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It is not for nothing that we speak of some languages as living, of others as dead. All spoken languages 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 forgo their own activity as to leave it exactly where they found it, it will therefore, so long as it is thus the utterance of human thought and feeling, inevitably show itself alive by many infallible proofs, by motion, growth, acquisition, loss, progress, and decay. A living language therefore is one which abundantly deserves this name; for it is one in which, spoken as it is by living men, a vital formative energy is still at work. It is one which is in course of actual evolution, which, if the life that animates it be a healthy one, is appropriating and assimilating to itself what it anywhere finds congenial to its own life, multiplying its resources, increasing its wealth; while at the same time it is casting off useless and cumbersome forms, dismissing from its vocabulary words of which it finds no use, rejecting from itself by a re-active energy the foreign and heterogeneous, which may for a while have been forced upon it. I would not assert that in the process of all this it does not make mistakes; in the desire to simplify it may let go distinctions which were not useless, and which it would have been better to retain; the acquisitions which it makes are very far from being all gains; it sometimes rejects words as worthless, or suffers words to die out, which were most worthy to have lived. So far as it does this its life is not perfectly healthy; there are here signs, however remote, 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 ill, all these errors are themselves the utterances and evidences of life. A dead language is the contrary 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 guard without change. Its course has been completely 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 when it ceased from the lips of men.

English a Living Language

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, ascending from the roots into the branches; and as this works, new leaves are continually being put forth by it, old are dying and dropping away. I propose for the subject of my present lecture to consider some of the evidences of this life at work in it still. As I took for the subject of my first lecture the actual proportions in which the several elements of our composite English are now found in it, and the service which they were severally called on to perform, so I shall consider in this 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 them.

I had occasion to mention in that lecture and indeed I dwelt with some emphasis on the fact, that the core, the radical constitution of our language, is Anglo-Saxon; so that, composite or mingled as it must be freely allowed to be, it is only such in respect to words, not in respect of construction, inflexions, or generally its grammatical forms. These are all of one piece; and whatever of new has come in has been compelled to conform itself to these. The framework is English; only a part of the filling in is otherwise; and of this filling in, of these its comparatively more recent accessions, I now propose to speak.

The Norman Conquest

The first great augmentation by foreign words of our Saxon vocabulary, setting aside those which the Danes brought us, was a consequence, although not an immediate one, of the battle of Hastings, and of the Norman domination which Duke William’s victory established in our land. And here let me say in respect of that victory, in contradiction to the sentimental regrets of Thierry and others, and with the fullest acknowledgement of the immediate miseries which it entailed on the Saxon race, that it was really the making of England; a judgment, it is true, but a judgment and mercy in one. God never showed more plainly that He had great things in store for the people which should occupy this English soil, than when He brought hither that aspiring Norman race. At the same time the actual interpenetration of our Anglo-Saxon with any large amount of French words did not find place till very considerably later than this event, however it was a consequence of it. 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, a conquering and a conquered, and neither forgetting the fact.

Time however softened the mutual antipathies. The Norman, after a while shut out from France, began more and more to feel that England was his home and sphere. The Saxon, recovering little by little from the extreme depression which had ensued on his defeat, became every day a more important element of the new English nation which was gradually forming from the coalition of the two races. His language partook of his elevation. It was no longer the badge of inferiority. French was no longer the only language in which a gentleman could speak, or a poet sing. At the same time the Saxon, now passing into the English language, required a vast addition to its vocabulary, if it were to serve all the needs of those who were willing to employ it now. How much was there of high culture, how many of the arts of life, of its refined pleasures, which had been strange to Saxon men, and had therefore found no utterance in Saxon words. All this it was sought to supply from the French.

We shall not err, I think, if we assume the great period of the incoming of French words into the English language to have been when the Norman nobility were exchanging their own language for the English; and I should be disposed with Tyrwhitt to believe that there is much exaggeration in attributing the large influx of these into English to one man’s influence, namely to Chaucer’s[38]. Doubtless he did much; he fell in with and furthered a tendency which already prevailed. But to suppose that the majority of French vocables which he employed in his poems had never been employed before, had been hitherto unfamiliar to English ears, is to suppose that his poems must have presented to his contemporaries an absurd patchwork of two languages, and leaves it impossible to explain how he should at once have become the popular poet of our nation.

