abundant idiom. Compare with this scanty and meagre transfusion of Tartar words the immense and permanent influence of the Moors upon the language, sentiment, and character of Spain, during the glorious dominion of the Mahommedans in Granada, and we shall see that, while the Moorish or Arab element forms an integral, permanent, and essential ingredient in the language of the country, the communication between the conquering and conquered nations must be rated, in the case of Britain and of Russia, so much lower as to be considered comparatively insignificant.

During the Roman occupation of the isles of Britain-an occupa tion which extended over a period of 470 years, i. e. from 60 B.C. to A.D. 410—there can be no doubt but that a considerable part of the indigenous population submitted to the victorious invaders, and continued to occupy their estates in the Roman provinces of Britain, paying tribute, as was natural, to the Roman government. We know, too, that the officers and soldiers of the Roman legions permanently stationed in Britain freely intermixed, and even allied themselves, by marriage and otherwise, with the now half-civilized British population which surrounded their military posts; and we may consequently speculate upon what would have been the consequence had they continued to maintain their footing in Britain. In the process of time there would have arisen a new mixed population, partaking in some measure of the qualities, of the blood, and perhaps also of the vices, of its double origin; and, what is of more importance to our present subject, the language spoken at the present day by the descendants of such a creole race would have resembled the French or the Spanish; that is to say, it would have been a dialect bearing the physiognomic character of some one of the numerous Romanz languages, all of which are the result of efforts, more or less successful, of a rude Celtic or Gaulish nation to speak the Latin, with which they were only acquainted by practice and by the ear.

In this barbarous, but useful and improvable dialect, some words of the ancient Gaulish or Celtic would remain; and in point of proximity to the Latin-its fundamental element—it would resemble the language of classical Rome to a greater or to a less degree exactly in proportion as the communication with the Romans was closer or more relaxed. Further, if the language of the conquerors happened to be, as was the case with that of Rome, an inflected and highly artificial tongue, the new dialect would be distinguished, like the modern French or the Italian, by an almost universal suppression of all inflected terminations indicating the various modifications of meaning, which modifications would thereafter be expressed by independent particles-by prepositions, by pronouns, by auxiliary verbs.

But the supposition which has just been made was not to be verified in the modern language of the country: such a species of corrupt Latinity was not destined to become in our times the spoken dialect

of the British islands; and, small as is the influence npon our present speech of the pure Celtic aboriginal tongue, the corruption of that tongue by the admixture of Latin (or rather the corruption of the Latin by the admixture of Celtic forms) was to be no less completely supplanted by new invasions, and by new languages originating in different and distant regions. It is undoubtedly obvious that a very large part of the modern English vocabulary, and even many forms of English grammar, are to be traced to the Romanz dialect, and therefore must be considered as having arisen from a corrupted Latinity, such as we have been describing as likely to have been employed by Gallic or Celtic tribes imperfectly acquainted with Latin. It would, however, be a fatal mistake to consider that these, or even any part of them, came from any such Romanz dialect or lingua franca ever spoken originally in Britain. They are, and without any exception, not of British growth, but were introduced into the English language after the Norman invasion of the country in 1066

We have said that the traces existing in the modern English of the aboriginal Celtic are exceeding few and faint: it is, however, proper to except one class of words-we allude to the names of places. In the long period of anarchy and bloodshed which intervened be tween the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Saxon hordes in 449, and the gradual foundation in England of the Eight Kingdoms, the country must be conceived to have gone back rather than advanced in the career of civilization. The Saxons, we know, who were during a long period incessantly at war, as the Romans had been before them, with the Picts, the Scots, and the Welsh, strenuously endeavored to obliterate every trace of the ancient language, even from the geography of the regions they had conquered: and it is singular to observe an Anglo-Saxon king, himself the member of a nation not very far removed from its ancient rudeness and ferocity, stigmatising as barbarous the British name of a spot to which he had occasion to allude, as known "barbarico nomine Pendyfig,” by the barbarous this was the British-name of Pendyfig. National hatred is perhaps the longest-lived of all things: and it is curious to observe the mutual dislike and contempt still existing between the Celtic and the Saxon race, and the Irish peasant of the present day expressing, in words which 1300 years have not deprived of their original bitterness, his detestation of the Sassenagh-the Saxon. A moment's inspection of the map of England will show the immense number of places which have retained, in whole or in part, their original Celtic form: we may instance the terminating syllable don with which many of these names conclude, and which is the Celtic dun, signifying a fortified rock. The Irish Kil, which begins so many names of places, is nothing more than a corruption of the Celtic Caille, signifying a forest; and the Caer, frequently found in the beginning of Welsh, Cornish, and Armorican names, and which the

Bretons have so often preserved in the initial syllable Ker (as Kerhoët), is evidently nothing but Caer, the rock or stone.

From what has been suggested, then, upon the subject of the Celtic language, the reader will conclude that, for all practical purposes of analogy or of derivation, it has exerted no appreciable influence on the modern speech of the country. Some few words indeed have been adopted into English from the tongue of the aboriginal possessors of the country, but so few in number, and so unimportant in signification, that it will be found to have borrowed as much from the language of Portugal, nay, even from those of China and Hindostan, as it has derived from the ancient indigenous tongue.

The English language, then, viewed with reference to its component elements, must be considered as a mixture of the Saxon and of the Romanz or corrupted Roman of the middle ages: and before we can proceed to investigate the peculiar character, genius, and history of such a composite dialect, it will be essential to establish with some degree of correctness-first, in what proportions these two elements are found in the compound substance under consideration; and second, what were the periods and what were the influences during and through which the process of amalgamation took place.

