ANGLO-SAXON IN ENGLISH.

69

an intimate knowledge and judicious use of that portion of their vernacular which was formed by their Anglo-Saxon forefathers, in their savage but poetical age. They knew that the words which fall first upon our ears from the lips of our mother, the words that we hear "in the home of our childhood, and amidst the sports of our youth," express the earliest and dearest sensations, and awaken in the heart of the hearer the strongest and most powerful feelings of our nature. Hence English style is impressive, English poets are popular, and English orators successful, in proportion as they employ the words which constitute the language of our home and our heart. Gray's Elegy, Milton's Massacre in Piedmont, Crabbe's Hall of Justice, and Cowper's Castaway, are monuments of the simple majesty of Saxon-English. Its power over the mind is not less strikingly proved by Latimer's terse and self-commending Saxon, of which Swift in a later age and Cobbett in our own have been the mighty masters, and, through it, the masters of their English readers and hearers. Besides, all who speak English may find in their own mother tongue an ancient idiom, to which they may successfully refer in their inquiries how language has been formed; they can there find a reason and a meaning for forms which possess neither life nor interest to the ignorant, and while they learn to prefer the original stores of their native tongue to the gaudy but borrowed plumage of foreign growth, they will no longer use words and phrases merely because all others do so, but because they know they are the best, the worthiest, and the most efficient that can be chosen. They will find them to be so, not by accident or by some mysterious power, but because a language which has stored up the united

treasures and combined efforts of the highest intellects of a nation for ages, must, by its very tones, reawaken like qualities, and excite like feelings, in the minds of later generations. A language becomes thus to him who knows its philosophy, as well as its outward forms, a very "charm to conjure with."

Such a knowledge is, moreover, almost indispensable to him who would, by a good and faithful translation of the masterworks of foreign nations, communicate to his own countrymen the inappreciable treasures of ancient and modern genius. In such cases, idiom has to be rendered by idiom, and the very spirit of a different cast of minds to be embodied in his own vernacular. How can he seize the almost imperceptible aroma of foreign inspiration who does not know the peculiar fragrance of his own tongue? What else but a thorough familiarity with the latter, can enable him to render delicate shades of meaning in a foreign idiom, by corresponding forms of his own? How can he ever hope to feel, rather than to know, the precise and accurate difference of synonymes, like the English "banish," and "exile," unless he knows the German "Bann," and the Latin "ex silire," the Teutonic punishment inflicted by sentence, and Cicero's definition of "perfugium potius supplicii, non supplicium." It is thus that the character of a nation may be said to show itself, in the success of their work of making foreign literature their own; and the superior conscientiousness of the German, and the light carelessness of the Frenchman, appear perhaps in nothing more conspicuously than in the better knowledge and greater faithfulness exhibited in German translations.

We hail it, therefore, as a most cheering sign of moderr.

progress, and as a creditable evidence of the taste of our age, that the works of old authors and especially the poems of former ages are more frequently resorted to and republished than heretofore. The reader of our day is thus conducted to the very well-head and fountain of his mother tongue; he sees the first sources and primal uses of his speech, and obtains an accurate, distinctive perception of the significance of its terms and idioms. Researches of this kind, in all languages, appear indispensable not only to the attainment of that pregnant conciseness, imaginative at once and definite, which we value as the highest triumph of literary composition, but also to the preservation of that standard purity of expression which arbitrary fashion and foreign influence constantly tend to disturb. The old authors, who have, as it were, originated the frame and energies of their idioms, become thus landmarks and beacons to which our eye may turn when we apprehend to float too far out on the sea of innovation, and, here also, a knowledge of the past will enable us to make the best use of the present.

CHAPTER XI.

COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY AND HISTORY.

Lost races-Ethnology-Relation of races-Provincial Dialects-Literature and Early History.

MORE important aid, however, is obtained from a comparative study of languages in historical researches, and it was probably by the assistance rendered to this sister science principally that. its high merits and unexpected usefulness first obtained more generally credit and acknowledgment. Languages have, of late, become new and productive mines for history; mines requiring, however, great skill in discovering the precious metals, and still greater art in bringing them up and freeing them from impure alloy. Well may the words of Ennius here be applied:

nec quisquam (etymologiam)

In somnis videt priu' quam jam dicere coepit."

Careful and accurate researches of men of the highest merit have led to the result that languages will speak when history and even poetical tradition are silent. Not only are the idioms many nations the only monuments which they have handed down to posterity, but we must bear in mind that, more gener

of

ally still, language was the first and earliest manifestation of the human intellect at the very time when the earliest efforts of the human mind were made, when the foundation was laid of the existing system of thought and of institutions of every kind, when, in fact, all human development first commenced. Language remained as the only evidence of the inner life of man, when all records are silent even as to his outer life. "For," says the learned Frisian, Halbertsma, "it pleases not the muse of history to speak but late, and then in a very confused manner. Yes, she often deceives, and, before she come to maturity, she seldom distinctly tells the truth. Language never deceives, but speaks more distinctly, though removed to a higher antiquity." Philology explores the inmost recesses of language, and, by such means, brings to light the fossil remains of early history, discovers the migrations of nations and changes of empires, and regains lost portions of our race. World-conquering races, full of unbounded vigor and irresistible power, nations that owned large portions of the globe, have disappeared and are forgotten among men. What remains of them? Here and there a few gigantic heaps of stone, like those of Carnak and Runnymede, and-words. Words that have attached themselves to mountain-chains and mighty rivers, and, even now, carry back our memory to days long gone by, the only evidence of the former power of empires and the existence of races. But races are not only thus known to us solely by their language; often we have the language left, whilst the race has utterly disappeared; thus the idiom, called Zend, belonged to a people of whom we know absolutely nothing, and which we only presume, from their speech, to have existed in a certain form!