Influence of Chaucer

That Chaucer largely developed the language in this direction is indeed plain. We have only to compare his English with that of another great master of the tongue, his contemporary Wiclif, to perceive how much more his diction is saturated with French words than is that of the Reformer. We may note too that many which he and others employed, and as it were proposed for admission, were not finally allowed and received; so that no doubt they went beyond the needs of the language, and were here in excess[39]. At the same time this can be regarded as no condemnation of their attempt. It was only by actual experience that it could be proved whether the language wanted those words or not, whether it could absorb them into itself, and assimilate them with all that it already was and had; or did not require, and would therefore in due time reject and put them away. And what happened then will happen in every attempt to transplant on a large scale the words of one language into another. Some will take root; others will not, but after a longer or briefer period will wither and die. Thus I observe in Chaucer such French words as these, ‘misericorde’, ‘malure’ (malheur), ‘penible’, ‘ayel’ (aieul), ‘tas’, ‘gipon’, ‘pierrie’ (precious stones); none of which, and Wiclif’s ‘creansur’ (2 Kings iv. 1) as little, have permanently won a place in our tongue. For a long time ‘mel’, used often by Sylvester, struggled hard for a place in the language side by side with honey; ‘roy’ side by side with king; this last quite obtained one in Scotch. It is curious to mark some of these French adoptions keeping their ground to a comparatively late day, and yet finally extruded: seeming to have taken firm root, they have yet withered away in the end. Thus it has been, for example, with ‘egal’ (Puttenham); with ‘ouvert’, ‘mot’, ‘ecurie’, ‘baston’, ‘gite’ (Holland); with ‘rivage’, ‘jouissance’, ‘noblesse’, ‘tort’ (= wrong), ‘accoil’ (accuellir), ‘sell’ (= saddle), all occurring in Spenser; with ‘to serr’ (serrer), ‘vive’, ‘reglement’, used all by Bacon; and so with ‘esperance’, ‘orgillous’ (orgueilleux), ‘rondeur’, ‘scrimer’ (= fencer), all in Shakespeare; with ‘amort’ (this also in Shakespeare)[40], and ‘avie’ (Holland). ‘Maugre’, ‘congie’, ‘devoir’, ‘dimes’, ‘sans’, and ‘bruit’, used often in our Bible, were English once[41]; when we employ them now, it is with the sense that we are using foreign words. The same is true of ‘dulce’, ‘aigredoulce’ (= soursweet), of ‘mur’ for wall, of ‘baine’ for bath, of the verb ‘to cass’ (all in Holland), of ‘volupty’ (Sir Thomas Elyot), ‘volunty’ (Evelyn), ‘medisance’ (Montagu), ‘petit’ (South), ‘aveugle’, ‘colline’ (both in State Papers), and ‘eloign’ (Hacket)[42].

We have seen when the great influx of French words took place—that is, from the time of the Conquest, although scantily and feebly at the first, to that of Chaucer. But with him our literature and language had made a burst, which they were not able to maintain. He has by Warton been well compared to some warm bright day in the very early spring, which seems to say that the winter is over and gone; but its promise is deceitful; the full bursting and blossoming of the springtime are yet far off. That struggle with France which began so gloriously, but ended so disastrously, even with the loss of our whole ill-won dominion 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, during which it could have made few important accessions to its wealth.

