produced by the military conscription, by the tendency of population towards great commercial and industrial centres, which has again become so marked a feature of the associate life of Europe, and by the absorption of the lesser estates into the domains of the great proprietors. The place of the conscript, or emigrant native peasant, was taken by servile and discharged military strangers to such an extent, that the Latin and other Italic races were said to have become almost extinct in the rural districts even before the days of the empire. These foreigners were of many different stocks and different tongues, and though the enslaved captives were distributed without much regard to community of origin or of speech, yet the disbanded veterans would naturally be colonised with some reference to their nationality, and hence each considerable allotment of military bounty lands would be a centre which would exercise a peculiar influence upon the language of its own vicinity, and thus tend to create a local patois, if none existed there before.

Raynouard, Lexique Roman, I. xiii., observes: 'Il est reconnu aujourd'hui que la romane rustique se forma de la corruption de la langue latine, que l'ignorance de ceux qui parlaient encore cette langue, à l'époque de l'invasion des hordes du Nord, et leur mélange avec ces hordes, modifièrent d'une manière spéciale, par suite de laquelle le nouvel idiome acquit un caractère distinct d'individualité.'

This theory supposes that the classical Latin was once the general popular speech, not only of Italy, but of Spain, Portugal, and France. This is an assumption, not only without proof, but at variance with probability, and there is no reason to believe that any one vulgar dialect ever had a great territorial range in the Italian peninsula, still less in the distant subjected provinces. We know historically that Italy was originally, or at least, at a very early period, peopled by many different races, which were at last united under the government, and forced into a conformity with the institutions of Rome. But we have no proof that their vernaculars ever melted and harmonised into one uniform lingua rustica, and, indeed, the period through which the sway of Rome extended was altogether too short for such an amalgamation to have taken place under such circumstances. The rustic dialects are to be regarded not as corruptions of the Latin, or of any other single speech, but each as in a certain sense the representative of an older and more primitive tongue. Their natural resemblances are results of a tendency to coalesce, imposed upon them by the social and political influence of Rome, not evidence of greater likeness and closer relationship at an earlier stage. The Latin itself is but a compromise and an amalgamation of the linguistic peculiarities of older speeches, and it was probably

never employed as the vulgar tongue of Roman Italy to a greater extent than Tuscan is spoken at this day in the modern Italian States. So far from being the mother of the rustic patois, the Latin itself may with greater truth be regarded as derivative, and as a coalescence of more ancient forms of them. This, indeed, is apparently less true of grammar than of the vocabulary. The stock of words in Latin is evidently of a very mixed character, but the regularity and completeness of the inflections show that the grammar of some one ancient dialect very greatly predominates in the composite literary tongue of Rome.

the

On the other hand, it must be admitted, that the general coincidence of vocabulary in the Romance languages, and especially the occurrence of numerous words, substantially the same in all of them, but which can hardly be traced to a classical Latin source such, for example, as It. acciajo, Sp. acero, Fr. acier; It. aguglia, Sp. aguja, Fr. aiguille; It. arrivare, Sp. arribar, Fr. arriver; It. bianco, Sp. blanco, Fr. blanc; It. bocca, Sp. boca, Fr. bouche; It. cacciare, Sp. cazar, Fr. chasser. -seems to point to a community of origin which their grammatical discrepancies tend to disprove. Literary and ecclesiastical influences have been very important agencies in bringing about a uniformity in the stock of words, and as to those vocables common to all the Romance dialects, but unknown to classical Latin, it is not improbable that they belonged to popular nomenclatures connected with the military or civil administration of the Roman government, and which were employed as widely as that government extended, though not forming a part of the literary tongue.-See On the Divergence of Dialects, Lecture II.

V. p. (27.)

GRAMMAR AND PHILOLOGY.

A syntax which looks no higher than to rules of concord and regimen, the determination of logical relations by the tallying of endings, is not a whit more intellectual than the game of dominoes. The study of linguistics is valuable, less as an independent pursuit, than as a means of access to a wider range of philologies, understood in that broad sense in which the word is now used in German criticism. Happily for the interests of learning, most distinguished Continental linguists are philologists also. On the other hand, American, and, I must add, English professed linguists, are in general but nibbling the shell while they imagine themselves to be enjoying the kernel of the fruit. I desire not

