points where the two books come necessarily into contact, that what was treated with any fulness before, should be here touched on more lightly; and only what there was slightly handled, should here be entered on more at large. ITCHENSTOKE, Feb. 7, 1855. ENGLISH, PAST AND PRESENT. LECTURE I. THE ENGLISH A COMPOSITE LANGUAGE. I HAVE chosen our English language, its past and its present, as the subject of that short course of lectures, which I have been invited to deliver to you in this place. It is an argument, which I confidently trust will find an answer and an echo in the hearts of all who hear me; which would have found such at any time; which will do so especially at the present. For these are times which naturally rouse into liveliest activity all our latent affections for the land of our birth. It is one of the compensations, indeed the greatest of all, for the wastefulness, the woe, the cruel losses of war, that it causes a people to know itself a people; and leads each one to esteem and prize most that which he has in common with his fellow countrymen, and not now any longer those things which separate and divide him from them. And the love of our own language, what is it in fact, but the love of our country expressing itself in one |