Latin Importation

The period however is notable as being that during which for the first time we received a large accession of Latin words. There was indeed already a small settlement of these, for the most part ecclesiastical, which had long since found their home in the bosom of the Anglo-Saxon itself, and had been entirely incorporated into it. The fact that we had received our Christianity from Rome, and that Latin was the constant language of the Church, sufficiently explains the incoming of these. Such were ‘monk’, ‘bishop’ (I put them in their present shapes, and do not concern myself whether they were originally Greek or no; they reached us as Latin); ‘provost’, ‘minster’, ‘cloister’, ‘candle’, ‘psalter’, ‘mass’, and the names of certain foreign animals, as ‘camel’, or plants or other productions, as ‘pepper’, ‘fig’; which are all, with slightly different orthography, Anglo-Saxon words. These, however, were entirely exceptional, and stood to the main body of the language not as the Romance element of it does now to the Gothic, one power over against another, but as the Spanish or Italian or Arabic words in it now stand to the whole present body of the language—and could not be affirmed to affect it more.

So soon however as French words were imported largely, as I have just observed, into the language, and were found to coalesce kindly with the native growths, this very speedily suggested, as indeed it alone rendered possible, the going straight to the Latin, and drawing directly from it; and thus in the hundred years which followed Chaucer a large amount of Latin found its way, if not into our speech, yet at all events into our books—words which were not brought through the French, for they are not, and have not at any time been, French, but yet words which would never have been introduced into English, if their way had not been prepared, if the French already domesticated among us had not bridged over, as it were, the gulf, that would have otherwise been too wide between them and the Saxon vocables of our tongue.

In this period, a period of great depression of the national spirit, we may trace the attempt at a pedantic latinization of English quite as clearly at work as at later periods, subsequent to the revival of learning. It was now that a crop of such words as ‘facundious’, ‘tenebrous’, ‘solacious’, ‘pulcritude’, ‘consuetude’ (all these occur in Hawes), with many more, long since rejected by the language, sprung up; while other words, good in themselves, and which have been since allowed, were yet employed in numbers quite out of proportion with the Saxon vocables with which they were mingled, and which they altogether overtopped and shadowed. 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 in others it is very manifest. Thus I must esteem the diction of Lydgate, Hawes, and the other versifiers who filled up the period between Chaucer and Surrey, immensely inferior to Chaucer’s; 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 century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of anglicising 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”[43].

To few indeed is the wisdom and discretion given, certainly it was given to none of those, to bear themselves in this hazardous enterprise according to the rules laid down by Dryden; who in the following admirable passage declares the motives that induced him to seek for foreign words, and the considerations that guided him in their selection: “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 adornment, 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 designed not to assist the natives, but to conquer them”[44].

Influence of the Reformation

But this tendency to latinize our speech was likely to receive, and actually did receive, a new impulse from the revival of learning, and the familiar re-acquaintance with the great masterpieces of ancient literature which went along with this revival. Happily another movement accompanied, or at least followed hard on this; a movement in England essentially national; and 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. 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 its turn further strengthened, purified, and called out. And thus, though Latin came in upon us now faster than ever, and in a certain measure also Greek, yet this was not without its redress and counterpoise, in the cotemporaneous unfolding of the more fundamentally popular side of the language. Popular preaching and discussion, the necessity of dealing with truths the most transcendent in a way to be understood not by scholars only, but by ‘idiots’ as well, all this served to evoke the native resources of our tongue; and thus the relative proportion between the one part of the language and the other was not dangerously disturbed, the balance was not destroyed; as it might well have been, if only the Humanists[45] 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 immediate 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 never leave the language of a nation where they found it. Much is changed in it; much probably added; for the old garment of speech, which once served all needs, has grown too narrow, and serves them now no more. “Change in language is not, as in many natural products, continuous; it is not equable, but eminently by fits and starts”; and when the foundations of the national mind are heaving under the power of some new truth, greater and more important changes will find place in fifty years than in two centuries of calmer or more stagnant existence. Thus the activities and energies which the Reformation awakened among us here—and I need not tell you that these reached far beyond the domain of our directly religious life—caused mighty alterations in the English tongue[46].

