ascribed to the influence of French originals upon the style of the translator, and how far it was a characteristic feature of the language of the time. The same remark applies, though with much less force, to Lord Berners' admirable translation of Froissart, the two volumes of which were published in 1523 and 1525 respectively; but this translation is doubtless the best English prose style which had yet appeared, and as a specimen of picturesque narrative, it is excelled by no production of later periods. The dramatic character and familiar gossipping tone of the original allowed some license of translation, and the dialogistic style of the English of Lord Berners is as racy, and nearly as idiomatic, as the French of Froissart.

Tyndale's translation of the New Testament is the most important philological monument of the first half of the sixteenth century, perhaps I should say of the whole period between Chaucer and Shakespeare, both as a historical relic and as having, more than any thing else, contributed to shape and fix the sacred dialect and to establish the form which the Bible must permanently assume in an English dress. The best features of the translation of 1611 are derived from the version of Tyndale, and thus that remarkable work has exerted, directly and indirectly, a more powerful influence on the English language than any other single production between the ages of Richard II. and Queen Elizabeth.*

The most important remaining prose works of the sixteenth century are the writings of Sir Thomas More,† (which, however, with all their excellence, are rather specimens of what the language in its best estate then was, than actually influential models of composition,) and those of Hooker. These last, indeed, are not remarkable as originating new forms or combinations of words, but they embody nearly all the real improvements which had been made, and they may be considered as exhibiting a structure of English not equalled by the style of any earlier writer, and scarcely surpassed by that of any later.

I shall reserve what I have to say upon the dialect of the authorized English version of the Bible for another occasion, and it would be superfluous to commend to the study of the inquirer such authors as Bacon, and Shakespeare, and Milton. There are,

*See Lecture xxviii.

+ Sce Lecture vi.

however, two or three classes of writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, whose works are much less known than their philological importance deserves. First, are what we must call, in relation to Shakespeare, and only in relation to him, the minor dramatists of the period in question. They are valuable, not only as perhaps the best authorities upon the actual spoken dialect of their age, but as genuine expressions of the character and tendencies of contemporaneous English humanity, and also for the aid they afford in the illustration and elucidation of Shakespeare himself, whose splendor has so completely filled the horizon of his art, that those feebler lights can hardly yet be said to have enjoyed the benefit of a heliacal rising.

Next come the early English translators of the great monuments of Greek and Roman literature. The reigns of Elizabeth and James produced a. large number of translations of classical authors, as for example the Lives and the Morals of Plutarch, the Works of Seneca, the History of Livy, the Natural History of the Elder Pliny, and other voluminous works. These translations are naturally more or less tinctured with un-English classical idioms, but the vast range of subjects discussed in them, especially in Plutarch and Pliny, demanded the employment of almost the entire native vocabulary, and we find in these works exemplifications of numerous words and phrases which scarcely occur at all in any other branch of the literature of that important period.

For the same reasons, the early voyages and travels, such as the voluminous collections of Hakluyt and Purchas, as well as the separately published works of this class are very valuable sources of philological knowledge. Their vocabularies are very varied and extensive, and they are rendered especially attractive by the life and fervor which, at a period when all that was foreign to Europe was full of wonder and mystery, clothed in almost poetic forms the narratives of events, and descriptions of scenery and objects, now almost too familiar to excite a momentary curiosity. Hakluyt is perhaps to be preferred to Purchas, because he allows the narrators whose reports he collected to speak for themselves, and appears in general to follow the words of the original journals more closely than Purchas, who often abridges, or otherwise modifies, his authorities.

The theological productions of the period between the reigns of Elizabeth and Anne, however eloquent and powerful, are, simply as philological monuments, less important than the secular compositions of the same century, and they furnish not many examples of verbal form or combination which are not even more happily employed elsewhere. To these remarks, however, the works of Fuller are an exception. Among the writers of that age, Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne come nearest to Shakespeare and Milton in affluence of thought and wealth of poetic sentiment and imagery. They are both remarkable for a wide range of vocabulary, Fuller inclining to a Saxon, Browne to a Latinized diction, and their syntax is marked by the same peculiarities as their nomenclature.

The interest which attaches to the literature of the eighteenth century is more properly of a critical and rhetorical than of a linguistic character; and, besides, in remarks which are intended to draw the attention of my hearers to unfamiliar rather than to every-day fields of study, it would be unprofitable to discuss the literary importance of Dryden, Pope, Swift, Addison, Johnson, Junius, Gibbon, and Burke.