In examining the relative proportions of two or more elements forming together a new dialect, it would certainly be a very simple and unphilosophical analysis which should consist of simply counting the various vocables in a dictionary and arranging them under the various languages from which they are derived, then striking a balance between them, and assigning as the true origin of the language the dialect to which the greater number should be found to belong. No; we must pay some attention to the nature and significance of the vocables themselves, and also to the degree of primitiveness and antiquity of their meaning; nor must we neglect, in particular, to take into the account the general form and analogies of the composite language viewed as a whole. It is evident that that dialect must be the primitive or radical one from which are derived the greatest number of vocables expressing the simpler ideas and the most universally known objects—such objects and ideas, in short, as cannot but possess equivalents in every human speech, however rude its state or imperfect its development.

Following this important rule, we shall find that all the primary ideas, and all the simpler objects, natural and artificial, are expressed in English by words so evidently of Teutonic origin-nay, so slightly varied from Teutonic forms-that a knowledge of the German will render them instantly intelligible and recognizable. Such for instance, are the words "man," "woman" (wif-man; i. e. female man), "sun, moon," "earth;" the names of the simpler colours, as "green, "red," "yellow" (note that "purple"-a compound colour--is de rived from the Greek), "brown," &c.; the commoner and simpler

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acts of life, "to run," "to fly," "to eat," "to sing," &c. ; the prima. ry and fundamental passions of our nature, and the verbs which express those passions as in activity, "love," "fear," "hate," &c.; the names of the ordinary animals and their cries, as "horse," "hound," "sheep," ," "to neigh," "to bark," "to bleat," "to low," &c.; the arts and employments, the trades and dignities of life, "to read," "to write," "seamen," "king," "miller," "earl," "queen," &c.; and the most generally known among artificial objects, as "house, "boat," "door." It is worthy of remark how universally applicable is this principle of antiquity or primitiveness: thus, those religious objects and ideas which are of the simplest and most obvious character are represented in English by words derived from the Teutonic dialects, while the more complicated and artificial-what we may call the scientific or technic-portion of the religious vocabulary, is almost in every case of Latin or Greek derivation: thus, "God," "fiend,” "wicked," "righteous," "hell," "faith," "hope," &c., are all pure Sax n words; while "predestination," "justification," "baptism," &c., will generally be found to come from other sources. So generally, indeed, is this principle observable in the English language, that we may in most cases decide, à priori, whether the equivalent for a given object or idea be a Saxon or a Latin word, by observing whether that object be a primitive and simple or a complex and arti ficial one.

It must not, however, be inferred from this that the Saxon language was a rude and uncultivated mode of speech: such a notion would be in the highest degree unjust and unfounded. Like all the languages of the Teutonic stock, the Anglo-Saxon was distinguished for its singular vigour, expressiveness, and exactness, and in particular for the great facilities it afforded for the formation of compound words.

We may remark that most of the Saxon compound words have ceased to exist in the modern English: in short, the tendency of our remarks is to show, not that the Saxon was incapable of expressing even the most complex and refined ideas, but that, by a curious fatality, those words have generally given place, in the tongue of the present day, to equivalents drawn from the Latin and Greek origins. That this substitution (for which we shall endeavor to assign a reason) of Latin and Greek derivatives for words of Saxon stock has been injurious in some cases to the expressiveness, and in all to the vigour, of the modern idiom, no one can deny who compares the distinctness of the older words, in which all the elements would be known to an English peasant, with the somewhat pedantic and far-fetched equiva lents: for instance, how much more picturesque, and, let us add, in telligible, are the words "mildheartedness," "deathsman,” “ ling," than the corresponding "mercifulness," "executioner," and "lunatic" !

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But perhaps the most singular transformation undergone by th Saxon language, in the course of its becoming the basis of the English is the annihilation of all, or nearly all, its inflections. The tongue of our Saxon ancestors was distinguished, like the modern German— ɔne of the offshoots of the same great parent stock-by a considera ble degree of grammatical complexity; it possessed its declensions, its cases, its numbers, and in particular its genders of substantive and adjective, indicated by terminations, as in almost all the languages ever spoken on the earth.

The whole of this elaborate apparatus has been rejected in our present speech, in the same manner as a great portion of it has been rejected by the Italian, Spanish, and French languages in their process of descent from the Latin. The English language presents, therefore, the singular phenomenon of a dialect derived from two distinct sources, each characterized by peculiarities of inflection, yet itself absolutely or nearly without any traces of the method of inflection prevalent in either the one or the other of those sources.

Among the singularities of the English pronunciation which place, as it were, upon the threshold of the language so many unexpected obstacles in the way of the foreigner, there are two or three always found peculiar difficulties by all, and particularly by Germans, who discover, in other respects, so many analogies between their language and our own. These are, among others, the sound, or rather the two distinct sounds, of the th. A very little explanation would suffice to render at all events the theoretical part of this difficulty very easy and intelligible to them; for they would then discover that the th which they so bitterly complain of represents the sound of two different and distinct letters in the Saxon alphabet, which were most injudiciously suppressed, their place being supplied by the combination th, which exists in almost all the European languages, but which is pronounced in none of them as in the English. The Saxon letters in question are and p, and are nothing more than 8 and (the Saxon d and t) followed by an aspirate, indicated by the cross line; and which are both most absurdly represented in English by th, the pronunciation of which varies, as in the words "this" and "thin," to assign the right sound being an effort of memory in the learner. Now the Saxon words in which is found the character are almost invariably observed to exist in German with the simple d, and those containing p, with either d or th; a circumstance tending strongly to prove that it is the Germans who have lost the ancient aspirated sound of the two letters or combinations (for it is of no consequence whether they were anciently written by the Germans with one character or two), and that, consequently, the English alone, of all the Teutonic races, have preserved the true ancient pronunciation in this particular. The same conclusion may be arrived at, we think not unfairly, with reference to the English w, the letter corresponding to which in Ger