Rise of New Words

For example, the Reformation had its scholarly, we might say, its scholastic, as well as its popular, aspect. Add this fact to the fact 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. Thus Puttenham, writing in Queen Elizabeth’s reign[47], gives a long list of words which, as he declares, had been quite recently introduced into the language. Some of them are Greek, a few French and Italian, but very far the most are Latin. I will not give you his whole catalogue, but some specimens from it; it is difficult to understand concerning some of these, how the language should have managed to do without them so long; ‘method’, ‘methodical’, ‘function’, ‘numerous’, ‘penetrate’, ‘penetrable’, ‘indignity’, ‘savage’, ‘scientific’, ‘delineation’, ‘dimension’—all which he notes to have recently come up; so too ‘idiom’, ‘significative’, ‘compendious’, ‘prolix’, ‘figurative’, ‘impression’, ‘inveigle’, ‘metrical’. All these he adduces with praise; others upon which he bestows equal commendation, have not held their ground, as ‘placation’, ‘numerosity’, ‘harmonical’. Of those neologies which he disallowed, he only anticipated in some cases, as in ‘facundity’, ‘implete’, ‘attemptat’ (‘attentat’), the decision of a later day; other words which he condemned no less, as ‘audacious’, ‘compatible’, ‘egregious’, have maintained their ground. These too have done the same; ‘despicable’, ‘destruction’, ‘homicide’, ‘obsequious’, ‘ponderous’, ‘portentous’, ‘prodigious’, all of them by another writer a little earlier condemned as “inkhorn terms, smelling too much of the Latin”.

French Neologies

It is curious to observe the “words of art”, as he calls them, which Philemon Holland, a voluminous translator at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, counts it needful to explain in a sort of glossary which he appends to his translation of Pliny’s Natural History[48]. One can hardly at the present day understand how any person who would care to consult the book at all would find any difficulty with words like the following, ‘acrimony’, ‘austere’, ‘bulb’, ‘consolidate’, ‘debility’, ‘dose’, ‘ingredient’, ‘opiate’, ‘propitious’, ‘symptom’, all which, however, as novelties he carefully explains. Some of the words in his glossary, it is true, are harder and more technical than these; but a vast proportion of them present no greater difficulty than those which I have adduced[49].

The period during which this naturalization of Latin words in the English Language was going actively forward, may be said to have continued till about the Restoration of Charles the Second. It first received a check from the coming up of French tastes, fashions, and habits of thought consequent on that event. The writers already formed before that period, such as Cudworth and Barrow, still continued to write their stately sentences, Latin in structure, and Latin in diction, but not so those of a younger generation. We may say of this influx of Latin that it left the language vastly more copious, with greatly enlarged capabilities, but perhaps somewhat burdened, and not always able to move gracefully under the weight of its new acquisitions; for as Dryden has somewhere truly said, it is easy enough to acquire foreign words, but to know what to do with them after you have acquired, is the difficulty.

Pedantic Words

It might have received indeed most serious injury, if all the words which the great writers of this second Latin period of our language employed, and so proposed as candidates for admission into it, had received the stamp of popular allowance. But happily it was not so; it was here, as it had been before with the French importations, and with the earlier Latin of Lydgate and Occleve. The re-active powers of the language, enabling it to throw off that which was foreign to it, did not fail to display themselves now, as they had done on former occasions. The number of unsuccessful candidates for admission into, and permanent naturalization in, the language during this period, is enormous; and one may say that in almost all instances where the Alien Act has been enforced, the sentence of exclusion was a just one; it was such as the circumstances of the case abundantly bore out. Either the word was not idiomatic, or was not intelligible, or was not needed, or looked ill, or sounded ill, or some other valid reason existed against it. A lover of his native tongue will tremble to think what that tongue would have become, if all the vocables from the Latin and the Greek which were then introduced or endorsed by illustrious names, had been admitted on the strength of their recommendation; 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’, ‘ardelion’ (Burton), ‘lepid’ and ‘sufflaminate’ (Barrow), ‘facinorous’ (Donne), ‘immorigerous’, ‘clancular’, ‘ferity’, ‘ustulation’, ‘stultiloquy’, ‘lipothymy’ (λειποθυμία), ‘hyperaspist’ (all in Jeremy Taylor), if ‘mulierosity’, ‘subsannation’, ‘coaxation’, ‘ludibundness’, ‘delinition’, ‘septemfluous’, ‘medioxumous’, ‘mirificent’, ‘palmiferous’ (all in Henry More), ‘pauciloquy’ and ‘multiloquy’ (Beaumont, Psyche); if ‘dyscolous’ (Foxe), ‘ataraxy’ (Allestree), ‘moliminously’ (Cudworth), ‘luciferously’ (Sir Thomas Browne), ‘immarcescible’ (Bishop Hall), ‘exility’, ‘spinosity’, ‘incolumity’, ‘solertiousness’, ‘lucripetous’, ‘inopious’, ‘eluctate’, ‘eximious’ (all in Hacket), ‘arride’[50] (ridiculed by Ben Johnson), with the hundreds of other words like these, and even more monstrous than are some of these, not to speak of such Italian as ‘leggiadrous’ (a favourite word in Beaumont’s Psyche), ‘amorevolous’ (Hacket), had not been rejected and disallowed by the true instinct of the national mind.

