stated in the "Vestiges of Creation" that this tendency is so strong and general, that perhaps there is scarcely a family in England that does not pronounce some words differently from others or use them in a different sense. I quite believe it, and if the reader will diligently take note of such instances I fancy he will come to believe it too.

Eternal change, ceaseless decay, such is the doom of the most polished as of the rudest tongues. Language perishes as fast in the forum as in the war speech by the council fire, or the drunken orgy by the Gaboon or Senegal. In the time of Horace the old roman tongue was obsolete as obscure as some old saxon chronicle to us. The salian priests could hardly understand their own hymns. It was not the venal faction of Rome that did this. It was not the roman snob, as intense in his snobbishness as the boasting tasteless uneducated englishman, boring his dear Horace about the monstrous sum he had given for yon bird or hare, which Horace did not think a bit better eating for that. No, it was the old incurable phonetic disease.

In vain do academies prescribe laws, in vain does the critic lash the exuberant maudlin of the lowest class of newspaper writers, the wretched taste of the punster, the affectation of the swell; he might as well try to stay the working of the laws that doomed the saurian and mammoth to extinction. This doom, however, is none of man's evoking. He has no more part in it than he has in the flight of time or the decay of the forest the laws which regulate decay "were not made by man; on the contrary, man had to obey them without knowing of their existence."

In its internal structure language suffers no change of form though it may lose its vitality, as the skeleton and brain, the heart and lungs of an old man but a few days from the grave are the same structures in their essence as in the same man at twenty or thirty. The greek and latin grammar taught at Oxford or Gottingen are really what Dionysius taught at Rome and Alcuin at York; they may have changed as much in their look as we have changed in our vestments since the days of the Egberts and Edwys, but beneath the surface grammar has suffered no more transmutation than a portion of the heavens that has long lain hid from view has undergone from the agency of the clouds that obscured it, or the strata of the earth from the forest that has grown upon their crust. The savage pedant who would castigate some poor lad for not knowing or not comprehending his peculiar views about the aorists, may now betake himself to Styx or Acheron as fast as he likes; any grammar that can be read at all will do just as well as his. After all, he can only teach a dry meagre outline of the principles of language, and that was taught just as well a thousand

years ago.

By means of this decay all languages have gradually degenerated till almost mere accident, some chance instance of isolation, has here and there preserved them at all, or in any way allowed us to trace them back to their source. Where all the languages of the earth, some eight or nine hundred, came from, long puzzled philosophers. That sound scholar and truly wonderful man Sir William Jones was one of the first, if not the very first, to find the key to this mystery in the sanskrit, to observe that it was a lan

guage of wonderful structure, more perfect than the greek, more copious than the latin, more exquisitely refined than either, and that it was impossible to compare the three without arriving at the conclusion that they had sprung from a common source.

Some of the more eminent of those who entered upon the subject at all were at once struck with the irresistible nature of the evidence upon which these conclusions were founded, and according to a wellknown law the soundness of their arguments was the very reason why others pronounced it unworthy of any credit whatever. Dugald Stewart denied the reality of such a language as the sanskrit altogether, and wrote an essay to prove that it was a literary forgery by those arch-scoundrels the Brahmins; and as in the days of Socrates and ever since there were plenty of people to applaud the spirit that would take any trouble, put forth any motive, brand, garble, and insinuate, do anything in fact but read and weigh with an impartial mind. Professor Müller says the first person who gave a shock to the comfortable security which followed this fierce onslaught upon the believers in sanskrit was Frederick Schlegel, who if not a great scholar was a genius. He vindicated the claims of the old indian writers against those who would have set them down as savages, and his ideas were soon received with the highest approbation. But sanskrit, old, pure, and tough as it may be, is but one of the eight children born of the aryan tongue. Among the other branches into which this great tree of language is found to divide are the greek and bactrian, lithuanian, old sclavonic, gothic, and armenian.

Gentle reader, did you ever hear of a teutonic language of which your own was a humble offshoot? If so, dismiss the dream. There never was a common teutonic language; there was no great sacred fountain from which flowed out and broke into branches the great high german river of language; there was no low german sluggish stream meandering away through the flat muddy domains of the Low Countries to feed the stagnant waters of the frisian and dutch tongues, the flemish and our lowly english. The low german is a "mere creation of grammarians who cannot understand a multiplicity of dialects without a common type."

Did you not, too, once think that greek was the mother of latin? That the tongue of Achilles and Zeus, of Calliope and Urania, of the fauns and dryads, was the tongue of the stern proud race taught by Romulus and Tarquin? Wrong as much as ever. The enchanter waves his wand, and the image graven with such toil on the mind of our youth for so many long generations at once becomes as broken and dim as the shapes in an enchanted mirror when the distracted gazer finds his tongue. "The idea of making greek the parent of latin is more preposterous than deriving english from german."

There is another dream, I do not know if it is heeded now by many, but I know I have often heard it recited in lectures; I have read it in books till when I see the first symptoms I know as well what is coming as though I had the gift of second sight. I mean a dream about the richness and variety of certain languages, usually attended by very humiliating reflections upon the great poverty of our own and some

others used by equally degenerate races. For instance, this scaldic poetry, about which everybody is getting so sick that they groan at the very title of a book on it, contained a hundred and fifteen names for Odin, while an island was allowed to possess as many as a hundred and twenty. But this very exuberance, like the pomp of luxury in a state, was only a sign of decay it was no more a token of strength than is a ponderous mass of fat or too deep a colour of the cheeks. As a florid style in architecture or poetry is a certain mark of decrepitude, so is a plethora of names an evil which cures itself by rapid decay and death. Even cases do not belong to the fine hardy tongues which drive their roots deep into the soil ploughed by the first speaking races. "The people with whom language grew up knew nothing of datives and accusatives;" a statement which must make many of our schoolboys conceive an intense admiration for such a wonderful people, and an ardent desire to raise an altar to them on which might flame as a burnt sacrifice all the books out of which they have to learn datives and accusatives.

Who were these people that constructed language in this way? They were the great aryan conquerors who first of all formed language and then split up into hordes, since which time their tongue has been breaking into a thousand strange dialects, decaying and losing power and beauty. "The whole framework of grammar," says our author, "the elements of derivation, declension, and conjugation, had become settled before the separation of the aryan family."

The Aryans, though tillers of the soil, had made great advances in the arts and luxuries of life. "They