His

I must, for similar reasons, refrain from entering upon the literature of our own times, and I shall only refer to a single author, who has made himself conspicuous as, in certain particulars, an exceedingly exact and careful writer. In point of thorough knowledge of the meaning, and constant and scrupulous precision in the use, of individual words, I suppose Coleridge surpasses all other English writers of whatever period. works are of great philological value, because they compel the reader to a minute study of his nomenclature, and a nice discrimination between words which he employs in allied, but still distinct senses, and they contribute more powerfully than the works of any other English author to habituate the student to that close observation of the meaning of words which is essential to precision of thought and accuracy of speech. Few writers so often refer to the etymology of words as a means of ascertaining, defining, or illustrating their meaning, while, at the same time, mere etymology was not sufficiently a passion with Coleridge to be likely to mislead him.*

Though Coleridge is a high authority with respect to the meaning of

LECTURE VI.

SOURCES AND COMPOSITION OF ENGLISH.

I.

THE heterogeneous character of our vocabulary, and the consequent obscurity of its etymology, have been noticed as circumstances which impose upon the student of English an amount of labor not demanded for the attainment of languages whose stock of words is derived, in larger proportion, from obvious and familiar roots. I now propose to give some account of the sources and composition of the English language. According to the views of many able philologists, comparison of grammatical structure is a surer test of radical linguistic affinity, than resemblances between the words which compose vocabularies. I shall not here discuss the soundness of this doctrine, my present object being to display the acquisitions of the Anglican tongue, and to indicate the quarters from which they have been immediately derived, not to point out its ethnological relationships. I shall therefore on this

single words, his style is by no means an agreeable or even a scrupulously correct one, in point of structure and syntax. Among other minor matters I shall notice hereafter (Lecture xxix.), his improper, or at least very questionable, use of the phrase in respect of, and I will here observe, that in opposition to the practice of almost every good writer from the Saxon period to his own, and to the rule given by Ben Jonson as well as all later grammarians, he employs the affirmative or after the negative alternative neither; as neither this or that. In this innovation, he has had few if any followers. Again, he uses both, not exclusively as a dual, but as embracing three or more objects. I am aware that in this latter case he had the example of Ascham and some other early authors, but it is contrary to the etymological meaning of the word, and to the constant usage of the best English writers. I do not think that any of these departures from the established construction were accidental. They were attempts at arbitrary reform, and though the last of them may be defended on the ground that dual forms are purely grammatical subtleties, and ought to be discarded, they will all probably fail to secure general adoption in English syntax.

occasion confine myself to the vocabulary, dismissing inquiry into the grammatical character of the language, with the simple remark, that it in general corresponds with that of the other dialects of the Gothic stock. In structure, English, though shorn of its inflections, is still substantially Anglo-Saxon, and it owes much the largest part of its words to the same source.

There are two modes of estimating the relative amount of words derived from different sources in a given language. The one is to compute the etymological proportions of the entire vocabulary, as exhibited in the fullest dictionaries; the other, to observe the proportions in which words of indigenous and of foreign origin respectively occur in actual speech and in written literature. Both modes of computation must be employed in order to arrive at a just appreciation of the vocabulary; but, for ordinary purposes, the latter method is the most important, because words tend to carry their native syntax with them, and grammatical structure usually accords more nearly with that of the source from which the mass of the words in daily use is taken, than with the idiom of languages whose contributions to the speech are fewer in number and of rarer occurrence. Besides this, all dictionaries contain many words which are employed only in special or exceptional cases, and which may be regarded as foreign denizens not yet entitled to the rights of full citizenship. At the same time, the method in question is a very difficult mode of estimation, because, not to speak of the peculiar diction of individual writers, every subject, every profession, and to some extent, every locality, has its own nomenclature, and it is often impossible to decide how far those special vocabularies can claim to form a part of the general stock.

Upon the whole, we may say that English, as understood and employed by the great majority of those who speak it, or, in other words, that portion of the language which is not restricted to particular callings or places, but is common to all intelligent natives, is derived from Anglo-Saxon, Latin, and French. Neither its vocabulary nor its structure possesses any important characteristic features which may not be traced directly to one of these sources, although the number of individual words which we have borrowed from other quarters is still very considerable.* Dean Trench

*This general statement must be qualified by the admission that certain