Naturalization of Words

A great many too were allowed and adopted, but not exactly in the shape in which they first were introduced among us; they were made to drop their foreign termination, or otherwise their foreign appearance, to conform themselves to English ways, and only so were finally incorporated into the great family of English words[51]. Thus of Greek words we have the following: ‘pyramis’ and ‘pyramides’, forms often employed by Shakespeare, became ‘pyramid’ and ‘pyramids’; ‘dosis’ (Bacon) ‘dose’; ‘distichon’ (Holland) ‘distich’; ‘hemistichion’ (North) ‘hemistich’; ‘apogæon’ (Fairfax) and ‘apogeum’ (Browne) ‘apogee’; ‘sumphonia’ (Lodge) ‘symphony’; ‘prototypon’ (Jackson) ‘prototype’; ‘synonymon’ (Jeremy Taylor) or ‘synonymum’ (Hacket), and ‘synonyma’ (Milton, prose), became severally ‘synonym’ and ‘synonyms’; ‘syntaxis’ (Fuller) became ‘syntax’; ‘extasis’ (Burton) ‘ecstasy’; ‘parallelogrammon’ (Holland) ‘parallelogram’; ‘programma’ (Warton) ‘program’; ‘epitheton’ (Cowell) ‘epithet’; ‘epocha’ (South) ‘epoch’; ‘biographia’ (Dryden) ‘biography’; ‘apostata’ (Massinger) ‘apostate’; ‘despota’ (Fox) ‘despot’; ‘misanthropos’ (Shakespeare) if ‘misanthropi’ (Bacon) ‘misanthrope’; ‘psalterion’ (North) ‘psaltery’; ‘chasma’ (Henry More) ‘chasm’; ‘idioma’ and ‘prosodia’ (both in Daniel, prose) ‘idiom’ and ‘prosody’; ‘energia’, ‘energy’, and ‘Sibylla’, ‘Sibyl’ (both in Sidney); ‘zoophyton’ (Henry More) ‘zoophyte’; ‘enthousiasmos’ (Sylvester) ‘enthusiasm’; ‘phantasma’ (Donne) ‘phantasm’; ‘magnes’ (Gabriel Harvey) ‘magnet’; ‘cynosura’ (Donne) ‘cynosure’; ‘galaxias’ (Fox) ‘galaxy’; ‘heros’ (Henry More) ‘hero’; ‘epitaphy’ (Hawes) ‘epitaph’.