to be understood as undervaluing the linguistic works of such men as Bopp and the brothers Grimm, whose labours have furnished the key to such vast stores of literary wealth, but at the same time I maintain that the student of language who ends with the linguistics of Bopp and Grimm had better never have begun; for grammar has but a value, not a worth; it is a means, not an end; it teaches but half-truths, and, except as an introduction to literature and that which literature embodies, it is a melancholy heap of leached ashes, marrowless bones, and empty oyster-shells. You may feed the human intellect upon roots, stems, and endings, as you may keep a horse upon saw-dust; but you must add a little literature in the one case, a little meal in the other, and the more the better in both. Many years ago, Brown, an American grammarian, invented what he called a parsing-machine, for teaching grammar. It was a mahogany box, some two feet square, provided with a crank, filled with cog and crown-wheels, pulleys, bands, shafts, gudgeons, couplings, springs, cams, and eccentrics; and with several trap-sticks projecting through slots in the top of it. When played upon by an expert operator, it functioned, as the French say, very well, and ran through the syntactical categories as glibly as the footman in Scriblerus did through the predicates. But it had one capital defect, namely, that the pupil must have learned grammar by some simpler method, before he could understand the working of the contrivance, and its lessons, therefore, came rather late. There are many sad ‘compounds of printer's ink and brain-dribble,' styled 'English Grammars,' which, as means of instruction, are, upon the whole, inferior to Brown's gimcrack.

LECTURE IL

ORIGIN AND COMPOSITION OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PEOPLE AND THEIR LANGUAGE.

BEFORE proceeding to the immediate subject of the present lecture, I will offer an explanatory remark upon the nomenclature which, in common with many writers on European philology, I employ. I shall make frequent use of the ethnological epithets, Gothic, Teutonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Romance. Under the term Gothic I include not only the extinct Maso-Gothic nation and language, and the contemporaneous kindred tribes and tongues, but all the later peoples, speeches, and dialects commonly known as Anglo-Saxon, German, Dutch, Flemish, Norse, Swedish, Danish, and Icelandic, together with our composite modern English. All these are marked by a strong family likeness, and hence are assumed, though by no means historically proved, to be descended from a common original. With the exception of a few words, chiefly proper names, which occur in the writings of the Greek and Latin historians and geographers, the oldest specimen we possess of any of the Gothic languages is the remnant of a translation of the Scriptures executed by Ulfilas, a bishop of the Moso-Goths, but himself, according to Philostorgius, of Cappadocian descent, who lived on the shores of the Lower Danube, in the fourth century after Christ. The Gothic languages divide themselves into

I. The Teutonic or Germanic branch, which consists of -1, the Maso-Gothic; 2, the Anglo-Saxon; 3, the Low-German, or Saxon; 4, the Dutch, or Netherlandish, including the

* See Illustrations II. and V. at the end of this lecture.

Flemish; 5, the Frisic; and 6, the High-German, to which may be added the Cimbric of the Sette and the Tredici Comuni in Italy*, and many Swiss and even Piedmontese patois.

II. The Scandinavian branch, which embraces-1, the OldNorthern, or Icelandic, improperly called Runic by many earlier English philologists; 2, the Swedish; 3, the Danish, including the Norse, or Norwegian.

III. The English, which, though less than half the words composing its total vocabulary are of Gothic descent, is classed with that family, because in its somewhat mixed grammatical structure the Gothic syntax very greatly predominates, and a majority of the words employed in the ordinary oral intercourse of life, and even in almost any given literary composition, are of Gothic etymology. Perhaps, also, the Scottish should be regarded as a distinct speech, rather than as a mere dialect of English.

All these, excepting the Moso-Gothic, and presumably that also, have or had a great number of spoken, and many of them even written, more or less divergent dialects. I am aware that the propriety of this application of the terms Gothic, Teutonic, and Germanic is disputed; but it has long been received, and will be better understood than any new phraseology.

Romance formerly meant - and is still defined in most dictionaries the dialects of the Spanish and Italian borders of France; but, in recent criticism, it is a generic term embracing all the modern languages usually regarded as cognate with the Latin,— in a word, the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, or Lemosint, Provençal, French, the Roumansch of several Swiss

* See First Series, Lecture VI., p. 140.

The Catalan or Lemosin is often spoken of as a dialect of Spanish. If by Spanish be meant the assemblage of speeches employed in Spain, the expression may be correct; but if the Castilian, the written language of most parts of Spain, be intended, it is no more true that Catalan is a dialect of Spanish than it is that Spanish is a dialect of Catalan. Neither is a derivative or an offshoot of the other. The development and history of each is independent of that of the other, and the Catalan is, in the important point of the construction of periods, quite as near to the French as to the Castilian.