, whereas we make a difference between the colours. Nor have they specialised a word corresponding to

russet. "Reddish," no doubt, was its French derivation, but we were able to specialise by borrowing a new word. What weighty monosyllables are dusk, and dun, and dank, and damp, and dim! While there are "sumpfe," or swamps, in Germany, there are in the British Isles also morasses, marshes, and mosses, and bogs and fens. While the Germans have only land-seas, we have lakes and tarns and meres, though the latter word, as "meer," is certainly applied by them to the sea at large. Then again, while they have the "Thal" and the "Schlucht," we have valleys, vales, dales, dells, ravines, gorges, glens, and coombs-a treasure of poetic words, of Latin, German, and Celtic origin. While they have winds, we have also breezes, and blasts, and gales, and gusts. In the nomenclature of natural history our language is the richer. The Germans give the common name of "weiss-fisch" to our dace and chub, and other species. They have the common name of "brunnen" for our springs and fountains, the latter word in English signifying a spring in a more or less artificial state.

When we step across the Channel, we find the French language richer than either the English or the German in all words significative of the relations of social life. French is par excellence the language of small-talk. What a host of words there are for small talk itself! Causer, jaser, babiller, jaboter, bavarder, caqueter, dégoiser, jaspiner! And what a wealth of expressions for all social relations, pains, and pleasures! For pleasure the French have plaisir, agrément, délices, divertissement, amusement, jouissance, recréation, joie, volupté, bonheur; for roguery and mischief-making, ruse, fourberie, friponnerie, espièglerie, perfidie, chicane, cabale, intrigue, liaison, clique, coterie, some of which words we are, to the credit of our language, obliged to borrow. And how peculiarly polite the

French are in glossing over what is unpleasant to be said! There is no language in which a deadly insult may be so delicately conveyed as in French. It is like the prick of a fine rapier in a vital part, not so wide as a church-door, as Mercutio says, but enough to make one a grave man. It is rude to tell a constable to keep an eye on a man, courteously severe to put a gentleman under the surveillance of the police. It is a solemn thing to warn an editor, but friendly to give him an "avertissement." On the whole, it is a language which drops oil on the wheels of society, and makes them turn without grating or creaking, so that it is especially adapted for diplomacy, in which difficult and disagreeable things have to be said with every show of courtesy. It is a language of doing rather than of suffering; with us it is cold, with the French il fait froid; with us a man suffers shipwreck, with the French il fait naufrage. The French are a social people, while we are solitary savages. We stand on our own legs and the broad basis of our several individualities. An Englishman's house is his castle"-chateau would not render the word. An English lady is "at home," a French lady reçoit. When we want to make ourselves attended to, we call out, "I say;" the French say, "Dites-donc," as the Germans say, "Hören Sie." The Germans have, in one respect, overdone French politeness. We have a common mode of address for every one in the second person plural. The French keep the first person singular for their intimates, and so do the Germans; while the Germans use the third person plural as a polite address, and the third person singular when they wish to be rude, reserving the second person plural as honorific, or as the exact plural of the second person singular. The Spaniards and Italians, however, even descend to fawning civility, the former addressing you as vues

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tra merced," and the latter as ec cellenza," or its equivalent "ella," as if you were an archbishop or a plenipotentiary. But the Spaniard overdoes it, for his hospitality more often consists in telling you that his house is yours than in really making you at home in it. If we come to the comparison of the structure of sentences, each of the three great languages of Europe maintains its character. French tells its story clearly and shortly throughout; English demands some attention to the meanings in which words are used; but German keeps the attention suspended to the end, requiring you to keep step throughout, the dénouement of the sentence being often entirely unexpected. A German, it is said, will spin a long yarn, give a puff of smoke with his pipe, and then add an aus," or an ab," or an "über," which is the key of the whole grammatical structure. You cannot see his drift till he has finished. The characteristics of the three great languages of modern Europe-English, French, and German-are at present very distinct and separate. As time goes on, it may be expected that they will assimilate more and more. All educated people in either country will feel themselves under the necessity of becoming more or less acquainted with the languages and literature of the other two, until, like a sculptured group of graces, the three throw their arms over each other's shoulders, and stand together, each equally beautiful beautiful each with an individual beauty, yet having in each case a sisterly resemblance to that of the remaining pair.

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It is impossible to overrate the value of the study of language in the spirit of patient investigation and comparison,-comparison not only of one language with another, but of the different dialects of the same language, and of different periods in the development of a language. Through language, contrasts and likenesses are discovered

in contemporaneous nations which would never have struck the superficial observer, and through language studied historically a series of photographic pictures is brought to light, representing the mind and manners of bygone ages, stamped by a natural process far more faithfully-if not so flatteringly in some

cases

-than in the pictures which men have painted, and in the accounts which men have written. In fact, such information reaches beyond any written or traditional records into the night of the past.

The earliest known records, if we except those that refer to the origin of man, tell us of Jews and Arabs, Greeks and Egyptians and Hindoos; whereas we possess in language tolerable evidence of the existence of the common forefathers of all the Indo-Germanic or Japhetic tribes as one nation before that time when "by these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." To this common nation it has been proposed to give the name of Aryans, or Iranians. It seems that their habits were much the same as those of the patriarchal tribes of the Semitic race described in the Bible. They were a pastoral people, and the head of the family was the king. Highlanders no doubt delight in the proofs of the antiquity of their own system of clans, by finding how finely divided and how much respected were collateral relationships in that early age. We might have heard more about them from the Hebrew records, if they, like the Israelites, had preserved a monotheistic tradition. Their idolatry appears to have proceeded, according to Dr Max Müller, from the original poverty of language. They were fain to describe the changes in the phenomena of nature by human relations, and thus they came to personification of those phenomena. With them night brought forth the dawn, and thus night became at once a mother, and in time was deified.