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 employment; though now they are such no longer. Thus Bacon uses generally, I know not whether always, ‘insecta’ for ‘insects’; and ‘chylus’ for ‘chyle’; Bishop Andrews ‘nardus’ for ‘nard’; Spenser ‘zephyrus’, and not ‘zephyr’; so ‘interstitium’ (Fuller) preceded ‘interstice’; ‘philtrum’ (Culverwell) ‘philtre’; ‘expansum’ (Jeremy Taylor) ‘expanse’; ‘preludium’ (Beaumont, Psyche), ‘prelude’; ‘precipitium’ (Coryat) ‘precipice’; ‘aconitum’ (Shakespeare) ‘aconite’; ‘balsamum’ (Webster) ‘balsam’; ‘heliotropium’ (Holland) ‘heliotrope’; ‘helleborum’ (North) ‘hellebore’; ‘vehiculum’ (Howe) ‘vehicle’; ‘trochæus’ and ‘spondæus’ (Holland) ‘trochee’ and ‘spondee’; and ‘machina’ (Henry More) ‘machine’. We have ‘intervalla’, not ‘intervals’, in Chillingworth; ‘postulata’, not ‘postulates’, in Swift; ‘archiva’, not ‘archives’, in Baxter; ‘demagogi’, not ‘demagogues’, in Hacket; ‘vestigium’, not ‘vestige’, in Culverwell; ‘pantomimus’ in Lord Bacon for ‘pantomime’; ‘mystagogus’ for ‘mystagogue’, in Jackson; ‘atomi’ in Lord Brooke for ‘atoms’; ‘ædilis’ (North) went before ‘ædile’; ‘effigies’ and ‘statua’ (both in Shakespeare) before ‘effigy’ and ‘statue’; ‘abyssus’ (Jackson) before ‘abyss’; ‘vestibulum’ (Howe) before ‘vestibule’; ‘symbolum’ (Hammond) before ‘symbol’; ‘spectrum’ (Burton) before ‘spectre’; while only after a while ‘quære’ gave place to ‘query’; ‘audite’ (Hacket) to ‘audit’; ‘plaudite’ (Henry More) to ‘plaudit’; and the low Latin ‘mummia’ (Webster) became ‘mummy’. The widely extended change of such words as ‘innocency’, ‘indolency’, ‘temperancy’, and the large family of words with the same termination, into ‘innocence’, ‘indolence’, ‘temperance’, and the like, can only be regarded as part of the same process of entire naturalization.

The plural very often tells the secret of a word, and of the light in which it is regarded by those who employ it, when the singular, being less capable of modification, would have failed to do so; thus when Holland writes ‘phalanges’, ‘bisontes’, ‘ideæ’, it is clear that ‘phalanx’, ‘bison’, ‘idea’, were still Greek words for him; as ‘dogma’ was for Hammond, when he made its plural not ‘dogmas’, but ‘dogmata’[52]; and when Spenser uses ‘heroes’ as a trisyllable, it plainly is not yet thoroughly English for him[53]. ‘Cento’ is not English, but a Latin word used in English, so long as it makes its plural not ‘centos’, but ‘centones’, as in the old anonymous translation of Augustin’s City of God[54]; and ‘specimen’, while it makes its plural ‘specimina’ (Howe). Pope making, as he does, ‘satellites’ a quadrisyllable in the line

“Why Jove’s satellites are less than Jove”,

must have felt that he was still dealing with it as Latin; just as ‘terminus’, a word which the necessities of railways have introduced among us, will not be truly naturalized till we use ‘terminuses’, and not ‘termini’ for its plural; nor ‘phenomenon’, till we have renounced ‘phenomena’. Sometimes it has been found convenient to retain both plurals, that formed according to the laws of the classical language, and that formed according to the laws of our own, only employing them in different senses; thus is it with ‘indices’ and ‘indexes’, ‘genii’ and ‘geniuses’.

The same process has gone on with words from other languages, as from the Italian and the Spanish; thus ‘bandetto’ (Shakespeare), ‘bandito’ (Jeremy Taylor), becomes ‘bandit’; ‘ruffiano’ (Coryat) ‘ruffian’; ‘concerto’, ‘concert’; ‘busto’ (Lord Chesterfield) ‘bust’; ‘caricatura’ (Sir Thomas Browne) ‘caricature’; ‘princessa’ (Hacket) ‘princess’; ‘scaramucha’ (Dryden) ‘scaramouch’; ‘pedanteria’ (Sidney) ‘pedantry’; ‘impresa’ ‘impress’; ‘caprichio’ (Shakespeare) becomes first ‘caprich’ (Butler), then ‘caprice’; ‘duello’ (Shakespeare) ‘duel’; ‘alligarta’ (Ben Jonson), ‘alligator’; ‘parroquito’ (Webster) ‘parroquet’; ‘scalada’ (Heylin) or ‘escalado’ (Holland) ‘escalade’; ‘granada’ (Hacket) ‘grenade’; ‘parada’ (J. Taylor) ‘parade’; ‘emboscado’ (Holland) ‘stoccado’, ‘barricado’, ‘renegado’, ‘hurricano’ (all in Shakespeare), ‘brocado’ (Hackluyt), ‘palissado’ (Howell), drop their foreign terminations, and severally become ‘ambuscade’, ‘stockade’, ‘barricade’, ‘renegade’, ‘hurricane’, ‘brocade’, ‘palisade’; ‘croisado’ in like manner (Bacon) becomes first ‘croisade’ (Jortin), and then ‘crusade’; ‘quinaquina’ or ‘quinquina’, ‘quinine’. Other slight modifications of spelling, not in the termination, but in the body of a word, will indicate in like manner its more entire incorporation into the English language. Thus ‘shash’, a Turkish word, becomes ‘sash’; ‘colone’ (Burton) ‘clown’[55]; ‘restoration’ was at first spelt ‘restauration’; and so long as ‘vicinage’ was spelt ‘voisinage’[56] (Sanderson), ‘mirror’ ‘miroir’ (Fuller), ‘recoil’ ‘recule’, or ‘career’ ‘carriere’ (both by Holland), they could scarcely be considered those purely English words which now they are[57].

Here and there even at this comparatively late period of the language awkward foreign words will be recast in a more thoroughly English mould; ‘chirurgeon’ will become ‘surgeon’; ‘hemorrhoid’, ‘emerod’; ‘squinancy’ will become first ‘squinzey’ (Jeremy Taylor) and then ‘quinsey’; ‘porkpisce’ (Spenser), that is sea-hog, or more accurately hogfish[58] will be ‘porpesse’, and then ‘porpoise’, as it is now. In other words the attempt will be made, but it will be now too late to be attended with success. ‘Physiognomy’ will not give place to ‘visnomy’, however Spenser and Shakespeare employ this briefer form; nor ‘hippopotamus’ to ‘hippodame’, even at Spenser’s bidding. In like manner the attempt to naturalize ‘avant-courier’ in the shape of ‘vancurrier’ has failed. Other words also we meet which have finally refused to take a more popular form, although such was once more or less current; or, if this is too much to say of all, yet hazarded by good authors. Thus Holland wrote ‘cirque’, but we ‘circus’; ‘cense’, but we ‘census’; ‘interreign’, but we ‘interregnum’; Sylvester ‘cest’, but we ‘cestus’; ‘quirry’, but we ‘equerry’; ‘colosse’, but we still ‘colossus’; Golding ‘ure’, but we ‘urus’; ‘metropole’, but we ‘metropolis’; Dampier ‘volcan’, but this has not superseded ‘volcano’; nor ‘pagod’ (Pope) ‘pagoda’; nor ‘skelet’ (Holland) ‘skeleton’; nor ‘stimule’ (Stubbs) ‘stimulus’. Bolingbroke wrote ‘exode’, but we hold fast to ‘exodus’; Burton ‘funge’, but we ‘fungus’; Henry More ‘enigm’, but we ‘enigma’; ‘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 way to a more Greek formation ‘apothecary’. Yet these and the like must be regarded quite as exceptions; the tendency of things is altogether the other way.

Looking at this process of the reception of foreign words, with their after assimilation in feature to our own, we may trace, as was to be expected, a certain conformity between the genius of our institutions and that of our language. It is the very character of our institutions to repel 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 ought else than members of it, have retained no other reminiscence of their foreign extraction than some slight difference of name, and that often disappearing or having disappeared. Exactly so has it been with the English language. No language has shown itself less exclusive; none has stood less upon niceties; none has thrown open its arms wider, with a fuller confidence, a confidence justified by experience, that it could make truly its own, assimilate and subdue to itself, whatever it received into its bosom; and in none has this experiment in a larger number of instances been successfully carried out.